I havent had an unintentional reboot since I started using Win XP.
You've had good luck then. I'll admit that out of the box WinXP is pretty stable, but I have experenced many an unintentional reboot under the following conditions.
1. Dual display HP laptop. When enabling it 1 time out of 10 blue screen of death.
2. Printer drivers... Some just don't play nice.
3. Internet Explorer... Ok, technicaly not a reboot, but still sometimes craps out for some unexplained reason.
I'll agree that WinXP is pretty good, pretty stable, and pretty useable save the garish layous but I still experence unintentional reboots.
...is so 1998. XP and 2K aren't unstable, as much as you'd like to believe they are. I've tried a slew of Linux distros, I spend about 10% of my time in them vs. Windows, and I 'shrug and reboot' more times in Linux.
I'm not going to disagree with you... getting zen with linux takes time. My first experences with linux were similar as I didn't know how to restart services or how to kill -9. Webmin is your friend. Not only does it help you administer your box, but it shows you were these trivial configeration files are and useful commands.
Win98... It seems to me I was rebooting once a day at least mostly due to poor memory management. If not that then minor changes such as network settings required a reboot.
Win2k... Under ideal conditions is pretty rock stable. I've had some issues though with printer drivers of all things. Some printer driver I was using would cause 2k to totally crash after installing sp3. I still have another USB printer that seems to be the cause to random screen dumps. Still I find I have to reboot weekly.
Linux Suse 9.0... Biggest issue still is installing dependencies for one application and resulting in problems with something else. This does result in me giving up and just installing a fresh copy. Current uptime 38days. I have no real need to reboot unless i'm installing hardware. Adding software and drivers doesn't typicaly require a reboot.
My experence is diffrent, but i've a win box and a lin box side by side for years. Services I keep on the lin box and the winbox I typicaly use for everyday stuff like quake.
A lot of time and money went into designing that firmware. You don't place any value on that??
Whether I place a value on it is beside the point... protesting a policy is a common rational. Whether it's moraly correct is an interesting question. Some might consider it immoral to chuck their current drive in favor of a new DL drive.
But you assume that more time was spent designing the firmware of the more costly version. The reverse could be true as well, as in they could have started with the premium unit and made changes to the firmware to dumb it down to create an entry level version. It happens often enough, rather than making a new version they slowly enable features over a period of time in order to encourage people to buy the new one. Or there might be multi-purpose hardware that the only diffrence between editions is a bit or a jumper change.
Case in point, I believe it was the Toshiba 3301 old caddy 2x scsi drive. Nice units, pre-copy protection for audio. You could buy a sun version, or an sgi version, or you could buy generic version and cut a trace and it would boot on either older suns or older sgis. In this case, I placed NO extra value on a SUN or SGI branded drive.
Now as soon as the DL media becomes cheep, then i'll have to make a choice whether to shell out more money for the DL drive, or update my firmware to DL. Firmware piracy or creating more trash.
Seems to me that paying $20 more (without even checking anywhere else) to purchase a drive that is meant to write at 8x (apparently in both + and -) and won't void your warranty is a much better deal.
Unless you plan to void your warrenty from the get go. I'd have to double check the number of things you can mod the liteon drive to do, but from memory you can have faster ripping speeds, multi region ability, booktype editing (i.e. this dvd-r gets labeled as a dvd-rom), and generally a vast number of useful things. Also from my understanding. In short, if you are going to screw with it anyway, might as well save the $20.00 assuming all things are equal.
But that's the thing... I haven't bothered to mod my drives because i'm happy with them at present, and I wouldn't bother modding my drives until such time the cost of the DL media drops to single digit numbers.
You could host a website on a house connection, but it doesn't mean that you'd want to. Perhaps your speed is inadaquate, or perhaps your ISP has become anal and doesn't permit remote access and such. Perhaps your connection is just flacky and you want a service to run as long as possible without interuption. Or heck, perhaps you don't want to keep your machines powered all the time. Or, this is probally the most important on, it's possible that a shell is hosted on a really kick ass machine and a kick ass connection that puts yours to shame.
