While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. My take: I wish Blu-Ray had a region-free policy like HD-DVD does. Living in USA today but one day moving to Europe, it will have an impact in my media library.

KDE's Aaron Seigo (who owes me a Martini) wrote about a few often-heard misconceptions and questions regarding KDE 4.0, which is supposed to be released January 11th. "Now that 4.0.0 is tagged and out and that bit of worry and concern is behind me for the moment, I wanted to take a moment to talk really bluntly about 4.0. In particular, I'm going to address some of the common memes in fairly random order that I see about kde 3.5 and 4.0. I'm going to speak bluntly (though not rudely) so prepare yourself."

"New Year is traditionally a time in which the achievements, surprises and disappointments of the previous year are reflected upon. Often, in spite of the fireworks and wild parties, time is set aside in which to dwell upon one's private thoughts. As 2008 is now underway I've found myself mulling over my involvement with RISC OS. Whether I like it or not, my involvement in the Acorn and RISC OS scene has been a significant part of my life over the past 27 years."

"When Steve Jobs announced Apples transition to Intel's x86 processor line, a huge stir occurred among some Mac OS X users who depend on 'Classic' the OS9 environment in Mac OS X for their day to day Mac usage, as Mac OS X on Intel means no more 'Classic' and they were right. Rosetta allows PowerPC applications to run on x86 through JIT (Just In Time) architecture emulation, but its translation is not on a low enough level within OS X to allow 'Classic' to work on x86 and as such those among us who use OS9 applications have been left out in the cold. Until now that is: a project called 'Sheep Shaver' was created to allow BeOS on PowerPC emulate the PowerPC architecture to run another PowerPC operating system on top of BeOS. This application was ported to Mac OS X with the demise of Be Inc. and has since been ported to Mac OS X on Intel processors."

Ars reviews Office:Mac 2008, and concludes: "Perhaps the best thing that can be said about software that one uses in the course of working is that even if it doesn't make the work fun, it doesn't make it any worse, and that's certainly the story with Office 2008. Those spreadsheets, presentations and software reviews won't write themselves, but now it's a deal easier to make them look like they did. That it does that in just the way you'd want a great Macintosh program to behave is good news for Office workers."

I don't usually do stories like this one, but I love this design so much I wanted to share it with you. "Dell has flaunted this gorgeous monitor for a while in various trade shows and press events, always saying that it's just a design concept and not available yet. That all changes now, because the 22-inch Dell Crystal LCD display is suddenly a real product. Just in time for CES, this beauty is set to ship in the next few days, and even though its spec list isn't as high-end as we had hoped, it's still so pretty, if it were smaller we'd want to wear it as a necklace." On a related note, Dell machines are appearing at Best Buy.

"Anyone who has installed Linux on Virtual PC/Virtual Server knows that while yes, Linux is supported on these platforms, and yes, it does run well after getting it setup - installation can be a downright pain. It is for this reason that I take great pride in the fact that installing Linux on the Hyper-V beta release is a breeze."

FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."

Engadget reports: "First unveiled nearly a year ago at Macworld 2007, the MacBook-based, Wacom-modified Modbook has definitely seen its share of delays, although in the days and months since, the 13.3-inch slate has gained the distinction of being one of the few pieces of non-Cupertino, Apple-approved hardware. The world's first OS X tablet can be yours immediately starting at USD 2290."

SharpOS 0.0.1 has been released. "The SharpOS project is aimed at writing an operating system in 100% C#. This originally proved to be a problem of nearly philosophical proportions because C# is a managed language, and by nature isn’t designed for such low-level uses as developing an operating system kernel. Please note that although our goal is to create an operating system in C#, the infrastructure we have created allows kernels to be written in any language that targets the Common Intermediate Language bytecodes and exposes pointers and unsafe code."

"AMD is on the heels of releasing the next set of GPU programming documentation to aide in the development of the open-source R500/600 drivers (xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd). It's already been discussed what this NDA-free documentation release will have, but one of the questions that have repeatedly come up is if/when AMD will release information on accelerated video playback. AMD's John Bridgman has now stated what they plan to release in the video realm as well as a new requirement for their future graphics processors: being open-source friendly while avoiding DRM."

FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 has been released. "The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on the ISOs. Even a very basic post-build test turned up one latent bug in sysinstall, and once that was fixed a more extensive test (load both KDE and GNOME) turned up two more latent bugs. The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren't fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 (they were fatal to installs on 6.3-RC2) and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is."

Users who install Windows XP Service Pack 3 will not be required to enter Microsoft's product activation key before they use the operating system, according to a Microsoft white paper. Instead they will get a 30-day period of grace - the same as users of Windows Vista - after which they will have to enter the key to prove that the product is genuine. Problems can occur if a user legally obtains the software and, for some reason, a problem occurs with validation. By allowing a 30-day period, users have a chance to get the problem fixed while they are using the software.

The Nasdaq market has delisted The SCO Group, the Linux-seller-turned-Linux-litigant now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company's shares were taken off the Nasdaq because of the bankruptcy proceedings, the company said Thursday in a statement. The company had appealed Nasdaq's decision to do so but lost its appeal on December 21, the company said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.