A quick recap of Neil Young's recent announcement at the Sun JavaOne conference, as reported by CNET's Dan Farber. The long-awaited (by fans) Neil Young Archive project is coming out this year. It'll be on Blu-ray, which is the first digital format to satisfy Mr. Young's needs (with a regular DVD, you couldn't watch high-resolution video and listen to music at the same time). He recommends buying a Sony PS3 as a Blu-ray player because the PS3 has an Internet connection and a fat hard drive, and he wants to update the content over time. And he hates the sound of MP3s. (No surprise from the man who's been speaking out against the CD from the time it was introduced.)
At recent shows, Neil Young's been dusting off "The Sultan" as a final encore, introduced by this gentleman banging a gong.
Now, there's a new promotional video on YouTube, which apparently replaces the old one from his Archives Web site. The compilation looks exhaustive, the optional update feature is shown, and his sense of humor is apparently intact judging from his decision to include the very Spinal Tap video of him singing in a buckskin jacket with sideburns.
Best of all is the backing music: Neil Young's first single, a surf-guitar instrumental called "The Sultan" from his band The Squires.
This post isn't about digital audio, but rather about a topic that pertains to the entire consumer technology industry. When I got to CES, I realized that I'd brought the wrong USB connector for my digital camera, a Kodak EasyShare DX4530. (Guilty: I didn't read the CNET review, but I've liked it better than the 6.8 rating might suggest. Although I'm not a fan of the integrated EasyShare software, which tries to hide the file system and in the process makes it really hard to use anything but EasyShare!) It's about four years old, and since then, Kodak's switched from the printer-like USB connector (upper right-hand picture on this page) to a different one that I've never seen on any other camera, so I couldn't borrow one of the connectors from the newer EasyShare cameras that CNET had on hand. I went to the Kodak booth--nice perk of being press and here a day early--and they were nice, but said they didn't make these types of cables anymore, so the wisest thing would be to take a cab to Best Buy and buy a card reader.
Snowy weather in Vegas.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)On my way, the cabbie overheard me talking to my wife about my dilemma. When I got off the phone, he asked "so what are they planning in there to make me throw out my DVDs?" I told him it looked like Blu-ray would be the winner. "Planned obsolescence," he replied. "That's the key to the whole industry. I was already supposed to throw out my $3,000 VHS tape collection. Now I'm supposed to throw out all my DVDs." I responded by telling him about an increasing countertrend, in which companies like Ion and Neuros making devices that let you convert a stream from any analog output to a common-format digital file that can live on your PC's hard drive, or a backup drive, or an optical disc. Forever.
He was glad to hear it, but responded by suggesting that the government needed to intervene more often and define standards, like they apparently did for coaxial cable and electrical plugs. Free marketers would flip, but then again, why do there need to be so many types of USB connections? Or cell-phone chargers? Or digital audio formats, for that matter. He also gave me an excellent summary of how the phone companies took a huge subsidy from the U.S. government to build out fiber optic to the home and proceeded to deliver very little.
Maybe it was the weather--cold and cloudy, with snow in the mountains.
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