But probally the most important reason a shell is desired is to test out your own shinola from a remote site.
For example, I recently got a "new" used car. It came with tired I didn't particularly like. I replaced the tires in fairly short order, and sold the old ones on ebay.
How odd... I guess it's diffrent in my state. If you replace your tires and you don't get rid of your old tires, it costs you extra. Same thing with batteries and such. It sucks when the purchaced item isn't actually a replacement, but for the most part this isn't an issue.
Your statement is in part true. Ikea for the most part uses philips and allen, rather then torx or torx plus (star rounded edges). I never thought of torx as being secure because the marketing promotes torx as a wonderful standard for automation because the screws/bolts don't fall off the bit. Also, the simple fact that if you have a set of allen keys, you can usually remove a torx with it. I'll agree that torx are not as common as allen or even square heads as far as home use, but I bump into them from time to time.
Torx I actually like in the fact that it is a secure screw that you can put alot of pressure on with reasonable assurance that you won't strip it out unless you are using the wrong tool. Allen is ok as well, but allen comes in both metric and SAE where torx uses the same head for both. Some might find it annoying, but I enjoy the fact that I don't have to have two sets of bits.
If they got the idea that the next film would sell better if it suddenly turned out that Troi was somehow Kirk's mother and actually a Klingon, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
It looks like Berman likes such ideas, after all it's his desire to get William Shatner on Enterprise. This opens up the possiblity James T. Kirk is his own grandpaw.
I never understood that reasoning. The Search For Spock, while far from perfect was a lot more interesting and thrilling than that neo-hippie fest that was number 4. Besides, I got a kick out of seeing Night Court's Dan Fielding and Taxi's Jim Ignatowski as Klingons.
The Search for Spock wasn't horrible but it was no Wrath of Khan. A single Klingon bird of prey with a tiny crew gets widdled away till finally there is a hand to hand confrontation between the two captains which ends in "I have had enough of YOU".
The Search for Whales is generally amusing as we return to classic Star Trek cultural diffrences between the reborn Spock and 1980's culture. You can be somewhat critical of it because of it's similarity to the first film The Motion Sickness. Probe comes from parts unknown to talk to someone or something that is long since dead. But part of Star Trek has been taking current issues such as the killing of whales and showing why it might be a bad idea, in this case it might result in a large rock sphere and cylinder comming and blanketing the earth in rain.
The first one, the motion sickness was pretty bad by anyone's standards. It's interesting in the fact that we get to see the possible result of 20th century thinking, let's toss out probes into the universe having no idea what is out there and not even think about the result of who or what they might bring back. But bad in the resolution is to make love not war and disapear in an orgasmic shockwave.
ST:Insurrection was eminently forgettable. You're entirely forgiven.
Not only is it eminently forgettable, but the fact Nemisis could have just as easily been titled Insurrection. After all, the central plot is a Romulan/Reman insurgence lead by little Picard. Hince when I checked startrek.com and I saw "Insurrection" I didn't think of face streching machines and happy go lucky crew feeling so young. That's the problem with one word titles, it's hard to associate them with a specific story. If I were to say "Star Trek The Motion Sickness" everyone would know specificly what I was talking about.
In the movie Enemy Mine -- as strange as it was -- I think humans never saw the Drac before, only their spacecraft as they attacked. Could they use the same reasoning?
It's possible that most people never saw or met a Drac, esp those in fighters blasting at other fighters. There is the legend of the Hartlepool Monkey where a monkey dressed in a navel uniform was washed ashore after a shipwreck and the people never seeing a frenchman before hung it for being a spy. The legend isn't very believable in the fact that any coastal town that did any sorta trading would likely have been in contact with people from France, but on the other hand unless they announced them selves as being French who's to know who where they came from. So who knows.
I think 9 was "The Search for Any Reason to Have a Face-Stretching Machine"
Which means Nemesis shoulda been 9.5, to stick to the even-numbers rule...
Yes I stand corrected, however I feel a sence of pride the fact that I can't remember all the startrek films.
