Everytime I see an article or hear a discussion about DTV transitions, I hear a bunch of people ranting and raving about buying new TVs, or how their TV that Moses brought down from the mount works just fine and you can pry it from their cold, dead hands. It really does crack me up when you consider what's realistically going to go into this transition.
First of all, The US deadline is now 2007, not 2006, per random circuit court.
A) 108 million households in the US have televisions. Of those, just over 70% subscribe to cable or satellite. Satellite subscribers don't have a thing to worry about in this transition (unless they don't spend the $6/month to get televised local stations, which is definitely worth avoiding ghosting and reception issues). Satellite users really don't have to worry about this at all, since the sat systems will probably keep broadcasting in the same manner they were before the change; essentially a slightly differently implemented digital signal. Local stations will be transmitted in the same manner, and the signals will be decoded by their existing set-top box. No pain. Cable carriers could, in theory, take the exisitng off-air digital signals, convert them back to analog, and send them along over the lines (I'm not sure if any of the FCC rules have forbid this), although with continued uptake on digital cable services, they'll basically be in a situation similar to the satellite carriers. Of course, assuming they're not allowed to to retransmit in analog, it'll be back to how it was 10 or 15 years ago before cable-ready TVs hit the market; a $4 or $5/month (maybe even $10) for the box, with the option to purchase per FCC rules. The boxes still patch into the TV using the standard interfaces (composite/S-Video, RF for the old crap, maybe component or DVI for newer equipment).
That leaves the off-air folks, the remaining 30%. Now consider what off-air DTV is. It isn't neccessarily HD (HD is a subset of Digital). DTV is MPEG-2 encoded video with dolby digital/AC-3 audio and 480 lines of resolution. Know what else uses that same video system? If you said the $20 DVD player they had on sale last friday, you're right. Essentially, you need an IC capable of decoding the stream, an antenna to get the signal in, and some RF equipment that can tune to that signal. In bulk, we're talking maybe $50, especially considering these won't be purchased for at least another 3 years. THe current cost of outboard ATSC tuners is mostly due to the fact that there's a very small market actually looking for them and the fact that they're typically designed to a little higher standards, given that they're usually interfacing to nicer HD equipment.
So the remaining 30% of people breaks down thusly: people who don't care enough about TV to invest in cable or satellite, and people who can't afford to invest in cable or satellite. The former group might have one or two TVs (they don't care enough, remember), so using my random $50 price point (which I think is reasonably believable), they can retrofit their existing equipment for $100, or simply put that $100 into buying a new TV. You can get a new TV for $100, and if they buy it at that time, it'll be DTV capable (see below). For the people who are too poor to afford cable or sat, well, they were obviously capable of scraping together enough to get a TV. Not to be heartless here, but TV is not a right, and if you could afford to get one you can probably afford to save up $50.
This all counts out the fact that one of the circuit courts of appeal upheld the ruling that all TVs larger than 13" are required to have a DTV tuner starting 2006 (I think it's '06).
So what we basically have is a lot of handwringing over a bunch of scaremongering by media outlets ("current DTV boxes cost hundreds of dollars", "of course they do, there's not a huge demand for them") and the lack of understanding of simple television systems by a lot of people. Folks, it's gonna be a cheap-ass box that hooks into your cable jack or A/V input and tunes to a channel. It's not rocket science. You can go back to watching your 15 year-old wood-panel TV now, and you can keep watching it for years to come.
The ESRB ratings system works exactly the way you describe.
In TV they have TV-Y7, TV-G (I think, something denoting that's it's fine for everyone), TV-14, and TV-MA, with modifiers displayed underneath the rating. Modifiers descibe Adult situations, Profane language, Nudity, and Violence.
Games have a rating EC (basically for games that only a young child would enjoy), E (for everyone), T for Teen, M for mature, and Ao for the rare porno game that bothers being submitted to the ESRB. Turn the package over, and there's a box on the back containing any of at least 12 descriptions I've encountered, which cover degrees of violence (cartoon-y, realistic, realistic w/ blood) profanity (mild for the occasionaly 'damn', etc.) and Nudity or sexual situations (Dead or ALive: Xtreme Beach volleyball doesn't have any nudity in the pure sense, but is basically right on the line).
If someone can't be bothered to turn the box over, well, I'm not exactly sure what else they want.
The Phantasy Star series (especially 2 and 4) has always been one of my favorites. They introduced some truly unique ideas for the console RPG genre. At a time when most console RPGs were simple fantasy-oriented fare on the NES (games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, where characters were completely non-descript beings who simply occupied a space in your party), PS had characters with real personalities. This was heavily reinforced by the animated, 80's style portrait close-ups for important bits of dialogue and the occasional cut-scene that looked absolutely brilliant compared to anything else. The cool futuristic but still pseudo-fantasy setting helped immensely, as did the bright anime-style graphics.
The games also introduced (again, for the console world, don't go nitpicking some random Amiga RPG with this feature) Macro commands for the parties (introduced in part 2, I think), where you could select a single macro that would issue a given command to each party character. Especially cool was that particular spell, item, or ability combinations in those macros would combine to form more powerful spells and attacks. They mention generations, and for some reason that jumps into my head as the title for PS III, the weakest link in the series. It had some cool ideas (chief among them was the fact that characters would eventually marry, have children, and their kids would take up their place in the party), but it basically degenrated into a severely weak game with a bunch of generic fetch-quests. Although PSO is fun, it's a shame that the Phantasy Star series never got a proper revisiting in the true console RPG sense after the amazing PS IV. Please Sega, for the love of all that is holy, re-release PS IV.
Look at the labeling. Point of Manufacture on these things are Malaysia, Thailand, Hungary, etc. They're shipped 20 and 30 to a 3'x4' packing crate, against their will. Forced to endure this trip without food or water, these poor mass-storage devices are then forced to spin at 5400 and sometimes 7200 revolutions per minute, without breaks, in dusty and hot environments.
I'm glad someone in California has at least taken the initiative to keep them from being referred to as slaves. The next step is a move to an 8-hour workday (although I think IBM already recommends that on some of their Deskstar line), and two 15-minute breaks per work period (I can do without swap for a few minutes, I guess). Of course, I hope they realize the negative connotations of the term "Server"
4 hours per day per weekday = 20 14 waking hours per weekend day *2 = 28
48 hours per week.
which works out to just under 2500 hours per year, or something like $250 a year. Do keep in mind, of course, that although some projectors do have speakers on them, they're not intended to be used as such, and that you'd want to have some sort of stereo/surround audio system, so you wouldn't necessarily have to run the projector in order to hear your music DVDs.
