It's probably the SCART connector between the player and the TV that's showing the good picture quality for PAL vs NTSC. SCART (Eurotel) carries RGB signals, which are far better than composite (although SCART also carries composite in case the TV is cheap and only has 1 RGB compatible SCART input). SCART's been standard in the UK for around 20 years too, so everything has it (apart from the PS2, if the PS3's the same then it can sod off back to Japan).
PAL (Picture Always Lousy) was only lousy with analogue terrestrial broadcasts. We've had satellite TV here in a big way since 1989, and digital satellite since 1998 (MPEG2, standard definition). We've simply had better source quality all the way to the TV than NTSC. And that has meant that HDTV uptake over here will not be because of a burning need to improve picture quality, it'll be merely because at some point you won't be able to buy a standard definition set.
I'm off to pay £2.50 for a pint here in Cambridge, and that's cheap for here. The pub across the road from work is £2.70 to £3.00 a pint (Adnams, Waggledance). Sadly the £2.50 ale is Greene King Triumph, but it's drinkable and I'd rather sit with friends than on my own.
Feel lucky you have it so cheap up there in the grim dark cold north:p
about 5 years ago the dollar-pound rate was around 1.4 dollars for a quid.
So £400 would have been $600.
Now it's around 1.9 dollars. £400 would be $760.
Of course, the PS2 launched at $299, I think it launched at £279 over here ($530 with today's exchange rate). That means that in the UK at least, people were willing to pay around $500 for a console (taxes included). If the $499/$599 prices were converted to pounds sterling fairly, they would cost around £329/£389 over here, including tax. The fact that they want to sell the machine for much more than that shows they're being greedy and yet again treating the UK as Treasure Island.
However, from that you can see that if people were willing to pay £279 5 years ago for a PS2, then they'd pay £329 today for the low-end version, it's a 'mere' £50 more. However I don't see them paying £100 more.
Wii's gonna be good and fun, and I've got a way way lower UID than you so on your UID is inversely proportional to post accuracy metric I will sway the tables back towards the Wii from the hulking PS3.
The MacBook Pros also have glossy screens as an option in addition to the speed grade increase.
That'll kill off the last 'Apple laptop displays aren't glossy and unusable in sunlight' whingers!:p
$1100 for a dual-core 1.83GHz widescreen laptop with 6 hours of battery life - that's really not a bad deal as well, especially if you value your time when dealing with Windows. It'll suck for games though.
Also Apple hasn't crippled the video out this time - it supports display spanning, whereas you had to hack the iBook to get more than mere mirroring on the output. Also it has GigE by default, I think the iBook only have 100Mbps.
Given ever increasing taxation and general cost of living, there's only so much money to go into the 'home entertainment' pot each month.
That pot is shared between DVDs, CDs, games and books.
There's only so much money, so I'll buy the best of each category and leave the 'good, but not great' until it is on sale, or just download it if I have the time to watch it.
So they wouldn't get any extra money in total if I didn't pirate it (how long until they count going around to a friend's house and watching a film with them as piracy?), and any loss isn't at full retail price, but at bargain sale price.
On the other hand I have bought CDs based upon downloading the music and liking the band. That music sale could have been a DVD sale, game sale or wine sale, the total money spent isn't increasing because I don't have that extra money to spend, but at least I could spend it better.
Fair point, you can't go chasing every atlantis/lost city/spaceport discovery, and this guy is wacko without the jacko.
I guess that people will wait on more results from the area before deciding it is worth investigating. The PDF of various analyses of topography and infra-red does seem quite interesting though.
If it turns out to be a pyramid, then it'd be something interesting at last, even if it was only a shaped natural hill with stone facing.
The problem is you'll never find a legitimate archaeologist to back it up because the established archaeoligical community has got together and denounced the entire project simply because of the person leading it.
Maybe if one of them was to send someone out there to 'help', i.e., disprove it at the earliest opportunity, then things would be resolved much quicker, and that person could also ensure that the dig is done under decent archaeological methods and ensure that no harm is done to other remains in the area.