1. The search for v'ger (aka a plot) 2. The Search for K'han 3. The Search for Spock (I have had enough of you) 4. The Search for Whales 5. The Search for God 6. The Search for Shakesphere 7. The Search for William Shatner 8. The Search for Vulcans 9. The Search for Youth (Face-Stretching Machine) 10. The Search for Little Picard
I'm overreacting a bit. Every time there's a Slashdot story about Enterprise, somebody get's modded up to +5 for complaining about continuity. I get frustrated when I think about how somebody can have Trek's vaguely defined timeline from the original series memorized to the minutist detail, but they don't remember the events of one of Star Trek's most popular movies.
The movies are easier to remember (ok I had to check the startrek.com site to remember them all)
1. The search for v'ger (aka a plot) 2. The Search for K'han 3. The Search for Spock 4. The Search for Whales 5. The Search for God 6. The Search for Shakesphere 7. The Search for William Shatner 8. The Search for Vulcans 9. The Search for Little Picard
And the rule of thumb, even numbered trek films don't suck (as much).
Start a website, distribute some.mpegs, sell some t-shirts, and perhaps offer a licensed jewel case and flyleaf for a fee. There are people like my self that are happy to download indy films, but don't know of a good centralized site where I can find links to reviews and downloads. If it's any good, might crank off a copy for a friend, or buy the offical flyleaf for those who don't accept pirated videos for whatever reason, usualy those wanting to get jobs in law enforcement.
Is now owned by Best Buy, but was originally a Canadian company. And I'm sure you know how sensitive we Canadians are to being invaded by Americans. So they are keeping the Future Shops around till they can transition us over to the Best Buy. It's not like I ever spent a lot of money at Future Shop, but I'd rather spend it at a Canadian chain. However I don't look a good price in the mouth when I need an item. A Linksys Wireless G card comes to mind.
I had to do a websearch to refresh my memory as to why Future Shop left the states. I believe this was in 1999 so I didn't automaticly make the connection with a Best Buy buyout as all the former FutureShop locations I'm aware of are not BestBuys. I have no idea when Best Buy bought Future Shop.
I understand the idea of supporting your own country, if all things being equal. I have no issues supporting a Canadian company, but I did have issues supporting Future Shop. In their hay day their business practices were questionable to say the least. In their closing it's questionable if they were legal. For their liquidation they advertised 5% or 10% off the last marked price but at the same time raised the prices of all their goods to full retail. Radio Shack used to do this, but got caught. Future Shop might have been diffrent because:
1. Everything was always on sale just like BestBuy or CompUSA, so 10% off regular price could have been higher then their regular *sale* price.
2. It was a liquidation company getting rid of their crap... in the Future Shop stores with people with Future Shop uniforms and generally looked Future Shop like. Some other guy marked up the prices before they were discounted and sold.
But I always found the idea of people in Canada wanting to support Future Shop for simply being Canadian. After all it seems to be modeled after the American ideal for a used car dealership.
Honestly, people act as if it were their GOD GIVEN RIGHT to have the ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICE every time they buy anything. They will wheedle, whine, pout, demand, and otherwise be pains in the ass until they get some kind of concession.
It's a bit late to respond to this thread but you raised an interesting point.
It's not their god given right no. But often times stores do offer a price guarantee where if you find a cheeper item within a certain period you are granted the granted by specific stores to get the diffrence, sometimes 50% or so more. It's not all that unusual to expect that sorta thing. Price matching is something I take advantage of from time to time. It saves me gas, and the store I frequent knows I will at least buy a reem of paper or some media while i'm there.
Besides... I thought those policies were put into place just so you can get joe user back in the store. Joe user feels safe about buying there, and heaven forbid they feel safe about buying there. Yes, there are those who do their best to take advantage of the store, of this there is no doubt. It's a question whether lossing money to one person doesn't pay for it self in the good word of mouth PR that person gives you.
Oh yes I remember this! A supposedly high security installation and there are USB ports on the keyboard! Puhhhlease! In high security environments where it matters, there aren't supposed to be disk drives and USB ports, or a easily accesible means to get data off the network.
