Slashdot Mirror

I am waiting for these to come down in price. It reminds me of the +/- war, it forces the mainstream customers to wait for dual-format players.

Wish granted. Do I get a cookie? ;)

I didn't think (from reading the article) that Mossberg thought the Dell was better, just that there was a reasonable all-in-one option for someone who wants to run Windows.

There are plenty of nice all-in-ones out there for people who run Windows. They're call laptops.

I still don't get why you'd buy either an iMac *or* an XPS One when you can buy something like this instead, and have full portability as part of the bargain. (And note the price.) I actually just bought one of those for $399 as a Christmas gift for my wife - it's a great little machine.

Yes, I know Apple makes laptops too. I have no problem with them if you're a Mac person. I just don't "get" the whole category of computers that the iMac and XPS One fit into. What is it, the bigger screen vs. a laptop? Hell, you could buy a laptop *and* a 24" LCD screen for less than an XPS One, and then you'd have a really nice computer with the same huge screen *and* it'd be fully portable!

You pointed to the OLPC; how many of those are being purchased by JQP? And how many compared to the other outlets? How about all 5 desktops at Circuit City for under $500, all pre-configured with Windows? The only two sub-$500 laptops at Circuit City come pre-loaded with Windows? How about all 9 sub-$500 desktops at Best Buy? Or the two laptops at Best Buy that have a decently sized screen, both coming with Windows? Take a look at Staples, Office Depot, Office Max. All the outlets have low-cost computers and all of them already come with Windows.

Yeah, the OLPC? Intel and Microsoft have a competing unit as well. I read the TFA, I just also happened to read a few other things that made me see the article for what it is - a wish to see 2008 as the "year of Linux because it's cheaper!", when the reality points to Windows still dominating all the consumer market niches...

You pointed to the OLPC; how many of those are being purchased by JQP? And how many compared to the other outlets? How about all 5 desktops at Circuit City for under $500, all pre-configured with Windows? The only two sub-$500 laptops at Circuit City come pre-loaded with Windows? How about all 9 sub-$500 desktops at Best Buy? Or the two laptops at Best Buy that have a decently sized screen, both coming with Windows? Take a look at Staples, Office Depot, Office Max. All the outlets have low-cost computers and all of them already come with Windows.

Yeah, the OLPC? Intel and Microsoft have a competing unit as well. I read the TFA, I just also happened to read a few other things that made me see the article for what it is - a wish to see 2008 as the "year of Linux because it's cheaper!", when the reality points to Windows still dominating all the consumer market niches...

My friend, if you are a retailer, you won't survive the holiday season because all your prices are bloated.

360 - $349.99, including TWO games

Extra Controller - $49.99

HD Cable - $0 (included in premium, elite, and halo systems)

My friend, if you are a retailer, you won't survive the holiday season because all your prices are bloated.

360 - $349.99, including TWO games

Extra Controller - $49.99

HD Cable - $0 (included in premium, elite, and halo systems)

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8525875&type=product&id=1186007267767&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=8525875

Nevermind - I think I found it - I didn't see one with 2 GB of RAM - just 1 GB - but looks like a great deal nonetheless - here is a link.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8525875&st=tablet&lp=11&type=product&cp=1&id=1186007267767

Well that was fast, 1TB drives for less than $300. We can now welcome our new unforgetful overlords. $289.99 $279.99 $279.99

Sorry, I did understand your point, but got stuck on the cable thing and didn't finish the argument. My fault.

The point I was trying to make was that bestbuy just sells overpriced stuff. Period. They're not selling hard drives as loss leaders to get people to buy their other stuff. Their hard drives (cheapest internal 500gb $139.99) are also overpriced compared to other places ($99.99, same specs)

They're especially bad with things that are supposed to be extremely cheap, like cables, but nothing is really cheap there. Actually, you can buy dvd's for decent prices at best buy. That's just about the only thing I buy there unless I'm in some type of hurry and can't wait for the mail delivery time.