As it is, this guy could simply smooth the hillside until it looks like a pyramid if he has to, and the entire thing will be covered in controversy for years to come.
The establishment could do more to actively talk against the actual discovery, rather than the guy, it just reeks of sour grapes.
If it doesn't turn out to be a pyramid, then maybe at least the guy has found something worthwhile, the tunnels at least deserve more investigation. But no, the academics will sit there laughing at the nutjob until he makes them look like fools.
They're always 'nutjobs' until they turn out to be correct.
Like that nutjob who said the Earth wasn't flat, and that it went around the Sun! Nutter! Or that loony who said that continents move over time, hell, we know the Earth is only 6000 years old, sheesh! Madman!
(Yes, most nutjobs are nutjobs, only a small number of them aren't).
Of course, sometimes it takes a loon to discover something like this. We won't find out for a while if he is right, but if the initial findings are correct and this turns out to be a pyramid, then human history will have been turned on its head. On the other hand the tunnels could be merely medieval remants from the city there, and so on, and this guy will have done a great job of funding his lifestyle for 5 years.
If multiple entries prove to be good, especially for different targets (e.g., Light HTML, Mobile Presentation, etc) then it should be trivial to implement having multiple stylesheets the user can select, either via the browser's stylesheet selector, or in the user preferences.
Woodcrest (Conroe based server part) will have the same bandwidth restrictions that hurt Xeon in the above test. Expect to see the usual suspects test four socket Woodcrest with cache intensive benchmarks.
However they're not a large part of the market really.
Um, you can't play guitar hero with a gamepad, and DDR via a gamepad defies the point of the game. Gamepads are well know to suck at certain genres - first person shoot-em-ups for example, and any idea that is generic enough to be used in multiple genres of games, yet improves the gameplay and fun for the player is to be welcomed.
A new controller mechanism will create new ways to interact with games, and create new gameplay concepts that wouldn't have worked with a gamepad.
The DS's touchscreen has created new gameplay, both in the available games, the interfaces and the interaction. I see this controller doing the same for the Revolution.
Guitar Hero via Gamepad... DDR via Gamepad... that fishing game with a rod, via Gamepad.
Simply put, different input mechanisms allow for a better gaming experience.
What this guy should be doing is working out how to use this control system in a future game to best effect.
Not all games can benefit from it I'm sure. The question should be whether enough games will to make it worthwhile for Nintendo to make it a base component of the system, unlike the examples above. Gameplay examples have been thought of before in previous articles for multiple game genres*, so in this case I think it is worthwhile.
* aiming in a FPS * more natural fighting in a fighting game * aiming missile weapons in an RPG, sword/ace weapon wielding * steering a vehicle * looking around in walk-around-a-lots
My phone is the device I'll have on me all the time, so it is important that I can get the calendar onto the phone (Symbian based).
Typically this means I enter the details onto the phone, because it's nigh on impossible to sync this phone with my Mac, where I would use iCal (the application, not the protocol) to manage things. Maybe if there was a way to sync the phone over a web connection with any of the online calendaring services...
Generally though I try and remember the important stuff myself.
Of the web services I've used, none are that good. Google Calendar is very beta. Yahoo!'s is rather basic although I haven't used it recently. None of them really integrate with the other services offered either. It'll probably be a couple of years before any of the companies turns their email + calendar + groups offerings into an integrated web interface.
No more f-cking around with the monstrosity that is the Itunes database. For those who prefer a filesystem approach, this is a godsend, and for those who like a tagged DB, Rockbox has just added support for a pretty nice platform-independent db of its own that can be generated on teh fly by the player!
wtf? do some people just go out to make things difficult for themselves?
In all my time as an iPod owner I've never had to deal with the iTunes database.
For every minute I haven't had to 'f-ck around' with renaming files, sorting out the filesystem for my media, etc, I've done something far more enjoyable, worthwhile or profitable. I used to spend a lot of time dealing with my Foobar2000 + file system setup, and I'll never get that time back. iTunes is actually a pretty good application out of the box, and when it comes to listening to music, I'm far more into 'appliance mode software' that 'build it from scratch' software.
