I've been in the market to buy an LCD monitor for the past 2 years and I have not seen any significant drop.
The price for craptacular 1280x1024 displays has been dropping, but if you actually want to use those 19 inches of screen real estate with, say, a higher resolution (say, 1600x1280) you're still looking at just under a grand. Which is absurd. Most good CRT's go up to 2048x1536, and can down-res when needed (higher framerates for games, for instance), yet cost half that.
That is AFTER I turn off the animation effects in WinXP (those induce hella lag).
Definately! XP in general is laggy, but the thing with Windows is, it's either all or nothing. That is, when you click on something, it either comes up right away, or you're sitting there like an idiot waiting for "something" to finish.
I am seriously wanting to experiment here, if you can pick where you notice it the most it would be helpful.
I would actually very much appreciate it. The system in question was a G4, though I don't know the processor speed. It's a slightly older system, however, so probably 733 Mhz. It had about a gig of RAM, but since most of the work involved large images in Photoshop, it still probably ended up swapping to disk.
The primary use was web design. To simulate it, load up Fetch, Photoshop with a (let's say) 2 MB image, and Safari on a page with Flash. Do a little of whatever in each of the programs, then pick a program with context menus and right-click (or control-click for one-button mice).
As the moment of button release, the menu should pop up. Or even easier, go to the top bar and open a menu item. Again, this should be instant, but all the Macs I've used have a slight delay--it's not enough to cry home about, but it hasn't helped to sell the Mac to me.
I'll have to try one of the new mini's out and give Apple another shot. Perhaps the processor wasn't up to snuff, or the systems I've used have been underpowered in some regard. If the new mini does indeed kick as much butt as all the fanatics say, that would be a hell of a price-point.
Just a quick Googling reveals I'm not the only person who's noticed this problem. It's funny, because the way he describes it is almost exactly the way I feel: "It's a hard phenomena to describe objectively--all I can say for sure is that when I go back to using my home PC or my work PC, the mouse movement is crisp, reliable and predictable."
It's so subtle that I usually just suck it up, but it is aggrivating when you're not used to it.
I've had a number of [ahem] discussions with Mac users about this. The nature of my work requires me to use the occasional Mac (graphic design), and the one thing that bugs me more than anything else is the tiny, almost inperceptible LAG when clicking on menu items or bringing up context menus. It's so small that you probably wouldn't notice it, that is until you work on a Wintel box where everything just snaps.
Don't ask about your transfer limits, either. What good is 6 Mb/s when your download limit is capped at 5 gigs? Fill your pipe up and you've got about 15 hours until full. Fantastic.
Probably because they figure they can get someone do to the same job, only charge them a few grand less because they're just "regular" students instead of "ivy-league" students.
Basically the same principle behind out-sourcing; just replace "regular" with "third-world" and "ivy-league" with "American".
Er, well you forgot the main reasons people like the Mac Mini: small size and the svelte, elegant design of the hardware, software, and GUI.
X-Boxes aren't small?
And I'll humbly offer up this interface to kick the pants out of any interface you can find for an OSX media machine. Remember, we're talking about media systems here. Readability and simplicity in user interface is key.
Microsoft never could figure those parts out.
As if this was a Microsoft vs. Apple issue. The guys that coded the link above have it running off of a Linux distro.
That's the crazy part about Apple fanatics: they fail to realize that people who don't agree with them aren't by default Microsoft fanatics. If I could have OSX running on my AMD system, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately this would kill Apple.
If you can make a p2p app in 15 lines, how hard is it to make one with built-in encryption? This seems like a relatively easy additional layer to implement, but I honestly don't know all the various pitfalls. Could someone please enlighten me? (I realize WASTE already has this, but the development of WASTE appears to have hit a stand-still in beta implementation).
The first is to change the default font sizes to larger values if you're too blind to see small fonts on a friggin' huge monitor. (DISPLAY / PROPERTIES / APPEARANCE / FONT SIZE: Normal, Large, Extra Large)
The second is to get LASIK, or be born with good close vision. The second was offered to me, and I took it.
Those fancy Princeton 19" LCD's still max out at 1280x1024. Look at LCD's in the 1600 range, and you'll see the prices double. And have fun playing down-res'd games. Of course, my NEC MultiSync 21" goes up to 2048x1536, but can play games at 800x600 if I need the high framerates, yet only cost $550. Go figure.
