The Zion scenes were pretty terrible. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the rave/sex scene (which didn't bother me mostly because the music reminded me of the classic Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Two Tribes" extended mix), but I was grinding my teeth through all the scenes with the angry commander guy and the dopey council people. There was so much eye-rollingly lame crap to sit through, most of it felt like a bad Star Trek episode. Shitty acting, lousy script, poor direction. Even the set design in Zion seemed weak... it looks like it was all designed to be grungy and hip circa 1995. And I notice they have beautiful high-tech air-traffic control centers, but apparently no one in Zion's ever heard of a freakin' washing machine. You'd think the Chosen One could get a little laundry service.
I even thought some of the fights were tiresome. Big deal, Neo slapfighting somebody... it may be nice choreography, but it's all clinical. The Burly Brawl is fun, but it's Morpheus' fight scene on the semi that's really worth sitting through the rest of the drek for. Great stuff.
I'm not saying the first Matrix script was a stroke of genius, either, but there was nothing in the second one that was as clever or fun as some of the bits in the first. And personally, I don't go for all the high school philosophy jibber-jabber... I appreciate that some people get a lot out of it or read a lot into it, but for me, it's a big freakin' yawn. Smoke some pot and read some Phillip K. Dick and get over it...
Oh, man, they must never get rid of the Wave Swinger. I already miss the old fun house, the earthquake ride, and my favorite ever, that one spinner contraption over by the aquarium where the floor drops out and you stick to the walls. Now that was a cool ride.
Those are gone but the Disaster Transport remained. Go figure.
I used to go there every summer, but since I moved to Washington it's not quite as convenient. I think the last time I was there the ride that year was the Raptor, which is amazing.
Just tell me - the arcade is still there, right? With all the classic games? That's the real important nerdy part of Cedar Point.
So my impression is that if Iraq was found to be in breach, then military force to 'secure the peace' was already explicitly authorized. Was there a need for Powell to go to the Security Council for a vote in the first place? At least in theory, could any member of the UN have legally assembled a 'peacekeeping' force and enforced the resolution without any further SC approval?
Yeah, the Guardian was just convenient on that one. I usually try to skip around as many different outlets as possible and compare and contrast, with the exception of Fox News, which makes my teeth hurt.
That's an excellent explanation of the resolutions, and thanks for it.
My question, however, is how do they define disarmament? Do the inspectors need to find proof that Iraq is deliberately hiding weapons, or is it enough to suspect it? Who decides the point at which Iraq is in material breach? Was there a clear methodology in place for enforcing the resolutions?
Also, have the missiles been positively ID'd as scuds? My impression is that the media is using the term scud generically, or at least speculatively. This article in the Guardian is the latest I've found, and it suggests that things aren't clear at this point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,918879,00.html
Bah, humbug. You lot can go on with your foolish optimism, your hopeful enthusiasm, and your boundless love... I have BETTER things to do this Valentine's Day! Like:
- Trying not to weep openly in public
- Trying not to think about all the great sex my ex-girlfriends must be having right now
- Stockpiling cheap hooch, 'cause once you get started, it can be tough to find the booze store when you need more
- Finding a comfortable, out-of-the-way gutter
- Maybe looking into that heroin addiction idea I've been kicking around
- Harshly silencing those dopey "friends" who always want to "help," as if I have some kind of "problem"
- Pondering a little private self-love, if you know what I mean, but realizing my self-loathing will just shoot me down, anyway
Yes, that's the glorious Valentine's Day I've got planned so far... anyone else have ideas?
I'm halfway through this book now, and Po struggled with the class issues a little himself. He wondered if the whole question isn't a little bourgeois. He discovered that that isn't the case - lower and middle class people struggle with the same questions.
Maybe a person with more money has more options, but more options does not necessarily make a decision easier, either.
Also: in general, people tend to spend what they make. The guy who makes $200k might be just as leveraged and stuck as a guy who makes $30k. OK, he drives a cooler car, but does that, in itself, make him less noble?
Even the loosest definition implies some degree of lost revenue, which sure as hell isn't the case with me. I don't want what the delivery systems currently provide, at any price. Just because I happen to have opportunities to view and hear the content anyway does not make that "theft."
