the car analogy doesn't work. you're comparing hardware to software.
A better thing to compare to cars is the computer hardware (multi HDs, extra RAM, more optical drives, etc)
Or, compare some aspect of the Ford to the choice of OS.
ie:
whadaya mean I could get an xbox, ps2 or gamecube in the back seat? I'm confoosed. What's better?
or
So, I can get a stereo with built-in radio, or get the XM/Sirius option? Or I could get the CD player/cassette combo... or the mp3 playing stereo. What's this about the ogg vorbis option?
That's a more linear comparison to the many tastes and flavours of vista.
[ Whatever flavour you choose, I'm sure there's so much eyecandy, it'll leave a bad taste in your mouth. ]
unfortunately, 7zip doesn't work properly on non-windows machines.
i've got an OSX version which does some very strange things when I unzip certain archives. I don't know if it's the way the archive was made or a bug in the program or what, but the same thing happens with the linux version of 7zip.
now that I think of it, I should probably bring my.7z archives to work and try unzipping them there. if it still fucks up, then it must be the archives...
for the curious, when I un-7zip my files, it creates a folder for every folder in the thing, but then extracts all of the files into the root 7zip folder, not in their respective folders, and many of the directories contain files with the same name, so I get a lot of prompts saying "overwrite?" and I don't know where the stuff is supposed to go. it's all screwed up.
I've worked in the screenprinting industry since 2000.
Right when I started working there, the other artist had put together a subway series design based exactly on the Official Design (minus a color or 2) and some of the more seedy characters in the place had started a little project.
3 days later, they had over 1000 tee shirts printed (crappy ones, I might add) and a dozen or so of their buddies were on the streets of manhattan hawking their goods. I believe they went through about 3/4 of their stock in the first day and printed another round before half their guys got arrested. From what I understand, the guys weren't smart enough to leave their money at home the second day. I believe they broke even.
If UMD movies are selling so well, it's probably because kids who managed to get their parents to buy them a PSP for their birthday or whatever, probably got it instead of a DVD player, so now, UMD is their only option if they want to watch movies on their own hardware. (assuming they don't watch on their computer).
I dunno. I can't even watch UMD movies on mine. I've got a japanese unit. Although I made the mistake of upgrading to 1.50. At least I can pop video onto the memory stick and watch stuff on there.
well, back during one of the jaguar updates that got pulled, I noticed that all of a sudden, my battery always thinks it's at 99%. no matter what. Even when I push the button on the bottom, all 4 LEDs illuminate. I contacted apple at the time and they referred me to this page on their site where it tells you to charge the battery, then let it drain like 3 or 4 times to restore it.
didn't do shit.
after that, my battery life went from ~4-5 hours (with normal use) down to about 2 hours within a couple weeks.
What really sucks is that the machine just turns off when it's dead. I don't get any warning that it's is going to go or anything. Just boom. black screen.
I popped a good battery in from another powerbook, and everything worked fine. My battery, when in the other powerbook, has the same issues. so it's definitely the battery.
apple says that it's not covered by warranty. and last time I got the machine back from apple (I've had many hardware issues with it since I got it. had the LCD replaced 5 times and the logic board replaced 3. turned out it was bad RAM), the battery was jammed in there. I can't get it out to put the replacement battery in. I gotta send it back to apple within the next couple months before applecare runs out and I'm fucked.
yeah, this doesn't really translate well to real-life (RL).
I mean, in these games, you're properly armed. You'd have to be an idiot to walk around in the danger zone without a decent sized sword and a handy collection of offensive spells.
I could see if this was the Sims or something and someone was going into houses and stealing stuff (hell, that would be awesome if you could), but man, this is a game based on offensive tactics.
I actually noticed that my battery is lasting much, much less time, lately, but I've been attributing that to the fact that it's almost 3 years old and hasn't had the life that it used to when it was young.
