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However, I am fed up with this charade and I would like to end it once and for all. I have the paperwork in front of me to take Universal Records to small claims court to recover the purchase price of the CD. Since Universal is not based in my area, it will be very expensive for them to send their high-priced lawyers to my county to deal with the charges. And, worst case, I will lose the cost of the CD (and best case, I will get a refund on the CD and make a political statement at the same time).

I strongly encourage all of you to do the same thing: buy whatever CDs you want, and sue the record labels if they are copy protected. Even if most of the cases get thrown out, it will be *very* expensive for the labels to take any sort of action against the thousands of individuals who are suing them.

The RIAA has been able to manipulate the legal system into standing up for their rights. Why shouldn't we do the same thing back to them?

~wally

Better hope the APA doesn't read this...

or any MS moles for that matter..

Console manufacturers have traditionally taken a loss of the sale of consoles and made up for it with licensing fees from games, so it's hard to think that a company has a pricing problem with a product that they are losing money on. Also, look at the price tags on the competition: PS2 and XBox are $100 more expensive and neither offer portability yet. Sure, you get the DVD capabilities, but I've already got a DVD player and even if I didn't, I could pick one up at Best Buy for less than $80 that will also play mp3's.

If you don't want any compression, why not go down to Circuit City and buy a 400-disk CD jukebox for $300?

(Yes, hard drives can fail, but as long as you stick with fairly decent drives and avoid junk, you should be OK...especially for something that more than likely won't be fired up all the time.)

I bought a Panasonic DVD-CV51 5-disc carousel DVD player recently. Has MP3 CD playability, for only $249 down at Best Buy. Burned up a 131-song MP3 CD, and piped it out of my 5.1 surround home-theater.

I was actually quite i
mpressed. I was expecting clicks, pops, crappy dynamic range, etc etc. However I ripped most of the tracks on that CD myself, using mid-high (192ish) quality VBR encoding. Some of the songs I did NOT rip myself that were encoded at 128kbps were obviously inferior, but as long as you rip them well, you should have a good bang for your buck audio experience.

Of course, YMMV. :)

I was leaning towards component video cables that are a good length (Monster brand and all which is pretty much the only brand that stores like Best Buy place prominently next to the game consoles See this link for PS2 cables prices.). Plus those needing that 5.1 surround sound or whatever you have to get digital audio cables for the sound, so $50 for all of your cables isn't that bad.

Really, my point was that someone talking about the GameCube/PS2/X-Box only costing $199/$299/$299 respectively isn't covering all the costs. Sure that's what you get with one controller, but I don't think there are too many gamers that go without a memory card for instance, and for all those preaching the high quality and resolution video of the X-Box/GC, getting component video connections is a pretty big deal.

BTW, I do agree with you that gaming shouldn't be about economic arguments and I'm looking forward to the next Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda games, but felt the need to clarify my post.

ranging from $0.79 each (100 on a spindle for $79) to $1.09

Hmmm... Regular 700MB CDR costs about $20.00/100 (or free, if you can find a good enough rebate). A MP3 CDrom player costs around $99.00 at BestBuy and a decent CDRW Drive costs about the same at the same place.

Sure, this new toy is possibly more convenient, but not $200 convenient, especially when you figure in a higher 'cost of ownership' per MB of storage.

Sorry, please play again.

ranging from $0.79 each (100 on a spindle for $79) to $1.09

Hmmm... Regular 700MB CDR costs about $20.00/100 (or free, if you can find a good enough rebate). A MP3 CDrom player costs around $99.00 at BestBuy and a decent CDRW Drive costs about the same at the same place.

Sure, this new toy is possibly more convenient, but not $200 convenient, especially when you figure in a higher 'cost of ownership' per MB of storage.

Sorry, please play again.

Afraid the Fresnel lens will degrade the quality of the image from your expensive LCD? Try this Bausch & Lomb lens--it appears to be a non-Fresnel, so it doesn't have the lines that could cause some quality loss. You could end up creating a better quality product than a $4000 LCD if this lens works the way I think it does.

Some video source thoughts:
-- 7-inch 16:9 LCD (I don't know where the 7 inches are--I think they're horizontal) being offered to Playstation/PSX owners
-- good source of variety of LCDs?
-- there are several 5-inch TFT NTSC LCDs available for use with the Playstation/PSX (some better than others)

If I weren't able to get good resolution out of the 16:9 version, I'd rather use a VGA LCD at ~$260-350 any day with the NTSC LCD prices Best Buy and Radio Shack charge.

