Yes, please join with me in admitting that you spent a fair share of time reading the Human Reproduction article on your beige IBM Aptiva back in the day. Or produced/plagiarised many a fine middle school research papers, culling facts from its bounty. Encarta, you will be missed.

If anyone hasn’t figured it out already, paid encyclopedias have been straight murdered by something called Wikipedia. In fact, I went to the Wikipedia page for Encarta to research this post. Oh, the irony; sorry to rub in the pain in your final hour, Encarta. The plug will be officially pulled in October of this year. [Reuters]

The Palm OS is a dead duck. Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan has signed its death sentence today. But while there will be no more new Palm OS products, their Windows Mobile smarty-panty-phones will survive (!): Talking to investors today, Colligan said there was no point in keeping on with its development. • No more Palm OS devices to be released by Palm. Only third-parties will do them. • From now on, it’s only webOS (the operating system in the Pre, pronounced “huevos” in Spanish, which means “eggs” or “cojones”) and Windows Mobile devices. • He also talked Apple, saying they didn’t want to get into a patent fight because they also had a big portfolio and it may turn nasty for both. Originally developed by US Robotics in 1996, the Palm OS leaves a long list of children, grandchildren, some bastards here and there, and a lot of die-hard users behind. It will join the Amiga OS and Be OS in the land of the cool-stuff-that-is-gone-gone. [PreCentral]

UPDATE: It’s official. Announcement is below the fold.That means that NEC TVs, home theatre products, whitegoods, and air conditioning products will all be going. This will hit the local TV market especially hard, considering we’ve already lost Hitachi, Philips and Fujitsu over the past 18 months, and leaves us with only a handful of major players and a few other smaller, cheaper brands.

We’ll hopefully have more on this as it develops later today…
UPDATE: Here’s the official announcement.

NEC Australia announces restructure to focus on business and services market

15 January 2008 – Melbourne – NEC Australia today announced a strategic restructure of its local business to focus solely on its core ICT/network communication solutions and services with a greater emphasis on delivering service and consultancy to its business and government customers. The move comes in response to rapidly changing market conditions in retail, the weakening Australian Dollar, and is in line with a focus of its resources and energies on the business and government markets.

As a result of the restructure, NEC Australia will cease its retail offerings as of 1st March 2009 including whitegoods, consumer appliances, home entertainment as well as consumer LCD and Plasma TVs.

Commercial displays, including digital signage and business projectors, are unaffected by the restructure and NEC will continue to sell this range to the business market via its Display Solutions Division.

Mr Wataru Takeuchi, Managing Director, NEC Australia said: “This move forms part of our strategic evolution towards redefining NEC Australia as a business services company. As such, a decision has been made to withdraw our retail products in order to focus our resources and energy on our key strengths which are our business offerings and our Research and Development capabilities.”

NEC Australia will continue to offer its ongoing support to existing customers by honouring its warranty and extended support agreements.

The restructure will result in approximately 200 staff leaving the business by the end of March through a combination of voluntary and compulsory redundancies, with the majority coming from the Retail division.

[Current]

While major retailers have long since ditched VHS for the space-friendly DVD alternative, Distribution Video Audio was the last major supplier of VHS, supporting part of their $US20 million a year business by selling mass amounts of VHS tapes on the cheap. With little fanfare last October, the company shipped their last truckload of VHS. From the company’s president:

It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt. I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.

Rather than rewrite the whole story, I’ll just point you to the LA Times and assure you that it’s a great, be it sad, read. The format that popularised replaying, archiving and sharing media is but the stuff of collections. Luckily, it’s been replaced by some pretty incredible alternatives. [LA Times and image]

[Circuit City via Consumerist, Image via qnr]

The move isn’t too much of a surprise, following the company’s decision to pull out of North America back in April, as well as Hitachi’s Australian AV death earlier in the year.

Current managed to have a chat with Matt Moran, Philips’ Lifestyle GM, and he told them that the decision was based upon “global direction”. I guess with prices dropping so substantially over the past few years, it’s becoming harder and harder for these “smaller” players to keep up.

All hope is not lost however – at this stage it looks like the move only effects TVs in Australia and New Zealand, so all your other Philips-related gadgetry should still be available when the company ceases TV distribution on December 31 this year.

[Current - Thanks Adam]

Click on the image above to see the full high resolution version

[Wikipedia and Sony Japan]

The good news is that they’ll still continue to support and repair your player based on the standard warranty, but chances are you’ll get little future use out of that player now that no movies will be made for it. What’s still unclear is whether there will ever be a Blu-ray add-on to the 360 that’s cheap enough to sell the Xbox + Blu-ray package at a comparable price to the PS3 (US$399ish). We’re guessing that something along these lines will hit within the year. [Gamerscreblog]

The Ulysses was the first spacecraft to ever pass over the north and south poles of the Sun, but amazing feats of pole to pole travelling were nothing compared to the three comet tails it successfully navigated. The lessons scientists have learnt regarding solar wind and interstellar dust have proven to be invaluable. Unfortunately then, the circuitry has now become defective, which means there is no way to supply power to the machinery that prevents the hydrazine power source from freezing. Once the hydrazine falls below the 2° Celsius freezing point, it’s going to be game over for old Ulysses, as there will be no way to control the sky skipper. We imagine it’s showing a RROD as we speak, which makes us unbearably sad. We just wanted to say thanks for all the indispensable scientific information, great times, good laughs and the terrific name. Cheers, you will be missed, Ulysses. [New Scientist]