I've seen crap like that. I just thought they used the PS/2 cable and the USB ports were useless.
Yeah whatever. I'm Canadian, and I'm always floored by the coldness of service in the US. It differs from region to region within the states, but it's always there. It feels like you all hate everything, including the customers and yourself. Mind you this is a generalization, but that's the overall trend. If you can't see it it's probably because you are used to it.
I feel the same way about Starbucks in Victoria/Vancover at times. It's as if they took the patented Seattle bad attitude and refined it to the next level, which would be Dennies.
I'm not saying that you are wrong... but what I don't understand is why does Future Shop still exist in Canada? There was virtualy no diffrence I could observe between stores above and below the 49th, yet they totally disapeared from the USA.
When VCR's were as cheap as $100 and came with all the bells and whistles, I bought a Sony that cost $500. On the surface, that didn't make any sense to most anyone at the time. However, 10 years later I still have that VCR and it functions as well as the day I bought it. The only problem I've had with it is the occasional head demag and I've had to replace grease that had crystalized and wasn't allowing the tape-grab assembly from keeping tension on the tape as it inserted/ejected the tape.
I wouldn't buy a Sony VCR these days as their warrenty is sub-standard. I have to go by memory as the sonysite isn't co-operating with me I believe it was 6 months parts/labor followed by 1 year parts for VCRS, even DVD with VCR onboard.
I've owned a few VCRs. My first was a Toshiba bought like 1985. It reached the point that it needed greese by 1997, but frankly by that point I wanted a new one with multiable AV inputs as well as a digital tuner. Oh and it wasn't stereo. Not sure what I spent on it, it was it was between $100-$200 as it was a front loader. It's still in service if I need to copy tapes. I was damned annoyed that it lasted for over 10 years, I was waiting for it to break to justify the purchace of a new stereo model.
It's replacement was a JVC bought for $75/$80. It didn't have a flying erase head or a clock, but all its other features were top notich, still in service. The unit with a flying erase head would have cost me $100 at the time.
Now it's possible you are happy with your $500 Sony VCR because of it's features and long life. But make no mistake, you didn't nessicarly save money. I have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 over a period of 19 years on VCRs. I see where you are comming from though.
So, I can get a DVD Recorder cheap but can I buy only one and enjoy its use till the media format nears obsolescence?
You can hardly buy a DVD player that fully supports DVD+/-R(W). While it's somewhat common for players to deal with home brewed discs, playback is more flacky and I have NO clue about dual layer playability. Plus the fact that you have to hunt for players that support the newer mpeg-4 standards, and not all players will do DVD-mp3. And who knows, DVD audio might become hip, DVD-A or SACD might become the standard or there might be a new standard. The best you can hope for is a DVD-recorder that takes a DVD-burner that you can swap out with ease as well as software updatability.
But unlike the 20th century, you can easily copy DVDs on a PC so what ever format is next chances are you can crank off copies of your media faster then real time.
This is kind of odd, really; I can get good capable-of-all-relevant-formats DVD burners for about $100CAD (about $75USD) each. Good CD burners cost around $60CAD.
Are CD burners that expensive in Canada? Assuming 1 CAD = 0.75 USD that's like $45.00. I can pickup a Liteon, Sony or a Samsung local for $30-$35usd ($40-46CAD). It's possible you mean the retail box, or your cd-r drives are taxed extra. The only reason I point this out is you quote for a DVD burner of $100CCA / $75USD is right on the money with what I expect to pay mail order for a NEC/Lite on/sony, close to what i'd pay local for an OEM edition. If CD-burners are taxed, perhaps because you can copy music with them, it would strike me as funny if DVD burners that can do CD were not taxed.
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I havent had an unintentional reboot since I started using Win XP.
You've had good luck then. I'll admit that out of the box WinXP is pretty stable, but I have experenced many an unintentional reboot under the following conditions.