"Yeah, but try moving it around!" you might retort.
How often do you move around your screen? Twice. When you move in, and when you move out. Big deal. If I wanted a portable screen, I'd have to get a portable computer as well. We call those laptops.
Well deserved award. Not only was Populus an stroke of pure, unadulterated genious (and helped create an entire game genre), but to my knowledge, Populus was one of the few games that was never successfully cracked. I recall a slew of irritating patches that *never* worked.
> Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Not amoral or unethical.
Really? The Chinese fought (and lost) two wars to kill the Opium trade because of the effects it was having on their people.
As prohibition was a crime, Joseph Kennedy's actions were not amoral, nor unethical.
Joseph Kennedy made his first round of cash by conspiring to inflate a stock's price, then selling it before investors got wind. And Prohibition wasn't a crime. Selling alcohol was the crime.
I'm sorry, is that supposed to be "amoral" or "unethical"?
Yes, you nitwit. There were several treaties later passed by the U.S. government to prevent the trade of alcohol with the Indians because of the disasterous effects it was having on their social order. They didn't do this because of the strong Indian Lobby, you know? They did it because it was unethical. Educatethyself.
Bill Gates is worse than Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer put together!
Oh, I get it now. Please, crawl back under your bridge and go back to eating little children.
I know that there are some people who cannot tell the difference between a 700 MB xvid file and the 9 GB DVD version, but I am not one of these people. I have watched MANY xvid movies and it is never as sharp and there are tons of artifacts.
Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting there's no loss in quality. Naturally there's a loss in quality. My point is that when you're balancing filesize/video quality, the more advanced codecs are going to win out any day of the week.
You might then argue that size is not a factor, but I would have to disagree for a number of reasons. First, if you're watching the movie on a standard (not HD) television, it's going to be downsampled anyway. Severely. Second, as I said earlier, smaller files = greater quantity distributed.
Size does matter to the end user. Not because they can't afford a DVD recorder (they're, what, $45 now?) but because they don't want to spend their time downloading extra bits when they don't have to, from a source that may or may not be online in another couple of hours.
Size also matters to an illegal distributor. If I were to offer a 200 GB hard drive for sale filled with movies, I can charge a lot more for 200 movies than 50.
But yes, for the purist, you'll want to stick to the closest-to-1st generation as you can get.
Simply not true. Any scene with highly detailed motion will show the deficiencies of these codecs.
Simply not true. Any encoder with a modicum of talent will divert more of the available bitrate to high-action scenes.
Besides, DVD format is a RELEASE format, and it is a known fact that you don't reencode a release format without loss and artifacts. SVCD's look pretty good, but everyone is trading DVD-R these days anyway.
This statement no sense.
DVD is already compressed. Anything you do to it to make it smaller will involve re-compressing. And why mention SVCD? The bitrate is 2600kbit/s for video and 224kbit/s for audio. And that's a non-adjustable, fixed bitrate (so no extra data chunks for high-motion scenes). With that high a bitrate, it better look good! But compressed-byte to compressed-byte, XVID wins hands down. There's simply no contest. Any variable rate codec is going to do better than a single bitrate given a limited space constraint.
but everyone is trading DVD-R these days anyway
Funny. I'm not. But then, I'm just a simple, humble guy. I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.
Say what you want about the greedy "rich people," they got to be that way by trade, not theft.
Most of the large fortunes you can name were reaped through amoral or unethical means.
Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Joseph Kennedy was involved not only in some shady stock deals, but later ballooned his fortune with alcohol during Prohibition.
John Jacob Astor made his initial fortune trading alcohol for furs with native americans.
Bill Gates bought QDOS from Tim Paterson for a pittance, only to license it to IBM for millions.
Of course, one could argue that these men weren't actually breaking any laws, they were simply taking advantage of the situations at hand while disregarding moral or ethical constraints that might bind us "normal" (read: unsuccessful) folk.
with DVD's so cheap..WHY do they continue to want to fit it on 700 MB CD's!
Time. Because with proper encoding, a 2-CD rip will look as good as the original ("as good" meaning virtually indestinguishable). With 1-CD encodes, you can send out 6 movies in the same amount of time as 1 standard DVD.
You're also talking about a geographic area that, frankly, is a few orders of magnitude smaller.
The problem is that people don't want to live in the cities, because cities == dangerous criminals and drugs and guns and hookers and small spaces and no backyard yada yada yada.
