Since most media products don't automatically play themselves, format shifting is required. i.e. you have to shift the data from the DVD, through the player, into the TV, likely splitting out the audio along the way. Self contained hand held video games (NOT PSP or Game Boy types) and similar devices are the exception, but they're a small minority.
To say I can shift the output of a DVD to the TV of my choice, but not to a laptop (via the hard drive) is a distinction that shouldn't automatically be decided in favor of whatever the media company wants. An even finer split hair is allowing CDs to be ripped to an iPod, but not allowing DVDs to be ripped to a central home video server. How the legally obtained media is played back should be determined by the buyer, not the seller.
House is really an example of what happens when something really rare comes in the door that's being masked by another condition. If your real doctor requires that much testing, you've either got a very rare disease (like first time at that hospital), or a doctor who's way out of their comfort zone.
My wife's a doctor, and she's usually telling me the next wrong diagnosis they're about to make. As far as the medicine is concerned, they seem to be very accurate.
And yes, patients lie. A lot. It's why she went into pediatrics instead of adult medicine. Kids don't lie nearly as much, and they're usually very bad at it.
Every cost estimate I've seen for the PS3 has been from people estimating what a random company would have to pay to build the same machine. They all seem reasonable until you hit the line for the blue-ray drive itself, which makes up half of their estimates. Sony's going to spend hundreds of extra dollars per machine to go with blue-ray instead of DVD? I don't think so.
I'm pretty sure Sony can build the blue-ray drives for a lot less than the 'insider' estimates (Merril Lynch's in particular). The high initial price tags for new tech usually come from trying to make up R&D costs on the early sales, as well as having to make them on a lower volume. Since Sony is most likely going to build 10 million or more of these in the first year, they know they can spread the costs more evenly. They can also push the initial R&D costs into other areas and 'give' the tech to the PS3 division for free as a marketing ploy for their movie division.
The tech publications put the PS3 manufacturing costs in the $500 range. The stock analysts put it at $800-900 based on looking up component costs. Mainstream press picks up on the latter number because it comes from a name they recognize, and it makes for a better story. But who do you think is better informed?
A. Any company that harms it's own customers access to sites they visit is stupid. The only thing they would accomplish is driving their customers to another provider that provides a fast connection to all websites.
B. Accessing websites hosted on your provider's network is intuitively faster. The less traffic you have to fight to get your data, the faster it arrives. Making a web host provide the same quality of service to everyone on the internet is like expecting Pizza Hut to deliver to anyone in the world in 30 minutes or less.
C. If ISPs really want to leverage their brand, they would offer additional content through selected sites that currently offer subscription tier service at relatively low pricing. The sites could auto-detect the user's ISP and deliver premium content automatically.
I'll bet as soon as any ISP starts cutting off it's subscribers from their favorite websites, they'll leave in droves. Most people are as dedicated to their ISP as they are to the brand of gas they put in their car.
The best part of this phone is that you can limit who your kids call. Most (heck, all?) cell phone companies seem focused on making you pay for whatever absurd bill your kid can run up each month. Either pay it or resign yourself to not being able to call your kid.
If anyone can correct me on this, I really want to know.
The caddies cost a whole lot of money. When you're protecting your $10 CDRW, it's worth an extra $5. When it's a $0.25 bulk disk, a caddy is a useless investment. When it starts looking a little scratched up, copy it to a new one.
Back in the day, I had CDrom drives (not even recordable) that required caddies. They were a huge pain in the ass and had a moderate tendency to get stuck while ejecting.
50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight's Tale, The Last Waltz (MGM), Resident Evil Apocalypse and XXX [initial HD-DVD titles]
[sarcasm]Wow, it's a pirate's dream come true! I've always wanted to download a 30gig HD copy of Resident Evil Apocalypse.[/sarcasm]
Idiots. The overwhelming majority of pirated content isn't even up to SD-DVD quality because most people don't want to (or can't) spend enough time downloading it. The idea that someone who can't afford to buy the $20 movie is actually going to download (and re-upload) a 30gig movie is ludicrous. They're going to stick to the 1 gig highly compressed SD version.
Sure, eventually broadband speeds will catch up to HDDVD size, but by then the MPAA will probably have a 150GB movie format to (re)sell to us.