1. Dual display HP laptop. When enabling it 1 time out of 10 blue screen of death.
2. Printer drivers... Some just don't play nice.
3. Internet Explorer... Ok, technicaly not a reboot, but still sometimes craps out for some unexplained reason.
I'll agree that WinXP is pretty good, pretty stable, and pretty useable save the garish layous but I still experence unintentional reboots.
I'm not going to disagree with you... getting zen with linux takes time. My first experences with linux were similar as I didn't know how to restart services or how to kill -9. Webmin is your friend. Not only does it help you administer your box, but it shows you were these trivial configeration files are and useful commands.
Win98... It seems to me I was rebooting once a day at least mostly due to poor memory management. If not that then minor changes such as network settings required a reboot.
Win2k... Under ideal conditions is pretty rock stable. I've had some issues though with printer drivers of all things. Some printer driver I was using would cause 2k to totally crash after installing sp3. I still have another USB printer that seems to be the cause to random screen dumps. Still I find I have to reboot weekly.
Linux
Suse 9.0... Biggest issue still is installing dependencies for one application and resulting in problems with something else. This does result in me giving up and just installing a fresh copy. Current uptime 38days. I have no real need to reboot unless i'm installing hardware. Adding software and drivers doesn't typicaly require a reboot.
My experence is diffrent, but i've a win box and a lin box side by side for years. Services I keep on the lin box and the winbox I typicaly use for everyday stuff like quake.
A lot of time and money went into designing that firmware. You don't place any value on that??
Whether I place a value on it is beside the point... protesting a policy is a common rational. Whether it's moraly correct is an interesting question. Some might consider it immoral to chuck their current drive in favor of a new DL drive.
But you assume that more time was spent designing the firmware of the more costly version. The reverse could be true as well, as in they could have started with the premium unit and made changes to the firmware to dumb it down to create an entry level version. It happens often enough, rather than making a new version they slowly enable features over a period of time in order to encourage people to buy the new one. Or there might be multi-purpose hardware that the only diffrence between editions is a bit or a jumper change.
Case in point, I believe it was the Toshiba 3301 old caddy 2x scsi drive. Nice units, pre-copy protection for audio. You could buy a sun version, or an sgi version, or you could buy generic version and cut a trace and it would boot on either older suns or older sgis. In this case, I placed NO extra value on a SUN or SGI branded drive.
Now as soon as the DL media becomes cheep, then i'll have to make a choice whether to shell out more money for the DL drive, or update my firmware to DL. Firmware piracy or creating more trash.
is there any real point to doing it?
Out of protest. If the drives are identical except for the firmware, wouldn't you feel a little cheated paying extra?
Seems to me that paying $20 more (without even checking anywhere else) to purchase a drive that is meant to write at 8x (apparently in both + and -) and won't void your warranty is a much better deal.
Unless you plan to void your warrenty from the get go. I'd have to double check the number of things you can mod the liteon drive to do, but from memory you can have faster ripping speeds, multi region ability, booktype editing (i.e. this dvd-r gets labeled as a dvd-rom), and generally a vast number of useful things. Also from my understanding. In short, if you are going to screw with it anyway, might as well save the $20.00 assuming all things are equal.
But that's the thing... I haven't bothered to mod my drives because i'm happy with them at present, and I wouldn't bother modding my drives until such time the cost of the DL media drops to single digit numbers.
You could host a website on a house connection, but it doesn't mean that you'd want to. Perhaps your speed is inadaquate, or perhaps your ISP has become anal and doesn't permit remote access and such. Perhaps your connection is just flacky and you want a service to run as long as possible without interuption. Or heck, perhaps you don't want to keep your machines powered all the time. Or, this is probally the most important on, it's possible that a shell is hosted on a really kick ass machine and a kick ass connection that puts yours to shame.
But probally the most important reason a shell is desired is to test out your own shinola from a remote site.
What if it actually harms just one kid if someone targeting a specific kid via their RFID tag and abducts 'em. It works both ways really.
For example, I recently got a "new" used car. It came with tired I didn't particularly like. I replaced the tires in fairly short order, and sold the old ones on ebay.