In New York, you understand this, and you get over it pretty quickly, because the benefits of living in city far outweigh the oh-so-not-luxurious standard of living in the 'burbs. Yeah, you got a backyard, but it's squeezed right next to your neighbor's, and all the houses look the same so your kids are going nuts, and the mall is where you do all your shopping, and you have to drive everywhere so you become a fat slob, and your "town" is nothing more than a few housing developments and a strip-mall so you have no sense of community, etc., etc., etc.
Amazing a country like Great Britian, with about a fifth the population of the U.S., and 1/40th of the land mass has so much green space, unspoiled by strip-malls, communities that feel like communities, easy transportation everywhere, etc. It's because half the country lives in urban areas.
I believe bi-torrent.com is simply a cache of SuprNova's torrents before they went offline, but that no new torrents are being added. Additionally, I don't think they're a tracker, just a pointer to other trackers: they can list whatever they want, but if the originating tracker is offline, you aren't going to be downloading anything.
And supernova.org (not to be confused with suprnova.org) is just a feeble attempt to install spyware on your system.
Yes (Motorola) -- but you're right about contacts being an asset. But you admit yourself, the actual knowledge you bring to the table is pretty low on the list of "things that will secure me a job." It shouldn't be like this, but an interview is a very short process, and there are a few time-tested ways of proving someone's skillset quickly. Grades are one of them. You can wax poetic about how you "learned so much" and "grew as a person" because of a class, but the bottom line is, if you don't have the grades to show for it, you might as well be talking out of your ass.
I actually don't understand that sentence; could you explain? The roof over my head is owed to my skills.
What I was referring to was the idealism of youth putting practical experience (useful as it is) ahead of such trivialities as GPA, when in most cases your employer will only truly realize your skills after you've secured the job.
Well, here's another data point. I have been asked for related coursework and grades in job interviews. When you're young and poor, knowledge is gold; this changes when you have to pay for the roof over your head. Yes, these skills are important to future employment once you've secured it, but to be so blasé about grades reflects a callow understanding of the IT field, particularly these days.
Well, then perhaps you do deserve to fail. He's the one doing the grading, and he's the person responsible for giving you an assignment where success is based as much on luck as on technical prowess.
He tells you what he means and sticks with it. That's something to respect.
This is called begging the question. Why, exactly, is this something to respect?
"Hey, I'm going to kill you if you don't give me your money."
"Well, I don't have any money."
"Sorry, gotta kill you."
"That's cool. I totally respect that."
Perhaps if you didn't idolize him as much, you might realize the practical consequences of a failing grade for your GPA, and potential employment future. But at least you got to learn from a kick-ass prof, right? Or rather, an ass-kicking prof.
He robbed people, or attempted to rob them. This is like robbing a bank, only worse.
No, it's not. Theft and robbery are different animals. These guys never held a gun to someone's head, never threatened anyone. They are more akin to cat burglers than "robbers".
Nine years is longer than a manslaughter conviction. Longer than most murder convictions. Longer than rape convictions. What kind of fucking idiot are you to value some large corporation's potential bottom line (since they actually stole nothing) more than the life of another human being?
This conviction is bullshit, made solely to prove a point by sadistic bastards like yourself.
An Epson 2200 or Canon S9000 is going to set you back about $500. Good inks for the Epson (the Ultrachrome inks) cost another $90.00 (for all colors), and good paper (archive quality) goes for about $0.50 / sheet. With Epson, I get longevity at the cost of image "punch". With Canon, I get faster, quieter prints and stronger colors, but they fade faster. If I go with a cheaper Epson (say, the 2000), I have to deal with terrible metamerism, a cheaper Canon I get terrible B&W. Each print is going to cost about $1.50 a page at best. This doens't factor in the cost of the printer itself.
Or, I can custom profile my photos for specific machine output (using Dry Creek's wonderful database), take my photos to CostCo/Sam's Club/Walgreens, where they print on Fuji Frontier's, pay $0.18 for a 4x6, get better color and more longevity.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been in the market to buy an LCD monitor for the past 2 years and I have not seen any significant drop.
The price for craptacular 1280x1024 displays has been dropping, but if you actually want to use those 19 inches of screen real estate with, say, a higher resolution (say, 1600x1280) you're still looking at just under a grand. Which is absurd. Most good CRT's go up to 2048x1536, and can down-res when needed (higher framerates for games, for instance), yet cost half that.