Do you call it theft when I go to a friend's house to watch The Simpsons instead of subscribing to cable myself? Is it theft when a friend loans me his Sopranos DVDs instead of subscribing to HBO? How is that practically - not semantically, but practically - different from downloading a Futurama episode off the net?
And I'm 73 years old. What, am I not mature enough for you? Shucks, and we had such a beautiful thing going...
Yeah, that's a good guess... none of them happen to be true in my particular case - at the moment - but I bet it's true most of the time. I also bet, though, that that's going to be changing over the next few years, and especially when the screens/projectors get better and cheaper. You'll still want a regular PC for work, but for home entertainment, one little Shuttle-like box, a set of good speakers, one remote, and one slick interface just makes a lot of sense for all but the most dedicated A/V grognards.
Especially when you combine it with an Archos or Video iPod...
Most of my MP3s are indeed legit (my CD collection is irritatingly huge), but not all. This is how I operate: I buy what I would've bought even if I couldn't get a "free" copy of it. But stuff I wouldn't buy for the going price, I might download.
Certain artists, I'll always buy their CDs/DVDs, out of respect and a desire to see that work continue. Independent artists in particular need this.
Counterexample: I wouldn't buy the soundtrack to "Battlestar Galactica" in a record store even if I won the lottery. I wouldn't take it if it was in the free box. But I'd download it for free, cause it's kinda goofy and nostalgic to have around. And if it were available to download in MP3 for a nickel a track, I'd buy it. Go figure.
Same goes for bootleg/OOP material. If I can't buy it anyway, but would/will if/when it becomes available, then it's no harm, no foul.
Is it legal? Is it ethical? Doesn't seem like a clear-cut issue either way, but I sleep just fine at night.
As far as the renting DVDs thing, as far as I'm concerned, it falls under timeshifting. Crappy or even average DVDs are too big to keep around on a hard drive frivolously, and the good ones I buy anyway. If it is technically illegal, it's very much a victimless crime, and anyone who would whine about it is a sanctimonious prick who deserves to be ruthlessly ignored.
Like they need a villain. They'll take away rights from people all over the world, regardless.
The MPAA, RIAA and sometimes even Congress are damage, and geeks will route around them.
As long as the MPAA, RIAA and the few cable/satellite companies have monopolies on media delivery, and continue to cling to outdated business models, resist new technologies, squash fair use, and attempt to implement nonsensical and tyrannical schemes of all kinds, they are the villain. Far as I'm concerned, anyone who disagrees is a retard, a shill, or just plain old-fashioned contrary (and good for you if you are that curmudgeon - it's cute).
These corporations could choose to sell me the services and products I want, and I'd be glad to pay for them. But they won't. They are irrelevant, and the world will move on in spite of them.
I've got one PC with a 21" NEC Multisync monitor. No TV, no Tivo, no Playstation, no stereo. And I love it. I'd hate to have the setup you've got.
The only downside is the monitor isn't as large as I'd like. 21" is pretty much a minimum size. I'm hoping for a huge flat widescreen monitor in the future.
My PC doesn't have an AIW or any other TV capability, because I don't have cable - thanks to the wonders of the internet, and my friends who do have cable, I don't really need it. But DVDs played on my PC look far better than on my friends' TVs. The colors are more vivid and the image is sharper - what's not to like? And 200gigs of instant-access MP3s kicks all kinds of ass over an MP3-enabled CD player. Logitech and Klipsch make speakers that sound terrific to me.
Best of all - if I rent a DVD and don't get time to watch it (happens all the time to me), I can just copy it to my hard drive 'til later.
And everything's available through one interface, in one place, with a wireless mouse or remote. No piles of remotes, no jungles of wires, no components stacked all over the place.
As far as I'm concerned, this is how it should be... bring on more!