Oh, and before I mess up this post as well, no, newegg isn't selling their hard drives as loss leaders for cables either. You can search their site for HDMI cables and see the 10' $6.99 one and 5' power cable for $3.49. I really like newegg, most of their prices are quite reasonable, and they ship things very quickly.

Well, you picked a place that sells way overpriced stuff. Especially cables. People keep telling me how HDMI cables cost $100, and if you're trying to buy them at Best Buy, you do find them at that price (although, I'm now finding "cheaper" cables. $49.99 is the cheapest I've found there. It says it's an "xbox hdmi cable", I assume microsoft doesn't have a proprietary plug and that's just a regular hdmi cable. If it's not a regular hdmi cable, then the cheapest is a $79.99 4' cable instead. On the other hand, if you do a simple google search, you'll easily find 6' cables for $6.99. Same for most other cables.

The lesson...stuff is getting cheaper, but you need to shop around before you buy. These days, with the convenience of the 'net, you have no excuse not to.

Let's just hope that this wireless solution is cheaper than the ridiculous pricing of the HDMI cable out there, because the only purpose of this solution is to replace the HDMI cable.

Stop buying from Best Buy and start buying from Newegg. You'll see a bit of a difference.

24K gold-plated connectors enhance conductivity, resist corrosion and provide high-quality signal transfer

It's digital. The signal gets through, or it does not.

What chapter would apply to that?
I'm interested in learning more about this, because as you say the way they would have you believe it is that you can't return any opened software.

So this is wrong?

You make a good point, but it is flawed.

Consoles are dedicated video game machines, and as such are much more affordable than fully functioning computers. So once people buy their hot new video game console they have more cash left over for games.

Oh, wait a minute, it seems that the cheapest PS3 on the market is more expensive than a desktop computer+flatscreen monitor combo...

You make a good point, but it is flawed.

Consoles are dedicated video game machines, and as such are much more affordable than fully functioning computers. So once people buy their hot new video game console they have more cash left over for games.

Oh, wait a minute, it seems that the cheapest PS3 on the market is more expensive than a desktop computer+flatscreen monitor combo...

Really, it doesn't even matter. Trademark is the weakest of the forms of "intellectual property." It's essentially designed to only prevent people from offering services under the same or confusingly similar names/logos as a trademarked one.

It's even weaker than that, as you can have names reused in unrelated businesses. Locally, there was a furniture retailer that called itself Best Buy Furniture. Their logo included a pricetag image tilted at an angle that bore a more than superficial similarity to that of a somewhat more widely known company. While both of them are retailers, one was primarily a furniture retailer and the other is primarily a consumer-electronics retailer (though they offer some RTA furniture on the side), so they left each other alone AFAIK.

You can edit documents, run spreadsheets (even multiply correctly!), design software/hardware, compose music, etc, just as easily in an OSS OS as Windows. And if people stopped worshipping Redmond they'd actually realize that *they* have the power to choose, not the producers.

It's not about "editing documents and spreadsheets," it's about "editing MS Office documents and spreadsheets" because Microsoft is a monopoly. Businesses aren't willing to screw around with OpenOffice if it means they might not be able to open files from clients. Microsoft wouldn't be able to charge $329 for an upgrade if they didn't have a lock on the market.

Why isn't photoshop ported to GNU/Linux? Because customers aren't demanding it enough.

No, because serious Photoshop users couldn't care less about running it on Linux. They need it to Just Work, not waste time tinkering with it.

Try this Ipod Nano at future shop 219$ (or BestBuy.ca)

Same Ipod nano at BestBuy.com at 149$

Not at all !

Goods are allways at higher price in Canada.

Look at cars, even if no border tax exist for foreing company to import car in Canada (or in the USA) all car have better price and better warrenty in the USA than in Canada. Go to jeep.ca or toyota.ca and try to build a car and then compare it with jeep.com ou toyota.com for a 30k car in the USA you will buy 36K in Canada (plus taxes).
Samething for everything from Apple, you got 10% to 30% of foreing charge when you buy in Canada.