While I don't have the X1 yet (still waiting for a few bonuses and such), I have put a good amount of research into it. The bulb is rated for 3,000 hours, and goes for $300. I estimated ~2 hours per day of viewing between myself and my SO, which puts me at just over 4 years between bulbs, a completely reasonable expense. Of course, your mileage may vary based on how much you watch, but do keep in mind that when the X1 first hit the streets, replacement bulbs were $500, so I don't see any reason why they wouldn't drop some in the next few years as well.
I was referring to the live-action intro movie in the original PSX version (the big box edition, before PSX games shipped in jewel cases). They cast actors who looked vaguely like the game characters. It ended with this terrible, UPN action show style intro where the live actors were shown doing some sort of vaguely cop thing for three seconds(loading gun, adjusting armor, etc.) while the narrator called their name out one by one (Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine). All of this was shown over a flaming background. It truly was so terrible that it deserved to have been kept. Maybe it's in there as a bonus feature or something, but I never ran across it.
Regardless of intro movie format, the fact stands that the mansion was out in the forest.
Direct Translations of the plot don't always work as well as a slightly reworked version. Remember, there's only 1.5-2 hours to develop the story, not 10-15.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that the mansion was in the forest. If you watch the god-awful intro video on the original PSX copy of RE (The gamecube version removed it, as did one of the classics or director's cut editions), you'll see the Stars team helicoptering in and then running through the forest to the mansion as they try to escape the zombie dogs.
While I'll partially concede most of your points (we really can't calculate true efficency or inneficiency until we also start to factor in the cost of creating hydrogen distribution methods, as well), but I'd have to take issue with the last bit.
Of course you can use oil and coal and nuclear, etc. but currently, the US doesn't seem willing to do so. People in Houston, for example, have the wonderful privilege of paying for a $1.2 Billion nuclear power plant that was completed in the early 80's and (outside of tests) never actually turned on. Why? Because it's nuclear. One woman actually had a letter published (in the opinion section, at least) in the Houston Chronicle where she stated that she would turn off her electricity because she was afraid that her electricity would be RADIOACTIVE! One of the issues that forced California's recent shennanigans (other than Enron crap and other related issues) is the fact that they haven't built a true power plant there since (forgive me for not having the exact year) sometime in the late 70's. Thus, one more aspect of the aforementioned efficency is factoring in whether constructing legitimate production plants that won't use oil/gas power sources would even be allowed by a lot of the uneducated populace, and the cost inherent in doing so.
(no attack on the original poster, as he was dead on) Hydrogen fuel cell discussions always chap my ass, because people miss the basic facts about the technology that will keep it from ever being more than an electric car-style gimmick.
Hydrogen in a fuel cell is not an energy source in the global sense; it's an energy holder. Ie. the hydrogen in there was not simply pulled from some place at a small expense and placed in the cell. Generating hydrogen from water requires large amounts of energy, which will likely come from the usual suspects. Of course, the other great source for hydrogen is simple hydrocarbons (namely natural gas), but of course, that puts as back at sqaure one: dependant on oil, just in a slightly different manner.
Now, the hydrogen production from water COULD be feasible, assuming we were willing to utilize different power sources than we are currently. Nuclear power, for example, is about the cleanest stuff out there, even factoring in the waste production. Solar power, assuming it was cost efficient (which it isn't currently, at least not in most places) might suffice as well.
Last year, Bush said something to the effect that, "By the end of the decade, we'll be using hydrogen fuel cells in automobiles". The quotation isn't exactly accurate, so forgive me on that one. Fun Fact: Nixon said the same thing, almost word for word when he was in office. Bottom line: I'm not some oil shill and I don't drive some as-guzzling monstrosity. I'm just sort of calling it like I personally see it. Oil is cheap, even factoring in all the associated costs, especially for things like cars, trucks, trains, etc.
the "1080i" resolution is 1920x1080. That would be a number well above what most gamers aim for (1024x768 seems to be the standard benchmark number). Incidentally, though, Xbox only outputs at 1080i in a couple of games; most others are 480p at best (a few don't even support progressive scan).
Folks who bought a PS2 at $499 must really feel screwed now. And they say Apple has large profit margins !
And rightly so, since the price (in US Dollars) at launch was $299.99. Unless they imported their unit prior to launch or we're talking AUS dollars or something, anyone who paid that much needs to put down the pipe.
I've found myself in a similar situation, and pondered the same questions. I looked at doing an HTPC for a long time, as I also really wanted to access all the MP3s in the home theater. Here's my setup:
ReplayTV + DVArchive. ReplayTVs have the ability to play shows recorded on other ReplayTVs, and DVArchive masquerades as a replayTV. Runs under Windows or Linux (and OS X, as well, I believe), and can be queued to automatically copy, transfer, or delete shows at scheduled times. Your replayTV will simply recognize the DVArchive machine as another replay named whatever you choose to name it (in my case, the brilliantly inventive "fileserver"), and you can play shows from it as you would in any other situation.
My current file server is a 2.0Ghz Celeron Dell that I got as a promo deal with a flat panel ($480 for the flat panel, $570 for flat panel, plus celeron machine, plus palm pilot). I put a Highpoint RocketRaid 404 in with a foursome of 80GB western digital drives ($50 a pop). Highpoint has win-Raid 5 drivers for the 404, and since I'm cheap as hell, I jumped on it. I'm currently looking at upgrading to Promise's SX6000, which is a 6-channel IDE hardware RAID5 controller with expandable RAM. Acquire hard drives bit by bit via rebates (buying retail drives with rebates is soooo much cheaper than parting it out all together. If time dictates otherwise, though, do it.) Best Buy has 200GB drives for $200 after rebate this week, and not a week goes by that I don't see 120GBs going for $60-70 after rebate from some manufacturer. I've actually had reasnably good luck with getting them back. Assuming RAID-5 for capacity and redundancy, it'd be $1200 for 1TB post-parity, plus ~$250 for the controller card. As far as I know, Promise's software package does support multiple cards in the machine, so just continue to add. If you're feeling lucky, I suppose you could go for a software RAID 0 and a crapload of IDE controller cards, but that's just tempting fate for little monetary gain.
