The original Drumm train was constructed in the Great Southern Railways workshops at Inchicore. The weight of the train with passengers was about 85 tons. There was seating accommodation for 140 passengers. The train could accelerate from standstill at about 1 m.p.h. per second and attain speeds of 40 to 50 m.p.h. with ease. The train was fitted with a successful system of regenerative braking, whereby an important fraction of the energy surge made available on a down-gradient or on de-accelerating at a station was returned to the battery. The Drumm Battery train operated successfully on the Dublin to Bray section of the line with occasional runs to Greystones some five miles farther on, from 1932 to 1948. As passsenger numbers increased two pairs of power units were joined under the control of one driver and later a specially wired coach was put between the two trains bringing its capacity up to 400 passengers. By 1939, four Drumm trains had been built but it became impossible to secure orders and raw material once the World War 11, 1939-1945, broke out. The Drumm Battery Company folded in 1940. The outbreak of the war made the Drumm trains invaluable as coal for steam engines was in short supply and inferior. With the war over, it was decided in 1949 to scrap the Drumm trains at a time when the promise of diesel locomotives pointed to the end of the steam era. The Drumm trains, minus their batteries were sometimes used as ordinary coaches. http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/history/drumm.html
i'd be really happy if they allowed me to delete the attachments but leave the email. i believe the feature was requested yonks ago but so far has not happened. i'm currently at 50% but that would drop to less than 10% if i could delete the attachments i already have downloaded.
other than that i cannot fault the service. i get my email at work, home and on my phone with no hassles. thanks google!
what safeguards would be put in place to protect these m-votes? worse, smses at very busy times are simply dumped. every new year i get messages a few hours or days late when the mobile phone system is overloaded. or they simply never turn up.
what i do know is that 2 of our suppliers who normally don't sell apple stock were offering cheap ipods for the past 2-3 months here in ireland. they really seem to have been off loading ipod video and ipod nano stock. i also heard from friends who had companies they dealt with offering similar deals. now it might just be the lower end but it was still a significant departure for these companies to suddenly offer stock from a company they normally had no dealings with.
prices offered to us * ipod nano 4gb 165 * ipod 30gb black 210
>Some people describe living in the Dymaxion house like living in an airplane.
some people live in boats or trailers. it can be done. not everybodies needs are the same.
>Space is limited,
i live in a tiny flat. for some space is all important. for me nice area was more important. i have a ton of stuff all packed. i see it as helping me get over my packrat nature. have to only keep a bare minimum of gear.
>and curved, so you will not be able to use regular furniture.
very true and probably i reckon the biggest problem or restriction. still just like if you were living on a boat you would build furniture to fit. yet i'm still attracted to the idea of a round house.
>Then there are the aluminum walls, which conduct heat like a giant heatsink.
easily beaten with newer more efficient materials. depends on the climate that you erect the house. me i like a house cold with no heating whatsoever. just that the house i grew up in had been designed without central heating and i adapted to that.
what i think was ironic was that back in 91 they had the acorn pocket book a pda that was targeted at schools. now we're waiting for the olpc. both designed around low cost and great battery life.
i had the commercial version the psion 3a myself and i can still remember how easy it was to code on them. only in the last year or so has my symbian phone begun to duplicate the functionality that the psions and acorns had back in the 90s. it's a bit depressing really to see great hardware and software fail.
KIRK: Dammit, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're things we carry with us -- the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain.
what caught my eye was the first line in causes of brigandage.
'Causes of brigandage:The conditions which favour the development of brigandage may be easily summed up. They are first bad administration, and then, in a less degree, the possession of convenient hiding-places.'
bad administration goes without saying when it comes to the policing and defence of peoples rights. the kicker was the refering to the convenient hiding place. i always picture the riaa and their ilk as hiding behind the law using their deeper pockets to win.
it always seems that when i hear wacky stories like this it involves some little old man or woman. is it because it involves an old person that the story is more likely to be reported?