I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.
oh yeah, I forgot about wing commander and all the quest games (kings, space, police and leisuresuit larry).
shit... ok. my memory is skewed or something.
but I have these distinct memories of being in the back of the bookstore in the mall in the computer section looking at comodore (sp?) and amiga and apple games wishing I could play them.
btw, diablo came out at the same time for mac and PC, or at least very close proximity. I was playing it during hte same time that all my PC friends were heavy into it, so yeah.
the mac had some cool-ass games, though. I mean... going back to the early PPC days, you've got Bloodbath, the Ambrosia games (escape velocity, maelstrom, barrack, avara, apperion, etc), dark forces, marathon, pathways into darkness, and more shareware games than you can possibly imagine.
I kinda miss those days, though. it was so easy to hack the graphics in the game with resedit. and programming crappy little apps was such a piece of cake.
Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren.
wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.
Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.
Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.
Look at the pre-release press. Announcing Vaporware and pumped up lists of features is a common practice for them, as a way to stifle or destroy the competition.
I think that is actually driving the competition. I mean, hey. People say "Woah, M$ is aiming to put features X and Y in their new OS in 3 years... we can get X in there in 8 months and release it as an incremental upgrade. Feature Y can be ready for the public in 16 months. Oh, and this other feature Z, which is rumored to be in there, well, we already have that, but let's make ours better."
no one in the mainstream ever realizes that 90% of M$'s features are either pieces of crap (clippy) or "Embraced and Extended" versions of other people's technologies.
Well, a good question is why the police aren't rounding them up......stopping this sort of sales is likely like stopping the sale of drugs.
It WOULD be like stopping the sales of drugs if the dealers had tables set up out in the open with crack vials of all shapes and sizes laid out and baggies with primo bud with people checking the stuff out.
This stuff isn't even being sold in the ghetto, man. This is out in the open. Midtown NYC. Chelsea, man. The cops should be all over this. If the RIAA can take 1000 IPs to court and sue each one for hundreds of thousands in damages, when they're just kids downloading stuff (and yeah, they downloaded 30GB of music and kept the stuff available to share), why don't they crack down on people who are actually profiting on this stuff. This is worse than spamming.
Also, people justify buying this stuff because they're PAYING FOR IT. They don't even think about whether the guy paid for it, or is doing it legally. They feel all fine and dandy because they're paying $ for these CDs.
There's this woman at work who exclusively buys this stuff. And she's mad because she can't MP3 the tracks on half of the CDs to stick in her iTunes library and listen at work. Copyprotected CDs that keep people from listening to their music, but don't keep people from duping and profiting off it.
What a broken system.
I mean, a CD + ink + case is getting close to $1. Then there's the time, labor and risk, is a $1 over cost enough to cover all that?
well, that's when you start having people in china, mexico, or wherever doing this crap. sweatshops, cheaper media (1 in 5 don't burn right, but they're not wasting time verifying, so whatever), computers pulled out of dumpsters instead of put together from clearance sales at newegg.
I'm pretty sure that's the direction it's going anyway.
well, aside from "New Game" "Load Game" "Operation" on the main menu, and "Operation Success" and "Operation Failure," there is virtually no english in it.
You can kinda get by without knowing any japanese (I can read katakana, so I can read "Retry? Yes, No?"), but I'm sure the doctors are telling you what to do and there must be some interesting dialog (because there's a LOT of it). They walk you through the first couple of operations and select the tool you'll need so you get a feel for it, but later on, you've gotta remember what you did under certain circumstances and do it again.
It's a cool game, though. I'm kinda stuck right now on this one operation, I think because I can't move fast enough. or maybe I'm missing something.
...they have decided to turn their FUD campaign towards recordable media.
I dunno if that's really FUD, per se...
I mean, look at less technical people. The non-geeks who spend hours setting up and sorting their torrents to download the latest albums from bands they never even heard of.
There are people I work with who don't even own a computer who buy all their music for 3$/CD on the street.
Somewhere, there are rooms full of CD duplicators and color laser printers. Sweatshops where people are duping CDs and DVDs and their respective packaging by the hundreds and making back 5x their investment.