Final thoughts on the dimness issue.. With an LCD, you should be able to remove the reflective backing (ever so carefully, pack a UV-protectant clear sheet of plastic over the back of the device and pump some flourescent, arc, or other bright lighting through it.
Some problems foreseen:
-- may take some experimentation to find the light that irritates the eyes the least
-- may need two settings for day and night
-- be very cautious as not to create a fire hazard

IANAL, but I doubt that the drexel furniture company owns a trademark on 'Drexel' as the name applies to education. The trademark only covers what they make it cover, i.e. furniture.

So i could finally build my long-dream McDonalds automobile and not face trouble with the fast-food chain accidently posing under the same name ?

you can not get ANY wireless fully 802.11b access points for under about 160$ new (even on ebay).

I can not get to the mailing list archive (slashdotted?)
What about the SOHOware Netblaster NCP600? SOHOware claims its 802.11b compatible and only $149 from them directly. It's at Bestbuy for $159.99.
Sorry about the anonymous, I'm at work

you can not get ANY wireless fully 802.11b access points for under about 160$ new (even on ebay).

I can not get to the mailing list archive (slashdotted?)
What about the SOHOware Netblaster NCP600? SOHOware claims its 802.11b compatible and only $149 from them directly. It's at Bestbuy for $159.99.
Sorry about the anonymous, I'm at work

Pioneer has a dvd-r/rw and cd-r/rw combo here at Best Buy for $799. Therefore, HP is not the first.

That's bullshit! I've see a DVD burner on the Best Buy website for a while. Let's see Best Buy. Only $800. They even sell the media (which isn't cheap).

one of these. - $250

at least two of these. - $130 each.

so, we're up to $510, as a reference point, as to what an 802.11b network costs.

~z

one of these. - $250

at least two of these. - $130 each.

so, we're up to $510, as a reference point, as to what an 802.11b network costs.

~z

(for the benefit of those browsing above the AC's...)

Hard disk space is NOT cheap. Have you seen the prices of hard disks recently?

Yeah, I got a 30GB drive several months ago for about $150, and prices have gone down since then. That's cheap. About 3 times as expensive as blank CDR's, megabyte for megabyte, but it is cheap.

But of course, I'm not the type to spout numbers without some kind of evidence. Check here, or if that's not big enough check here or here. Yeah, it's more than a few beers, but what were you expecting to pay for serious storage?

Unless they wanted compatibility with LinuxPPC,

but that wouldn't get them anywhere considering the lack of packaged software for it.

Where was I?

I was working at Best Buy at the time. I remember clearly counting down the hours to when the shareware was released.

When did you download it?

I hit the net the hour id said it was released. I was at work, so I had to improvise. Well, BB had a tech center that wasn't being used at the time, so I mentioned I was going to do some paper work at the front of the store (I was a Product Specialist at the time). I went into that room for about an hour and a half.

How did you download it?

I tried over modem first, as that is what everyone had at the time. FTP sites were slow, and there was none of this FilePlanet B.S. as we have it today. I tried to go direct to my machine, but the FTP site would have none of that, so I telnetted into an university account I had at the time I was admin, and did a FTP session there.

How long did the download take?

To the university? Oh, about a minute and a half. Seriously, back when only the select few had broadband, it rocked. To get it home from there, oh, I would say about two hours. But, not much outbound traffic at that university ;-).

First impression?

My computer really that slow? Damn, I need some new gear!

If Ford is so serious about 'protecting' their properties wtf don't they sue Microsoft over the Explorer trademark? MS is using Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer and Ford has trademarked long time ago Ford Explorer. Sure they are competing in different industris but Ford could bring it up under the trademark dilution clause.

It's usually not dilution if they're in different industries. Locally, there's a company called "Best Buy Furniture" that is in the furniture retail business. They even have a yellow-tag logo that bears a certain amount of resemblance to the logo of a certain consumer-electronics retailer. AFAIK, there's never been any litigation between the two companies...and there probably never will be any. If I'm in the market for a big-screen TV, I'm not likely to go looking in a furniture store for it.

Consider this hypothetical situation. You go to one of the numerous electronics or computer retailers across the fruited plain and you buy a computer off the shelf. (Please...you can stop laughing now at the absurdity of this possibility.) The thing's preloaded with the latest bluescreen inducer. (We're also assuming that, for whatever reason, thinking different isn't an option.) You'd rather replace the preloaded software with something that's a little more reliable. You borrow a copy of $LINUX_DISTRO|$FREEBSD_DISTRO from a friend and blow away Win$YEAR when Billy sends some attack lawyers down from Redmond and slaps you with a lawsuit for depriving him of any future revenue when Win`expr $YEAR + 1` comes along.