BroadQ's Qcast is a software package for PS2s which streams media files to the PS2 over a network from a machine running the server software. It supports Windows, Linux, and OS X. It currently supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, various MPEG-4 flavors, MP3 audio, JPEG, and PNG images. I use this for MP3 playback primarily. Major bonuses include the fact that remotes are cheap for the PS2, the PS2 has optical digital output for cleaner audio, and it supports component video quite easily. Picture quality, particularly on well-encoded DiVX animes is quite amazing.
My advice would be thusly: I've found DVarchive to be awesome, and I absolutely love the simple integration and the one-box-does-all aspect. But you're running a TiVO.
I had fiddled around a bit with the idea of copying recorded shows, piping them to an MPEG-4 encoder, and then playing them back with Qcast on a PS2. Assuming you already have a PS2, the Network adapter is $40, and Qcast is $50, so that's not a terribly big outlay. Assuming your fileserver isn't going to be doing anything more strenuous than hosting your media stuff, you might just splurge and go for a reasonably speedy athlon setup and have it do encoding in the offtime for storage purposes (hourlong shows at medium quality can take about 1.5GB vs. the 500 megs or so that I'd probably aim for in DiVX...) it's worth it to me to have it easily viewable and useable from my replay, but your mileage may vary.
Don't tell that to the GF2 GTS that's been doing active duty in my girlfriend's NForce2 mobo with 8X AGP. The only thing I've seen weird discrepencies with is way old AGP 1x/2X cards (kinda hard to find nowadays, unless you're going used) and the 5volt PCI spec. Of course, I just replaced it with a Radeon 9500 so we're running on true 8X, but I don't think there's any issue there.
I've had my 5040 for about 6 months now. I positively love the thing, and we purchased over TiVO because of Network compatability (at the time, without purchasing add-on parts).
It seems that my commercial skip function has become less and less effective over time. Replay's fine print says that it's 90% effective, and I presume it's looking for a particular time sequence in blank space or something to that effect. I'm not sure if the networks have caught on to what the Replay is doing, but it seems that lately my commercial skipping is about 30% effective. Certain shows will always be able to skip commercials, while others (those that air on Cartoon Network, for example), are almost guaranteed to be unskippable. It doesn't bother me; a few clicks of the 30-second skip button work just as well, and I occasionally catch glimpses of commercials I want to see (and go back to them).
Also, check out DVArchive on sourceforge. Great multi-platform program that masquerades as another ReplayTV on the network. Grab one of those $300 w/ service included 5040s from Sonicblue, throw some extra drives (I've seen stuff going for $0.75/GB or lower) in a computer, and go to town with your several hundred hour Replay without even voiding a warranty.
Way back in the day (well, okay, more like 15 years ago), they had what could basically be described as "Choose Your Own Adventure" Laserdiscs. You had to have a CLV player (the one that could actually randomly skip tracks), and it helped a lot to have one of the educational-targeted barcode reader add-ons, but they played nearly the same way.
I remember one "movie" about some kids finding a skeleton in the woods. It was the same idea, and would work wonderfully in today's market. Of course, the Dragon's Lair DVDs work the same way (controlled with the DVD remote, and just queue to a different chapter, much as the old arcade LD unit did).
Not that anyone will even read this, but good call.
I see so many people spend beacoup money on their internals and then say, "oh, yeah, and this 420Watt PS I got for $35. What a steal!"
A good power supply is not cheap. On the flip side, though, a good power supply is not cheap. And a bad power supply is the most annoying thing to troubleshoot.
Antec makes some good stuff that I've been very happy with, ditto for PC Power and Cooling. Expensive, but so worth it it isn't funny.
Re:X-Box Troll Handbook
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Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The only good games for the XBox are out for the other systems, except for Halo which i was not impressed with
I own all three of the current-gen systems, and every one of the XBox games I own are "XBox-exclusive". Halo is a great game, but you might also check out Buffy (basically a 3D Double Dragon with a decent storyline), Panzer Dragoon, Jet Grind Radio, Mech Assault, and Dead or Alive 3 (if fighting games are your thing).
Dead or Alive 3 was the only game I was interested in at launch (I was a fan of the prior games), and I put off buying the XBox until early last summer. Although I'd still recommend a GC or PS2 to someone who only wants one console (A PS2 would be my first inclination), the Xbox is a really solid game machine.
I remember the heyday of cartoons, when everything was a clearly delineated, toy tie-in. Well, okay, other than Looney Tunes, which was simply fantastic.
Cartoons were clearly tied to gender. There were boy cartoons (GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., that one with the light gun plane where you shot at the screen, and so forth), and girl cartoons (Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, etc.). These were genuine, good quality shows that were obvious toy tie-ins, but kids loved them. See, toys provide something tangible, and the easiest way to generate toys is to not have character development. If I want to add a character to Spongebob, I have to have a meaningful purpose for that character, because said cartoon is primarily narrative and dialogue-driven. Transformers is also arguably narrative-driven, although the narrative consists primarily of Autobots vs. decepticons, so adding a flying plane or a dinosaur is trivial.
It seems a bit rambling, but I'm bringing it together here. I can remember watching kids play Power Rangers at the park. Power Rangers is easy to play. You choose your ranger, you go off and battle "evil". How the hell do a bunch of kids play Spongebob? What, you pretend to be some crab and exchange half-wit banter while simultaneously apppealing to an older demographic?
Basically, it's a lack of conflict. Every solid cartoon show revolved around the simplest of ideas, good vs. evil. It might've been that the evil was Decepticons, or the wicked Voltron queen, or Cobra, or that Rainbrow Brite villain who was only drawn in shades of gray. A dialogue-driven children's show is going to have to be pretty damned well-written to appeal to kids, and hiring good writers costs good money. Cartoons exist primarily because they're cheap to produce, so any gain from choosing the medium is eliminated when you have to gety talented writers on board. Maybe it's a reflection of our values as a society (or more particularyl, young parents' values) , or maybe it's Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, as other posts have mentioned, but something's just missing there.
Alternately, it could simply be that the plethora of cable networks broadcasting cartoons has taken the profitability away from the format.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this. I picked one up after it was mentioned in/. a while ago, and I couldn't be happier. The client runs on a PS2, which means you can use the PS2 to feed Optical Digital out and Component Video Out to any television. The server supports multiple connections, and a PS2 plus the little remote piece won't run you more then $230 or so. $50 for the QCast software. Plus, if you want another client box you just buy another PS2, and the kids'll probably thank you for that (assuming they exist).