Proven oil reserves in "thousand million barrels":
Canada: 1981: 8.5 1991: 8.0 2000: 6.4
Total Middle East: 1981: 362.6 1991: 661.6 2000: 683.5
Source: BP statistical review of world energy - Oil and Gas Journal posts very similar numbers, and World Oil posted numbers varying by somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05%, by my quick off-the-cuff glance. It's true that Canada may potentially have much more oil, but statistics about unproven reserves are even less reliable for comparison's sake.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that Canada has 4.7 billion barrels of reserves, and is the No. 3 supplier of crude oil to the US, behind Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
The US gets somewhere between 25% and 45% of its oil from the Middle East, depending on where you look. Not that the statistics are the end-all and be-all, anyway... the real question is, is there a compelling strategic need to maintain a reasonable amount of control over current oil production (even "less than 20%" as you claim is a very substantial amount of oil), is there a staggeringly humongous amount of money to be made by the oil industry in the Middle East and Central Asia, and do George Bush, Dick Cheney, the S.S. Condoleeza Rice, Hamid Karzai, and others have substantial investments, holdings, and interests in the oil industry? Will these people likely continue with or go back to the oil industy after their term is up? Are most of their backers, family, family friends, and business associates from the oil/energy industries?
The US already uses its political leverage to increase oil production in Canada. You may notice they don't need to send the 101st Airborne to do so, as they may in more unruly parts of the world. If you do even the slightest bit of research, you might find that some Canadians feel that NAFTA and other agreements has already basically ceded their oil to US interests. And the US managed to do that without having support a coup, as they did, whaddaya know, just recently in Venezuela.
Your facts are wrong and your reasoning is faulty. If you truly want to be better informed, take a look at The Economist or the BBC, for starters.
most people don't rip DVD's onto hard drives, and the few who do are pretty stupid
I dunno... I was just thinking about this the other day. Let's say an average DVD is 6 gigs and 20 bucks. You could fit 20 DVDs on a 120 gig drive. You'll spend probably $200 for the drive and rentals versus $400 for the DVDs. Throw compression into the mix, and the cost disparity goes through the roof. Throw in downloaded and homemade content, and there's plenty of reasons for wanting to access media stored on a hard drive from your TV.
Granted, 120 gigs isn't much, but 320s are just around the corner, and who knows how far we'll be in another year or two.
Storing movies on hard drives (or some other future large media) is the way to go, AFAIC. I'm sick of all this physical media. I'd much rather have a gigantic, portable, external hard drive that I can plug in anywhere and keep my whole media collection on than acres of shelf space for CDs and DVDs. Now, if only they'd build Firewire/USB2 jacks into car stereos and TVs, along with decent interfaces for accessing media drives, we'd be all set...
I've always to assemble a MegaTouch... those dopey trivia/photo hunt machines you see at bars and airports. I know the MegaTouch XL used commodity 486 hardware and appears to boot off a CD, but apparently there's a proprietary PROM and a "Dallas" security key that I know nothing about. Anyone ever get ahold of a MegaTouch CD and mess around with it?
Who the fuck has 220GB of personal data? Seriously, for the cost of backing up that much porn, you can just go down to the store and buy the legit DVDs.
Actually, if you watch DVDs on your PC like I do, it's cheaper to just copy them to the hard drive than buy them. A 120GB drive is $165 at NewEgg. An average DVD is probably 6GB. That's 20 DVDs per $165 hard drive. Figure $20 per DVD, and suddenly the hard drive is a bargain.
You'd spend $400 for 20 DVDs.
You'd spend $200 for a hard drive plus rentals, plus you get quick, easy access to your movies, plus you get flexibility... need space for other stuff? Well, how often did you watch "Point Break" anyway? The downside is, you can't really bring your movies over to a friend's house to share unless you get an external enclosure and he's got his PC hooked up to an entertainment center too, but on the other hand, you might be better off just leaving "Point Break" as your own little secret, anyway.
If you want to back 'em up, though, then you're into the same ballpark, cost-wise. But if it's just DVDs, why bother? You can always just rent or borrow 'em again. Hopefully in the next few years there will be affordable and huge backup options.
Damn skippy, Americans have gotten what we deserve. I don't mean the 9/11 attacks (rhetoric aside, no one deserves to actually be killed, IMO), but we get what we deserve with the Bush administration. These guys are so blatantly malicious, so asinine, so crazy, there's practically a new "holy shit" moment every week. Last week it was that Kissinger business, this week it was authorizing the CIA to kill American citizens, now it's this... next week it'll be something even more out there... And NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE. These guys can just about do whatever they want, and no one blinks. No one cares. And if Bush doesn't "win" the election in 2004, I'll eat my hand.
Oh,/. cares now that suddenly someone's attacked a universally sacred geek cow, but this is just a minor speedbump.
