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As originally approved last year (Feb 2004) when the DVD Forum endorsed it, tonite Bloomberg carries a press release in Japan that Microsoft and Intel will back the HD-DVD format. (Full press release is also available here on MSN Money Central). See also the discussion and announcements of the content to be available later this year. As reported this summer, the Xbox 360 may eventually support HD-DVD at some point.

Whenever the Auxiliary Display on an Asus laptop makes an entrance, there’s a buzz. I especially love it when people look at this feature as part of a series of fleeting features in a Windows Vista in a dimly lit room, and among is a gaggle of other cool devices… and they remember aux display.

“That was so cool!” was one reaction I heard recently. “I want that now.”

“You’ll have to buy a new laptop to get it. Is it worth it?” I asked the person next to me while standing in a line for something to warm me up.

“Oh yeah… I’ll buy a new laptop when (Windows) Vista comes out. That (auxiliary) display is icing on the cake, or at least the lid.” They then grabbed a frosty-cold one and headed off to see a few demos.

Slated for laptops in the Windows Vista era, aux display it is a very nice feature for taking a quick look at your calendar or firing up Windows Media Player to listen to audio (I’d personally prefer that to having to open the lid on a flight, as with the innovative HP DV1000-type laptops). Makes you wonder why this shouldn’t be a must-have feature on PCs as well, especially those with displays today as on my Windows Media Center PC. 

A note on real-world impact of aux display: I spend my day hopping all over campus and I run into the same situation in almost every meeting: someone waits for their laptop to awake from S3 standby in order to check their calendar (‘Though I’ve found that most people use S4 as the preferred standby state, putting their PCs into a deep sleep between meetings. Many people don’t even open their laptops in meeting for fear that people will think they’re working on email: no, really, I’m taking notes in OneNote.) If there are just 100 meetings a day across our entire company where this scenario plays out for one person in each one, you’re looking at not-so-little cumulative productivity hit of around 400 hours a year. Now, extrapolate that benefit across the laptop market: oodles and oodles of productivity gains, fewer GPRS minutes wasted in syncing your Smartphone, no more printed Outlook calendar pages…

And that’s just the calendar. Imagine being able to see the Outlook notification messages when new mail arrives.

More pre-release info on the aux display platform API is up on MSDN. Bill also mentioned it in his WinHEC keynote earlier this year. And one fun look at one guy who absolutely had to have aux display on his PC today.

Today in the Seattle Times’ Here & Now Traffic Watch:

Several thousand people are expected at Safeco Field today for a private, daylong business gathering. Pedestrian and vehicle traffic, including more than 200 charter buses, is likely to impact the stadium area from about 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

No kidding.

The lights. The sounds. The demos (many were high-level highlights from PDC). The chocolate bars. OK, scratch the last one. Robch has a good summary on his blog tonite, ‘though he did miss the remaining two items from his top five list (not to mention XBOX 360, TabletPC, Windows Starter Edition, the new suite of Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and of course Windows Media Center Edition… so it should probably be a top ten list).

So I’ll add these two for now to round out the top five as it’s bedtime for the kids (aka “the witching hour”):

4. The presenters: I was impressed by just about everyone, and how they noted the importance of our customers in almost every one of the sessions. When you look at the suite of products and services discussed this summer and our incredibly customer-tech-product focused execs, I’m happy to be here.

5. The crowd: Microsofties at their best, with super enthusiasm even in sub-arctic weather (think March of the Penguins). Kudos to those with the gumption to import noise makers and rock the house.

Word of the week: “Zany”  Considering the source I’ll use that in my general responses from now on.

Phrase for the rest of the year: “Heavens to Betsy.” Continuous Improvement is already in my vocabulary.

(Added 092405: If you’re interested in reading — and listening to — a joint interview with Bill and Steve just after the meeting, check out the article in today’s Seattle Times.)

Enterprise Windows IT has a brief story this week on Windows OneCare which is in beta. Says E-W-IT:

“If Windows OneCare is reasonably priced, plenty of consumers will be happy to forget all about viruses, firewalls, and file fragments and let the computer take care of itself.”

Just having a service ping me regularly to defrag and back up is helpful. And better for members of the family who may not think about that along the same lines as other things that fit into the rhythm of everyday technological lives.

Now, getting such a thing to work automatically with my LAN storage… that would be nice. I’ve had a number of customers and friends with small home networks say that the next barrier for them is to move away from writable disc back-up to doing more with their home network: PC back-up, storage and file serving (OK, they don’t call it “file serving” but “I want to access my ripped WMA collection in the office on my family room PC.”). In talking with customers at the local computer superstores (especially the ones that flag you down as you have some MS logoware on or similarly monikered paraphanalia dangling off of a belt) I’ve found that interest in personal back-up has reached an all-time high, almost in line with security and keeping their PCs up-to-date.

Perhaps it’s just the disaster scenarios everyone sees on the nightly news. That’s the one that triggered a recent discussion in a coffee line on “but what do I do to ensure that the stuff on my computer is still safe when my house falls into a giant sink hole?” Remote file storage is a great idea, but who has time to send discs to the bank vault? I’ve done that onle a couple of times, and that after hearing of a friend losing everything in a house fire.

Neat solutions are starting to emerge along the lines of ibackup’s offering, which does part of what I’d like, but better synchronization and integration with the PCs on my home network would be a real treat. Just increase the size to match the size of My Documents (anyone have less than 5GB these days? Surely, you jest…) and add a nice, secure web-enabled front end so I can access my files anywhere. It might even make migrating to a new PC that much easier.