For those who didn't catch the little article, QCast supports MP3, OGG Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and the various flavors of DiVX (3.11, 4, and 5), as well a JPEG and PNG photos for slideshow playback.
I had been looking into building an HT Computer (I really just wanted streaming playback of the above list, not something for on-the-fly HD scaling or anything like that). For something that wasn't going to overpower my audio with fan noise, would playback any of those formats without any assistance (sorry Via Epia), and would fit in a case exactly 17" wide so that width would match the rest of the equipment, I was looking at something significantly more expensive than $230. It connects to a file server with a 4x80GB drive setup (drives ran me a sweet $50 each).
I use a ReplayTV for PVR functionality. It connects via ethernet, and there are third party programs available that allow you to connect and "download" one of the shows from it (although it only use 10BaseT). It would be somewhat trivial to have a cron job set to run the program, pipe the file to a DiVX encoder of your choice, and save it on a centralized box.
Oh, yeah, use CAT5. RG6 for the actual video source, but if you're trying to move PVR-ed video around, CAT5. I'd make sure to run all CAT5e or CAT6 so that I could make the jump to gigabit ethernet when the switches stop costing more than some of my computers.
A year and a half ago, I would've agreed with you. A year ago, I would've agreed with you. Around the release of the the socket 478 P4s with 512K L2 cache, I stopped believing.
I went to build a machine about 4 years ago. Top of the line P3 was $600 or so, so I picked up my 450mhz K6-2 for a little under $100. It wasn't faster by any stetch of the imagination, but it played games just fine coupled with the video card I could afford because of the savings. It wasn't beating Intel by any stretch, but it was cheap and reliable (that machine now resides with my parents, doing everything they want just fine).
I bought a 1ghz Athlon for about $200 or so. The 1ghz P3s cost more than twice as much, and were outperformed in nearly every respect. Those were AMDs glory days (starting there and progressing through to the Northwood P4s). AMD outperformed whatever Intel threw at them for about half as much. It was a no-brainer. The deficit increased even more wih the P4, which was only close when paired with RDRAM. There was an ever-so-brief period a little over a year ago where a lot of retail PC companies (the Compaqs and HPs of the world) were actually shipping their higher-end units with Athlons. I considered that great, because so few Joe Six-Packs knew the AMD name, and seeing that "trusted" companies (and not just screwdriver shops) used them went a good way in spreading the word about AMD
And then Intel got serious. They slashed the prices of their chips and released their 512KB L2 cache processors. I bought a 2.4Ghz P4 a couple of weeks ago for $160. The Athlon 2400+ was $130. These are two processors that would literally be neck-and-neck in almost any situation. If the Intel processor was $250, we'd definitely be talking AMD time, but it wasn't. It was $30 more, a number that could easily be made up for in any number of other areas. Plus, it was nice to forget about VIAs 4-in-1 crap (although the NForce stuff looks pretty nice). Now, I built a 2000+ for my brother about a month ago, and for stuff in that range ($80 for the proc, $70 for the NForce1 Board), AMD still rules, but I honestly hope the hammer seriously kicks ass if AMD wants to stay in this business.
To me, it all has to do with what the product cost vs. what they charge. Example: I bought a home theater receiver that was literally hot off the presses (it had been released less than a month before I bought it) with a retail price tag of $500. The receiver came with a 24 month warranty from the factory, and let's be honest, most solid state stuff is going to fail immediately or never. The 3-year warranty (which essentially extended the coverage from 2 to 3 years, and threw in the standard "power surge, wear, etc." additional coverage) was $40. I bought it. Why?
I'm a college student. I'm by no means poor (the ol' home (apartment) theater recently surpassed $5,000 in equipment, and is due for a few more add-ons soon), but I'm also not overflowing with money. And it tends to come in spurts. I work in addition to school to pay rent and bills and such, but over summer, spring break, and around christmas I tend to generate a little extra money because of more hours availabale to work or gifts and such. So for me, an extra $40 to hedge my bets on not having $500 available at a moment's notice to replace the receiver is worth it, especially when I consider that that $40 is just going to get spent on beer, or some videogame I forget after 2 weeks.
One other thing to always consider on these deals: shipping and repairs. Most manufacturers will make you pay to ship the product in for repairs. Now, you can get around that if you argue with them and so forth, but it's not the standard policy. Consider the cost to ship and insure a 30 pound receiver to California (and youd better damned well insure that pckage) vs. being able to drive to the local store, and you're starting to see a bit of the worth in it.
On the flip side, I didnt buy it on the last television I bought (32" Tube). It was over $160 for the warranty coverage, and tube TVs seem to me like solid state electronics: die immediately or never. If that warranty cost was, say, $80, then we're talking, but $160 doesn't make it worthwhile to me. Of course, I also never buy them on game consoles, and I'm on my second PS2 and my third PS1.
Michael Chabon (Author) is writing the script for Spiderman 2. He is also adapting Kavalier and Clay for the screen.
Oh, and this book deserves any amount of praise heaped on it. The writing is amazing, and characters are dynamic and fully-developed. Literally, my only regret about this book (well, okay, you have to push yourself through the VERY beginning) is that it wasn't longer.
SCSI isn't that expensive, especially if you're willing to analyze what you're actually going to use, and not just RAID 0-ing two 80GB drives like a lot of people I know.
I picked up two Western Digital 9.1GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives for $35 each, shipped. If you don't have a controller, U-160 Cards can be had for about $70. I stick my OS on one drive, swap and applications on the second, and have a 45GB IDM Deskstar (75GXP and still running after 2 years, I like living on the edge) handling mass-storage tasks.
According to WD's site, these drives have transfer rates comparable to the 8MB Cache IDE drives, but seek times in the 5 ms range (vs. around 8.5). Oh, and they're not particularly loud either, at least not anything I've noticed.
At $160, this drive doesn't seem like a good idea. I've seen numerous 10K ~36GB SCSI drives for about $30 more. I guess you can factor in the card cost if you honestly want to, but if you're talking about RAIDing these things, you're probably talking about buying a good SATA or IDE RAID card anyway.
If you have plans to archive every friggin' CD you own in FLAC format, then SCSI isn't a cost-effective method to go. I don't. YMMV, but I've found that I can beat the hell out of the computer and I don't see the nasty drive access issues that I used to. For a site where a lot of people piss and moan about not needing this many mhz or that DX9-capable card, I'd say the logic of smaller faster drives when you probably aren't gonna fill the giant ones is pretty evident.