How odd... I guess it's diffrent in my state. If you replace your tires and you don't get rid of your old tires, it costs you extra. Same thing with batteries and such. It sucks when the purchaced item isn't actually a replacement, but for the most part this isn't an issue.
Torx screws are not common in the home use world
Your statement is in part true. Ikea for the most part uses philips and allen, rather then torx or torx plus (star rounded edges). I never thought of torx as being secure because the marketing promotes torx as a wonderful standard for automation because the screws/bolts don't fall off the bit. Also, the simple fact that if you have a set of allen keys, you can usually remove a torx with it. I'll agree that torx are not as common as allen or even square heads as far as home use, but I bump into them from time to time.
Torx I actually like in the fact that it is a secure screw that you can put alot of pressure on with reasonable assurance that you won't strip it out unless you are using the wrong tool. Allen is ok as well, but allen comes in both metric and SAE where torx uses the same head for both. Some might find it annoying, but I enjoy the fact that I don't have to have two sets of bits.
Info on this page and here
If they got the idea that the next film would sell better if it suddenly turned out that Troi was somehow Kirk's mother and actually a Klingon, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
It looks like Berman likes such ideas, after all it's his desire to get William Shatner on Enterprise. This opens up the possiblity James T. Kirk is his own grandpaw.
I never understood that reasoning. The Search For Spock, while far from perfect was a lot more interesting and thrilling than that neo-hippie fest that was number 4. Besides, I got a kick out of seeing Night Court's Dan Fielding and Taxi's Jim Ignatowski as Klingons.
The Search for Spock wasn't horrible but it was no Wrath of Khan. A single Klingon bird of prey with a tiny crew gets widdled away till finally there is a hand to hand confrontation between the two captains which ends in "I have had enough of YOU".
The Search for Whales is generally amusing as we return to classic Star Trek cultural diffrences between the reborn Spock and 1980's culture. You can be somewhat critical of it because of it's similarity to the first film The Motion Sickness. Probe comes from parts unknown to talk to someone or something that is long since dead. But part of Star Trek has been taking current issues such as the killing of whales and showing why it might be a bad idea, in this case it might result in a large rock sphere and cylinder comming and blanketing the earth in rain.
The first one, the motion sickness was pretty bad by anyone's standards. It's interesting in the fact that we get to see the possible result of 20th century thinking, let's toss out probes into the universe having no idea what is out there and not even think about the result of who or what they might bring back. But bad in the resolution is to make love not war and disapear in an orgasmic shockwave.
ST:Insurrection was eminently forgettable. You're entirely forgiven.
Not only is it eminently forgettable, but the fact Nemisis could have just as easily been titled Insurrection. After all, the central plot is a Romulan/Reman insurgence lead by little Picard. Hince when I checked startrek.com and I saw "Insurrection" I didn't think of face streching machines and happy go lucky crew feeling so young. That's the problem with one word titles, it's hard to associate them with a specific story. If I were to say "Star Trek The Motion Sickness" everyone would know specificly what I was talking about.
at that peroid of time, Romulans wore combat armor with helmets that covered their faces
I would believe that for in the TOS history line, most Romulan grunt troops wore helmets because they had a problem with their ears falling off.
In the movie Enemy Mine -- as strange as it was -- I think humans never saw the Drac before, only their spacecraft as they attacked. Could they use the same reasoning?
It's possible that most people never saw or met a Drac, esp those in fighters blasting at other fighters. There is the legend of the Hartlepool Monkey where a monkey dressed in a navel uniform was washed ashore after a shipwreck and the people never seeing a frenchman before hung it for being a spy. The legend isn't very believable in the fact that any coastal town that did any sorta trading would likely have been in contact with people from France, but on the other hand unless they announced them selves as being French who's to know who where they came from. So who knows.
I think 9 was "The Search for Any Reason to Have a Face-Stretching Machine"
Which means Nemesis shoulda been 9.5, to stick to the even-numbers rule...
Yes I stand corrected, however I feel a sence of pride the fact that I can't remember all the startrek films.