The only true fight in today's political landscape is over the middle - the extremes will always vote along party lines, so both sides have to appeal to the swing votes
That was absolutely correct 10-15 years ago. However, in the past decade the Republicans have focused more on maximizing turnout among their base. If you change your message to appeal to the swing voters, you just lose turnout in your base. So the Republicans have been creating 'fake' issues like gay marriage or taking bibles away to scare their base into voting for them. The only counter issue the Democrats have been able to make up is the draft coming back. Too bad that mostly concerns teenage boys who can't vote yet.
What I'd like to see is a tax or fine that nearly requires people to cast a vote, even if they just check 'none' all the way down. Anyone who is able to vote should have to pay $100 if they don't bother to vote in a presidential election. Everyone should also be able to vote online, by mail, or in person up to a week before the election is over. It's really sad that so many people in this country don't care enough to vote, and unfortunately that's what is making it so easy for corrupt politicians to take over.
BTW, Clinton didn't win in 92 because he appealed so much to the swing voters. He won because Bush thought he had the race locked up and stopped working to get his own base out. Bush pretty much stopped campaigning two weeks before the election. OTOH, the Republicans practically conceeded the 96 election. Hardly anyone wanted to give up their office to lose to an incumbent president with such a high approval rating.
Half price? I can get an iBook for $1000 USD....
Way to help prove the other poster's point. The common low end price on a new PC laptop is around $500. Best Buy had one on sale this week for $450 (add ~$50 to upgrade to 512MB). Just moving up to a 14" screen in a macbook puts you into the $1300 range.
ROFL! I didn't realize if my AC, power windows or power steering break down that my entire car would become a useless heap of junk. And larger engines DO get lower mileage, but they last longer because they're made for heavier use.
People slam Valve all the time, but thanks to Steam, I got Half-life 2 and the entire Half-life catalog of games for the price of one game, all without having to have a single game on CD. Some may not like it, but I call it a deal.
There's a big downside. Thanks to Steam, I was forced to upgrade to a new binary for HL2 (many times, really). Unfortunately the latest binaries randomly hard-lock my system within 20 minutes of starting the game. I can't reject the upgrade, so now I'm stuck with a $50 game that doesn't work on my system and I can't resell it to someone else who may be able to use it. The only upside is that I already played the main game through once before they hosed it for me.
If this is the future of gaming, I'm out. Steam has proven to me that it's not worth giving up this much control of your hardware.
I think the issue that the article fails to notice is that games will continue to grow in size (bytes) that make them prohibitively large to download for many people. Once everyone has the capacity to download today's 4gig games, the games will actually be up to 50gig. Plastic discs of bits will continue to be the most feasible delivery for a large demographic, and many people who do download will still want to back them up to disc to make sure they don't have to download a second time.
It's more difficult to get a hardware NAT router/firewall for your connection.
You're less likely to download the large security updates because of time it takes.
'Always on' isn't a requirement. You can turn off the router or modem just like you can disconnect on dialup. I know people who do this.
Most exploits are quite small, and won't take long at all to install on your machine, even on dialup.
I've had 3 machines on cable behind a $25 belkin NAT firewall/router for over 5 years. I run zone alarm on the machines while I'm web surfing. I use mozilla because they seem to be more responsive to security issues than microsoft. I'm pretty lazy about patching, and I still haven't gotten any viruses, worms or trojans.
250GB DVR for directv currently costs $400 ($600-$200MIR). Certainly not $1000, but it's still the reason why my HD plasma doesn't have an HD signal. I went with the HD version because it has less 'screening' to the picture, and I don't want another piece of junk for the garage when I actually DO get an HD receiver. Even if the receiver wasn't so expensive, there's barely enough actual HD content to justify the hasle of switching to a new unit (catching up on Tivoed shows on old unit).
Also, how good was the upconverter (or was there one) for the SD signal?
If they're upconverting the signal, it's not really HD. It may or may not look better, but it's not HD. Anyone who thinks otherwise is the target audience for cameras with 800x digital zoom.
Here in the USA, 'broadcast' doesn't refer to subscription satellite. It refers to anything sent out over public airwaves for free viewing/listening.
OP is correct, DRM should not be used on anything that is broadcast free of charge. Broadcasters should stop worrying about people 'stealing' what they give away for free.