I applaud the Fuck Yous to the adminstration, but we need to not forget the real problem: fuck you, everyone who voted for these people, and double-fuck everyone who inexplicably continues to support them. There's something seriously wrong with those people, and I'm embarassed to share a species with them, let alone a country.
I'm at the point where I don't even bother arguing with them anymore. It's like arguing with flat-earthers - why bother. But the weird part is, there's probably a good 50-100 million of those people. Most of them are not even clinically mentally deficient in some way, so they don't even have that excuse. Those people fully deserve the government they get. I just wish I wasn't living in the same place as them...
For home use, you can't beat an external exclosure with a whopping great hard drive. NewEgg has a great one for $76 that's USB2 and Firewire. Keep it in your office and take it home with you once a week, and back up changed files.
It's offsite, it's fast, it's reasonably cheap, it's easy, you'll know if there's a problem with the media, you can plug it in anywhere and read your files with no special drives or drivers, and you can easily upgrade as you need more space.
Sure, it's more ghetto than 'leet, but it'll do the trick...
I've bought dozens of Asus boards over the years, but one day a few years back I needed a mobo quick, and turned to my friendly neighborhood computer store. They only had Abit boards on hand, and I, having read all kinds of glowing reviews online, figured a KA-7 would be fine.
Within a year, it had blown caps. Wasted a lot of time with that PC, trying to figure out the problem.
I love Sketchup, but at $500 it is probably too expensive. Still, it is fun - you can download a fully functional demo from their site, and it's good for 8 hours of use. It's pretty intuitive, so that might be enough time for your situation.
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The Zion scenes were pretty terrible. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the rave/sex scene (which didn't bother me mostly because the music reminded me of the classic Frankie Goes to Hollywood "Two Tribes" extended mix), but I was grinding my teeth through all the scenes with the angry commander guy and the dopey council people. There was so much eye-rollingly lame crap to sit through, most of it felt like a bad Star Trek episode. Shitty acting, lousy script, poor direction. Even the set design in Zion seemed weak... it looks like it was all designed to be grungy and hip circa 1995. And I notice they have beautiful high-tech air-traffic control centers, but apparently no one in Zion's ever heard of a freakin' washing machine. You'd think the Chosen One could get a little laundry service.
I even thought some of the fights were tiresome. Big deal, Neo slapfighting somebody... it may be nice choreography, but it's all clinical. The Burly Brawl is fun, but it's Morpheus' fight scene on the semi that's really worth sitting through the rest of the drek for. Great stuff.
I'm not saying the first Matrix script was a stroke of genius, either, but there was nothing in the second one that was as clever or fun as some of the bits in the first. And personally, I don't go for all the high school philosophy jibber-jabber... I appreciate that some people get a lot out of it or read a lot into it, but for me, it's a big freakin' yawn. Smoke some pot and read some Phillip K. Dick and get over it...
I hope someone does a "Phantom Edit" on this one!
Oh, man, they must never get rid of the Wave Swinger. I already miss the old fun house, the earthquake ride, and my favorite ever, that one spinner contraption over by the aquarium where the floor drops out and you stick to the walls. Now that was a cool ride.
Those are gone but the Disaster Transport remained. Go figure.
I used to go there every summer, but since I moved to Washington it's not quite as convenient. I think the last time I was there the ride that year was the Raptor, which is amazing.
Just tell me - the arcade is still there, right? With all the classic games? That's the real important nerdy part of Cedar Point.
ACE looks beautiful - clean and functional and fast. But $700/year seems a wee steep for what it is... do you run this? Is it worth it?
How is it for DVDs? I need to replace my 21" NEC MultiSync...
So my impression is that if Iraq was found to be in breach, then military force to 'secure the peace' was already explicitly authorized. Was there a need for Powell to go to the Security Council for a vote in the first place? At least in theory, could any member of the UN have legally assembled a 'peacekeeping' force and enforced the resolution without any further SC approval?
Yeah, the Guardian was just convenient on that one. I usually try to skip around as many different outlets as possible and compare and contrast, with the exception of Fox News, which makes my teeth hurt.
That's an excellent explanation of the resolutions, and thanks for it.
9 ,00.html
My question, however, is how do they define disarmament? Do the inspectors need to find proof that Iraq is deliberately hiding weapons, or is it enough to suspect it? Who decides the point at which Iraq is in material breach? Was there a clear methodology in place for enforcing the resolutions?