Walking up 6th Ave in Manhattan, you'll see at least one guy on each block with a table full of 5 or 10$ DVDs and 3-5$ CDs, all pirate copies. All the latest stuff.
I just think that the RI/MPAA are going after the wrong people. They should be going after the guys on the street, not the casual CompUSA shopper.
Trauma Center is, by far, the greatest game I've played for the DS.
I also just picked up Jump Superstars last week, but I haven't had the time to play it since getting Trauma Center. Man that game rules.
on my PSP, I've been stuck playing NES games and Lumines for months. I'm actually getting sick of it. Although it is good for watching tv shows on the train. I've been downloading various shows and encoding them for the PSP.
Growing up, I never had any issues with my parents and video games (aside from how often I play them and the fact that I was a fatass who was nearly failing out of school).
Hell, my dad gave me this great game called AstroTit when I was like 6. It involved a giant cock at the bottom of the screen jizzing upwards towards falling breasts and bibles. quite a good game... although had a very poor replay factor.
The only censorship that I ever had to endure was when I started playing the CCG "Magic: The Gathering." my mom kinda freaked out. not that she's religious or anything, but to this day still refuses to discuss why she didn't want me playing it and why I never got my box of cards back (she took them when I got 3 Ds on my report card in 8th grade, and 6 months later, she still had them).
I still think that games should be rated and treated on a similar scale to movies. AO games should be like an X rated movie. M should be like R (yes, boobies and cursing and ultraviolence), etc.
I don't see what the difference between letting your kid play GTA3 and letting your kid see fightclub or sin city is. personally, I think the latter is worse.
well, I wouldn't really count pacman... you're stuck at a constant speed and you can't stop munching.
I was doing speedrunning back in the days of the original Prince of Persia on my old green-screen compaq suitcase computer when I was like 8 years old.
Prince of persia was full of loopholes to help you beat the level faster, whether it was sidestepping the dudes with swords or climbing over them.
Hell, I bet no one knew you could beat the first level in under a minute. you don't HAVE to get the sword, you know. You automagically get it, if you didn't already have it, at the start of the second level.
...like T-Bag in the downhill domination game. Who ever designed that character need's to be shot.
you've peaked my curiosity. Who is this 'T-Bag' fellow?
I've never played any GTA since the first incarnation (Grand Theft Auto 1, on the PC back in like 1997 or so). What could possibly be so horrific about this character? How could he be any worse than anything Dave Chapel has done?
Try living here in England. You'd be looking at £5 (~$9). And £18 for that DVD! ($32!)
jesus christ. at least I have the advantage of hopping over the river to NJ and getting cigarettes for ~$3 cheaper. or, when I visit my friend in PA, getting cigarettes for under $3. Although I quit smoking a couple months ago (but I still buy a pack here and there to fend off the nicotine rage).
and about the DVD price... I don't see how they're getting away with charging that much. I don't see how anyone's getting away with charging as much as they are for nearly everything all of a sudden. It seems that DVD prices have gone up in the last couple years. Gas prices have. The price of parking has more than quadrupled.
The parking meters outside of my old job used to be 25 cents per hour. Now they're 25 cents for 15 minutes. Parking at the train station used to be free, then it was $1.00 for the day, now it's up to $4.00. If you park and don't pay, it's a 45$ ticket.
I think the best bet would be to just give up tech and go homeless. Life would be so much simpler and cheaper.
a UMD movie has less features and less quality than a DVD... why does it cost at least as much as one? UMD movies should be free in boxes of cereal. They should come with games. they should come with DVDs. They should cost less than a pack of cigarettes (I live in NY, so a pack of cigarettes costs upwards of 7-8$).
You can imagine my surprise when after reading all the crap about PSP games not being region encoded, then when UMD movies are finally available I can't play them.
I got my PSP the first week of January. Imported from japan. It's nice that the Japanese PSPs can play US games and vice versa, and not that I would buy them if I could, but it sucks that I can't watch US UMD movies on my japanese PSP.