My HD plasma also waits until it fails to lock onto a signal before letting you cycle to the next set of video inputs. At a few seconds per input X 10 vid inputs, it can take a while to cycle to the input I need. It's a really annoying button to press by accident. It's too bad that it doesn't remember the inputs you use most (and cycle to them first), or have a way to shut them off. It's hard to believe that they spend so little time engineering a user interface for such an expensive TV.
First of all, any good photographer overshoots most scenes because it's easier (and usually necessary anyway) to crop than to reshoot the scene. Movies are generally overshot quite a bit regardless of what format will be used in the final product. At a minimum, the editors are cutting out things like camera booms that they don't want in the scene because they want to preserve the best performance, and directors often decide that they want to change the balance of the scene for artistic reasons. The cameraman also has to be mindful that the scene will later be cut for both 3x4 or 16x9 displays. A wide shot has to have enough padding for the top of the screen so you won't need to pan back and forth in 4x3. A narrow shot has to have padding on the sides so you're not cutting off peoples' heads in the 16x9 version.
As long as there are multiple standards for display ratios, someone's going to bitch about either 'not getting the whole picture', or wasting screen area with black bars. It's completely unavoidable. Even 4x3 CRTs crop a small border around the entire picture. There will be some sort of cropping no matter what you do.
Best-Buy, Circuit-City, Office Max and Staples don't refuse to sell you the item if you don't get the service plan. Not even their doorbusters. They'll also let you return it(the service plan) within the regular return period if you change your mind.
I used to work in sales at a bestbuy (I have no particular love for them, btw). Of the few training sessions we actually got, it was heavily emphasized that we were not allowed to offer any sale price or other offer that was contingent on purchasing any other product or service plan (they referred to it as 'inboarding'). Bestbuy had lost a case in florida and paid a large penalty for it. They did still required us to push the service plans, though. Being in the computer department, they also expected us to make sure that nobody bought a machine thinking that Bestbuy was the servicing agent for the factory warranty. It was amazing to find how many people blamed Bestbuy when the manufacturer was taking a month just to fix something dumb like a CDrom. In fact, the main reason why the computers were only accessible by ladder was so that customers couldn't buy one without going through a salesperson and the service plan speech.
Two years of Xbox Live: $120
Licensing fees for a single ($60, non-MS) game: $10
Even on just game controllers, faceplates, remote controls, battery packs, memory cards, headsets, wireless adapters, custom bags, xbox branded cables, etc.. some buyers could easily be leaving MS in the profit zone before they leave the store.
Of course, nobody is factoring in the development costs yet. They'll have to move a lot of games to make that back up.
As I see it, the reason ringtones are so popular is that they are being bought by teens on their parents credit. Giving a teen a cell phone is just like giving them your credit card that can only be used at a limited selection of stores. They happily run up hundreds of dollars in charges for going over their plan or buying add-ons like ringtones. The only reason they pay it off is that they're forced to by their parents. If the cell phone companies had to get their money directly from the teens, they'd never get paid. One way or another, the parents usually end up having to pay for a fair chunk of these extra garbage charges.
IIRC, the 64 bit version is faster in PC games, runs cooler, uses less power, and is future-proofed for a later OS upgrade, or when games start using the 64bit extentions. Also, the price difference is smaller than you think. They listed the retail boxed 64 3000+ version, which is about $30 more than the OEM that only runs about $117. The XP 3000 only runs about $110. It's well worth the extra $7 in a gaming machine.
My bargain basement laptop I bought last year can run any of those games fantastically. If you're spending $500 custom building a desktop PC to jack up your framerate in Warcraft 2, you're a complete tool.
Older PSUs are usually not able to handle the specific voltage requirements of a newer CPU and vid card combined. I try to buy a PSU that's about 100W over what I think I need, and it's rarely sufficient for my next get PC to run stable. Never mind that some PSUs currently on the market (never mind one from a year ago) may not have the 24 pin power connectors for your mobo, or the PCIe power cable to run your vid card.
Merely suggesting that you could build a gaming rig with only 256mb ram just shows that you are not a pc gamer in the least. I thought it was laughable that the guide only included 512mb.
Anyone building a $500 gaming rig isn't going to spring the extra $ for XP Pro over the home edition.
That said, they should have approached the article more from the PoV of doing a large scale upgrade. Recycled monitor, KB, mouse, case, optical drive, OS, HD; new MB, ram, CPU, Vid. Anyone doing a homebrew system should have a $30 120gb HD from bestbuy.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most media products don't automatically play themselves, format shifting is required. i.e. you have to shift the data from the DVD, through the player, into the TV, likely splitting out the audio along the way. Self contained hand held video games (NOT PSP or Game Boy types) and similar devices are the exception, but they're a small minority.
