And therein lies the real tragedy in all this. An entire generation will learn to spell "blue" incorrectly.
This may be a joke, but the sad truth is there are a lot of things aimed at children that teach bad speech habits. Rugrats, popular children's show, and the main characters all spoke incorrectly, misused words and are constantly getting into situations that could be deadly to infants. Rugrats is the bane of children.
This may be a joke, but the sad truth is there are a lot of things aimed at children that teach bad speech habits.
Oh, I teach eighth-grade English. Believe me, I know. The removal of 'netspeak from formal writing is a constant battle for me. If "lol" was a transition my life would be a lot easier.
Hey, at least the internet mean literacy rates are way up, even if we don't like what netspeak is doing to it :P But, the need to read and write professionally will continue to be a major counterweight against that trend.
No kidding. Strangely, it's affected my movie purchasing overall, not just hi def. I've owned a Blu-Ray player since Christmas, but haven't bought a single movie yet - I've used it almost exclusively for Netflix. I pick one up in the store, see the price, and think, "HELL no." Then I pick up the same movie on DVD and think, "Why would I buy this in standard def when it's available in high?" I end up buying nothing.
I am the same way. But renting Blu-Ray rocks
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Retired life is GREAT!
I suppose that no one has even researched BluRay, but are content as hell to stick a fork in it. It has the same market penetration that DVD did at the same point in it's life cycle, which is incredible considering the higher buy in cost of having to upgrade other hard ware other than just the player (IE HDTV). Slam it all you want, and throw out your anecdotal "evidence" BluRay is picking up steam and digital download won't be killing anything (until we can achieve average internet speeds on par with Japan).
But I think the recession my put a kink in the continued adoption of it.
__________________
What to play? Where to ride?
Retired life is GREAT!
PC gaming certainly has been changed by digital downloads, as has music distribution.
IMHO the reason that both retail music and retail PC game sales have died off as platforms was due to the fact that both are super easy to pirate. Digial downloading does exist as the primary market for both of those products, the problem is that the people who are doing the digital downloads are not PAYING for those products.
They both had a huge slump in sales for the same reasons -- high costs, piss-poor quality and easy availability of pirate versions.
As other people have mentioned, Blu-ray isn't going to suffer the same problem for a long while since few people can download 50 GB of data in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, even if you could download a full uncompressed Blu-ray disc, the cost of the burner and the blank media is still very high.
The sales of regular DVD's might begin to suffer the same fate as PC games and music in the next few years, but by that time people may not be bothering with regular DVD's anyway due to the succes of Blu-ray.