Luckily in my area (northern NJ, now), we've got *some* broadband choice.
It's amazing though, it depends on where you live, what service you will get.
Until recently, we had verizon DSL, but it was restrictive, hard to operate the included router, slow, and was very very very prone to disconnects. It would frequently go down for hours at a time. Verizon's solution was to "power down all computer, powerdown the DSL, and power everything back up" which wouldn't always work. and it was a pain to power down 8 computers.
That's when I got speakeasy. I got them because they had less restrictions, faster advertised speeds (I didn't qualify for hte 6mbit, so I had to get the 1.5. I'm over 10000 feet from the CO, so yeah), and I got 8 static IPs with the slashdot promotion. It's been really good, except not the speed I was used to when I had cable.
Where I'm living now, we've got comcast cable. I had them back in 1998-2000 when I lived in this area last, and the experience was horrible. Their tech support was sub-par and didn't know anything except windows, and it took them 3 months to send a tech to my house to replace the modem. The damned thing wasn't powering on, yet the guy on the phone said "well, we can communicate perfectly fine with the modem, so it's got to be your computers. Here, go to the start button adn go to settings......" The guy didn't understand how I could not have a start button. So, I hate comcast, now.
I've gotta move again, and I hope I qualify for faster speakeasy. and I hope this deregulation doesn't affect that.
besides, what about the other DSL providers? What about Covad? What are businesses going to do? Verizon businessclass DSL is grossly expensive for the same service/hardware you get with the home service, and they still block ports on you, and now they're blocking my outgoing email unless I use their SMTP servers.
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the car analogy doesn't work. you're comparing hardware to software.
A better thing to compare to cars is the computer hardware (multi HDs, extra RAM, more optical drives, etc)
Or, compare some aspect of the Ford to the choice of OS.
ie:
whadaya mean I could get an xbox, ps2 or gamecube in the back seat? I'm confoosed. What's better?
or
So, I can get a stereo with built-in radio, or get the XM/Sirius option? Or I could get the CD player/cassette combo... or the mp3 playing stereo. What's this about the ogg vorbis option?
That's a more linear comparison to the many tastes and flavours of vista.
[ Whatever flavour you choose, I'm sure there's so much eyecandy, it'll leave a bad taste in your mouth. ]
unfortunately, 7zip doesn't work properly on non-windows machines.
.7z archives to work and try unzipping them there. if it still fucks up, then it must be the archives...
i've got an OSX version which does some very strange things when I unzip certain archives. I don't know if it's the way the archive was made or a bug in the program or what, but the same thing happens with the linux version of 7zip.
now that I think of it, I should probably bring my
for the curious, when I un-7zip my files, it creates a folder for every folder in the thing, but then extracts all of the files into the root 7zip folder, not in their respective folders, and many of the directories contain files with the same name, so I get a lot of prompts saying "overwrite?" and I don't know where the stuff is supposed to go. it's all screwed up.
I've worked in the screenprinting industry since 2000.
Right when I started working there, the other artist had put together a subway series design based exactly on the Official Design (minus a color or 2) and some of the more seedy characters in the place had started a little project.
3 days later, they had over 1000 tee shirts printed (crappy ones, I might add) and a dozen or so of their buddies were on the streets of manhattan hawking their goods. I believe they went through about 3/4 of their stock in the first day and printed another round before half their guys got arrested. From what I understand, the guys weren't smart enough to leave their money at home the second day. I believe they broke even.
If UMD movies are selling so well, it's probably because kids who managed to get their parents to buy them a PSP for their birthday or whatever, probably got it instead of a DVD player, so now, UMD is their only option if they want to watch movies on their own hardware. (assuming they don't watch on their computer).
I dunno. I can't even watch UMD movies on mine. I've got a japanese unit. Although I made the mistake of upgrading to 1.50. At least I can pop video onto the memory stick and watch stuff on there.
I'm trying to get back to my roots. I'm planning on building one of these .
