I love you, turtle friend

While listening to "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, I had yet another thought. At first I was perturbed, because because this most recent thought was my 12th in the day. I rarely have more than a dozen thoughts on any given day, and never on a Friday. But, I had it nonetheless, so I decided to hear myself out. My thought was about this recent battle between HD DVDs and Blue-Ray DVDs. In the next year or two, one of them will most likely win out as the "better technology." This is necessary, because the next generation of players will need to pick which format it would most like to "shake hands" with. Now, I love a good technology battle as much as the next man, but I'm a little confused here. With the always-mentioned-in-media-studies-classes battle between VHS and BETA, they were distinctly different technologies. They look very different. However, with the DVD battle, how different can they really be? What makes one any different from the other? Aren't they both just DVD's that are capable of higher resolution on a screen? What is the difference in technology is really what I'm asking? why couldn't a player play both kinds? I'm kind of excited to see which technology wins this completely arbitrary battle. Actually between the time I wrote that last sentence and this one, I read another article in Newsweek about it, and apparently there are players coming out that can play both kinds soon, but one will still certainly "win" because that's what America's all about. May the best plastic disk win.