That is AFTER I turn off the animation effects in WinXP (those induce hella lag).
Definately! XP in general is laggy, but the thing with Windows is, it's either all or nothing. That is, when you click on something, it either comes up right away, or you're sitting there like an idiot waiting for "something" to finish.
I am seriously wanting to experiment here, if you can pick where you notice it the most it would be helpful.
I would actually very much appreciate it. The system in question was a G4, though I don't know the processor speed. It's a slightly older system, however, so probably 733 Mhz. It had about a gig of RAM, but since most of the work involved large images in Photoshop, it still probably ended up swapping to disk.
The primary use was web design. To simulate it, load up Fetch, Photoshop with a (let's say) 2 MB image, and Safari on a page with Flash. Do a little of whatever in each of the programs, then pick a program with context menus and right-click (or control-click for one-button mice).
As the moment of button release, the menu should pop up. Or even easier, go to the top bar and open a menu item. Again, this should be instant, but all the Macs I've used have a slight delay--it's not enough to cry home about, but it hasn't helped to sell the Mac to me.
I'll have to try one of the new mini's out and give Apple another shot. Perhaps the processor wasn't up to snuff, or the systems I've used have been underpowered in some regard. If the new mini does indeed kick as much butt as all the fanatics say, that would be a hell of a price-point.
Just a quick Googling reveals I'm not the only person who's noticed this problem. It's funny, because the way he describes it is almost exactly the way I feel: "It's a hard phenomena to describe objectively--all I can say for sure is that when I go back to using my home PC or my work PC, the mouse movement is crisp, reliable and predictable."
It's so subtle that I usually just suck it up, but it is aggrivating when you're not used to it.
I've had a number of [ahem] discussions with Mac users about this. The nature of my work requires me to use the occasional Mac (graphic design), and the one thing that bugs me more than anything else is the tiny, almost inperceptible LAG when clicking on menu items or bringing up context menus. It's so small that you probably wouldn't notice it, that is until you work on a Wintel box where everything just snaps.
Don't ask about your transfer limits, either. What good is 6 Mb/s when your download limit is capped at 5 gigs? Fill your pipe up and you've got about 15 hours until full. Fantastic.
Probably because they figure they can get someone do to the same job, only charge them a few grand less because they're just "regular" students instead of "ivy-league" students.
Basically the same principle behind out-sourcing; just replace "regular" with "third-world" and "ivy-league" with "American".
Er, well you forgot the main reasons people like the Mac Mini: small size and the svelte, elegant design of the hardware, software, and GUI.
X-Boxes aren't small?
And I'll humbly offer up this interface to kick the pants out of any interface you can find for an OSX media machine. Remember, we're talking about media systems here. Readability and simplicity in user interface is key.
Microsoft never could figure those parts out.
As if this was a Microsoft vs. Apple issue. The guys that coded the link above have it running off of a Linux distro.
That's the crazy part about Apple fanatics: they fail to realize that people who don't agree with them aren't by default Microsoft fanatics. If I could have OSX running on my AMD system, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately this would kill Apple.
Wish I had mod points for you.
Oh, you forgot one thing:
Allows you to play thousands of games.
Apple never could figure that part out.
If you can make a p2p app in 15 lines, how hard is it to make one with built-in encryption? This seems like a relatively easy additional layer to implement, but I honestly don't know all the various pitfalls. Could someone please enlighten me? (I realize WASTE already has this, but the development of WASTE appears to have hit a stand-still in beta implementation).
Well, you have two options.
The first is to change the default font sizes to larger values if you're too blind to see small fonts on a friggin' huge monitor. (DISPLAY / PROPERTIES / APPEARANCE / FONT SIZE: Normal, Large, Extra Large)
The second is to get LASIK, or be born with good close vision. The second was offered to me, and I took it.
Those fancy Princeton 19" LCD's still max out at 1280x1024. Look at LCD's in the 1600 range, and you'll see the prices double. And have fun playing down-res'd games. Of course, my NEC MultiSync 21" goes up to 2048x1536, but can play games at 800x600 if I need the high framerates, yet only cost $550. Go figure.
"Yeah, but try moving it around!" you might retort.