And then you say that (clearly due to demand), the software has added in a system that does all this. However someone else said the UI of Rockbox sucked. I appreciate all the technical effort and knowhow and skill that has been put into writing this software, but clearly it is not being written against what users want to do on their system.
So tell me again, as someone who has his CD collection ripped in AAC, an open format that actually isn't half bad, why I, and the vast majority of iPod owners, would want to downgrade their iPod experience?
Let's take the E599 price. That presumably includes tax. let's assume that is in a country with really high tax rates - sweden's is 25% (!), whereas the UK has a 17.5% rate of VAT - I'm assuming that's why the guy gave a price range.
Taking off VAT we have E480.
Converting to US dollars via XE we get $589. Round that up to $599.
Sorry. The PS3 is dead. I'm not an early adopter of new media playing technology, I couldn't be interested in the capability to play BluRay movies this year, nor next year, nor until I have a HDTV (around 2010 at this rate). $599 is a *lot* of money. $399 is a lot of money for a console, but people can accept that at the beginning of a console lifecycle, $499 would make 80% of buyers stop, $599 - sod that for a games machine.
Sony is not going to sell 6 million of these things this year. They're not going to sell 6 million by the end of next year. The market is XBox360s and Revolutions. Future price drops will be chasing XBox360 price drops.
Or maybe I have underestimated the amount that people will pay for a games console with the Playstation brand name. Maybe it is perfectly aimed at the target market - young single men with lots of gadgets and disposable income, and whiny kids with rich parents who've already got a HDTV because their insufferable little shite of a kid has already made them get one. I guess consumer debt will rise this Christmas significantly.
I've seen ATMs offer mobile phone top ups for quite a while, which is probably useful if you have a pre-pay mobile.
Anything else takes too long - when there's a queue you aren't going to live long if you start using slow specialist services.
I also happen to think that charging people to get access to their own money is a bit rich, but luckily I'm in the UK so all the standard bank and building society cash machines are free regardless of who you bank with. Going abroad is always a shock though, because we're used to withdrawing smaller amounts of money more frequently than large amounts of money infrequently.
How interested in pr0n, sex, raping, are you after you've just had a good five knuckle shuffle? Or are you wondering how to clean the keyboard/monitor/chair/pet that was sitting next to you at the time?
If you had no porn, then the majority would make do with something, but some people will go out and fulfil their need with some form of sexual activity that will hurt someone.
Is that number more than the number of people that would go and do such a crime because they had seen porn? Maybe violent porn is a problem here, but traditional porn is generally quite clear that the woman is doing it out of her own free will (yay money!) and that's probably a good thing to get into these people's heads.
Install a bittorrent application and add that site, a seaside area full of hearty pirates, Arrrr!, to their bookmarks.
It might reduce your ongoing workload... it isn't your job to stop them doing it:D Indeed many students need the stress relief!:p
OTOH you might end up without a job!
Identify your wants and needs
on
Tech on the Cheap?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And prioritise the spending on the needs, and only pick up the wants when they're a good deal.
And paying of your credit card bill is a great need than any of your wants.
For many things waiting just a few months can make something you want more affordable. This especially applies to computer hardware, but also applies to DVDs, CDs, as well. Patience has its rewards.
Don't underestimate missing out on your typical upgrade cycle and just sticking with what you have. Oh, and know your product release cycles by reading the geeky websites every so often.
OTOH don't become a miser! Don't buy cheap stuff just because it is cheap. Get good quality stuff even though it costs more, because it will last longer (in most cases).
The article seems to imply that all that is different between the Gamecube and the Revolution are the clock speeds of the processor and GPU, and the amount of memory, both being 50% faster.
So in 5 years, and probably two process shrinks, these components can only be clocked 50% higher (within the cooling requirements of the revolution of course, which is quite thin)? Both processors are 1/4 of the size (assuming 90nm for Revolution and 180nm for the original Gamecube), so they must be pretty damn cheap if they're the same design.