I've been designing the software for it, and although I haven't had time to work on it for about a week, it's coming along nicely.
Shameless plug: AFX
I just need to think of a better way of describing what it is in the project summary.
well, back during one of the jaguar updates that got pulled, I noticed that all of a sudden, my battery always thinks it's at 99%. no matter what. Even when I push the button on the bottom, all 4 LEDs illuminate. I contacted apple at the time and they referred me to this page on their site where it tells you to charge the battery, then let it drain like 3 or 4 times to restore it.
didn't do shit.
after that, my battery life went from ~4-5 hours (with normal use) down to about 2 hours within a couple weeks.
What really sucks is that the machine just turns off when it's dead. I don't get any warning that it's is going to go or anything. Just boom. black screen.
I popped a good battery in from another powerbook, and everything worked fine. My battery, when in the other powerbook, has the same issues. so it's definitely the battery.
apple says that it's not covered by warranty. and last time I got the machine back from apple (I've had many hardware issues with it since I got it. had the LCD replaced 5 times and the logic board replaced 3. turned out it was bad RAM), the battery was jammed in there. I can't get it out to put the replacement battery in. I gotta send it back to apple within the next couple months before applecare runs out and I'm fucked.
yeah, this doesn't really translate well to real-life (RL).
I mean, in these games, you're properly armed. You'd have to be an idiot to walk around in the danger zone without a decent sized sword and a handy collection of offensive spells.
I could see if this was the Sims or something and someone was going into houses and stealing stuff (hell, that would be awesome if you could), but man, this is a game based on offensive tactics.
I actually noticed that my battery is lasting much, much less time, lately, but I've been attributing that to the fact that it's almost 3 years old and hasn't had the life that it used to when it was young.
I wish there was a way of disabling spotlight during certain times. especially when I'm running a script that's creating dozens of files only to trash them again later. I think it's taking a bit of a performance hit from spotlight.
oh yeah, I forgot about wing commander and all the quest games (kings, space, police and leisuresuit larry).
shit... ok. my memory is skewed or something.
but I have these distinct memories of being in the back of the bookstore in the mall in the computer section looking at comodore (sp?) and amiga and apple games wishing I could play them.
btw, diablo came out at the same time for mac and PC, or at least very close proximity. I was playing it during hte same time that all my PC friends were heavy into it, so yeah.
the mac had some cool-ass games, though. I mean... going back to the early PPC days, you've got Bloodbath, the Ambrosia games (escape velocity, maelstrom, barrack, avara, apperion, etc), dark forces, marathon, pathways into darkness, and more shareware games than you can possibly imagine.
I kinda miss those days, though. it was so easy to hack the graphics in the game with resedit. and programming crappy little apps was such a piece of cake.
Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren.
wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.
Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.
Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.
hmph.
Look at the pre-release press. Announcing Vaporware and pumped up lists of features is a common practice for them, as a way to stifle or destroy the competition.
I think that is actually driving the competition. I mean, hey. People say "Woah, M$ is aiming to put features X and Y in their new OS in 3 years... we can get X in there in 8 months and release it as an incremental upgrade. Feature Y can be ready for the public in 16 months. Oh, and this other feature Z, which is rumored to be in there, well, we already have that, but let's make ours better."
no one in the mainstream ever realizes that 90% of M$'s features are either pieces of crap (clippy) or "Embraced and Extended" versions of other people's technologies.
I can't find any way of viewing it in OSX OR linux...
Although I can listen to the audio. not the same.
i'm bringing it to work today to watch there.
Well, a good question is why the police aren't rounding them up... ...stopping this sort of sales is likely like stopping the sale of drugs.
It WOULD be like stopping the sales of drugs if the dealers had tables set up out in the open with crack vials of all shapes and sizes laid out and baggies with primo bud with people checking the stuff out.