How is the above hypothetical any different than what Gracenote is trying to pull off here? They seem to be under the impression that once you use their service in your software, you're stuck with them forever.

(Does anybody have a tool and/or a project (probably of a distributed nature) going to brute-force CDDB for all possible data and pass the info along to one of the free (as in speech) alternatives?)

They're showing up in my local stores. Perhaps you are not looking carefully enough?
http://www.bestbuy.com/videogames/Detail.asp?e=110 26992&m=937&cat=955&scat=

http://www.bestbuy.com/videogames/Detail.asp?e=110 26992&m=937&cat=955&scat=

Hey - why the hell would anyone want to buy a cramped POS HP, compaq, etc system?
The damn cases are cramped, a bitch to work with, the power supplies are crap, limited upgradibility etc.. etc..

This is definitely true of the "consumer-grade" stuff these companies put out, but don't lump Vectras and Deskpros in with Pavilions and Presarios (and Brios, which are rebadged Pavilions for the most part). The business-grade stuff is somewhat better. (Nothing beats building your own, unless you need to send a computer a couple thousand miles to a remote location. If it breaks on the other side of the country, it's cheaper to call IBM, Compaq, or whoever and have them send their people out than to hop on a plane and fix a homebrew box.)

Dell still has some credibility in my eyes, they have really nice cases, and fairly decent boards.

You must be joking. Back when I fixed computers for The Man, I always dreaded taking in Dells. I got the impression that they took whatever seconds Intel had that week and slapped them together into something that resembled a computer. Upgrading them and fixing them was a cast-iron b*tch compared to nearly anything else. I would rather have worked on Packard Bells...at least they didn't pretend to be high-end, and if you worked on enough of them, you could figure out their quirks and deal with them reasonably well.

Yeah. And probably on a Sony VAIO running windows...

Hey, you may not have heard of this, but didja know that you can watch DVDs as a Linux user? Yeah, you have to buy a $100 DVD hardware decoder though... Apex makes mine, but Pioneer, Panasonic and JVC make some too. Click here for a starting point.

Oh, and at least in the past, Taco's girlfriend uses Windows, so he's familiar with what Windows looks like; he's just chosen Linux.

--
Evan (in a twistedly sarcastic mood today fer some reason).

Yeah, it would be nice if you could buy FreeBSD at Best Buy...

I'm sure you'll still be able to use their universal key. The one that's all 0s with one 1. I don't remember offhand, but it has the form of 00000-01000-0000-000 something like that. Oops, did they not want that to get out?

Back when I was under the thumb of The Man, I actually memorized a Win98 OEM CD key. I had twenty machines to ops-check before the day-after-Thanksgiving one year, so I scribbled down the CD key from one of the machines on pieces of masking tape which went up at each of the four workstations I was using to get the job done. By the time all the machines were done, I had the stupid thing committed to memory...so there are now dozens of Win98 boxen all over town using BCP3V-3RR6D-Q8BK8-YRKP2-T43R8. Sometimes I scare even myself. :-)

Part | 1990 | 2000 | Difference
Proc | 286 12MHz | Athlon 1GHz | 83X faster clock
Memory | 1 MB | 128MB | 128X more and faster
HD | 42MB | 60GB | 1500X more and faster
Modem | 2.4kbps | 56kbps | 23.3X faster
Network | none | 100Mbps | 41kX faster than 2400 modem
video | 320x240 256 colors | 1600x1200 2^24 colors | 25X more pixels 2^16X more colors

Make of this what you will, some components have increased in power faster than Moore might have predicted, some slower, but there is no mistake that every single part of the computer has made huge strides in the last decade. It's true that today the processor is less likely to be the bottle neck on a system than 10 year ago, but the performance increase is huge nonetheless.
_____________

"Watch in awe as MP3s download more quickly and graphics flow more smoothly."

What a load of crap! it's no wonder Joe Consumer keeps buying Intel's overpriced junk. As long as Intel's marketing Juggernaut keeps tossing around flashy words like "NetBurst Architecture" and "HyperPipeline", Intel will continue to sell chips. I fully believe that they could package shit on a stick, give it a nice marketing spin, and show some weird abstract commercials during prime time, and people would continue to buy it.