Also, have the missiles been positively ID'd as scuds? My impression is that the media is using the term scud generically, or at least speculatively. This article in the Guardian is the latest I've found, and it suggests that things aren't clear at this point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,91887
Bah, humbug. You lot can go on with your foolish optimism, your hopeful enthusiasm, and your boundless love... I have BETTER things to do this Valentine's Day! Like:
- Trying not to weep openly in public
- Trying not to think about all the great sex my ex-girlfriends must be having right now
- Stockpiling cheap hooch, 'cause once you get started, it can be tough to find the booze store when you need more
- Finding a comfortable, out-of-the-way gutter
- Maybe looking into that heroin addiction idea I've been kicking around
- Harshly silencing those dopey "friends" who always want to "help," as if I have some kind of "problem"
- Pondering a little private self-love, if you know what I mean, but realizing my self-loathing will just shoot me down, anyway
Yes, that's the glorious Valentine's Day I've got planned so far... anyone else have ideas?
I have lots of fun things in mind for Valentine's Day!
- Trying not to weep openly in public
- Trying not to think about all the great sex my ex-girlfriends must be having right about now
- Stockpiling cheap hooch, 'cause once you get started, it can be tough to find the booze store when you need more
- Finding a comfortable, out-of-the-way gutter
- Maybe looking into that heroin addiction idea I've been kicking around
That's all I've got planned so far... anyone else have ideas?
I'm halfway through this book now, and Po struggled with the class issues a little himself. He wondered if the whole question isn't a little bourgeois. He discovered that that isn't the case - lower and middle class people struggle with the same questions.
Maybe a person with more money has more options, but more options does not necessarily make a decision easier, either.
Also: in general, people tend to spend what they make. The guy who makes $200k might be just as leveraged and stuck as a guy who makes $30k. OK, he drives a cooler car, but does that, in itself, make him less noble?
Here's a clue: look up the definition of "steal."
Even the loosest definition implies some degree of lost revenue, which sure as hell isn't the case with me. I don't want what the delivery systems currently provide, at any price. Just because I happen to have opportunities to view and hear the content anyway does not make that "theft."
Do you call it theft when I go to a friend's house to watch The Simpsons instead of subscribing to cable myself? Is it theft when a friend loans me his Sopranos DVDs instead of subscribing to HBO? How is that practically - not semantically, but practically - different from downloading a Futurama episode off the net?
And I'm 73 years old. What, am I not mature enough for you? Shucks, and we had such a beautiful thing going...
Yeah, that's a good guess... none of them happen to be true in my particular case - at the moment - but I bet it's true most of the time. I also bet, though, that that's going to be changing over the next few years, and especially when the screens/projectors get better and cheaper. You'll still want a regular PC for work, but for home entertainment, one little Shuttle-like box, a set of good speakers, one remote, and one slick interface just makes a lot of sense for all but the most dedicated A/V grognards.
Especially when you combine it with an Archos or Video iPod...
Most of my MP3s are indeed legit (my CD collection is irritatingly huge), but not all. This is how I operate: I buy what I would've bought even if I couldn't get a "free" copy of it. But stuff I wouldn't buy for the going price, I might download.
Certain artists, I'll always buy their CDs/DVDs, out of respect and a desire to see that work continue. Independent artists in particular need this.
Counterexample: I wouldn't buy the soundtrack to "Battlestar Galactica" in a record store even if I won the lottery. I wouldn't take it if it was in the free box. But I'd download it for free, cause it's kinda goofy and nostalgic to have around. And if it were available to download in MP3 for a nickel a track, I'd buy it. Go figure.
Same goes for bootleg/OOP material. If I can't buy it anyway, but would/will if/when it becomes available, then it's no harm, no foul.
Is it legal? Is it ethical? Doesn't seem like a clear-cut issue either way, but I sleep just fine at night.
As far as the renting DVDs thing, as far as I'm concerned, it falls under timeshifting. Crappy or even average DVDs are too big to keep around on a hard drive frivolously, and the good ones I buy anyway. If it is technically illegal, it's very much a victimless crime, and anyone who would whine about it is a sanctimonious prick who deserves to be ruthlessly ignored.
Like they need a villain. They'll take away rights from people all over the world, regardless.
