Riiiight ... why would they force people to dump existing hardware?

Are you sure you're not thinking of Blue laser DVDs which will be coming around 2005/6? They're planning on making those machines backwards compatible so they will play today's DVDs.

Do you have a link to the article or can you scan it?

sounds absurd.... but who knows?
and wats all this about blue lazers???

Blue laser discs can store much more on a single disc because the beam width of the blue beam is much narrower than that of a red beam. Narrower beam = narrower data = more data per inch = more data per disc = a good thing for the consumer.

The reason it's good is we'll get higher quality movies and such. It also has the bad side of needing to get new hardware to read the new blue laser discs. The other bad thing is (same thing we're seeing with the writable media), there's 2 camps for blue laser formats.

Why is the industry so amazingly brilliant that they can produce a blue laser that can store immense quantities of data, yet so amazingly stupid that they can't agree on a format in which to store said data?

guess they're just silly

but thats a nice idea.. hehe..

thanx for the explaination pulse