Elvesbane

HD-DVD is dead. Yaaay! Finally, someone has decided to give up in the mad race to be the next next-gen recording media. Finally, I can look forward to backing up the hundreds of gigs of data I’d rather not keep on my hard disk. Well… at the very least, I can finally anticipate a near future where I can back up all those HD movies to some brilliant multiple layer discs.

I played Witcher the other day, and realized that graphics in computing has moved beyond my 7900GS for good. It seemed like the sort of game I’d really appreciate, but the frame rates were too inconsistent, even at medium settings… and that’s a total no-no. Ah well, this is in a way, good news, since it just points to the improvements being made in the general gaming industry… unlike some once-in-a-while rarities that are more graphics than gameplay (cough! crysis! cough!). I most certainly look forward to the story-telling possibilities created by the new graphics powerhouses that are the updated nVidia 8-series. I suppose I could say the same about the 9, higher ends of which should be out late this year.

The Macbook Air was a delightful surprise! Un-buyably costly as it is, it’s perhaps the best example of the thinning that’s going on among gadgets in general. And thinner is almost always better! The one device I have which follows the same trend is, of course, the nano… which is ridiculously thin! In fact, the nano, as a mp3 player with a 3.5mm jack has probably reached it’s minimum size since the device is just thick enough to accommodate the jack! You gotta put the hole somewhere!

I’ve also been wondering about just how important sound is in the field of computing. The thought of sound bring three things to my mind: music, movies and games. Of these, both movies and games demand surround sound reproduction as an obvious feature. Music on the other hand is still primarily stereo. I remember seeing the intro of DVD-A-s with AC3 / DTS audio and such, but those don’t seem to have caught on… and having listened to a lot of surround music, I can attest to how ruddy brilliant it is, and how much of an improvement it is over regular 2-channel music. Surround music is still a rarity though and I wonder when it’ll become mainstream. It should, eventually, since it seems like a natural progression.

Staying on the topic of sound and games, it comes to my mind that close to no one I know has ever experienced any game with surround sound. I haven’t either… not really anyway. Almost everybody owns just stereo speakers, even though decent 5.1-s can be had for dirt cheap these days. I wonder how many guys are even aware of the fact that sound could actually matter when playing a game (or how much it could matter). Think F.E.A.R. or Doom 3 with perfect directional sound reproduction. It’s one of my dreams to play such horror thriller titles on a properly working surround setup.

That’s enough thinking for one night, I think. I need to sleep!