To say I can shift the output of a DVD to the TV of my choice, but not to a laptop (via the hard drive) is a distinction that shouldn't automatically be decided in favor of whatever the media company wants. An even finer split hair is allowing CDs to be ripped to an iPod, but not allowing DVDs to be ripped to a central home video server. How the legally obtained media is played back should be determined by the buyer, not the seller.
House is really an example of what happens when something really rare comes in the door that's being masked by another condition. If your real doctor requires that much testing, you've either got a very rare disease (like first time at that hospital), or a doctor who's way out of their comfort zone.
My wife's a doctor, and she's usually telling me the next wrong diagnosis they're about to make. As far as the medicine is concerned, they seem to be very accurate.
And yes, patients lie. A lot. It's why she went into pediatrics instead of adult medicine. Kids don't lie nearly as much, and they're usually very bad at it.
Every cost estimate I've seen for the PS3 has been from people estimating what a random company would have to pay to build the same machine. They all seem reasonable until you hit the line for the blue-ray drive itself, which makes up half of their estimates. Sony's going to spend hundreds of extra dollars per machine to go with blue-ray instead of DVD? I don't think so.
I'm pretty sure Sony can build the blue-ray drives for a lot less than the 'insider' estimates (Merril Lynch's in particular). The high initial price tags for new tech usually come from trying to make up R&D costs on the early sales, as well as having to make them on a lower volume. Since Sony is most likely going to build 10 million or more of these in the first year, they know they can spread the costs more evenly. They can also push the initial R&D costs into other areas and 'give' the tech to the PS3 division for free as a marketing ploy for their movie division.
The tech publications put the PS3 manufacturing costs in the $500 range. The stock analysts put it at $800-900 based on looking up component costs. Mainstream press picks up on the latter number because it comes from a name they recognize, and it makes for a better story. But who do you think is better informed?
A. Any company that harms it's own customers access to sites they visit is stupid. The only thing they would accomplish is driving their customers to another provider that provides a fast connection to all websites.
B. Accessing websites hosted on your provider's network is intuitively faster. The less traffic you have to fight to get your data, the faster it arrives. Making a web host provide the same quality of service to everyone on the internet is like expecting Pizza Hut to deliver to anyone in the world in 30 minutes or less.
C. If ISPs really want to leverage their brand, they would offer additional content through selected sites that currently offer subscription tier service at relatively low pricing. The sites could auto-detect the user's ISP and deliver premium content automatically.
I'll bet as soon as any ISP starts cutting off it's subscribers from their favorite websites, they'll leave in droves. Most people are as dedicated to their ISP as they are to the brand of gas they put in their car.
The best part of this phone is that you can limit who your kids call. Most (heck, all?) cell phone companies seem focused on making you pay for whatever absurd bill your kid can run up each month. Either pay it or resign yourself to not being able to call your kid.
If anyone can correct me on this, I really want to know.
The caddies cost a whole lot of money. When you're protecting your $10 CDRW, it's worth an extra $5. When it's a $0.25 bulk disk, a caddy is a useless investment. When it starts looking a little scratched up, copy it to a new one.
Back in the day, I had CDrom drives (not even recordable) that required caddies. They were a huge pain in the ass and had a moderate tendency to get stuck while ejecting.
50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, A Knight's Tale, The Last Waltz (MGM), Resident Evil Apocalypse and XXX [initial HD-DVD titles]
[sarcasm]Wow, it's a pirate's dream come true! I've always wanted to download a 30gig HD copy of Resident Evil Apocalypse.[/sarcasm]
Idiots. The overwhelming majority of pirated content isn't even up to SD-DVD quality because most people don't want to (or can't) spend enough time downloading it. The idea that someone who can't afford to buy the $20 movie is actually going to download (and re-upload) a 30gig movie is ludicrous. They're going to stick to the 1 gig highly compressed SD version.
Sure, eventually broadband speeds will catch up to HDDVD size, but by then the MPAA will probably have a 150GB movie format to (re)sell to us.