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Everytime I see an article or hear a discussion about DTV transitions, I hear a bunch of people ranting and raving about buying new TVs, or how their TV that Moses brought down from the mount works just fine and you can pry it from their cold, dead hands. It really does crack me up when you consider what's realistically going to go into this transition.
First of all, The US deadline is now 2007, not 2006, per random circuit court.
A) 108 million households in the US have televisions. Of those, just over 70% subscribe to cable or satellite. Satellite subscribers don't have a thing to worry about in this transition (unless they don't spend the $6/month to get televised local stations, which is definitely worth avoiding ghosting and reception issues). Satellite users really don't have to worry about this at all, since the sat systems will probably keep broadcasting in the same manner they were before the change; essentially a slightly differently implemented digital signal. Local stations will be transmitted in the same manner, and the signals will be decoded by their existing set-top box. No pain. Cable carriers could, in theory, take the exisitng off-air digital signals, convert them back to analog, and send them along over the lines (I'm not sure if any of the FCC rules have forbid this), although with continued uptake on digital cable services, they'll basically be in a situation similar to the satellite carriers. Of course, assuming they're not allowed to to retransmit in analog, it'll be back to how it was 10 or 15 years ago before cable-ready TVs hit the market; a $4 or $5/month (maybe even $10) for the box, with the option to purchase per FCC rules. The boxes still patch into the TV using the standard interfaces (composite/S-Video, RF for the old crap, maybe component or DVI for newer equipment).
That leaves the off-air folks, the remaining 30%. Now consider what off-air DTV is. It isn't neccessarily HD (HD is a subset of Digital). DTV is MPEG-2 encoded video with dolby digital/AC-3 audio and 480 lines of resolution. Know what else uses that same video system? If you said the $20 DVD player they had on sale last friday, you're right. Essentially, you need an IC capable of decoding the stream, an antenna to get the signal in, and some RF equipment that can tune to that signal. In bulk, we're talking maybe $50, especially considering these won't be purchased for at least another 3 years. THe current cost of outboard ATSC tuners is mostly due to the fact that there's a very small market actually looking for them and the fact that they're typically designed to a little higher standards, given that they're usually interfacing to nicer HD equipment.
So the remaining 30% of people breaks down thusly: people who don't care enough about TV to invest in cable or satellite, and people who can't afford to invest in cable or satellite. The former group might have one or two TVs (they don't care enough, remember), so using my random $50 price point (which I think is reasonably believable), they can retrofit their existing equipment for $100, or simply put that $100 into buying a new TV. You can get a new TV for $100, and if they buy it at that time, it'll be DTV capable (see below). For the people who are too poor to afford cable or sat, well, they were obviously capable of scraping together enough to get a TV. Not to be heartless here, but TV is not a right, and if you could afford to get one you can probably afford to save up $50.
This all counts out the fact that one of the circuit courts of appeal upheld the ruling that all TVs larger than 13" are required to have a DTV tuner starting 2006 (I think it's '06).
So what we basically have is a lot of handwringing over a bunch of scaremongering by media outlets ("current DTV boxes cost hundreds of dollars", "of course they do, there's not a huge demand for them") and the lack of understanding of simple television systems by a lot of people. Folks, it's gonna be a cheap-ass box that hooks into your cable jack or A/V input and tunes to a channel. It's not rocket science. You can go back to watching your 15 year-old wood-panel TV now, and you can keep watching it for years to come.
The ESRB ratings system works exactly the way you describe.
In TV they have TV-Y7, TV-G (I think, something denoting that's it's fine for everyone), TV-14, and TV-MA, with modifiers displayed underneath the rating. Modifiers descibe Adult situations, Profane language, Nudity, and Violence.
Games have a rating EC (basically for games that only a young child would enjoy), E (for everyone), T for Teen, M for mature, and Ao for the rare porno game that bothers being submitted to the ESRB. Turn the package over, and there's a box on the back containing any of at least 12 descriptions I've encountered, which cover degrees of violence (cartoon-y, realistic, realistic w/ blood) profanity (mild for the occasionaly 'damn', etc.) and Nudity or sexual situations (Dead or ALive: Xtreme Beach volleyball doesn't have any nudity in the pure sense, but is basically right on the line).
If someone can't be bothered to turn the box over, well, I'm not exactly sure what else they want.
The Phantasy Star series (especially 2 and 4) has always been one of my favorites. They introduced some truly unique ideas for the console RPG genre. At a time when most console RPGs were simple fantasy-oriented fare on the NES (games like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, where characters were completely non-descript beings who simply occupied a space in your party), PS had characters with real personalities. This was heavily reinforced by the animated, 80's style portrait close-ups for important bits of dialogue and the occasional cut-scene that looked absolutely brilliant compared to anything else. The cool futuristic but still pseudo-fantasy setting helped immensely, as did the bright anime-style graphics.
The games also introduced (again, for the console world, don't go nitpicking some random Amiga RPG with this feature) Macro commands for the parties (introduced in part 2, I think), where you could select a single macro that would issue a given command to each party character. Especially cool was that particular spell, item, or ability combinations in those macros would combine to form more powerful spells and attacks. They mention generations, and for some reason that jumps into my head as the title for PS III, the weakest link in the series. It had some cool ideas (chief among them was the fact that characters would eventually marry, have children, and their kids would take up their place in the party), but it basically degenrated into a severely weak game with a bunch of generic fetch-quests. Although PSO is fun, it's a shame that the Phantasy Star series never got a proper revisiting in the true console RPG sense after the amazing PS IV. Please Sega, for the love of all that is holy, re-release PS IV.
Look at the labeling. Point of Manufacture on these things are Malaysia, Thailand, Hungary, etc. They're shipped 20 and 30 to a 3'x4' packing crate, against their will. Forced to endure this trip without food or water, these poor mass-storage devices are then forced to spin at 5400 and sometimes 7200 revolutions per minute, without breaks, in dusty and hot environments.
I'm glad someone in California has at least taken the initiative to keep them from being referred to as slaves. The next step is a move to an 8-hour workday (although I think IBM already recommends that on some of their Deskstar line), and two 15-minute breaks per work period (I can do without swap for a few minutes, I guess). Of course, I hope they realize the negative connotations of the term "Server"
Simple addition to the rescue!
4 hours per day per weekday = 20
14 waking hours per weekend day *2 = 28
48 hours per week.
which works out to just under 2500 hours per year, or something like $250 a year. Do keep in mind, of course, that although some projectors do have speakers on them, they're not intended to be used as such, and that you'd want to have some sort of stereo/surround audio system, so you wouldn't necessarily have to run the projector in order to hear your music DVDs.