> When you're poor enough, everything beyond food and bills becomes a major expense
From Terry Pratchetts Men at Arms
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
i travel on public transport here in dublin ireland. 3+ hours a day. it's interesting to watch the various devices in use.
every day i see dozens of various players/pdas/phones in use on the bus, waiting in queues and so forth. i would recognise a zune if i saw one as it has such a large screen. still haven't seen one. ipods, creative, archos (and i thought they were rare) are common. i watch my portable tv on a nokia 770.
they should be more visible as you can watch videos on them so they should be in peoples hands and not in pockets and again i still don't see them.
i've seen psp's before they were released in ireland. i've seen about a dozen sharp zaurus's (even the rare only released in japan versions) so it is a good place to spot hardware.
while you're correct in pointing out that the numbers out there are relatively small i still think you should have a good chance to spot one by now if you are in the right public space. even if you only want to point at the poor sod and laugh.:-)
the swiss army knife is made by 2 companies victorinox and wegner. they buy 50% of their knives from each as they did not want to have to depend on a single manufacturer. it lasted for about 100 years till it looked like wegner was going to be bought by a non swiss company. victorinox stepped in and bought wegner but maintains it as separate company.
perhaps the olpc project could buy 50% of their chips from intel and 50% from amd. of course they would have to each be making a very similar chip or for intel to be building the amd chip under licence. they could still compete and profit as they each find cheaper ways to make the same chips. they would each be demonstrating that their interest is in educating the children which is very good pr.
>everything they do or say is subjected to unending speculation here, albeit negative.
they've fucked over so many of their partners. they've broken so many laws. and the us government does nothing. should people who can see that they are doing evil ignore them? that'll make the problem go away! hey that might work!
>Outside of Slashdot I dont know a soul who really gives a rats ass what MS do
my brother knows nothing about computers. what he does know is that every 3-4 weeks he was calling me to get rid of viruses on his system. i can install firefox, avg, thunderbird and remove as much ms junk as possible but some will inevitably get through as it's the os that is vulnerable especially to socially engineered attacks (it's also not easy downloading 50 million patches on dialup, teaching that porn.jpg.exe in an email should not be opened etc.). i finally convinced him to get a mac and all now is happiness and light. after a couple of months him and his kids are using it more than they ever used the windows pc. he loves it so much he's now trying to convince his friends to switch from ms. he really gives a rats ass enough to try and convince them! i love seeing people switch, it's seeing them realise computers can work without driving them crazy.
>and would never in a million years even consider discussing MS in the sort of emotive language used here.
pick an industry. they all have whipping posts. it's just that ms is such a good one as they really really deserve it:-)
> Microsoft was the first company to really get the PDA right
that honour i think many would agree would fall to psion (at least for anybody who has ever used one). portable. ran for a week on aa batteries. incredibly useful.
in the early 90s here in ireland and the uk i think every accountant and architect (plus a lot of docters) seemed to have one. whenever they released a new one they fetched premium prices as people bidded to get there hands on one. it handled out of the box spreadsheets, word processing and had a built in programming language opl. pure genius.
however as with many things victory does not favour the best. windows desktops for everybody?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_PLC i love that the article above mention that they got out as they faced competition from keyboardless rivals when now more and more devices are going back to keyboards. of all the portable keyboards that i have used the best is still the psion 3a.
on the plus side the software they created ended up as symbian in 100m phones so it's not all bad.
today my psion 5 has been replaced by a nokia e61. not perfect but still a damn sight better than any windows device i've tried.
it's not quite ready for joe average yet. or at least i'm not capable of supporting it yet. i'll get there as there are dozens of abandoned windows systems that people have given up on that ubuntu would do very nicely on.
i have got most of the people i know moved over to mac and know other nerds who've switched their families and friends over as well. the easiest way to do this is tell people that mac support is free but that i charge 50 an hour to fix windows(i usually only charge for the first hour unless they've done something bad which i've warned them about before more than once). after 3-4 visits people start thinking a cheap mac mini looks even cheaper.
some times you have to be cruel to be kind but it was getting to be a joke with some people calling me 1-2 a month to clean down a windows system that had been reinfected (they were using thunderbird and firefox and still got infected). the infections weren't as bad as internet explorer users but still bad enough to need to rebuild the system.
if enough nerds to this then microsoft will actually have to support their customers or the oems that sell the pcs. up till now most people have depended on friends and family to repair their systems. take away the free tech support and then see what happens to ms profits.
good luck to the hacker getting a keyboard logger on that!:-) probably possible with a vnc server but bloody difficult.
that been said i bought a 770 second hand and i've stopped using it. i got a nokia e61 a few weeks after buying it and i'm now using the e61 for almost everything that i bought the 770 for.
