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I hope we get some good pictures and video from the show as a lot of new IPOD and HI-FI products are being shown this year as well as Zune add ons.I also hope the beeb seek out British Company's to showcase!!

I know the British Company NXT and a partner Shinhint are showing together for the first ever time with a brand new technology called BR.

Having a hybrid disk or player that supports both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is excellent. It will benefit both the consumer, as well as the manufacturers.

As for Microsoft, they have been notorious for failures in the areas of security and stability. I wouldn't want anything from them in my car, even if it is just for entertainment.

I not sure that HD-DVD and BR-DVD are going to take off. for these reasons.

1. Everyone has a collection of DVD's and they are not going to go out and buy new copies on HD/BR unless it is a fav film. Look at the UMV format on the psp as an example.

2. Piracy, Piracy!! you say but the reason mp3 has stayed the main audio format is that it is easy to share / pirate. Lets be honest DVD is easy to copy.

3. New media, by the time HD/BR should be taking off, two to three years time we will be downloading films to hard drives in set-top boxes / computers to watch. This is either pay per view or buying. Don't forget we will have 100MB internet by then. Also Flash or its replacement will be about the size of HD/BR buy then.

Hope people agree or disagree :-)

Another huge tech-fest of useless, glitzy gadgets coming up, brought to you by our dynamic corporations, to dazzle the starry-eyed sheep into letting go of their hard-earned bucks in the dumb hope that it will somehow make their lives better.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Uncle George is preparing another mega lights-and-sounds display, this time over Iran, while the sheep blink at the pyrotechnics on their new-format DVD's. Meanwhile, the planet lurches even further towards the brink of extinction, as it's rapidly diminishing resources are squandered on irrelevant trivia and it's ecological balance tips over into chaos. Meanwhile, huge swathes of the "developing" world are becoming wastelands, their populations subjected to anarchy, pollution and spiralling malnutrition.

You probably remember that Cree Indian saying about the White Man's rape of America "Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught, will we realise we cannot eat money."

So good luck with your new all-in-one DVD formats.
I for one will not be cheering.

It amuses me that John posted his little (for lack of a better word) rant using one of those "useless, glitzy gadgets" he hates so much... the Personal Computer.

I think "glitzy gadget" is defined as zunes, ipods, Hi-def DVD, USB Coffee cup warmers, etc.

A PC is a genuinely useful piece of kit for a 1000 reasons.

Personally, I agree with John

Yes, I have to agree with Mark and John as well. It's certainly troubling, these pursuits in that light.
Keep a balance, I will.

Ev, Mark and John seem to be such technophobes I wonder what they are doing on this page. Technology is indeed the reason we are able to sit here tapping this out on a laptop which is connected wirelessly to the whole world.
I think the politics of war are indirectly connected with technology but there again, what is not. Without the technology wars would still be being fought for the same age-old reasons.
To be so against new technology makes them seem so Luddite. They have very little sense of history.

I think that as long as we keep on buying technology, then businesses will keep on selling it to us.

I updated my phone, so I now no longer need to use my mp3 player. So that piece of new technology has helped me.

So technology can help us, but we have to be careful that we don't buy every bit of technology going, because some of it might just be a flashy bit of plastic.

I luv all these new gadgets .. the more the better . Samsung are going to release a combined mp3 player/bar of soap and LG are sure to showcase their Pipe/Gps unit.
Any unwanted freebies, send them my way, I will make good use of them

The Luddite accusation is a bit of a simplistic premise, M. Hughes. And not just because it's a cliché - you ought to read a bit more about who the Luddites were and what they wanted, rather than believing the caricatures you were fed in the classroom.

I welcome the advances in technology which have allowed us (or at any rate, those of us living in a world with basic infrastructures and able to eat our fill every day) to communicate better and faster with people from all over the world - the internet has opened up vast new perspectives and access to knowledge that we could never have dreamed of 2 centuries ago.

In fact I've founded and managed a company focused on new learning technology for 15 years and am pretty well versed in information systems (from the user, not the designer angle).

But technology is not an end in itself, nor is it in itself "good". To believe that is to be living still under the 19th century positivist, or "industrealist" (Alvin Toffler) delusion that technical "progress" has some kind of inherent spiritual virtue. Which is bollocks.

Like everything it can be useful - it can empower us and function as an extension of our resources and a means to ease and enrich our lives - and it can be utterly destructive and impoverish or enslave us. Example : one one hand, the PC and internet, on the other hand, Depleted Uranium ammunition, now compromosing the lives and future health of Iraki civilians throughout the country - there are babies being born with two heads down there at the moment and cancer is spiralling (this information is being systematically suppressed). And any technology can be both, depending on how it is used - air travel has helped ordinary people communicate and explore the world to an extent that is positively mind-blowing - yet at the same time, the multiplication of air-travel is contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer, compromising the lives of future generations.

So the problem is not technology in itself, but what we do with it.

And this glitzy tech-fest, a gigantic waste of the finite resources and of the intelligent minds of our planet, basically engineered by the spin of corporations entirely committed to selling whatever they can convince us to buy in order to fatten their already bloated shareholders, getting people all excited about the competition over some new-fangled DVD format or the war between Apple and Microsoft about how to wire the New home, is a perfect example of our technophilic blindness.

Think : the latest prediction for peak oil (when demand begins to outstrip supply)- is 2013. A gigantic financial crisis is likely to follow. Uranium - maybe 20 years left of it ? Bauxite, Tin, Copper, etc...about half a century ? Think : the tipping point for a global warming of catastrophic proportions has perhaps already been reached. Predictions are that arable lands are likely to diminish by a factor of 50% in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, poverty, anarchy and malnutrition are developing dangerously in huge swathes of the world, fish stocks are falling below renewal levels, entire species are disappearing into extinction. How are our children going to feed themselves, when mass-produced food dwindles both due to global warming and lack of oil-based fertilizers and spiralling costs of running agricultural machinery ? Think : most of the glaciers in the Andes will have melted by the middle of the century, leaving vast populations without water. And everywhere, ground water is being used up or becoming polluted.

The rise of industrial society has been accompanied by the plundering of the earth's resources, a war against nature, the positivist ideology of progress and a Social-Darwinist belief in the evolution of civilization. This socio-economic model is in it's death throes, as we discover that our fossil-fuels and our mineral wealth, which have fuelled this gigantic technological leap forward, are now running out and that we are irreversibly damaging the biosphere of the planet which is our home.

It is high time we began to look at technology, not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end - that of preserving our home planet and it's dwindling resources for future generations and creating a sustainable socio-economic model for them.

This tech-fest of useless, spurious gadgetary together with our crazy, chaotic technological wars are simply helping to precipitate us, like blinded, squabbling lemmings, over the edge of the cliff.

Time is running out.