1. The search for v'ger (aka a plot)
2. The Search for K'han
3. The Search for Spock (I have had enough of you)
4. The Search for Whales
5. The Search for God
6. The Search for Shakesphere
7. The Search for William Shatner
8. The Search for Vulcans
9. The Search for Youth (Face-Stretching Machine)
10. The Search for Little Picard
I'm overreacting a bit. Every time there's a Slashdot story about Enterprise, somebody get's modded up to +5 for complaining about continuity. I get frustrated when I think about how somebody can have Trek's vaguely defined timeline from the original series memorized to the minutist detail, but they don't remember the events of one of Star Trek's most popular movies.
The movies are easier to remember (ok I had to check the startrek.com site to remember them all)
1. The search for v'ger (aka a plot)
2. The Search for K'han
3. The Search for Spock
4. The Search for Whales
5. The Search for God
6. The Search for Shakesphere
7. The Search for William Shatner
8. The Search for Vulcans
9. The Search for Little Picard
And the rule of thumb, even numbered trek films don't suck (as much).
But those are Korean products we're talking about here.
South Korea uses NTSC IIRC. And just goggled a site that is listing 110/220v 60hz.
But those are Korean products we're talking about here.
Yes, you would think that a region like the far east would decide on a standard for line voltage, but alas no.
Start a website, distribute some .mpegs, sell some t-shirts, and perhaps offer a licensed jewel case and flyleaf for a fee. There are people like my self that are happy to download indy films, but don't know of a good centralized site where I can find links to reviews and downloads. If it's any good, might crank off a copy for a friend, or buy the offical flyleaf for those who don't accept pirated videos for whatever reason, usualy those wanting to get jobs in law enforcement.
Is now owned by Best Buy, but was originally a Canadian company. And I'm sure you know how sensitive we Canadians are to being invaded by Americans. So they are keeping the Future Shops around till they can transition us over to the Best Buy. It's not like I ever spent a lot of money at Future Shop, but I'd rather spend it at a Canadian chain. However I don't look a good price in the mouth when I need an item. A Linksys Wireless G card comes to mind.
I had to do a websearch to refresh my memory as to why Future Shop left the states. I believe this was in 1999 so I didn't automaticly make the connection with a Best Buy buyout as all the former FutureShop locations I'm aware of are not BestBuys. I have no idea when Best Buy bought Future Shop.
I understand the idea of supporting your own country, if all things being equal. I have no issues supporting a Canadian company, but I did have issues supporting Future Shop. In their hay day their business practices were questionable to say the least. In their closing it's questionable if they were legal. For their liquidation they advertised 5% or 10% off the last marked price but at the same time raised the prices of all their goods to full retail. Radio Shack used to do this, but got caught. Future Shop might have been diffrent because:
1. Everything was always on sale just like BestBuy or CompUSA, so 10% off regular price could have been higher then their regular *sale* price.
2. It was a liquidation company getting rid of their crap... in the Future Shop stores with people with Future Shop uniforms and generally looked Future Shop like. Some other guy marked up the prices before they were discounted and sold.
But I always found the idea of people in Canada wanting to support Future Shop for simply being Canadian. After all it seems to be modeled after the American ideal for a used car dealership.
Honestly, people act as if it were their GOD GIVEN RIGHT to have the ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICE every time they buy anything. They will wheedle, whine, pout, demand, and otherwise be pains in the ass until they get some kind of concession.
It's a bit late to respond to this thread but you raised an interesting point.
It's not their god given right no. But often times stores do offer a price guarantee where if you find a cheeper item within a certain period you are granted the granted by specific stores to get the diffrence, sometimes 50% or so more. It's not all that unusual to expect that sorta thing. Price matching is something I take advantage of from time to time. It saves me gas, and the store I frequent knows I will at least buy a reem of paper or some media while i'm there.
Besides... I thought those policies were put into place just so you can get joe user back in the store. Joe user feels safe about buying there, and heaven forbid they feel safe about buying there. Yes, there are those who do their best to take advantage of the store, of this there is no doubt. It's a question whether lossing money to one person doesn't pay for it self in the good word of mouth PR that person gives you.