No word on whether or not the graphics chip is wider (more pipelines), something that matters a lot in the graphics world as the task is very parallel. No word on if there processor has more cache, or two cores - stuff that could easily be done and still have a cheaper processor than the original Gamecube's.
I'm going to get a Revolution, simply because it is more affordable than the other options - I don't game that much, nor do I have a HDTV. OTOH if it's not that much faster than a Gamecube then maybe I should just keep on playing that, there's enough good games to last me a few years.
However whilst gameplay is the most important thing in a game (and the Revolution will have a lot of good points here), the impact of graphical splendour shouldn't be ignored. Shaders make a vast difference to a game - realistic water, accurately reflective metals, it adds atmosphere. If the Revolution is not going to have this relatively old technology inside, then we're basically talking about Gamecube graphics with more polygons.
I just worry about 3 years time. By then the 360 and the PS3 will be $200 or less, and they'll be a no-brainer purchase. A $99 Revolution may be a nice bedroom console still. Maybe Nintendo are putting off the really big update for a few years, so they have the first major update next time around. I've always thought that Sony should have clocked the slimline PS2 faster than the original, and allowed games to have a standard version for the original PS2, and a faster, smoother, higher-resolution version for the slimline. Not that Sony ever hurt for income from the PS2:p
I wish you could sue someone for being a complete and utter titarse. I would have let him call the FBI, then there would have been enough damage done to make suing a viable option.
I imagine an invoice, properly worded, would get processed automatically by the local government however. Include the transcripts, and charge $100 per email.
Slashdot Mirror
The beer I mentioned went up to £2.60 a pint in the past week sometime.
The spirits are looking more tempting every day. The alcoholics in the government will never raise duty on spirits, only on wine and beer.
Yes, I was avoiding Wetherspoons, although their pints are £1.90 each (last time I went) here.
Majestic is a good place to get decent beer for a good price.
Note that european prices include VAT.
UK VAT is 17.5%.
EU prices vary between 17% and 25% IIRC.
Sadly everyone picks a safe conversion rate, so instead of the current $1.87 == £1, they'll pick $1.70 to absorb any variancy in their favour.
It's probably the SCART connector between the player and the TV that's showing the good picture quality for PAL vs NTSC. SCART (Eurotel) carries RGB signals, which are far better than composite (although SCART also carries composite in case the TV is cheap and only has 1 RGB compatible SCART input). SCART's been standard in the UK for around 20 years too, so everything has it (apart from the PS2, if the PS3's the same then it can sod off back to Japan).
PAL (Picture Always Lousy) was only lousy with analogue terrestrial broadcasts. We've had satellite TV here in a big way since 1989, and digital satellite since 1998 (MPEG2, standard definition). We've simply had better source quality all the way to the TV than NTSC. And that has meant that HDTV uptake over here will not be because of a burning need to improve picture quality, it'll be merely because at some point you won't be able to buy a standard definition set.
I'm off to pay £2.50 for a pint here in Cambridge, and that's cheap for here. The pub across the road from work is £2.70 to £3.00 a pint (Adnams, Waggledance). Sadly the £2.50 ale is Greene King Triumph, but it's drinkable and I'd rather sit with friends than on my own.
:p
Feel lucky you have it so cheap up there in the grim dark cold north
about 5 years ago the dollar-pound rate was around 1.4 dollars for a quid.
So £400 would have been $600.
Now it's around 1.9 dollars. £400 would be $760.
Of course, the PS2 launched at $299, I think it launched at £279 over here ($530 with today's exchange rate). That means that in the UK at least, people were willing to pay around $500 for a console (taxes included). If the $499/$599 prices were converted to pounds sterling fairly, they would cost around £329/£389 over here, including tax. The fact that they want to sell the machine for much more than that shows they're being greedy and yet again treating the UK as Treasure Island.
However, from that you can see that if people were willing to pay £279 5 years ago for a PS2, then they'd pay £329 today for the low-end version, it's a 'mere' £50 more. However I don't see them paying £100 more.
Wii's gonna be good and fun, and I've got a way way lower UID than you so on your UID is inversely proportional to post accuracy metric I will sway the tables back towards the Wii from the hulking PS3.