And don't try to buy it at Amazon.com, they don't send thing like that in Canada, you must buy at Amazon.ca.

Try this Ipod Nano at future shop 219$ (or BestBuy.ca)

Same Ipod nano at BestBuy.com at 149$

Even if the Can$ is higger thant the US$ price a cheapper in USA, That's before taxes, and the overall business etablishment price is lower in Canada.

Er... TiVo HD is $299. I got my Series2 DT there for $99, and I think I paid the same price for my first Series2. There were some rebates involved, but still, you can't get a CableCard-ready TiVo for anywhere near that price, AFAICT.

But, I can't go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart and buy a $100 tuner off the shelf.

No, but you can go to Best Buy or Circuit City and buy a $180 tuner off the shelf.

Best Buy's product page

Circuit City's product page

There seems to be only one of these on the market right now. It's an ATSC/ClearQAM tuner from Samsung, and it comes equipped with video outputs for HDMI, component, composite (x2), and s-video. Audio outs are in the form of RCA L/R and TOSLink. It also has an antenna passthrough. It gets pretty good reviews from the enthusiast sites (News for TV-heads, stuff that matters?), and I'd go so far as to say you should probably get one of these if you don't already get ATSC TV in your home.

For the record, no, I don't work for any of the affiliated parties here, nor do I own one of these boxes (though after reading some of the reviews, I might within the week!).

Sony just pissed themselves.

$487.99 for Blue-ray Vs. $150... wonder who will win that aspect to the format war?
The only thing that may limit this format is whether the movie companies will pick it up, and more importantly the porn industry.

The base price online is still MUCH better than the normal retail price at a big-box type store. Even if I don't ever get the rebate, I still feel I've paid a fair price, and it's HALF as much from newegg as it is from Best Buy. 1/3rd the price if I get the rebate. I win either way, and I don't feel like I have to "recover" any money from when I paid too much for the product in the first place. Rebates are a scam, and I never buy a product based on the price after a rebate.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7916 892&st=Duke+Nukem&type=product&id=1149208575530

whatever you do, don't look at this page, or else the release date won't be the first of December any more...Crap!

best buy. I've been really happy with my samsung, but that list has several upconvert, not all of which I would call 'good', but a few that I would.

Now if you want anything more than an iPod, you need to buy directly from Apple.

The best thing I see coming from this, there will longer be a Linksys WRT54G. [...] [Best Buy employees] constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP.

I don't think it will have the issues the GC had, though it's still pretty early. 3rd parties are looking toward the Wii with interest, and sales figures are driving that. There are some fun 1 person games out there.

Heatseeker, great game. I've played this for a few hours on my fathers Wii.

Trauma Center Fun puzzle game. Cheesy storyline, but the puzzles get tougher and it really is fun.

Metroid Prime Not out yet, but this one looks like it'll be good.

I enjoyed paper mario more than any other platform game I've played in years. I'm not sure what it's downfall was to you, but perhaps Mario Galaxy won't have the same issue.

I don't think it will have the issues the GC had, though it's still pretty early. 3rd parties are looking toward the Wii with interest, and sales figures are driving that. There are some fun 1 person games out there.

Heatseeker, great game. I've played this for a few hours on my fathers Wii.

Trauma Center Fun puzzle game. Cheesy storyline, but the puzzles get tougher and it really is fun.

Metroid Prime Not out yet, but this one looks like it'll be good.

I enjoyed paper mario more than any other platform game I've played in years. I'm not sure what it's downfall was to you, but perhaps Mario Galaxy won't have the same issue.

I don't think it will have the issues the GC had, though it's still pretty early. 3rd parties are looking toward the Wii with interest, and sales figures are driving that. There are some fun 1 person games out there.

Heatseeker, great game. I've played this for a few hours on my fathers Wii.