While I don't have the X1 yet (still waiting for a few bonuses and such), I have put a good amount of research into it. The bulb is rated for 3,000 hours, and goes for $300. I estimated ~2 hours per day of viewing between myself and my SO, which puts me at just over 4 years between bulbs, a completely reasonable expense. Of course, your mileage may vary based on how much you watch, but do keep in mind that when the X1 first hit the streets, replacement bulbs were $500, so I don't see any reason why they wouldn't drop some in the next few years as well.
wow, a late response here.
I was referring to the live-action intro movie in the original PSX version (the big box edition, before PSX games shipped in jewel cases). They cast actors who looked vaguely like the game characters. It ended with this terrible, UPN action show style intro where the live actors were shown doing some sort of vaguely cop thing for three seconds(loading gun, adjusting armor, etc.) while the narrator called their name out one by one (Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine). All of this was shown over a flaming background. It truly was so terrible that it deserved to have been kept. Maybe it's in there as a bonus feature or something, but I never ran across it.
Regardless of intro movie format, the fact stands that the mansion was out in the forest.
Direct Translations of the plot don't always work as well as a slightly reworked version. Remember, there's only 1.5-2 hours to develop the story, not 10-15.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that the mansion was in the forest. If you watch the god-awful intro video on the original PSX copy of RE (The gamecube version removed it, as did one of the classics or director's cut editions), you'll see the Stars team helicoptering in and then running through the forest to the mansion as they try to escape the zombie dogs.
While I'll partially concede most of your points (we really can't calculate true efficency or inneficiency until we also start to factor in the cost of creating hydrogen distribution methods, as well), but I'd have to take issue with the last bit.
Of course you can use oil and coal and nuclear, etc. but currently, the US doesn't seem willing to do so. People in Houston, for example, have the wonderful privilege of paying for a $1.2 Billion nuclear power plant that was completed in the early 80's and (outside of tests) never actually turned on. Why? Because it's nuclear. One woman actually had a letter published (in the opinion section, at least) in the Houston Chronicle where she stated that she would turn off her electricity because she was afraid that her electricity would be RADIOACTIVE! One of the issues that forced California's recent shennanigans (other than Enron crap and other related issues) is the fact that they haven't built a true power plant there since (forgive me for not having the exact year) sometime in the late 70's. Thus, one more aspect of the aforementioned efficency is factoring in whether constructing legitimate production plants that won't use oil/gas power sources would even be allowed by a lot of the uneducated populace, and the cost inherent in doing so.
(no attack on the original poster, as he was dead on)
Hydrogen fuel cell discussions always chap my ass, because people miss the basic facts about the technology that will keep it from ever being more than an electric car-style gimmick.
Hydrogen in a fuel cell is not an energy source in the global sense; it's an energy holder. Ie. the hydrogen in there was not simply pulled from some place at a small expense and placed in the cell. Generating hydrogen from water requires large amounts of energy, which will likely come from the usual suspects. Of course, the other great source for hydrogen is simple hydrocarbons (namely natural gas), but of course, that puts as back at sqaure one: dependant on oil, just in a slightly different manner.
Now, the hydrogen production from water COULD be feasible, assuming we were willing to utilize different power sources than we are currently. Nuclear power, for example, is about the cleanest stuff out there, even factoring in the waste production. Solar power, assuming it was cost efficient (which it isn't currently, at least not in most places) might suffice as well.
Last year, Bush said something to the effect that, "By the end of the decade, we'll be using hydrogen fuel cells in automobiles". The quotation isn't exactly accurate, so forgive me on that one. Fun Fact: Nixon said the same thing, almost word for word when he was in office. Bottom line: I'm not some oil shill and I don't drive some as-guzzling monstrosity. I'm just sort of calling it like I personally see it. Oil is cheap, even factoring in all the associated costs, especially for things like cars, trucks, trains, etc.
the "1080i" resolution is 1920x1080. That would be a number well above what most gamers aim for (1024x768 seems to be the standard benchmark number). Incidentally, though, Xbox only outputs at 1080i in a couple of games; most others are 480p at best (a few don't even support progressive scan).
Folks who bought a PS2 at $499 must really feel screwed now. And they say Apple has large profit margins !
And rightly so, since the price (in US Dollars) at launch was $299.99. Unless they imported their unit prior to launch or we're talking AUS dollars or something, anyone who paid that much needs to put down the pipe.
I've found myself in a similar situation, and pondered the same questions. I looked at doing an HTPC for a long time, as I also really wanted to access all the MP3s in the home theater. Here's my setup:
ReplayTV + DVArchive. ReplayTVs have the ability to play shows recorded on other ReplayTVs, and DVArchive masquerades as a replayTV. Runs under Windows or Linux (and OS X, as well, I believe), and can be queued to automatically copy, transfer, or delete shows at scheduled times. Your replayTV will simply recognize the DVArchive machine as another replay named whatever you choose to name it (in my case, the brilliantly inventive "fileserver"), and you can play shows from it as you would in any other situation.
My current file server is a 2.0Ghz Celeron Dell that I got as a promo deal with a flat panel ($480 for the flat panel, $570 for flat panel, plus celeron machine, plus palm pilot). I put a Highpoint RocketRaid 404 in with a foursome of 80GB western digital drives ($50 a pop). Highpoint has win-Raid 5 drivers for the 404, and since I'm cheap as hell, I jumped on it. I'm currently looking at upgrading to Promise's SX6000, which is a 6-channel IDE hardware RAID5 controller with expandable RAM. Acquire hard drives bit by bit via rebates (buying retail drives with rebates is soooo much cheaper than parting it out all together. If time dictates otherwise, though, do it.) Best Buy has 200GB drives for $200 after rebate this week, and not a week goes by that I don't see 120GBs going for $60-70 after rebate from some manufacturer. I've actually had reasnably good luck with getting them back. Assuming RAID-5 for capacity and redundancy, it'd be $1200 for 1TB post-parity, plus ~$250 for the controller card. As far as I know, Promise's software package does support multiple cards in the machine, so just continue to add. If you're feeling lucky, I suppose you could go for a software RAID 0 and a crapload of IDE controller cards, but that's just tempting fate for little monetary gain.