* reading etexts, the 770 and 800 are almost to big for this. if the book is a ascii text document then it is very readable on the e61. the e61 is smaller and sturdier. if it is a pdf then the larger screen of the 770 scores but some pdf's that i have for rpg's are still too big to view a full line on the screen so you have to scroll left and right to read 1 line which makes it useless. i'll probably have to wait for a commercial olpc before i get a low powered cheap device that can show a pdf in a readable format. * browsing the web. while the 770 has a far larger screen i find the e61 ok for browsing low graphic sites. the lack of touchscreen on the e61 isn't as bad as i thought it would be. the joystick allows you to scroll very quickly around a site, slow down near a link and press it to select. * email. google have released a mobile client for gmail so that's taken care of very nicely on the e61. * wifi. the 770 wins here as the e61 is fussier at connecting to wifi ap. the 770 also has a far better reception. * data entry. the e61 has a small keyboard and can be used a lot easier for entering data. playing around with python these days on the bus to and from work(if only the nokia python pdf was viewable on the e61 on the pdf viewer). the touch screen keyboard of the 770 is nice but it doesn't come close to the speed of text entry that i can achieve on the e61. * movies and tv shows. a friend records tv onto files for his 770 and i find them very good while travelling on the bus (i use a good headset so i'm not the irritating people around me). haven't tried anything like this on the e61 but it would be possible. more likely i would get a ds lite media reader or a video ipod than transfer it to the e61.
overall i really liked the 770. still use it once in a while. it's greatest use is viewing files still on the phone, photos, video, mp3's as the file manager on the 770 can cut, copy and paste to the phone in my pocket. i don't see myself upgrading to the 800 unless some killer app comes along.
>If you're bemoaning The Fifth Element only moving about 900 copies a week and making the top-10 for it, well, maybe your format needs more appealing films than 10-year-old sci-fi dreck that The Daily Show once called "the gay Star Wars."
are you crazy? i'd consider fifth element to be one of the top 10 sci fi movies of all time (ok may be top 20:-) ). that list would not include star wars (not trolling, just thought star wars was weak sci fi, good space opera).
less off topic. i have a copy of fifth element on dvd with a shelf load of other movies i liked and bought (i have bittorrents of some but i usually always try and get a legit copy) there is no compelling reason to get a blu ray or hd dvd version. * the cost of a player alone puts me off (the cheapest is sony ps3 and there's no way i'm going to pay for that power hungry piece of crap). * as a nerd i hate the drm crap they contain (treat me like a thief and i will behave like a thief!). * more importantly i'm more likely these days to watch a movie on a handheld of some sort while travelling (nokia 770 currently, i might get an ipod video). this means converting the film i have into a portable format. these new formats make this more difficult and considering i'm lowering the quality of the movie that i will be watching completely pointless to have that extra resolution.
these companies don't get it. sony tried to break into the portable market with the psp umd discs and look how that turned out.
when a format better than dvd with the flexibility of dvd and the cost of dvd or less comes along then maybe i will switch. till then i'll keep checking the bargin bin at my local video shop.
Slashdot Mirror
i'd be really happy if they allowed me to delete the attachments but leave the email. i believe the feature was requested yonks ago but so far has not happened. i'm currently at 50% but that would drop to less than 10% if i could delete the attachments i already have downloaded.
other than that i cannot fault the service. i get my email at work, home and on my phone with no hassles. thanks google!
mod parent up
there has been vote rigging on a number of tv shows.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article2540055.ece
what safeguards would be put in place to protect these m-votes? worse, smses at very busy times are simply dumped. every new year i get messages a few hours or days late when the mobile phone system is overloaded. or they simply never turn up.
when working on a windows or one of the few dos systems still about i use ted 1.1 quite a bit.
ted.com is 2988 bytes in size.
it's limited to 64k text files. but by golly it's a great little editor written in the 80s
TED 1.1 (c) 1988 Ziff Communications Co.
PC Magazine Tom Kihlken
perhaps.
what i do know is that 2 of our suppliers who normally don't sell apple stock were offering cheap ipods for the past 2-3 months here in ireland. they really seem to have been off loading ipod video and ipod nano stock. i also heard from friends who had companies they dealt with offering similar deals. now it might just be the lower end but it was still a significant departure for these companies to suddenly offer stock from a company they normally had no dealings with.
prices offered to us
* ipod nano 4gb 165
* ipod 30gb black 210
>Some people describe living in the Dymaxion house like living in an airplane.
some people live in boats or trailers. it can be done. not everybodies needs are the same.
>Space is limited,
i live in a tiny flat. for some space is all important. for me nice area was more important. i have a ton of stuff all packed. i see it as helping me get over my packrat nature. have to only keep a bare minimum of gear.
>and curved, so you will not be able to use regular furniture.
very true and probably i reckon the biggest problem or restriction. still just like if you were living on a boat you would build furniture to fit. yet i'm still attracted to the idea of a round house.