This stuff isn't even being sold in the ghetto, man. This is out in the open. Midtown NYC. Chelsea, man. The cops should be all over this. If the RIAA can take 1000 IPs to court and sue each one for hundreds of thousands in damages, when they're just kids downloading stuff (and yeah, they downloaded 30GB of music and kept the stuff available to share), why don't they crack down on people who are actually profiting on this stuff. This is worse than spamming.
Also, people justify buying this stuff because they're PAYING FOR IT. They don't even think about whether the guy paid for it, or is doing it legally. They feel all fine and dandy because they're paying $ for these CDs.
There's this woman at work who exclusively buys this stuff. And she's mad because she can't MP3 the tracks on half of the CDs to stick in her iTunes library and listen at work. Copyprotected CDs that keep people from listening to their music, but don't keep people from duping and profiting off it.
What a broken system.
I mean, a CD + ink + case is getting close to $1. Then there's the time, labor and risk, is a $1 over cost enough to cover all that?
well, that's when you start having people in china, mexico, or wherever doing this crap. sweatshops, cheaper media (1 in 5 don't burn right, but they're not wasting time verifying, so whatever), computers pulled out of dumpsters instead of put together from clearance sales at newegg.
I'm pretty sure that's the direction it's going anyway.
well, aside from "New Game" "Load Game" "Operation" on the main menu, and "Operation Success" and "Operation Failure," there is virtually no english in it.
You can kinda get by without knowing any japanese (I can read katakana, so I can read "Retry? Yes, No?"), but I'm sure the doctors are telling you what to do and there must be some interesting dialog (because there's a LOT of it). They walk you through the first couple of operations and select the tool you'll need so you get a feel for it, but later on, you've gotta remember what you did under certain circumstances and do it again.
It's a cool game, though. I'm kinda stuck right now on this one operation, I think because I can't move fast enough. or maybe I'm missing something.
...they have decided to turn their FUD campaign towards recordable media.
I dunno if that's really FUD, per se...
I mean, look at less technical people. The non-geeks who spend hours setting up and sorting their torrents to download the latest albums from bands they never even heard of.
There are people I work with who don't even own a computer who buy all their music for 3$/CD on the street.
Somewhere, there are rooms full of CD duplicators and color laser printers. Sweatshops where people are duping CDs and DVDs and their respective packaging by the hundreds and making back 5x their investment.
Walking up 6th Ave in Manhattan, you'll see at least one guy on each block with a table full of 5 or 10$ DVDs and 3-5$ CDs, all pirate copies. All the latest stuff.
I just think that the RI/MPAA are going after the wrong people. They should be going after the guys on the street, not the casual CompUSA shopper.
Trauma Center is, by far, the greatest game I've played for the DS.
I also just picked up Jump Superstars last week, but I haven't had the time to play it since getting Trauma Center. Man that game rules.
on my PSP, I've been stuck playing NES games and Lumines for months. I'm actually getting sick of it. Although it is good for watching tv shows on the train. I've been downloading various shows and encoding them for the PSP.
Growing up, I never had any issues with my parents and video games (aside from how often I play them and the fact that I was a fatass who was nearly failing out of school).
Hell, my dad gave me this great game called AstroTit when I was like 6. It involved a giant cock at the bottom of the screen jizzing upwards towards falling breasts and bibles. quite a good game... although had a very poor replay factor.
The only censorship that I ever had to endure was when I started playing the CCG "Magic: The Gathering." my mom kinda freaked out. not that she's religious or anything, but to this day still refuses to discuss why she didn't want me playing it and why I never got my box of cards back (she took them when I got 3 Ds on my report card in 8th grade, and 6 months later, she still had them).
I still think that games should be rated and treated on a similar scale to movies. AO games should be like an X rated movie. M should be like R (yes, boobies and cursing and ultraviolence), etc.
I don't see what the difference between letting your kid play GTA3 and letting your kid see fightclub or sin city is. personally, I think the latter is worse.
Pacman had speed runners.
well, I wouldn't really count pacman... you're stuck at a constant speed and you can't stop munching.
I was doing speedrunning back in the days of the original Prince of Persia on my old green-screen compaq suitcase computer when I was like 8 years old.