Oh yes I remember this! A supposedly high security installation and there are USB ports on the keyboard! Puhhhlease! In high security environments where it matters, there aren't supposed to be disk drives and USB ports, or a easily accesible means to get data off the network.
I've seen crap like that. I just thought they used the PS/2 cable and the USB ports were useless.
Yeah whatever. I'm Canadian, and I'm always floored by the coldness of service in the US. It differs from region to region within the states, but it's always there. It feels like you all hate everything, including the customers and yourself. Mind you this is a generalization, but that's the overall trend. If you can't see it it's probably because you are used to it.
I feel the same way about Starbucks in Victoria/Vancover at times. It's as if they took the patented Seattle bad attitude and refined it to the next level, which would be Dennies.
I'm not saying that you are wrong... but what I don't understand is why does Future Shop still exist in Canada? There was virtualy no diffrence I could observe between stores above and below the 49th, yet they totally disapeared from the USA.
When VCR's were as cheap as $100 and came with all the bells and whistles, I bought a Sony that cost $500. On the surface, that didn't make any sense to most anyone at the time. However, 10 years later I still have that VCR and it functions as well as the day I bought it. The only problem I've had with it is the occasional head demag and I've had to replace grease that had crystalized and wasn't allowing the tape-grab assembly from keeping tension on the tape as it inserted/ejected the tape.
I wouldn't buy a Sony VCR these days as their warrenty is sub-standard. I have to go by memory as the sonysite isn't co-operating with me I believe it was 6 months parts/labor followed by 1 year parts for VCRS, even DVD with VCR onboard.
I've owned a few VCRs. My first was a Toshiba bought like 1985. It reached the point that it needed greese by 1997, but frankly by that point I wanted a new one with multiable AV inputs as well as a digital tuner. Oh and it wasn't stereo. Not sure what I spent on it, it was it was between $100-$200 as it was a front loader. It's still in service if I need to copy tapes. I was damned annoyed that it lasted for over 10 years, I was waiting for it to break to justify the purchace of a new stereo model.
It's replacement was a JVC bought for $75/$80. It didn't have a flying erase head or a clock, but all its other features were top notich, still in service. The unit with a flying erase head would have cost me $100 at the time.
Now it's possible you are happy with your $500 Sony VCR because of it's features and long life. But make no mistake, you didn't nessicarly save money. I have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 over a period of 19 years on VCRs. I see where you are comming from though.
So, I can get a DVD Recorder cheap but can I buy only one and enjoy its use till the media format nears obsolescence?
You can hardly buy a DVD player that fully supports DVD+/-R(W). While it's somewhat common for players to deal with home brewed discs, playback is more flacky and I have NO clue about dual layer playability. Plus the fact that you have to hunt for players that support the newer mpeg-4 standards, and not all players will do DVD-mp3. And who knows, DVD audio might become hip, DVD-A or SACD might become the standard or there might be a new standard. The best you can hope for is a DVD-recorder that takes a DVD-burner that you can swap out with ease as well as software updatability.
But unlike the 20th century, you can easily copy DVDs on a PC so what ever format is next chances are you can crank off copies of your media faster then real time.
Does anyone make SCSI units? Or is everything ATAPI?
The Pioneer DVR-S201 DVD-r external SCSI drive. 1x recording for $4000 or so. 1x dvd-r I believe. It's the only one I am aware of.
This is kind of odd, really; I can get good capable-of-all-relevant-formats DVD burners for about $100CAD (about $75USD) each. Good CD burners cost around $60CAD.
Are CD burners that expensive in Canada? Assuming 1 CAD = 0.75 USD that's like $45.00. I can pickup a Liteon, Sony or a Samsung local for $30-$35usd ($40-46CAD). It's possible you mean the retail box, or your cd-r drives are taxed extra. The only reason I point this out is you quote for a DVD burner of $100CCA / $75USD is right on the money with what I expect to pay mail order for a NEC/Lite on/sony, close to what i'd pay local for an OEM edition. If CD-burners are taxed, perhaps because you can copy music with them, it would strike me as funny if DVD burners that can do CD were not taxed.