How often do you move around your screen? Twice. When you move in, and when you move out. Big deal. If I wanted a portable screen, I'd have to get a portable computer as well. We call those laptops.
Well deserved award. Not only was Populus an stroke of pure, unadulterated genious (and helped create an entire game genre), but to my knowledge, Populus was one of the few games that was never successfully cracked. I recall a slew of irritating patches that *never* worked.
> Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Not amoral or unethical.
Really? The Chinese fought (and lost) two wars to kill the Opium trade because of the effects it was having on their people.
As prohibition was a crime, Joseph Kennedy's actions were not amoral, nor unethical.
Joseph Kennedy made his first round of cash by conspiring to inflate a stock's price, then selling it before investors got wind. And Prohibition wasn't a crime. Selling alcohol was the crime.
I'm sorry, is that supposed to be "amoral" or "unethical"?
Yes, you nitwit. There were several treaties later passed by the U.S. government to prevent the trade of alcohol with the Indians because of the disasterous effects it was having on their social order. They didn't do this because of the strong Indian Lobby, you know? They did it because it was unethical. Educate thyself.
Bill Gates is worse than Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer put together!
Oh, I get it now. Please, crawl back under your bridge and go back to eating little children.
I know that there are some people who cannot tell the difference between a 700 MB xvid file and the 9 GB DVD version, but I am not one of these people. I have watched MANY xvid movies and it is never as sharp and there are tons of artifacts.
Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting there's no loss in quality. Naturally there's a loss in quality. My point is that when you're balancing filesize/video quality, the more advanced codecs are going to win out any day of the week.
You might then argue that size is not a factor, but I would have to disagree for a number of reasons. First, if you're watching the movie on a standard (not HD) television, it's going to be downsampled anyway. Severely. Second, as I said earlier, smaller files = greater quantity distributed.
Size does matter to the end user. Not because they can't afford a DVD recorder (they're, what, $45 now?) but because they don't want to spend their time downloading extra bits when they don't have to, from a source that may or may not be online in another couple of hours.
Size also matters to an illegal distributor. If I were to offer a 200 GB hard drive for sale filled with movies, I can charge a lot more for 200 movies than 50.
But yes, for the purist, you'll want to stick to the closest-to-1st generation as you can get.
Simply not true. Any scene with highly detailed motion will show the deficiencies of these codecs.
Simply not true. Any encoder with a modicum of talent will divert more of the available bitrate to high-action scenes.
Besides, DVD format is a RELEASE format, and it is a known fact that you don't reencode a release format without loss and artifacts. SVCD's look pretty good, but everyone is trading DVD-R these days anyway.
This statement no sense.
DVD is already compressed. Anything you do to it to make it smaller will involve re-compressing. And why mention SVCD? The bitrate is 2600kbit/s for video and 224kbit/s for audio. And that's a non-adjustable, fixed bitrate (so no extra data chunks for high-motion scenes). With that high a bitrate, it better look good! But compressed-byte to compressed-byte, XVID wins hands down. There's simply no contest. Any variable rate codec is going to do better than a single bitrate given a limited space constraint.
but everyone is trading DVD-R these days anyway
Funny. I'm not. But then, I'm just a simple, humble guy. I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.
Say what you want about the greedy "rich people," they got to be that way by trade, not theft.
Most of the large fortunes you can name were reaped through amoral or unethical means.
Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Joseph Kennedy was involved not only in some shady stock deals, but later ballooned his fortune with alcohol during Prohibition.
John Jacob Astor made his initial fortune trading alcohol for furs with native americans.
Bill Gates bought QDOS from Tim Paterson for a pittance, only to license it to IBM for millions.
Of course, one could argue that these men weren't actually breaking any laws, they were simply taking advantage of the situations at hand while disregarding moral or ethical constraints that might bind us "normal" (read: unsuccessful) folk.
with DVD's so cheap..WHY do they continue to want to fit it on 700 MB CD's!
Time. Because with proper encoding, a 2-CD rip will look as good as the original ("as good" meaning virtually indestinguishable). With 1-CD encodes, you can send out 6 movies in the same amount of time as 1 standard DVD.
Is there anything Google can't do?
You're also talking about a geographic area that, frankly, is a few orders of magnitude smaller.
The problem is that people don't want to live in the cities, because cities == dangerous criminals and drugs and guns and hookers and small spaces and no backyard yada yada yada.