>Then there are the aluminum walls, which conduct heat like a giant heatsink.
easily beaten with newer more efficient materials. depends on the climate that you erect the house. me i like a house cold with no heating whatsoever. just that the house i grew up in had been designed without central heating and i adapted to that.
i'd love to see buckminster fullers house given a chance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
what i think was ironic was that back in 91 they had the acorn pocket book a pda that was targeted at schools. now we're waiting for the olpc. both designed around low cost and great battery life.
i had the commercial version the psion 3a myself and i can still remember how easy it was to code on them. only in the last year or so has my symbian phone begun to duplicate the functionality that the psions and acorns had back in the 90s. it's a bit depressing really to see great hardware and software fail.
> Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.
tell that to the guy who can add that system to his zombie botnet spewing spam.
Any moron can
Write haiku. Just stop at the
Seventeenth sylla
KIRK: Dammit, Bones, you're a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're things we carry with us -- the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain.
> 1. The word "piracy" is repeatedly used. I don't believe this is a standard legal term (outside of naval encounters).
_ brigandage
i was going to make a smart alec remark that on land piracy is called 'brigandage'
then i looked it up on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigandage#Causes_of
what caught my eye was the first line in causes of brigandage.
'Causes of brigandage:The conditions which favour the development of brigandage may be easily summed up. They are first bad administration, and then, in a less degree, the possession of convenient hiding-places.'
bad administration goes without saying when it comes to the policing and defence of peoples rights. the kicker was the refering to the convenient hiding place. i always picture the riaa and their ilk as hiding behind the law using their deeper pockets to win.
i think the main benefit of spying on consumer technology like blackberries is that it could be easier to install and harder to trace.
0 .html
they never did find who were spying on the greeks.
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1703702,0
depends on the man, depends on the bear
6 2,-1.php
http://www.thebackpacker.com/trailtalk/thread/162
it always seems that when i hear wacky stories like this it involves some little old man or woman. is it because it involves an old person that the story is more likely to be reported?
whenever i feel that the little guy is going to be crushed my some giant multi national corporation i read the mclibel case for enjoyment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case
> When you're poor enough, everything beyond food and bills becomes a major expense
From Terry Pratchetts Men at Arms
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
i travel on public transport here in dublin ireland. 3+ hours a day. it's interesting to watch the various devices in use.
:-)
every day i see dozens of various players/pdas/phones in use on the bus, waiting in queues and so forth. i would recognise a zune if i saw one as it has such a large screen. still haven't seen one. ipods, creative, archos (and i thought they were rare) are common. i watch my portable tv on a nokia 770.
they should be more visible as you can watch videos on them so they should be in peoples hands and not in pockets and again i still don't see them.
i've seen psp's before they were released in ireland. i've seen about a dozen sharp zaurus's (even the rare only released in japan versions) so it is a good place to spot hardware.
while you're correct in pointing out that the numbers out there are relatively small i still think you should have a good chance to spot one by now if you are in the right public space. even if you only want to point at the poor sod and laugh.
mod parent up.
_ Hundred_Million_S60s.php
r y_other_smartphone_sold_ac.php
symbian has recently announced the sale of 100 million series 60 devices.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/5198_One
that does not count series 40 or series 80 devices which make up a huge market in them selves.
last year 2006, 80 million smart phones were sold. symbian had 38 million of those. they are the market.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/4969_Eve
now if i could only learn python on my nokia e61.
or another option. do what the swiss army do.
t orinox_and_Wenger
the swiss army knife is made by 2 companies victorinox and wegner. they buy 50% of their knives from each as they did not want to have to depend on a single manufacturer. it lasted for about 100 years till it looked like wegner was going to be bought by a non swiss company. victorinox stepped in and bought wegner but maintains it as separate company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Army_knife#Vic
perhaps the olpc project could buy 50% of their chips from intel and 50% from amd. of course they would have to each be making a very similar chip or for intel to be building the amd chip under licence. they could still compete and profit as they each find cheaper ways to make the same chips. they would each be demonstrating that their interest is in educating the children which is very good pr.
>Slasdot is obsessed with MS,
:-)
know your enemy?
>everything they do or say is subjected to unending speculation here, albeit negative.
they've fucked over so many of their partners. they've broken so many laws. and the us government does nothing. should people who can see that they are doing evil ignore them? that'll make the problem go away! hey that might work!
