Sony To Post First Loss In 14 Years

According to news.com.au's sources in Japan Sony, the electronics giant, will be posting its first loss in 14 years. Sony is expected to "post an operating loss of ¥100 billion" ($1.6 billion AUD) due to falling demand and a stronger yen the Nikkei business daily reported.

Personally I'm only surprised it hasn't happened sooner. Sony have a tendency to come out with wonderful new gadgets that cost an arm and a leg then not bother advertising them or they sabotage themselves in other ways.

Back in the day I bought (for a ridiculous amount of hard earned cash) the first "portable" MiniDisc recorder, the MZ1. It was huge but dear to my heart but not once did I see a Sony advertisement for MiniDisc other than on English soccer jerseys. By the time other people knew about MiniDiscs the MP3 revolution had arrived burying what could have been a large money spinner and really a handy product.

Now we have the PS3 which is leaning heavily on its Bluray capabilities to convince people that it's worth twice as much as an Xbox 360 which does essentially the same thing. Obviously not everyone is convinced.

It's about time Sony had a big rethink. Maybe they should use Microsoft as an example after all the positive hype around Windows 7 compared to the negative hype surrounding Vista prior to release.

Video Playback, Windows 7 FTW

If you've ever tried to set up a computer to play the varying forms of videos you can get on the internet these days then you probably know how much of a headache it can be. Codec packs have been the answer for a few years now (I'm currently using K-Lite for my home theatre PC) but news today may make them a thing of the past.

On Long Zheng's blog, I Started Something, he has posted an item detailing the Codec support found in Windows 7 and how Microsoft's "Vista 2.0" will play almost everything out of the box. Great news for those of you who "acquire" TV episodes or "backup" your own DVDs as most MPEG4 formats are supported (XVID/DIVX/MP4 et al) plus those whacky 3GP Codecs your mobile phone is so fond of.

What interests me the most is the support of the H264 (MPEG-4 AVC) Codec, which is the current standard for high definition video encoding, and the total lack of support for the Matroska (MKV) container format (just like the Xbox 360/PS3) which appears to be totally intentional on Microsoft's part.

I'll keep my eye on this one and props to Microsoft for at least making our Codec Pack horrors slightly less painful.

Windows 7 Will Do Stuff

Sorry for the day-late post but here's where you can get all you need to know about the new version of Windows, Windows 7. To me it looks like a point release for Vista but then again, it's not out for another year so who knows what'll happen between now and then.

Some highlights:

The icon-only items in the taskbar, which is now very square looking, are highlighted with a dynamic colour based on the main colour in the icon.

The Sidebar is gone and gadgets are now dumped on the desktop.

Hovering over an item in the taskbar brings that application into focus by making the other windows transparent (kind of like switching to it without switching to it). You can also do this with the Desktop so you can see your gadgets without having to minimize everything.

Supports up to 256 CPUs but can run on a pissy little eePC's CPU plus new DirectX enhancements means 50% less memory usage for the UX.

Lots more Windows 7 info can be found over on Long Zheng's blog.