The only true fight in today's political landscape is over the middle - the extremes will always vote along party lines, so both sides have to appeal to the swing votes
That was absolutely correct 10-15 years ago. However, in the past decade the Republicans have focused more on maximizing turnout among their base. If you change your message to appeal to the swing voters, you just lose turnout in your base. So the Republicans have been creating 'fake' issues like gay marriage or taking bibles away to scare their base into voting for them. The only counter issue the Democrats have been able to make up is the draft coming back. Too bad that mostly concerns teenage boys who can't vote yet.
What I'd like to see is a tax or fine that nearly requires people to cast a vote, even if they just check 'none' all the way down. Anyone who is able to vote should have to pay $100 if they don't bother to vote in a presidential election. Everyone should also be able to vote online, by mail, or in person up to a week before the election is over. It's really sad that so many people in this country don't care enough to vote, and unfortunately that's what is making it so easy for corrupt politicians to take over.
BTW, Clinton didn't win in 92 because he appealed so much to the swing voters. He won because Bush thought he had the race locked up and stopped working to get his own base out. Bush pretty much stopped campaigning two weeks before the election. OTOH, the Republicans practically conceeded the 96 election. Hardly anyone wanted to give up their office to lose to an incumbent president with such a high approval rating.
Half price? I can get an iBook for $1000 USD....
Way to help prove the other poster's point. The common low end price on a new PC laptop is around $500. Best Buy had one on sale this week for $450 (add ~$50 to upgrade to 512MB). Just moving up to a 14" screen in a macbook puts you into the $1300 range.
ROFL! I didn't realize if my AC, power windows or power steering break down that my entire car would become a useless heap of junk. And larger engines DO get lower mileage, but they last longer because they're made for heavier use.
People slam Valve all the time, but thanks to Steam, I got Half-life 2 and the entire Half-life catalog of games for the price of one game, all without having to have a single game on CD. Some may not like it, but I call it a deal.
There's a big downside. Thanks to Steam, I was forced to upgrade to a new binary for HL2 (many times, really). Unfortunately the latest binaries randomly hard-lock my system within 20 minutes of starting the game. I can't reject the upgrade, so now I'm stuck with a $50 game that doesn't work on my system and I can't resell it to someone else who may be able to use it. The only upside is that I already played the main game through once before they hosed it for me.
If this is the future of gaming, I'm out. Steam has proven to me that it's not worth giving up this much control of your hardware.
I think the issue that the article fails to notice is that games will continue to grow in size (bytes) that make them prohibitively large to download for many people. Once everyone has the capacity to download today's 4gig games, the games will actually be up to 50gig. Plastic discs of bits will continue to be the most feasible delivery for a large demographic, and many people who do download will still want to back them up to disc to make sure they don't have to download a second time.
'It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.'
For some reason, I found this last part to be quite funny.
It's more difficult to get a hardware NAT router/firewall for your connection.
You're less likely to download the large security updates because of time it takes.
'Always on' isn't a requirement. You can turn off the router or modem just like you can disconnect on dialup. I know people who do this.
Most exploits are quite small, and won't take long at all to install on your machine, even on dialup.
I've had 3 machines on cable behind a $25 belkin NAT firewall/router for over 5 years. I run zone alarm on the machines while I'm web surfing. I use mozilla because they seem to be more responsive to security issues than microsoft. I'm pretty lazy about patching, and I still haven't gotten any viruses, worms or trojans.
250GB DVR for directv currently costs $400 ($600-$200MIR). Certainly not $1000, but it's still the reason why my HD plasma doesn't have an HD signal. I went with the HD version because it has less 'screening' to the picture, and I don't want another piece of junk for the garage when I actually DO get an HD receiver. Even if the receiver wasn't so expensive, there's barely enough actual HD content to justify the hasle of switching to a new unit (catching up on Tivoed shows on old unit).
Also, how good was the upconverter (or was there one) for the SD signal?
If they're upconverting the signal, it's not really HD. It may or may not look better, but it's not HD. Anyone who thinks otherwise is the target audience for cameras with 800x digital zoom.
Here in the USA, 'broadcast' doesn't refer to subscription satellite. It refers to anything sent out over public airwaves for free viewing/listening.
OP is correct, DRM should not be used on anything that is broadcast free of charge. Broadcasters should stop worrying about people 'stealing' what they give away for free.