BroadQ's Qcast is a software package for PS2s which streams media files to the PS2 over a network from a machine running the server software. It supports Windows, Linux, and OS X. It currently supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, various MPEG-4 flavors, MP3 audio, JPEG, and PNG images. I use this for MP3 playback primarily. Major bonuses include the fact that remotes are cheap for the PS2, the PS2 has optical digital output for cleaner audio, and it supports component video quite easily. Picture quality, particularly on well-encoded DiVX animes is quite amazing.
My advice would be thusly: I've found DVarchive to be awesome, and I absolutely love the simple integration and the one-box-does-all aspect. But you're running a TiVO.
I had fiddled around a bit with the idea of copying recorded shows, piping them to an MPEG-4 encoder, and then playing them back with Qcast on a PS2. Assuming you already have a PS2, the Network adapter is $40, and Qcast is $50, so that's not a terribly big outlay. Assuming your fileserver isn't going to be doing anything more strenuous than hosting your media stuff, you might just splurge and go for a reasonably speedy athlon setup and have it do encoding in the offtime for storage purposes (hourlong shows at medium quality can take about 1.5GB vs. the 500 megs or so that I'd probably aim for in DiVX...) it's worth it to me to have it easily viewable and useable from my replay, but your mileage may vary.
Don't tell that to the GF2 GTS that's been doing active duty in my girlfriend's NForce2 mobo with 8X AGP. The only thing I've seen weird discrepencies with is way old AGP 1x/2X cards (kinda hard to find nowadays, unless you're going used) and the 5volt PCI spec. Of course, I just replaced it with a Radeon 9500 so we're running on true 8X, but I don't think there's any issue there.
I've had my 5040 for about 6 months now. I positively love the thing, and we purchased over TiVO because of Network compatability (at the time, without purchasing add-on parts).
It seems that my commercial skip function has become less and less effective over time. Replay's fine print says that it's 90% effective, and I presume it's looking for a particular time sequence in blank space or something to that effect. I'm not sure if the networks have caught on to what the Replay is doing, but it seems that lately my commercial skipping is about 30% effective. Certain shows will always be able to skip commercials, while others (those that air on Cartoon Network, for example), are almost guaranteed to be unskippable. It doesn't bother me; a few clicks of the 30-second skip button work just as well, and I occasionally catch glimpses of commercials I want to see (and go back to them).
Also, check out DVArchive on sourceforge. Great multi-platform program that masquerades as another ReplayTV on the network. Grab one of those $300 w/ service included 5040s from Sonicblue, throw some extra drives (I've seen stuff going for $0.75/GB or lower) in a computer, and go to town with your several hundred hour Replay without even voiding a warranty.
Way back in the day (well, okay, more like 15 years ago), they had what could basically be described as "Choose Your Own Adventure" Laserdiscs. You had to have a CLV player (the one that could actually randomly skip tracks), and it helped a lot to have one of the educational-targeted barcode reader add-ons, but they played nearly the same way.
I remember one "movie" about some kids finding a skeleton in the woods. It was the same idea, and would work wonderfully in today's market. Of course, the Dragon's Lair DVDs work the same way (controlled with the DVD remote, and just queue to a different chapter, much as the old arcade LD unit did).
Not that anyone will even read this, but good call.
I see so many people spend beacoup money on their internals and then say, "oh, yeah, and this 420Watt PS I got for $35. What a steal!"
A good power supply is not cheap. On the flip side, though, a good power supply is not cheap. And a bad power supply is the most annoying thing to troubleshoot.
Antec makes some good stuff that I've been very happy with, ditto for PC Power and Cooling. Expensive, but so worth it it isn't funny.
The only good games for the XBox are out for the other systems, except for Halo which i was not impressed with
I own all three of the current-gen systems, and every one of the XBox games I own are "XBox-exclusive". Halo is a great game, but you might also check out Buffy (basically a 3D Double Dragon with a decent storyline), Panzer Dragoon, Jet Grind Radio, Mech Assault, and Dead or Alive 3 (if fighting games are your thing).
Dead or Alive 3 was the only game I was interested in at launch (I was a fan of the prior games), and I put off buying the XBox until early last summer. Although I'd still recommend a GC or PS2 to someone who only wants one console (A PS2 would be my first inclination), the Xbox is a really solid game machine.
I remember the heyday of cartoons, when everything was a clearly delineated, toy tie-in. Well, okay, other than Looney Tunes, which was simply fantastic.
Cartoons were clearly tied to gender. There were boy cartoons (GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., that one with the light gun plane where you shot at the screen, and so forth), and girl cartoons (Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, etc.). These were genuine, good quality shows that were obvious toy tie-ins, but kids loved them. See, toys provide something tangible, and the easiest way to generate toys is to not have character development. If I want to add a character to Spongebob, I have to have a meaningful purpose for that character, because said cartoon is primarily narrative and dialogue-driven. Transformers is also arguably narrative-driven, although the narrative consists primarily of Autobots vs. decepticons, so adding a flying plane or a dinosaur is trivial.
It seems a bit rambling, but I'm bringing it together here. I can remember watching kids play Power Rangers at the park. Power Rangers is easy to play. You choose your ranger, you go off and battle "evil". How the hell do a bunch of kids play Spongebob? What, you pretend to be some crab and exchange half-wit banter while simultaneously apppealing to an older demographic?
Basically, it's a lack of conflict. Every solid cartoon show revolved around the simplest of ideas, good vs. evil. It might've been that the evil was Decepticons, or the wicked Voltron queen, or Cobra, or that Rainbrow Brite villain who was only drawn in shades of gray. A dialogue-driven children's show is going to have to be pretty damned well-written to appeal to kids, and hiring good writers costs good money. Cartoons exist primarily because they're cheap to produce, so any gain from choosing the medium is eliminated when you have to gety talented writers on board. Maybe it's a reflection of our values as a society (or more particularyl, young parents' values) , or maybe it's Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, as other posts have mentioned, but something's just missing there.
Alternately, it could simply be that the plethora of cable networks broadcasting cartoons has taken the profitability away from the format.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this. I picked one up after it was mentioned in /. a while ago, and I couldn't be happier. The client runs on a PS2, which means you can use the PS2 to feed Optical Digital out and Component Video Out to any television. The server supports multiple connections, and a PS2 plus the little remote piece won't run you more then $230 or so. $50 for the QCast software. Plus, if you want another client box you just buy another PS2, and the kids'll probably thank you for that (assuming they exist).
For those who didn't catch the little article, QCast supports MP3, OGG Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and the various flavors of DiVX (3.11, 4, and 5), as well a JPEG and PNG photos for slideshow playback.