The real question is why I still read Slashdot.
The MacBook Pros also have glossy screens as an option in addition to the speed grade increase.
:p
That'll kill off the last 'Apple laptop displays aren't glossy and unusable in sunlight' whingers!
$1100 for a dual-core 1.83GHz widescreen laptop with 6 hours of battery life - that's really not a bad deal as well, especially if you value your time when dealing with Windows. It'll suck for games though.
Also Apple hasn't crippled the video out this time - it supports display spanning, whereas you had to hack the iBook to get more than mere mirroring on the output. Also it has GigE by default, I think the iBook only have 100Mbps.
Given ever increasing taxation and general cost of living, there's only so much money to go into the 'home entertainment' pot each month.
That pot is shared between DVDs, CDs, games and books.
There's only so much money, so I'll buy the best of each category and leave the 'good, but not great' until it is on sale, or just download it if I have the time to watch it.
So they wouldn't get any extra money in total if I didn't pirate it (how long until they count going around to a friend's house and watching a film with them as piracy?), and any loss isn't at full retail price, but at bargain sale price.
On the other hand I have bought CDs based upon downloading the music and liking the band. That music sale could have been a DVD sale, game sale or wine sale, the total money spent isn't increasing because I don't have that extra money to spend, but at least I could spend it better.
Fair point, you can't go chasing every atlantis/lost city/spaceport discovery, and this guy is wacko without the jacko.
I guess that people will wait on more results from the area before deciding it is worth investigating. The PDF of various analyses of topography and infra-red does seem quite interesting though.
If it turns out to be a pyramid, then it'd be something interesting at last, even if it was only a shaped natural hill with stone facing.
The problem is you'll never find a legitimate archaeologist to back it up because the established archaeoligical community has got together and denounced the entire project simply because of the person leading it.
Maybe if one of them was to send someone out there to 'help', i.e., disprove it at the earliest opportunity, then things would be resolved much quicker, and that person could also ensure that the dig is done under decent archaeological methods and ensure that no harm is done to other remains in the area.
As it is, this guy could simply smooth the hillside until it looks like a pyramid if he has to, and the entire thing will be covered in controversy for years to come.
The establishment could do more to actively talk against the actual discovery, rather than the guy, it just reeks of sour grapes.
If it doesn't turn out to be a pyramid, then maybe at least the guy has found something worthwhile, the tunnels at least deserve more investigation. But no, the academics will sit there laughing at the nutjob until he makes them look like fools.
They're always 'nutjobs' until they turn out to be correct.
Like that nutjob who said the Earth wasn't flat, and that it went around the Sun! Nutter! Or that loony who said that continents move over time, hell, we know the Earth is only 6000 years old, sheesh! Madman!
(Yes, most nutjobs are nutjobs, only a small number of them aren't).
Of course, sometimes it takes a loon to discover something like this. We won't find out for a while if he is right, but if the initial findings are correct and this turns out to be a pyramid, then human history will have been turned on its head. On the other hand the tunnels could be merely medieval remants from the city there, and so on, and this guy will have done a great job of funding his lifestyle for 5 years.
If multiple entries prove to be good, especially for different targets (e.g., Light HTML, Mobile Presentation, etc) then it should be trivial to implement having multiple stylesheets the user can select, either via the browser's stylesheet selector, or in the user preferences.
However I quite liked the OMG Ponies design...
Just a FYI as you might be interested, Anandtech today did another Opteron vs. Xeon test, this time with 8 cores per machine, 4 sockets.
The 2.6GHz Opterons stomped on the 3.0GHz Xeon MPs by around 30-40%.
Article
Woodcrest (Conroe based server part) will have the same bandwidth restrictions that hurt Xeon in the above test. Expect to see the usual suspects test four socket Woodcrest with cache intensive benchmarks.
However they're not a large part of the market really.
Um, you can't play guitar hero with a gamepad, and DDR via a gamepad defies the point of the game. Gamepads are well know to suck at certain genres - first person shoot-em-ups for example, and any idea that is generic enough to be used in multiple genres of games, yet improves the gameplay and fun for the player is to be welcomed.