The MPAA, RIAA and sometimes even Congress are damage, and geeks will route around them.
As long as the MPAA, RIAA and the few cable/satellite companies have monopolies on media delivery, and continue to cling to outdated business models, resist new technologies, squash fair use, and attempt to implement nonsensical and tyrannical schemes of all kinds, they are the villain. Far as I'm concerned, anyone who disagrees is a retard, a shill, or just plain old-fashioned contrary (and good for you if you are that curmudgeon - it's cute).
These corporations could choose to sell me the services and products I want, and I'd be glad to pay for them. But they won't. They are irrelevant, and the world will move on in spite of them.
I've got one PC with a 21" NEC Multisync monitor. No TV, no Tivo, no Playstation, no stereo. And I love it. I'd hate to have the setup you've got.
The only downside is the monitor isn't as large as I'd like. 21" is pretty much a minimum size. I'm hoping for a huge flat widescreen monitor in the future.
My PC doesn't have an AIW or any other TV capability, because I don't have cable - thanks to the wonders of the internet, and my friends who do have cable, I don't really need it. But DVDs played on my PC look far better than on my friends' TVs. The colors are more vivid and the image is sharper - what's not to like? And 200gigs of instant-access MP3s kicks all kinds of ass over an MP3-enabled CD player. Logitech and Klipsch make speakers that sound terrific to me.
Best of all - if I rent a DVD and don't get time to watch it (happens all the time to me), I can just copy it to my hard drive 'til later.
And everything's available through one interface, in one place, with a wireless mouse or remote. No piles of remotes, no jungles of wires, no components stacked all over the place.
As far as I'm concerned, this is how it should be... bring on more!
Proven oil reserves in "thousand million barrels":
Canada:
1981: 8.5
1991: 8.0
2000: 6.4
Total Middle East:
1981: 362.6
1991: 661.6
2000: 683.5
Source: BP statistical review of world energy - Oil and Gas Journal posts very similar numbers, and World Oil posted numbers varying by somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05%, by my quick off-the-cuff glance. It's true that Canada may potentially have much more oil, but statistics about unproven reserves are even less reliable for comparison's sake.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that Canada has 4.7 billion barrels of reserves, and is the No. 3 supplier of crude oil to the US, behind Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
The US gets somewhere between 25% and 45% of its oil from the Middle East, depending on where you look. Not that the statistics are the end-all and be-all, anyway... the real question is, is there a compelling strategic need to maintain a reasonable amount of control over current oil production (even "less than 20%" as you claim is a very substantial amount of oil), is there a staggeringly humongous amount of money to be made by the oil industry in the Middle East and Central Asia, and do George Bush, Dick Cheney, the S.S. Condoleeza Rice, Hamid Karzai, and others have substantial investments, holdings, and interests in the oil industry? Will these people likely continue with or go back to the oil industy after their term is up? Are most of their backers, family, family friends, and business associates from the oil/energy industries?
The US already uses its political leverage to increase oil production in Canada. You may notice they don't need to send the 101st Airborne to do so, as they may in more unruly parts of the world. If you do even the slightest bit of research, you might find that some Canadians feel that NAFTA and other agreements has already basically ceded their oil to US interests. And the US managed to do that without having support a coup, as they did, whaddaya know, just recently in Venezuela.
Your facts are wrong and your reasoning is faulty. If you truly want to be better informed, take a look at The Economist or the BBC, for starters.
I'd just like to take a moment to thank everyone who voted for Bush and Ashcroft for their hard work in being total idiots.
Like all of this wasn't completely predictable from the beginning, you fucktards. Thanks a lot.
After all, nothing assures freedom like easily manipulated, credulous and distractible voters. Keep it up!
And what's worse, the parrot is now completely psychotic from having watched so much Fox News.
Damn shame.
most people don't rip DVD's onto hard drives, and the few who do are pretty stupid
I dunno... I was just thinking about this the other day. Let's say an average DVD is 6 gigs and 20 bucks. You could fit 20 DVDs on a 120 gig drive. You'll spend probably $200 for the drive and rentals versus $400 for the DVDs. Throw compression into the mix, and the cost disparity goes through the roof. Throw in downloaded and homemade content, and there's plenty of reasons for wanting to access media stored on a hard drive from your TV.