Trauma Center Fun puzzle game. Cheesy storyline, but the puzzles get tougher and it really is fun.

Metroid Prime Not out yet, but this one looks like it'll be good.

I enjoyed paper mario more than any other platform game I've played in years. I'm not sure what it's downfall was to you, but perhaps Mario Galaxy won't have the same issue.

> > When did the word "only" start applying to 17" screens?

>2002

Odd that, since my 15" Viewsonic LCD was made in 2002. Must have been right before this great change.

I bought my laptop just this year, and it has a screen much smaller than 17 inches. And 15 inch monitors are still on the market.

the 33 1/3 LP format. With digital music, this concept is totally outdated and destined to die.

I hope not. I much prefer vinyl records over digital. However if I ever want digital I can easily rip and burn vinyl to digital. Recently I've seen new turntables in stores, some with usb ports built in. Even BestBuy has some turntables. I've been thinking of getting a new turntable myself but first I want to find a good one and make sure I can get stylus' for it as well as find a good reel-to-reel tape deck.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7773 117&st=512+usb&type=product&id=1142289732645

it's worth the investment once you consider microsofts storage will require internet :P

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8403 514&st=bluray&type=product&id=1180743330749
- $499.99 is $100 cheaper than a PS3.

And the PS3 is sitting right around 3-3.5 million 6 months off the block. So, if we say that people didn't buy them for the games (which my brother didn't) you might safely guess that quite a few of those (>1 million?) are dedicated players. Not even including the sales of the dedicated players themselves. Blu Ray is picking up like it or not.

Your comparison is misleading because you linked to the two-disc special edition. The regular edition DVD is only $14.99 -- it's marked down quite a bit from an inflated "list price", but Best Buy always does that.

That's the same price as on the iTunes store, but you still get extra features (outtakes, commentary, other languages) as well as the ability to play it on any DVD player, rip it to your favorite compressed format, etc.

Depends on the movie. Usually when I go to Best Buy, new releases are right around $20. Look at their website, and you'll see a lot of movies saying something like:

List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $19.99

Old movies, yeah, you might be able to get them for $5-$10. But at this moment, Best Buy is selling a copy of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (the movie in question) with a list price of $34.99 with Best Buy's price of $26.99.

Is this an indication of movie quality, or another notch in the belt for the Blu-ray format

Is this an indication of movie quality, or another notch in the belt for the Blu-ray format

>>he Monster connection kit for $150-200 so he gets all of the cables he could possi

never! The guy will be selling you these HDMI cables.. and better yet, TWO of the MFs! Then you need the surge protector. Anything major should definitely be protected but for that price one could do much better.

No way are they selling a all in one kit for $200 when they can hook you with this. Sit and watch what else people end up buying when they go in ill prepared.

>>he Monster connection kit for $150-200 so he gets all of the cables he could possi

never! The guy will be selling you these HDMI cables.. and better yet, TWO of the MFs! Then you need the surge protector. Anything major should definitely be protected but for that price one could do much better.

No way are they selling a all in one kit for $200 when they can hook you with this. Sit and watch what else people end up buying when they go in ill prepared.

I cant even get it from a DISTRIBUTOR for that cheap. Distributor pricing is still in the 30s-40s for a no-name.

Here are some references to back up the range I'm describing:

If you can get one for under $10 (3 or 6 foot)...but them!!

Just one question: Where would you plug it in? Most of the people destined to use these have no mains power.

I can understand the desire to get low cost computers into the hands of the underprivileged, really I do, it's an awesome goal. But I always have these nagging doubts if neutering the technology to get it to a cost they deem reasonable defeats the whole purpose. Remember when they tried to make those cheap internet appliances that grandma could use to check her email and surf the web? They had a dumbed down OS and scaled back hardware to make them cheap and simple to use, they also bombed horribly because they couldn't run any of the standard apps that a full on pc could. Same deal with webtv. So while this computer is cool how will it's usefullness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?