A new controller mechanism will create new ways to interact with games, and create new gameplay concepts that wouldn't have worked with a gamepad.
The DS's touchscreen has created new gameplay, both in the available games, the interfaces and the interaction. I see this controller doing the same for the Revolution.
Guitar Hero via Gamepad ... DDR via Gamepad ... that fishing game with a rod, via Gamepad.
Simply put, different input mechanisms allow for a better gaming experience.
What this guy should be doing is working out how to use this control system in a future game to best effect.
Not all games can benefit from it I'm sure. The question should be whether enough games will to make it worthwhile for Nintendo to make it a base component of the system, unlike the examples above. Gameplay examples have been thought of before in previous articles for multiple game genres*, so in this case I think it is worthwhile.
* aiming in a FPS
* more natural fighting in a fighting game
* aiming missile weapons in an RPG, sword/ace weapon wielding
* steering a vehicle
* looking around in walk-around-a-lots
My phone is the device I'll have on me all the time, so it is important that I can get the calendar onto the phone (Symbian based).
...
Typically this means I enter the details onto the phone, because it's nigh on impossible to sync this phone with my Mac, where I would use iCal (the application, not the protocol) to manage things. Maybe if there was a way to sync the phone over a web connection with any of the online calendaring services
Generally though I try and remember the important stuff myself.
Of the web services I've used, none are that good. Google Calendar is very beta. Yahoo!'s is rather basic although I haven't used it recently. None of them really integrate with the other services offered either. It'll probably be a couple of years before any of the companies turns their email + calendar + groups offerings into an integrated web interface.
No more f-cking around with the monstrosity that is the Itunes database. For those who prefer a filesystem approach, this is a godsend, and for those who like a tagged DB, Rockbox has just added support for a pretty nice platform-independent db of its own that can be generated on teh fly by the player!
wtf? do some people just go out to make things difficult for themselves?
In all my time as an iPod owner I've never had to deal with the iTunes database.
For every minute I haven't had to 'f-ck around' with renaming files, sorting out the filesystem for my media, etc, I've done something far more enjoyable, worthwhile or profitable. I used to spend a lot of time dealing with my Foobar2000 + file system setup, and I'll never get that time back. iTunes is actually a pretty good application out of the box, and when it comes to listening to music, I'm far more into 'appliance mode software' that 'build it from scratch' software.
And then you say that (clearly due to demand), the software has added in a system that does all this. However someone else said the UI of Rockbox sucked. I appreciate all the technical effort and knowhow and skill that has been put into writing this software, but clearly it is not being written against what users want to do on their system.
So tell me again, as someone who has his CD collection ripped in AAC, an open format that actually isn't half bad, why I, and the vast majority of iPod owners, would want to downgrade their iPod experience?
I find it unlikely that hardcore gamers would switch.
Maybe casual gamers, like me, would switch. An X1600 like in the iMac would suffice.
But the lack of options for faster graphics cards on the consumer machines will limit the total number of gamers choosing Macs.
To confirm the $599 price:
Let's take the E599 price. That presumably includes tax. let's assume that is in a country with really high tax rates - sweden's is 25% (!), whereas the UK has a 17.5% rate of VAT - I'm assuming that's why the guy gave a price range.
Taking off VAT we have E480.
Converting to US dollars via XE we get $589. Round that up to $599.
Sorry. The PS3 is dead. I'm not an early adopter of new media playing technology, I couldn't be interested in the capability to play BluRay movies this year, nor next year, nor until I have a HDTV (around 2010 at this rate). $599 is a *lot* of money. $399 is a lot of money for a console, but people can accept that at the beginning of a console lifecycle, $499 would make 80% of buyers stop, $599 - sod that for a games machine.
Sony is not going to sell 6 million of these things this year. They're not going to sell 6 million by the end of next year. The market is XBox360s and Revolutions. Future price drops will be chasing XBox360 price drops.