Prince of persia was full of loopholes to help you beat the level faster, whether it was sidestepping the dudes with swords or climbing over them.
Hell, I bet no one knew you could beat the first level in under a minute. you don't HAVE to get the sword, you know. You automagically get it, if you didn't already have it, at the start of the second level.
...like T-Bag in the downhill domination game. Who ever designed that character need's to be shot.
you've peaked my curiosity. Who is this 'T-Bag' fellow?
I've never played any GTA since the first incarnation (Grand Theft Auto 1, on the PC back in like 1997 or so). What could possibly be so horrific about this character? How could he be any worse than anything Dave Chapel has done?
Try living here in England. You'd be looking at £5 (~$9). And £18 for that DVD! ($32!)
jesus christ. at least I have the advantage of hopping over the river to NJ and getting cigarettes for ~$3 cheaper. or, when I visit my friend in PA, getting cigarettes for under $3. Although I quit smoking a couple months ago (but I still buy a pack here and there to fend off the nicotine rage).
and about the DVD price... I don't see how they're getting away with charging that much. I don't see how anyone's getting away with charging as much as they are for nearly everything all of a sudden. It seems that DVD prices have gone up in the last couple years. Gas prices have. The price of parking has more than quadrupled.
The parking meters outside of my old job used to be 25 cents per hour. Now they're 25 cents for 15 minutes. Parking at the train station used to be free, then it was $1.00 for the day, now it's up to $4.00. If you park and don't pay, it's a 45$ ticket.
I think the best bet would be to just give up tech and go homeless. Life would be so much simpler and cheaper.
the idea behind UMD movies is pretty cool.
however, the implementation BLOWS.
a UMD movie has less features and less quality than a DVD... why does it cost at least as much as one? UMD movies should be free in boxes of cereal. They should come with games. they should come with DVDs. They should cost less than a pack of cigarettes (I live in NY, so a pack of cigarettes costs upwards of 7-8$).
yeah, it sucks.
You can imagine my surprise when after reading all the crap about PSP games not being region encoded, then when UMD movies are finally available I can't play them.
I got my PSP the first week of January. Imported from japan. It's nice that the Japanese PSPs can play US games and vice versa, and not that I would buy them if I could, but it sucks that I can't watch US UMD movies on my japanese PSP.
Isn't that forwards compatible?
you've got it backwards... you're thinking of the XBox180.
Luckily in my area (northern NJ, now), we've got *some* broadband choice.
It's amazing though, it depends on where you live, what service you will get.
Until recently, we had verizon DSL, but it was restrictive, hard to operate the included router, slow, and was very very very prone to disconnects. It would frequently go down for hours at a time. Verizon's solution was to "power down all computer, powerdown the DSL, and power everything back up" which wouldn't always work. and it was a pain to power down 8 computers.
That's when I got speakeasy. I got them because they had less restrictions, faster advertised speeds (I didn't qualify for hte 6mbit, so I had to get the 1.5. I'm over 10000 feet from the CO, so yeah), and I got 8 static IPs with the slashdot promotion. It's been really good, except not the speed I was used to when I had cable.
Where I'm living now, we've got comcast cable. I had them back in 1998-2000 when I lived in this area last, and the experience was horrible. Their tech support was sub-par and didn't know anything except windows, and it took them 3 months to send a tech to my house to replace the modem. The damned thing wasn't powering on, yet the guy on the phone said "well, we can communicate perfectly fine with the modem, so it's got to be your computers. Here, go to the start button adn go to settings......" The guy didn't understand how I could not have a start button. So, I hate comcast, now.
I've gotta move again, and I hope I qualify for faster speakeasy. and I hope this deregulation doesn't affect that.
besides, what about the other DSL providers? What about Covad? What are businesses going to do? Verizon businessclass DSL is grossly expensive for the same service/hardware you get with the home service, and they still block ports on you, and now they're blocking my outgoing email unless I use their SMTP servers.