Granted, 120 gigs isn't much, but 320s are just around the corner, and who knows how far we'll be in another year or two.
Storing movies on hard drives (or some other future large media) is the way to go, AFAIC. I'm sick of all this physical media. I'd much rather have a gigantic, portable, external hard drive that I can plug in anywhere and keep my whole media collection on than acres of shelf space for CDs and DVDs. Now, if only they'd build Firewire/USB2 jacks into car stereos and TVs, along with decent interfaces for accessing media drives, we'd be all set...
I've always to assemble a MegaTouch... those dopey trivia/photo hunt machines you see at bars and airports. I know the MegaTouch XL used commodity 486 hardware and appears to boot off a CD, but apparently there's a proprietary PROM and a "Dallas" security key that I know nothing about. Anyone ever get ahold of a MegaTouch CD and mess around with it?
Who the fuck has 220GB of personal data? Seriously, for the cost of backing up that much porn, you can just go down to the store and buy the legit DVDs.
Actually, if you watch DVDs on your PC like I do, it's cheaper to just copy them to the hard drive than buy them. A 120GB drive is $165 at NewEgg. An average DVD is probably 6GB. That's 20 DVDs per $165 hard drive. Figure $20 per DVD, and suddenly the hard drive is a bargain.
You'd spend $400 for 20 DVDs.
You'd spend $200 for a hard drive plus rentals, plus you get quick, easy access to your movies, plus you get flexibility... need space for other stuff? Well, how often did you watch "Point Break" anyway? The downside is, you can't really bring your movies over to a friend's house to share unless you get an external enclosure and he's got his PC hooked up to an entertainment center too, but on the other hand, you might be better off just leaving "Point Break" as your own little secret, anyway.
If you want to back 'em up, though, then you're into the same ballpark, cost-wise. But if it's just DVDs, why bother? You can always just rent or borrow 'em again. Hopefully in the next few years there will be affordable and huge backup options.
Can't wait for 320GB drives...
Damn skippy, Americans have gotten what we deserve. I don't mean the 9/11 attacks (rhetoric aside, no one deserves to actually be killed, IMO), but we get what we deserve with the Bush administration. These guys are so blatantly malicious, so asinine, so crazy, there's practically a new "holy shit" moment every week. Last week it was that Kissinger business, this week it was authorizing the CIA to kill American citizens, now it's this... next week it'll be something even more out there... And NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE. These guys can just about do whatever they want, and no one blinks. No one cares. And if Bush doesn't "win" the election in 2004, I'll eat my hand.
/. cares now that suddenly someone's attacked a universally sacred geek cow, but this is just a minor speedbump.
Oh,
I applaud the Fuck Yous to the adminstration, but we need to not forget the real problem: fuck you, everyone who voted for these people, and double-fuck everyone who inexplicably continues to support them. There's something seriously wrong with those people, and I'm embarassed to share a species with them, let alone a country.
I'm at the point where I don't even bother arguing with them anymore. It's like arguing with flat-earthers - why bother. But the weird part is, there's probably a good 50-100 million of those people. Most of them are not even clinically mentally deficient in some way, so they don't even have that excuse. Those people fully deserve the government they get. I just wish I wasn't living in the same place as them...
For home use, you can't beat an external exclosure with a whopping great hard drive. NewEgg has a great one for $76 that's USB2 and Firewire. Keep it in your office and take it home with you once a week, and back up changed files.
It's offsite, it's fast, it's reasonably cheap, it's easy, you'll know if there's a problem with the media, you can plug it in anywhere and read your files with no special drives or drivers, and you can easily upgrade as you need more space.
Sure, it's more ghetto than 'leet, but it'll do the trick...
I've bought dozens of Asus boards over the years, but one day a few years back I needed a mobo quick, and turned to my friendly neighborhood computer store. They only had Abit boards on hand, and I, having read all kinds of glowing reviews online, figured a KA-7 would be fine.
Within a year, it had blown caps. Wasted a lot of time with that PC, trying to figure out the problem.
It was my first and last Abit board.
For those whose pumpkin tastes runs less towards throwing and more towards... well... intimacy, there's Punkin Lovin.
I love Sketchup, but at $500 it is probably too expensive. Still, it is fun - you can download a fully functional demo from their site, and it's good for 8 hours of use. It's pretty intuitive, so that might be enough time for your situation.