Or maybe I have underestimated the amount that people will pay for a games console with the Playstation brand name. Maybe it is perfectly aimed at the target market - young single men with lots of gadgets and disposable income, and whiny kids with rich parents who've already got a HDTV because their insufferable little shite of a kid has already made them get one. I guess consumer debt will rise this Christmas significantly.
I've seen ATMs offer mobile phone top ups for quite a while, which is probably useful if you have a pre-pay mobile.
Anything else takes too long - when there's a queue you aren't going to live long if you start using slow specialist services.
I also happen to think that charging people to get access to their own money is a bit rich, but luckily I'm in the UK so all the standard bank and building society cash machines are free regardless of who you bank with. Going abroad is always a shock though, because we're used to withdrawing smaller amounts of money more frequently than large amounts of money infrequently.
How interested in pr0n, sex, raping, are you after you've just had a good five knuckle shuffle? Or are you wondering how to clean the keyboard/monitor/chair/pet that was sitting next to you at the time?
If you had no porn, then the majority would make do with something, but some people will go out and fulfil their need with some form of sexual activity that will hurt someone.
Is that number more than the number of people that would go and do such a crime because they had seen porn? Maybe violent porn is a problem here, but traditional porn is generally quite clear that the woman is doing it out of her own free will (yay money!) and that's probably a good thing to get into these people's heads.
Install a bittorrent application and add that site, a seaside area full of hearty pirates, Arrrr!, to their bookmarks.
... it isn't your job to stop them doing it :D Indeed many students need the stress relief! :p
It might reduce your ongoing workload
OTOH you might end up without a job!
And prioritise the spending on the needs, and only pick up the wants when they're a good deal.
And paying of your credit card bill is a great need than any of your wants.
For many things waiting just a few months can make something you want more affordable. This especially applies to computer hardware, but also applies to DVDs, CDs, as well. Patience has its rewards.
Don't underestimate missing out on your typical upgrade cycle and just sticking with what you have. Oh, and know your product release cycles by reading the geeky websites every so often.
OTOH don't become a miser! Don't buy cheap stuff just because it is cheap. Get good quality stuff even though it costs more, because it will last longer (in most cases).
The article seems to imply that all that is different between the Gamecube and the Revolution are the clock speeds of the processor and GPU, and the amount of memory, both being 50% faster.
:p
So in 5 years, and probably two process shrinks, these components can only be clocked 50% higher (within the cooling requirements of the revolution of course, which is quite thin)? Both processors are 1/4 of the size (assuming 90nm for Revolution and 180nm for the original Gamecube), so they must be pretty damn cheap if they're the same design.
No word on whether or not the graphics chip is wider (more pipelines), something that matters a lot in the graphics world as the task is very parallel. No word on if there processor has more cache, or two cores - stuff that could easily be done and still have a cheaper processor than the original Gamecube's.
I'm going to get a Revolution, simply because it is more affordable than the other options - I don't game that much, nor do I have a HDTV. OTOH if it's not that much faster than a Gamecube then maybe I should just keep on playing that, there's enough good games to last me a few years.
However whilst gameplay is the most important thing in a game (and the Revolution will have a lot of good points here), the impact of graphical splendour shouldn't be ignored. Shaders make a vast difference to a game - realistic water, accurately reflective metals, it adds atmosphere. If the Revolution is not going to have this relatively old technology inside, then we're basically talking about Gamecube graphics with more polygons.
I just worry about 3 years time. By then the 360 and the PS3 will be $200 or less, and they'll be a no-brainer purchase. A $99 Revolution may be a nice bedroom console still. Maybe Nintendo are putting off the really big update for a few years, so they have the first major update next time around. I've always thought that Sony should have clocked the slimline PS2 faster than the original, and allowed games to have a standard version for the original PS2, and a faster, smoother, higher-resolution version for the slimline. Not that Sony ever hurt for income from the PS2
How about suing for slander or defamation?
I wish you could sue someone for being a complete and utter titarse. I would have let him call the FBI, then there would have been enough damage done to make suing a viable option.
I imagine an invoice, properly worded, would get processed automatically by the local government however. Include the transcripts, and charge $100 per email.