In New York, you understand this, and you get over it pretty quickly, because the benefits of living in city far outweigh the oh-so-not-luxurious standard of living in the 'burbs. Yeah, you got a backyard, but it's squeezed right next to your neighbor's, and all the houses look the same so your kids are going nuts, and the mall is where you do all your shopping, and you have to drive everywhere so you become a fat slob, and your "town" is nothing more than a few housing developments and a strip-mall so you have no sense of community, etc., etc., etc.
Amazing a country like Great Britian, with about a fifth the population of the U.S., and 1/40th of the land mass has so much green space, unspoiled by strip-malls, communities that feel like communities, easy transportation everywhere, etc. It's because half the country lives in urban areas.
I believe bi-torrent.com is simply a cache of SuprNova's torrents before they went offline, but that no new torrents are being added. Additionally, I don't think they're a tracker, just a pointer to other trackers: they can list whatever they want, but if the originating tracker is offline, you aren't going to be downloading anything.
And supernova.org (not to be confused with suprnova.org) is just a feeble attempt to install spyware on your system.
So, did you get those particular jobs?
Yes (Motorola) -- but you're right about contacts being an asset. But you admit yourself, the actual knowledge you bring to the table is pretty low on the list of "things that will secure me a job." It shouldn't be like this, but an interview is a very short process, and there are a few time-tested ways of proving someone's skillset quickly. Grades are one of them. You can wax poetic about how you "learned so much" and "grew as a person" because of a class, but the bottom line is, if you don't have the grades to show for it, you might as well be talking out of your ass.
I actually don't understand that sentence; could you explain? The roof over my head is owed to my skills.
What I was referring to was the idealism of youth putting practical experience (useful as it is) ahead of such trivialities as GPA, when in most cases your employer will only truly realize your skills after you've secured the job.
No employer has ever asked me for my GPA.
Well, here's another data point. I have been asked for related coursework and grades in job interviews. When you're young and poor, knowledge is gold; this changes when you have to pay for the roof over your head. Yes, these skills are important to future employment once you've secured it, but to be so blasé about grades reflects a callow understanding of the IT field, particularly these days.
I know this shouldn't detract from the 11+ million downloads and all that... but I noticed a couple of doubles in the names.
And no, I didn't read the entire list. I just happened to notice "Nathan Campbell Nathan Campbell" two times in a row by accident.
Just sayin'.
We're not blaming DJB for our failure.
Well, then perhaps you do deserve to fail. He's the one doing the grading, and he's the person responsible for giving you an assignment where success is based as much on luck as on technical prowess.
He tells you what he means and sticks with it. That's something to respect.
This is called begging the question. Why, exactly, is this something to respect?
"Hey, I'm going to kill you if you don't give me your money."
"Well, I don't have any money."
"Sorry, gotta kill you."
"That's cool. I totally respect that."
Perhaps if you didn't idolize him as much, you might realize the practical consequences of a failing grade for your GPA, and potential employment future. But at least you got to learn from a kick-ass prof, right? Or rather, an ass-kicking prof.
He robbed people, or attempted to rob them. This is like robbing a bank, only worse.
No, it's not. Theft and robbery are different animals. These guys never held a gun to someone's head, never threatened anyone. They are more akin to cat burglers than "robbers".
Nine years is longer than a manslaughter conviction. Longer than most murder convictions. Longer than rape convictions. What kind of fucking idiot are you to value some large corporation's potential bottom line (since they actually stole nothing) more than the life of another human being?
This conviction is bullshit, made solely to prove a point by sadistic bastards like yourself.
An Epson 2200 or Canon S9000 is going to set you back about $500. Good inks for the Epson (the Ultrachrome inks) cost another $90.00 (for all colors), and good paper (archive quality) goes for about $0.50 / sheet. With Epson, I get longevity at the cost of image "punch". With Canon, I get faster, quieter prints and stronger colors, but they fade faster. If I go with a cheaper Epson (say, the 2000), I have to deal with terrible metamerism, a cheaper Canon I get terrible B&W. Each print is going to cost about $1.50 a page at best. This doens't factor in the cost of the printer itself.
Or, I can custom profile my photos for specific machine output (using Dry Creek's wonderful database), take my photos to CostCo/Sam's Club/Walgreens, where they print on Fuji Frontier's, pay $0.18 for a 4x6, get better color and more longevity.
Pretty simple decision to me.