“I don’t regret it,” he told VentureBeat in a phone call on Thursday. “I’ll fight it. If they want to come after me, bring it on."

"This kind of witch-hunt mentality is wrongheaded," writes Takahashi. "When I was thinking about making a difference with our story this isn’t what I had in mind." We're just amazed that Microsoft's legal team made it through all six pages of Takahashi's story.

Here we know better. Software is the ingredient that turns content into quicksilver, shifting in time and place to the device we desire, at the moment we choose. Apple has mastered this alchemy, and others like Microsoft and Amazon.com are studying the fast; but to Sony it remains a dark art.

Online video remains immensely fragmented. Should you download a video on Xbox Live? Buy it on Amazon.com's Unbox via your TiVo set-top? Rent it on iTunes, and broadcast it to your flat-screen display with an Apple TV? The choices seem endless, and endlessly confusing. But none of them, I'd note, market themselves based on a format. The format, if any, is broadband, and a set of standardized audio/video connectors. The rest is fungible.

There will no doubt be a shakeout among online-video stores. If nothing else kills off the weaker players, consumers will rapidly tire of purchasing the same movies again and again. A rack of DVDs on the shelf provides a reassuring sense of permanence. Perhaps physical media will make a comeback. Warren Lieberfarb, who helped invent the DVD at Warner Bros. and now consults for Toshiba on HD-DVD, predicts that flash-memory devices might be sold in stores preloaded with video.

Sony actually had that idea, I believe, with its MagicGate memory sticks. Another nonstandard format, tied to hardware, with buggy software. The same complaints are being made about Blu-ray, with its ever-shifting specification requiring firmware updates. Sony, drenched in blood, stands victorious in the optical-disc format battle. Too bad the war is now being waged in another theater.

When it ties that same back-end service into cell phones — maybe those running Windows Mobile? — it would be capable of serving media to basically any device. With this distribution network, content providers would simply hand over Microsoft the source material, the way they send film reels to theaters, and Allard's division would be responsible for distributing it. The one problem with this idea? Hollywood trusts Microsoft about as far as it can throw it.

The doorbell rings.

Me: Thinks: Sweet! The UPS man brought Halo 3 a day early.

Standing at the door is a gaggle of old ladies.

Me: Thinks: Fuck.

Old Lady: I'm with a group of volunteers in your neighborhood...

Me: Thinks: WTF do you want!? You're not the UPS man, nor are you Master Chief.

Old Lady: Do you think that God is the cause of all suffering the world?

Me: Um. Now's not really a good time. I write for this blog ... work from home ...

Old Lady: Well, can I come back later at a better time?

Me: Only if God has sent you as his divine messenger to punish me for believing that he only exists as some sort of metaphilosophical crutch to explain the Big Bang.

Digg, of course, has its own thriving videogames subsection — so Diggxbox's creator posted an advertisement for his site on Digg. His Digg account was subsequently banned. Apparently founder Kevin Rose doesn't view amateur imitation as flattery. On the other hand, this diggxbox chap should be pleased he escaped with a mere banning instead of say, a trademark-infringement lawsuit.

By: Brian Crecente

The interview was, as I said earlier, a bit fragmented due to the nature of the forum. When you get five geeks to sit around the table with Bill Gates, chances are they aren't going to want to all talk about the same things.

While Gates spent a bulk of the time talking about stuff as varied as his charity work (it's going to blossom when he semi-retires next summer), the amount of spam assaulting his mailbox (next to none recently) and his penchant for speeding, yet not dying when he was younger. (Yes, that old gem.)

Gates told the small group that Microsoft has always been about software and that despite their recent jump into some hardware, always will be.

"Microsoft has always been about software that empowers people," he said. "What can happen over the next ten years is probably even bigger than what's happened over the entire history as we get speech and vision just getting rid of constraints: Storage constraints, resolution constraints."

"Microsoft was a software company in 1975 well be a software company 20 years from now, that's what we are good at that's our unique contribution."

He did touch a few times on gaming and for the most part what he said was direct and interesting. Gates, it turns out, is a pretty personable guy.

I even got him to laugh when I asked him to take a picture with me.

Me: Do you mind if I get my picture with you? Last one, promise.
Gates: Sure, though no one ever stops the next person from getting a picture with me.
Me: Give me a fork and a spoon and I'll fight them off for you.

I crack myself up, and at least slightly amuse Gates.

I decided to break down the chat into a group of stories to make it more digestible:

Gates on Vision and Live
Gates the Gamer
Zune is the Xbox of Music
Gates: Xbox is a PC

Fox Television last month began airing a new Saturday morning cartoon called "Viva Pi ata," about a world where colorful pi atas [ACTUALLY PICTURED] compete to be chosen for children's birthday parties. But the real force behind the TV show — and an onslaught of affiliated ventures — is Microsoft Corp., which hopes the pi atas can help it crack open the secret to selling more Xbox 360 game consoles to young children.

Microsoft's planning an Xbox game for young children called "Viva Pi ata" — all of this somehow ignoring the purpose of pi atas, which is to make them not so viva.

Microsoft Tries to Raise 'Candiosity,' Aims at Kid Market with 'Viva Pi ata' [WSJ]