My HD plasma also waits until it fails to lock onto a signal before letting you cycle to the next set of video inputs. At a few seconds per input X 10 vid inputs, it can take a while to cycle to the input I need. It's a really annoying button to press by accident. It's too bad that it doesn't remember the inputs you use most (and cycle to them first), or have a way to shut them off. It's hard to believe that they spend so little time engineering a user interface for such an expensive TV.
First of all, any good photographer overshoots most scenes because it's easier (and usually necessary anyway) to crop than to reshoot the scene. Movies are generally overshot quite a bit regardless of what format will be used in the final product. At a minimum, the editors are cutting out things like camera booms that they don't want in the scene because they want to preserve the best performance, and directors often decide that they want to change the balance of the scene for artistic reasons. The cameraman also has to be mindful that the scene will later be cut for both 3x4 or 16x9 displays. A wide shot has to have enough padding for the top of the screen so you won't need to pan back and forth in 4x3. A narrow shot has to have padding on the sides so you're not cutting off peoples' heads in the 16x9 version.
As long as there are multiple standards for display ratios, someone's going to bitch about either 'not getting the whole picture', or wasting screen area with black bars. It's completely unavoidable. Even 4x3 CRTs crop a small border around the entire picture. There will be some sort of cropping no matter what you do.
Best-Buy, Circuit-City, Office Max and Staples don't refuse to sell you the item if you don't get the service plan. Not even their doorbusters. They'll also let you return it(the service plan) within the regular return period if you change your mind.
I used to work in sales at a bestbuy (I have no particular love for them, btw). Of the few training sessions we actually got, it was heavily emphasized that we were not allowed to offer any sale price or other offer that was contingent on purchasing any other product or service plan (they referred to it as 'inboarding'). Bestbuy had lost a case in florida and paid a large penalty for it. They did still required us to push the service plans, though. Being in the computer department, they also expected us to make sure that nobody bought a machine thinking that Bestbuy was the servicing agent for the factory warranty. It was amazing to find how many people blamed Bestbuy when the manufacturer was taking a month just to fix something dumb like a CDrom. In fact, the main reason why the computers were only accessible by ladder was so that customers couldn't buy one without going through a salesperson and the service plan speech.
Two years of Xbox Live: $120
Licensing fees for a single ($60, non-MS) game: $10
Even on just game controllers, faceplates, remote controls, battery packs, memory cards, headsets, wireless adapters, custom bags, xbox branded cables, etc.. some buyers could easily be leaving MS in the profit zone before they leave the store.
Of course, nobody is factoring in the development costs yet. They'll have to move a lot of games to make that back up.
As I see it, the reason ringtones are so popular is that they are being bought by teens on their parents credit. Giving a teen a cell phone is just like giving them your credit card that can only be used at a limited selection of stores. They happily run up hundreds of dollars in charges for going over their plan or buying add-ons like ringtones. The only reason they pay it off is that they're forced to by their parents. If the cell phone companies had to get their money directly from the teens, they'd never get paid. One way or another, the parents usually end up having to pay for a fair chunk of these extra garbage charges.
IIRC, the 64 bit version is faster in PC games, runs cooler, uses less power, and is future-proofed for a later OS upgrade, or when games start using the 64bit extentions. Also, the price difference is smaller than you think. They listed the retail boxed 64 3000+ version, which is about $30 more than the OEM that only runs about $117. The XP 3000 only runs about $110. It's well worth the extra $7 in a gaming machine.
My bargain basement laptop I bought last year can run any of those games fantastically. If you're spending $500 custom building a desktop PC to jack up your framerate in Warcraft 2, you're a complete tool.
Older PSUs are usually not able to handle the specific voltage requirements of a newer CPU and vid card combined. I try to buy a PSU that's about 100W over what I think I need, and it's rarely sufficient for my next get PC to run stable. Never mind that some PSUs currently on the market (never mind one from a year ago) may not have the 24 pin power connectors for your mobo, or the PCIe power cable to run your vid card.
Merely suggesting that you could build a gaming rig with only 256mb ram just shows that you are not a pc gamer in the least. I thought it was laughable that the guide only included 512mb.
Anyone building a $500 gaming rig isn't going to spring the extra $ for XP Pro over the home edition.
That said, they should have approached the article more from the PoV of doing a large scale upgrade. Recycled monitor, KB, mouse, case, optical drive, OS, HD; new MB, ram, CPU, Vid. Anyone doing a homebrew system should have a $30 120gb HD from bestbuy.