I normally don't get them, unless the product I'm buying can be reasonably expected to last a long time, and the warranty includes some extras.
When I got a Dell U2410 monitor I got the five-year plan on it, because it offers advance exchange, and I expect a monitor to last five years at least. And I got a plan on my fridge, but that plan also includes a free annual maintenance check, and a discount on parts and filters.
If the warranties didn't offer those extras, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
That's not the real price of the phone. Those are speculators, who got them early and are trying to make a quick buck before the phone is actually out.
It's the same thing you see when a new video game console comes out and hits ebay for double the list price.
(The Q10 is likely to be about $500 - $600, depending on storage and exact model. In line with other smartphones.)
I could have paid for my first T-Mo phone up front, but since they were offering 0% financing, I took it. The rate was still reasonable even with the phone payment included, so why not?
(This was a few years ago, and they were calling it the Even More Plus plan. What pissed ME off is that Microsoft turned off the Sidekick servers before I was done paying for the thing, so for two months I was making payments on a useless brick. However, I'd have been screwed by that no matter when I'd paid for the phone.)
I hate it when developers do this. Offer a torrent as your default download, sure, but put a direct download buried somewhere in your support pages.
Some people (like me) have net connections that just crap out on torrents. I can download a large file reasonably well, but the same file in a torrent will take weeks.
And some people (a majority, in some nations) have caps, and a torrent-based downloader eats into that quite a bit.
I've never had a problem with the buttons on the Opus being nonresponsive. (Though if I hit the d-pad on a diagonal, sometimes it registers two presses.) It's slow in menus and such, but I never had a problem while reading.
Which firmware are you using? I use the MobiPocket firmware, and never had a problem with PDFs. Other than it being slow to load them initially - once loaded, panning around works okay. I do have to zoom the heck in, because of the size of the screen. It's not a good device for reading my role-playing game books on, but for its intended purpose - novels - it's hard to beat.
In general, I really like e-readers for anything I'm going to read start to finish, like a novel or a biography or something. Reference I'm going to flip around in, I want a paper book.
What I'd like is an Opus with a frontlight. I don't need a touchscreen, or wifi, or any of that.... having said that, the Ectaco Jetbook Color with the color e-ink screen and 170 language translation function, SAT courses, speech recognition for its built-in foreign language courses, and such, would be a fun toy. But it's $500. And it's rather large.
If you want a pocket-sized e-ink reader, find a Bookeen Cybook Opus. They've stopped making them, but they have a 5" screen and the case is designed so it fits nicely in a pocket, all rounded edges.
They support either epub or MobiPocket, but not both at once. (It takes a firmware flash to switch back and forth.)
I like mine enough that when I broke it (dropped something heavy on it. Oops.) I hunted up another rather than get a larger reader, even though I wound up paying more.
They also have physical buttons for page turns, which is a must for me. The touchscreen Kindles drive me up a wall.
Well, if we're admitting taking forever to get the joke, it took me damn near fifteen years to get that the name of Sonic the Hedgehog's sidekick was a gag. A real 'Oh, duh.... how the hell did I miss that?' moment.
The website Cracked is pretty much nothing like the long-running magazine Cracked.
Cracked was a fairly successful ripoff of MAD. The problem, and it's the same one MAD faces, is that you can't really parody pop culture any more because it's become self-parodying. MAD stays in business, but just barely. There doesn't seem to be room for more than one mag in that segment now, though.
Interesting tidbit: Microsoft gave DirectMusic back to the original developer they got it from, who has since released the source to the program it was based on. So Bars and Pipes is back, kinda. (Still only on Amigas, though.)
In my experience with games that have both DX10 and DX11 renderers, DX11 doesn't look any nicer than DX10, but it's much faster.
This does sometimes let a game have a few more visual gewgaws in DX11 because they'd be too much of a performance hit in DX10, but mostly DX11 mode looks the same but with a higher framerate.
The system isn't there to remind you to use your turn signal.
It's there because if you're drifting out of lane without using your turn signal you may very well be falling asleep or distracted and not REALIZE you're drifting out of the lane.
Depends on where your talents lie, I suppose. Dust: An Elysian Tail is basically by one guy, though he hired an outside studio to do the music and voiceovers. It's one of the prettiest games I've ever seen, entirely hand-drawn 2D sprites and background.
Of course, it did take Dean a long time to finish it, but he didn't KNOW how to program an Xbox 360 when he started - he was teaching himself as he went along. That's not a recipe for speed; you wind up rewriting whole chunks of your game when you get better at coding.
My gadgets are multiplying like rabbits. Hell, I have five game consoles on my *desk*.
A coupla cell phones, tablets, laptops, several computers, printers, a PDA I still use, portable game systems, and a rats-nest of cables and switchboxes tying it all together.
Out under the TV I've got a VCR, HD-DVD, DVR, and a network media player. I have so many gizmos in the kitchen that it takes forever to reset all the clocks for DST. (Whyinhell does a fridge need a clock on it, anyway?)