Best Buy is currently selling a laptop, retail!, for $399. $399 laptop
And the specs on it are actually not half bad, not as bad as you might think:

15.4" screen
1.5 ghz Via C7-M
512 ram
128 meg shared video
DVD +/- DL burner
60 GB HDD
802.11 b/g
10/100 ethernet
v.92 modem
Vista Basic


Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks, scale down the screen size and maybe eliminate a few usb ports and some other stuff, mass produce it and you could have a full on pc capable of running even windows vista for probably under 300 bucks. I have to think that something like that would be much more useful, even if you bought half as many it would still be better in the long run with it's upgradeability and standards compliance. Thoughts?

You know Nintendo is going to come out with new colors of Wii with extra features like DVD playback in a year or so.

Yes, because I've often thought that getting a DVD movie player was much too difficult and expensive.

Lack of DVD movie support was a good idea. At $30 everyone who wants a DVD player has one and has probably had it fom some time. It saved Nintendo a little money in licensing fees per machine. As an added bonus they don't need to worry about the complexity of adding Macrovision or other DRM complications to their hardware.

Here's one: a Hitachi 51" Widescreen Rear-Projection CRT SDTV, Model: 51F59, $900.

The ATSC defines widescreen SDTV as 704 pixels × 480 lines with 16:9 aspect ratio.

It's been about 8 months since I gave up on inkjet as a technology. We'd been through about 6 printers over the past 6 years, some lasting longer than others, and would usually get one that was cheap-ish, but inevitably they would clog. Why? Because we didn't print every day. The last one was actually 2 printers as Canon replaced it for free. But if you went more than 2 weeks without printing anything, you were headed to clogsville.

That's been my experience with an Epson Stylus Photo R200. I had long avoided Epsons because of bad experience keeping the demo printers in good working order back when I wore the blue shirt, but they're the only game in town for printing on CDs and DVDs (unless you want to spend $300+, or are OK with the monochrome thermal-transfer disc printers from Casio). I've had to send mine away for service once so far, and even after 3-4 cleaning cycles, there are some nozzles that still won't clear. Printing discs in best-quality mode minimizes the appearance of problems, so that's what I usually end up doing.

OTOH, I have an HP DeskJet 450wbt that is still running on its original color cartridge (I think I've had to replace the black cartridge once after it ran out) after about a year and a half. It gets used twice a year at homebrew competitions, and sporadically in between. The last time I used it, I didn't even need to run the cleaning cycle first; it spit out a flawless test page right off the bat, after having sat idle for 3-4 months. It definitely cost more than most inkjet printers (being a portable printer with a battery and Bluetooth for 100% wireless operation will do that, but you could save ~$100 by leaving those off), but it's been one of the better inkjet printers I've bought. It works like a champ with Linux, too, over both Bluetooth and USB, and HPLIP reads ink level and battery charge when connected over USB.

I flat out don't believe you. What couldn't they find in Vista? What's so drastically different from XP? Did they fail to notice the handy (new) search bar? Do they not know how to make shortcuts?

There's always going to be a bit of a learning curve with any new product that is different even in the slightest of ways. Complaining about how it's different is asinine to me...if they just wanted XP because that's what they were used to, then why were they shopping for new computers? Sounds like you weren't much of a help at all.

And as for this nonsense about Vista being a memory hog and performance drain...that is demonstrably false. I have a 3 year old Dell that I've just upgraded with Vista, and if anything, Vista is snappier.

You are right about one thing, though; XP is next to impossible to find:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?j=1&id=cat 16104&type=category
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/5385 14/ref=br_bx_c_2_1/103-9340057-3065405
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/search-ng.gsp?searc h_constraint=3944&search_query=windows+xp&Continue .x=22&Continue.y=7
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/howtobuy/d efault.mspx
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?DEPA =0&type=&Description=xp&Submit=ENE&N=0&Ntk=all