....Earthquake hits the UK

About half an hour ago we were hit by an earthquake. Reports on the BBC website suggest it's centre was in the midlands. I'm up near Liverpool and the tremor was quite strong. In fact it felt like something had hit the house and I actually went outside to check. Quite surreal.

....makes me sad. Stage 6 to shut down?

Here's a copy of an email i've just received...

I'm Tom (aka Spinner), a Stage6 user and an employee of DivX, Inc., the company behind the service. I'm writing this message today to inform you that we plan to shut down Stage6 on February 28, 2008. Upload functionality has already been turned off, and you'll be able to view and download videos until Thursday.

I know this news will come as a shock and disappointment to many Stage6 users, and I'd like to take a few moments to explain the reasons behind our decision.

We created Stage6 with the mission of empowering content creators and viewers to discover a new kind of video experience. Stage6 began as an experiment, and we always knew there was a chance that it might not succeed.

In many ways, though, the service did succeed, beyond even our own initial expectations. Stage6 became very popular very quickly. We helped gain exposure for some talented filmmakers who brought great videos to the attention of an engaged community. We helped prove that it's possible to distribute true high definition video on the Internet. And we helped broaden the Internet video experience by offering content that is compatible with DVD players, mobile devices and other products beyond the PC.

So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it's really as simple as that.

Now, why didn't we think of that before we decided to create Stage6 in the first place, you may ask? That's a good question. When we first created Stage6, there was a clear need for a service that would offer a true high-quality video experience online because other video destinations on the Internet simply weren't providing that to users. A gap existed, and Stage6 arrived to fill it.

As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high-quality video), it became clear that operating the service as a part of the larger DivX business no longer made sense. We couldn't continue to run Stage6 and focus on our broader strategy to make it possible for anyone to enjoy high-quality video on any device. So, in July of last year we announced that we were kicking off an effort to explore strategic alternatives for Stage6, which is a fancy way of saying we decided we would either have to sell it, spin it out into a private company or shut it down.

I won't (and can't, really) go into too much detail on those first two options other than to say that we tried really hard to find a way to keep Stage6 alive, either as its own private entity or by selling it to another company. Ultimately neither of those two scenarios was possible, and we made the hard decision to turn the lights off and cease operation of the service.

So that's where we are today. After February 28, Stage6 will cease to exist as an online destination. But the larger DivX universe will continue to thrive. Every day new DivX Certified devices arrive on the market making it easy to move video beyond the PC. Products powered by DivX Connected, our new initiative that lets users stream video, photos, music and Internet services from the PC to the TV, are hitting retail outlets. We remain committed to empowering content creators to deliver high-quality video to a wide audience, and we'll continue to offer services that will make it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.

It's been a wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.

--Tom

Sad day.

....breaks; Seems YouTube is down.

For some reason anybody attempting to browse to www.youtube.com is out of luck at the moment, for the last 30 minutes or so the site has been unreachable. Now that's going to be affecting a lot of sites that embed their videos. Is it another broken cable?

....breaks; Another problem with deep sea cables

Reports abound that yet another cable linking the Middle East with the West has either been cut or has suffered a power outage. Conspiracy theories are starting to flow across what's left of the Internet (Perhaps Osama got a mini-sub for Christmas?). I guess it may just be possible that any extra traffic carried on this cable has caused a problem after the 3 failiures last week?

It does however highlight that our reliance on the Internet and it's apparent design weaknesses can be easily jepordised. Imagine what will happen if India becomes completely cut off from the west? All that 'out sourcing' of our call centers isn't going to seem like such a good money saving scheme to banks and the like when we can't access our details via the telephone.

God help us if a solar storm knocks out a few satallites this week; still it'll be a chance to catch up on some real 'book' reading.

Have your computer screen professionally cleaned.

This really is just for fun, and it made me laugh.

http://www.linein.org/media/screenclean.swf

OK, it seems that was taken down, but here a link to the same thing as a Windows Screensaver: http://shell.jssjr.com/files/screenclean.exe

...

Or when technology is great.

Technology put to good use against undesirables?

The Internet-based group "Anonymous" has released statements on YouTube and via a press release, outlining what they call a "War on Scientology". Church of Scientology related websites, such as religiousfreedomwatch.org have been removed due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service-attack (DDoS) by a group calling themselves "Anonymous". On Friday, the same group allegedly brought down Scientology's main website, scientology.org, which was available sporadically throughout the weekend.

Read more

Early adopters of Blu-Ray - paying the price?

It seems that people who went out and invested in Blu-Ray early-on are unlikely to be able to take advantage of new features being added to newly released movies. Blu-Ray players are divided in to categories (or profiles) with all players released before Nov 2007 being Profile 1.0. The latest profile, 1.1 allows new features to be accessed, one example of which is Picture-in-Picture. Anybody who owns a Sony PlayStation 3 will be aware that the recent update from Sony upgraded the Blu-Ray firmware to Profile 1.1. And that's the problem; there was no requirement for the hardware of early players to be upgradable and so they're pretty much stuck with an out-of-date Profile.


Whilst I'm sure there will soon be a great eBay market for 'chipping' or modding older players to upgrade the Profile of a player you've got to ask yourself how hard would it have been for the manufacturers to implement an upgrade process from day one. It would seem that in the rush to get their systems out to market, and thus not allow HD-DVD too great a lead, the players released weren't quite as good as they should have been and now the most dedicated base of users is to pay the price.

Now whilst I'm sure many of the early-adopters were aware that this may have become an issue when they purchased their players, it just doesn't seem right. In this day and age firmware updates are common for the gadgets we use (iPods, routers & games consoles etc...), and considering the complexity of the Blu-Ray technology, how hard would it have been to include an Ethernet port and update functionality?

The problem is only going to become more apparent when Profile 2.0 is released later in 2008. At present the only upgradable player on the market is the PlayStation 3 which seems to top may peoples lists as the best quality/value around.

You can read more in this BBC article