This isn't even counting all the gadgets I have left over from ages past that are packed away and no longer used.
My cell phone hasn't replaced my 'portable music player'. My car has. (And the PMP was a Walkman.) The only other gizmo my cell phone has really replaced was the -really tiny- laptop I used to carry around for SSH use and light browsing. (A Toshiba Libretto 50CT.)
Sure, there are gizmos that do -more- than they used to, but none of them do -all- of what I need my crapola to do, so I wind up with a bunch of them. I have a really nice tablet. I also have a netbook. Why? Sometimes I just want battery life and timekillers, and other times I need to run full computer software.
(Although I could probably ditch the netbook if someone pointed me at a full Windows XP emulator for Android - all I can find is QEMU, which only works up to 98.)
I actually had a NeXTStation ColorTurbo set up right next to an Amiga 3000 Tower/040. The NeXT was a sluggish *pig* compared to the Amiga.
I wound up getting rid of the NeXT and keeping the Amiga. The NeXT's keyboard was amazingly good, but that didn't make up for the general sluggishness or the severe lack of software for it. Compared to the NeXT, the Amiga had a Windows-like software library.
My Mac didn't come with a scroll-capable input device. In fact, Apple still sells brand-new Macs that don't scroll unless you buy a third-party scrolling device.
A lot of people use a laptop as their only computer. So the hard drive has to store everything on it. All their programs, their documents, and - very importantly, for a lot of people - their giant collection of MP3s. And maybe some movies, too. All those eat up a lot of space, fast.
My laptop has almost nothing on it. Because it's all on my NAS at home - 6TB and about half full.
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I normally don't get them, unless the product I'm buying can be reasonably expected to last a long time, and the warranty includes some extras.
When I got a Dell U2410 monitor I got the five-year plan on it, because it offers advance exchange, and I expect a monitor to last five years at least. And I got a plan on my fridge, but that plan also includes a free annual maintenance check, and a discount on parts and filters.
If the warranties didn't offer those extras, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
That's not the real price of the phone. Those are speculators, who got them early and are trying to make a quick buck before the phone is actually out.
It's the same thing you see when a new video game console comes out and hits ebay for double the list price.
(The Q10 is likely to be about $500 - $600, depending on storage and exact model. In line with other smartphones.)
That's the theory. In practice, offline mode sucks ass and doesn't work reliably.
Failed on me yesterday, for instance.
I could have paid for my first T-Mo phone up front, but since they were offering 0% financing, I took it. The rate was still reasonable even with the phone payment included, so why not?
(This was a few years ago, and they were calling it the Even More Plus plan. What pissed ME off is that Microsoft turned off the Sidekick servers before I was done paying for the thing, so for two months I was making payments on a useless brick. However, I'd have been screwed by that no matter when I'd paid for the phone.)
I hate it when developers do this. Offer a torrent as your default download, sure, but put a direct download buried somewhere in your support pages.
Some people (like me) have net connections that just crap out on torrents. I can download a large file reasonably well, but the same file in a torrent will take weeks.
And some people (a majority, in some nations) have caps, and a torrent-based downloader eats into that quite a bit.
I've never had a problem with the buttons on the Opus being nonresponsive. (Though if I hit the d-pad on a diagonal, sometimes it registers two presses.) It's slow in menus and such, but I never had a problem while reading.
Which firmware are you using? I use the MobiPocket firmware, and never had a problem with PDFs. Other than it being slow to load them initially - once loaded, panning around works okay. I do have to zoom the heck in, because of the size of the screen. It's not a good device for reading my role-playing game books on, but for its intended purpose - novels - it's hard to beat.
In general, I really like e-readers for anything I'm going to read start to finish, like a novel or a biography or something. Reference I'm going to flip around in, I want a paper book.
What I'd like is an Opus with a frontlight. I don't need a touchscreen, or wifi, or any of that. ... having said that, the Ectaco Jetbook Color with the color e-ink screen and 170 language translation function, SAT courses, speech recognition for its built-in foreign language courses, and such, would be a fun toy. But it's $500. And it's rather large.
If you want a pocket-sized e-ink reader, find a Bookeen Cybook Opus. They've stopped making them, but they have a 5" screen and the case is designed so it fits nicely in a pocket, all rounded edges.
They support either epub or MobiPocket, but not both at once. (It takes a firmware flash to switch back and forth.)
I like mine enough that when I broke it (dropped something heavy on it. Oops.) I hunted up another rather than get a larger reader, even though I wound up paying more.
They also have physical buttons for page turns, which is a must for me. The touchscreen Kindles drive me up a wall.
Well, if we're admitting taking forever to get the joke, it took me damn near fifteen years to get that the name of Sonic the Hedgehog's sidekick was a gag. A real 'Oh, duh. ... how the hell did I miss that?' moment.
(Tails's name is Miles Prower.)
I still read RCCA and some of the other AirAge hobby mags.
I don't really have the time to race my toy cars any more, but I still like reading the race coverage and reviews of new toys.