I Just bought a Linksys EtherFast 4-port Cable/DSL Router and for the record, it uses the exact same power cable that a computer uses. Thus, no AC/DC adapter taking up 2-3 spots on the powerbar. In addition, I love the fact that it's power is independant of any of my machines. I don't want to have to worry about the power to my router dieing because I had to hard reset a computer (happens sometimes while gaming). If that were to happen: bye bye connections. Any friends who were on the game server with you are gone too.

That said, if this were a lot cheaper than the Linksys, then I can see a market.

So you can buy a DigitalTV that doesn't do HD, or you can buy a HDTV that does it all. For now.

Usually you're buying a monitor that is spec'd for its capable resolutions, and you'll buy the tuner seperately, and if you're not using an HD set, somewhere in there scan lines will be discarded. The monitor, I suppose.

Here is Best Buy's attempt at an explanation.

Here ya go: everyt hing you ever wanted to see on tv

I work in the streaming media biz, and although I think it's admirable that someone would limit all their viewing to streams, be realistic - there's still no substitute for tv, and that won't change until people think about 56k modems the same way we think of 300 baud externals today. Maybe once broadband is the norm, tv and streams will converge. Until then, the boob toob is the only way to get all the tv programming you want.

While it might be nice if it were dead. It most certainly isn't. And belive it or not I know plenty of government agencies that still have windowless TN3270 terminals for database lookups.

Some of 'em are still in the private sector, too. My former employer was still using IBM terminals up to sometime within the past 12 months. I think they've converted from terminals to NT workstations, but they still have a 3270 emulator on them for legacy-system access.

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

In the nicer parts of America, that's how CDs are sold. It's only in high-loss neighborhoods that you'll find those horrid cd protectors that do a great job of making the useful display space disappear.

Sometimes they only do this with the CDs that are most often subject to the "five-finger discount." Back in my days working for The Man, certain categories of music (such as rap, though I don't know if that qualifies as music :-) ) got placed in the anti-theft packaging thingies, while the other CDs were simply sensor-tagged. (The kids in the "crack alley" across the street from the store were more likely to want to snatch Snoop Doggy Dogg than Yanni. :-) )

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Even if it isn't, this would still be very valuable to WebTV users, who usually don't have a computer(or at least in concept), and therefore they can't print stuff off the the internet.

Um...most (all? I can't remember) WebTV boxes have a parallel port. IIRC from when I sold the things @ a certain consumer-electronics retailer that will remain unnamed :-), the standard WebTV would work with HP inkjets, while WebTV Plus also supported Canon and one or two other manufacturers.

HP even made a printer specifically for use with WebTV, the DeskJet 670TV.

The fine print for the Best Buy offer says that it is valid only on new MSN account established in store at time of PC purchase. So it depends on how they define "new account." If it means you must never have had an MSN account before, then you can only do it once. If it just means that you must not have an existing account, perhaps this would work: use the rebate today, cancel the MSN, and within a month when it's all canceled, try it again. The offer ends Feb 29, so I imagine you could only get it in twice.

That said, the GF and I are off to Best Buy tonight to see what free stuff we want to pick up. ;-)

And on the top of my list is the Simpson's Music CD, the new one is out now, check it out at amazon.com. This link may expire, so just do a search for "Simpsons" in the "Popular Music" sectoin. They've got 4 albums now, if you include the oldest (and really bad) The Simpsons Sing the Blues.

What else.....CDs full of MP3s are good.....or if you know that your geek has a CD Burner, blank CDs are always useful. You can get them for around a buck a piece at your local best buy.

Also, just check out linux.ora.com. If theres a book there that I don't have, I'd be happy to receive it.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Ties. (Star Wars, Cirque du Soleil, Wolverine, etc.)
However, I'm in the process of changing jobs, so I don't know if I'll be required to wear a tie at my next job, so this isn't on my list.

When in doubt, the best choice are 'gift cards', from somewhere you know the person shops--
Best Buy, Tower Records, etc.

Of course, one of the biggest problems with buying things over the internet is the problem with returns. I have no problem ordering stuff for myself over the internet, but if I have even the slightest thought that someone may possibly want to return something, chances are, I'll order through Border Books or Barnes and Noble over Amazon.

So, to restate the whole point -- there is no 'one perfect gift'. (even cash may not qualify, if there's someone who never leaves the house, and so, would need for you to handle direct deposit instead, so they could make use of it)