I had been looking into building an HT Computer (I really just wanted streaming playback of the above list, not something for on-the-fly HD scaling or anything like that). For something that wasn't going to overpower my audio with fan noise, would playback any of those formats without any assistance (sorry Via Epia), and would fit in a case exactly 17" wide so that width would match the rest of the equipment, I was looking at something significantly more expensive than $230. It connects to a file server with a 4x80GB drive setup (drives ran me a sweet $50 each).
I use a ReplayTV for PVR functionality. It connects via ethernet, and there are third party programs available that allow you to connect and "download" one of the shows from it (although it only use 10BaseT). It would be somewhat trivial to have a cron job set to run the program, pipe the file to a DiVX encoder of your choice, and save it on a centralized box.
Oh, yeah, use CAT5. RG6 for the actual video source, but if you're trying to move PVR-ed video around, CAT5. I'd make sure to run all CAT5e or CAT6 so that I could make the jump to gigabit ethernet when the switches stop costing more than some of my computers.
A year and a half ago, I would've agreed with you. A year ago, I would've agreed with you. Around the release of the the socket 478 P4s with 512K L2 cache, I stopped believing.
I went to build a machine about 4 years ago. Top of the line P3 was $600 or so, so I picked up my 450mhz K6-2 for a little under $100. It wasn't faster by any stetch of the imagination, but it played games just fine coupled with the video card I could afford because of the savings. It wasn't beating Intel by any stretch, but it was cheap and reliable (that machine now resides with my parents, doing everything they want just fine).
I bought a 1ghz Athlon for about $200 or so. The 1ghz P3s cost more than twice as much, and were outperformed in nearly every respect. Those were AMDs glory days (starting there and progressing through to the Northwood P4s). AMD outperformed whatever Intel threw at them for about half as much. It was a no-brainer. The deficit increased even more wih the P4, which was only close when paired with RDRAM. There was an ever-so-brief period a little over a year ago where a lot of retail PC companies (the Compaqs and HPs of the world) were actually shipping their higher-end units with Athlons. I considered that great, because so few Joe Six-Packs knew the AMD name, and seeing that "trusted" companies (and not just screwdriver shops) used them went a good way in spreading the word about AMD
And then Intel got serious. They slashed the prices of their chips and released their 512KB L2 cache processors. I bought a 2.4Ghz P4 a couple of weeks ago for $160. The Athlon 2400+ was $130. These are two processors that would literally be neck-and-neck in almost any situation. If the Intel processor was $250, we'd definitely be talking AMD time, but it wasn't. It was $30 more, a number that could easily be made up for in any number of other areas. Plus, it was nice to forget about VIAs 4-in-1 crap (although the NForce stuff looks pretty nice). Now, I built a 2000+ for my brother about a month ago, and for stuff in that range ($80 for the proc, $70 for the NForce1 Board), AMD still rules, but I honestly hope the hammer seriously kicks ass if AMD wants to stay in this business.
Dammit! Cheap wall hacks ruin the war for the rest of us!
To me, it all has to do with what the product cost vs. what they charge. Example: I bought a home theater receiver that was literally hot off the presses (it had been released less than a month before I bought it) with a retail price tag of $500. The receiver came with a 24 month warranty from the factory, and let's be honest, most solid state stuff is going to fail immediately or never. The 3-year warranty (which essentially extended the coverage from 2 to 3 years, and threw in the standard "power surge, wear, etc." additional coverage) was $40. I bought it. Why?
I'm a college student. I'm by no means poor (the ol' home (apartment) theater recently surpassed $5,000 in equipment, and is due for a few more add-ons soon), but I'm also not overflowing with money. And it tends to come in spurts. I work in addition to school to pay rent and bills and such, but over summer, spring break, and around christmas I tend to generate a little extra money because of more hours availabale to work or gifts and such. So for me, an extra $40 to hedge my bets on not having $500 available at a moment's notice to replace the receiver is worth it, especially when I consider that that $40 is just going to get spent on beer, or some videogame I forget after 2 weeks.
One other thing to always consider on these deals: shipping and repairs. Most manufacturers will make you pay to ship the product in for repairs. Now, you can get around that if you argue with them and so forth, but it's not the standard policy. Consider the cost to ship and insure a 30 pound receiver to California (and youd better damned well insure that pckage) vs. being able to drive to the local store, and you're starting to see a bit of the worth in it.
On the flip side, I didnt buy it on the last television I bought (32" Tube). It was over $160 for the warranty coverage, and tube TVs seem to me like solid state electronics: die immediately or never. If that warranty cost was, say, $80, then we're talking, but $160 doesn't make it worthwhile to me. Of course, I also never buy them on game consoles, and I'm on my second PS2 and my third PS1.
Michael Chabon (Author) is writing the script for Spiderman 2. He is also adapting Kavalier and Clay for the screen.
Oh, and this book deserves any amount of praise heaped on it. The writing is amazing, and characters are dynamic and fully-developed. Literally, my only regret about this book (well, okay, you have to push yourself through the VERY beginning) is that it wasn't longer.
SCSI isn't that expensive, especially if you're willing to analyze what you're actually going to use, and not just RAID 0-ing two 80GB drives like a lot of people I know.
I picked up two Western Digital 9.1GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives for $35 each, shipped. If you don't have a controller, U-160 Cards can be had for about $70. I stick my OS on one drive, swap and applications on the second, and have a 45GB IDM Deskstar (75GXP and still running after 2 years, I like living on the edge) handling mass-storage tasks.
According to WD's site, these drives have transfer rates comparable to the 8MB Cache IDE drives, but seek times in the 5 ms range (vs. around 8.5). Oh, and they're not particularly loud either, at least not anything I've noticed.
At $160, this drive doesn't seem like a good idea. I've seen numerous 10K ~36GB SCSI drives for about $30 more. I guess you can factor in the card cost if you honestly want to, but if you're talking about RAIDing these things, you're probably talking about buying a good SATA or IDE RAID card anyway.
If you have plans to archive every friggin' CD you own in FLAC format, then SCSI isn't a cost-effective method to go. I don't. YMMV, but I've found that I can beat the hell out of the computer and I don't see the nasty drive access issues that I used to. For a site where a lot of people piss and moan about not needing this many mhz or that DX9-capable card, I'd say the logic of smaller faster drives when you probably aren't gonna fill the giant ones is pretty evident.