By completely changing your content type?
The website Cracked is pretty much nothing like the long-running magazine Cracked.
Cracked was a fairly successful ripoff of MAD. The problem, and it's the same one MAD faces, is that you can't really parody pop culture any more because it's become self-parodying. MAD stays in business, but just barely. There doesn't seem to be room for more than one mag in that segment now, though.
Interesting tidbit: Microsoft gave DirectMusic back to the original developer they got it from, who has since released the source to the program it was based on. So Bars and Pipes is back, kinda. (Still only on Amigas, though.)
In my experience with games that have both DX10 and DX11 renderers, DX11 doesn't look any nicer than DX10, but it's much faster.
This does sometimes let a game have a few more visual gewgaws in DX11 because they'd be too much of a performance hit in DX10, but mostly DX11 mode looks the same but with a higher framerate.
You can't do that now. Nintendo game downloads are tied to the console, not an account.
If your Wii dies and you don't want to lose the games you bought on it, you have to send it in to Nintendo for repair. Same with the DSi, 3DS, etc.
Lego City Undercover is an absolutely fantastic game that's WiiU exclusive.
There are some other good games, but most of them are multiplatform, so they're not a reason to get a WiiU.
The system isn't there to remind you to use your turn signal.
It's there because if you're drifting out of lane without using your turn signal you may very well be falling asleep or distracted and not REALIZE you're drifting out of the lane.
Okay, that cracked me up.
(It was 'Behind Jaggy Lines'. Or, on ports to other systems, 'Rescue on Fractalus'.)
Not only does my 3DS fit comfortably in my pocket, I can put a DSi XL in my pocket without any issues.
Granted, the DSi XL only fits in a front pants pocket, but my 3DS fits in a back pocket, or a shirt pocket.
How small are your pockets?
Depends on where your talents lie, I suppose. Dust: An Elysian Tail is basically by one guy, though he hired an outside studio to do the music and voiceovers. It's one of the prettiest games I've ever seen, entirely hand-drawn 2D sprites and background.
Of course, it did take Dean a long time to finish it, but he didn't KNOW how to program an Xbox 360 when he started - he was teaching himself as he went along. That's not a recipe for speed; you wind up rewriting whole chunks of your game when you get better at coding.
New diesel vehicles have a smaller filler nozzle.
Old diesel pumps, however, do not have that smaller nozzle.
So if you have a new car and the station has old pumps, you're fucked.
I'm sure ebay will be ass-deep in netbooks for a decade, at least.
Alternately, if I wanted to spend more dough, I could import something like this http://www.dynamism.com/top-notebooks/mengda-md-w8.shtml from Japan.
My gadgets are multiplying like rabbits. Hell, I have five game consoles on my *desk*.
A coupla cell phones, tablets, laptops, several computers, printers, a PDA I still use, portable game systems, and a rats-nest of cables and switchboxes tying it all together.
Out under the TV I've got a VCR, HD-DVD, DVR, and a network media player. I have so many gizmos in the kitchen that it takes forever to reset all the clocks for DST. (Whyinhell does a fridge need a clock on it, anyway?)
This isn't even counting all the gadgets I have left over from ages past that are packed away and no longer used.
My cell phone hasn't replaced my 'portable music player'. My car has. (And the PMP was a Walkman.) The only other gizmo my cell phone has really replaced was the -really tiny- laptop I used to carry around for SSH use and light browsing. (A Toshiba Libretto 50CT.)
Sure, there are gizmos that do -more- than they used to, but none of them do -all- of what I need my crapola to do, so I wind up with a bunch of them. I have a really nice tablet. I also have a netbook. Why? Sometimes I just want battery life and timekillers, and other times I need to run full computer software.
(Although I could probably ditch the netbook if someone pointed me at a full Windows XP emulator for Android - all I can find is QEMU, which only works up to 98.)
I actually had a NeXTStation ColorTurbo set up right next to an Amiga 3000 Tower/040. The NeXT was a sluggish *pig* compared to the Amiga.
I wound up getting rid of the NeXT and keeping the Amiga. The NeXT's keyboard was amazingly good, but that didn't make up for the general sluggishness or the severe lack of software for it. Compared to the NeXT, the Amiga had a Windows-like software library.
I still miss that NeXT keyboard.
My Mac didn't come with a scroll-capable input device. In fact, Apple still sells brand-new Macs that don't scroll unless you buy a third-party scrolling device.
Amusingly enough, my Commodore does store its data on an SSD.
Well, sort of. It's Flash, at least. My Commodore 128D has a two gig SD card that it sees as a hard drive.
Partly because getting that set up was cheaper than buying a bunch of blank 5 1/4" diskettes these days.
A lot of people use a laptop as their only computer. So the hard drive has to store everything on it. All their programs, their documents, and - very importantly, for a lot of people - their giant collection of MP3s. And maybe some movies, too. All those eat up a lot of space, fast.
My laptop has almost nothing on it. Because it's all on my NAS at home - 6TB and about half full.