>Outside of Slashdot I dont know a soul who really gives a rats ass what MS do
my brother knows nothing about computers. what he does know is that every 3-4 weeks he was calling me to get rid of viruses on his system. i can install firefox, avg, thunderbird and remove as much ms junk as possible but some will inevitably get through as it's the os that is vulnerable especially to socially engineered attacks (it's also not easy downloading 50 million patches on dialup, teaching that porn.jpg.exe in an email should not be opened etc.). i finally convinced him to get a mac and all now is happiness and light. after a couple of months him and his kids are using it more than they ever used the windows pc. he loves it so much he's now trying to convince his friends to switch from ms. he really gives a rats ass enough to try and convince them! i love seeing people switch, it's seeing them realise computers can work without driving them crazy.
>and would never in a million years even consider discussing MS in the sort of emotive language used here.
pick an industry. they all have whipping posts. it's just that ms is such a good one as they really really deserve it
> Microsoft was the first company to really get the PDA right
that honour i think many would agree would fall to psion (at least for anybody who has ever used one). portable. ran for a week on aa batteries. incredibly useful.
in the early 90s here in ireland and the uk i think every accountant and architect (plus a lot of docters) seemed to have one. whenever they released a new one they fetched premium prices as people bidded to get there hands on one. it handled out of the box spreadsheets, word processing and had a built in programming language opl. pure genius.
however as with many things victory does not favour the best. windows desktops for everybody?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_PLC
i love that the article above mention that they got out as they faced competition from keyboardless rivals when now more and more devices are going back to keyboards. of all the portable keyboards that i have used the best is still the psion 3a.
on the plus side the software they created ended up as symbian in 100m phones so it's not all bad.
today my psion 5 has been replaced by a nokia e61. not perfect but still a damn sight better than any windows device i've tried.
>No, don't try to convert them to Linux
it's not quite ready for joe average yet. or at least i'm not capable of supporting it yet. i'll get there as there are dozens of abandoned windows systems that people have given up on that ubuntu would do very nicely on.
i have got most of the people i know moved over to mac and know other nerds who've switched their families and friends over as well. the easiest way to do this is tell people that mac support is free but that i charge 50 an hour to fix windows(i usually only charge for the first hour unless they've done something bad which i've warned them about before more than once). after 3-4 visits people start thinking a cheap mac mini looks even cheaper.
some times you have to be cruel to be kind but it was getting to be a joke with some people calling me 1-2 a month to clean down a windows system that had been reinfected (they were using thunderbird and firefox and still got infected). the infections weren't as bad as internet explorer users but still bad enough to need to rebuild the system.
if enough nerds to this then microsoft will actually have to support their customers or the oems that sell the pcs. up till now most people have depended on friends and family to repair their systems. take away the free tech support and then see what happens to ms profits.
good luck to the hacker getting a keyboard logger on that! :-) probably possible with a vnc server but bloody difficult.
that been said i bought a 770 second hand and i've stopped using it. i got a nokia e61 a few weeks after buying it and i'm now using the e61 for almost everything that i bought the 770 for.
* reading etexts, the 770 and 800 are almost to big for this. if the book is a ascii text document then it is very readable on the e61. the e61 is smaller and sturdier. if it is a pdf then the larger screen of the 770 scores but some pdf's that i have for rpg's are still too big to view a full line on the screen so you have to scroll left and right to read 1 line which makes it useless. i'll probably have to wait for a commercial olpc before i get a low powered cheap device that can show a pdf in a readable format.
* browsing the web. while the 770 has a far larger screen i find the e61 ok for browsing low graphic sites. the lack of touchscreen on the e61 isn't as bad as i thought it would be. the joystick allows you to scroll very quickly around a site, slow down near a link and press it to select.
* email. google have released a mobile client for gmail so that's taken care of very nicely on the e61.
* wifi. the 770 wins here as the e61 is fussier at connecting to wifi ap. the 770 also has a far better reception.
* data entry. the e61 has a small keyboard and can be used a lot easier for entering data. playing around with python these days on the bus to and from work(if only the nokia python pdf was viewable on the e61 on the pdf viewer). the touch screen keyboard of the 770 is nice but it doesn't come close to the speed of text entry that i can achieve on the e61.
* movies and tv shows. a friend records tv onto files for his 770 and i find them very good while travelling on the bus (i use a good headset so i'm not the irritating people around me). haven't tried anything like this on the e61 but it would be possible. more likely i would get a ds lite media reader or a video ipod than transfer it to the e61.
overall i really liked the 770. still use it once in a while. it's greatest use is viewing files still on the phone, photos, video, mp3's as the file manager on the 770 can cut, copy and paste to the phone in my pocket. i don't see myself upgrading to the 800 unless some killer app comes along.
>If you're bemoaning The Fifth Element only moving about 900 copies a week and making the top-10 for it, well, maybe your format needs more appealing films than 10-year-old sci-fi dreck that The Daily Show once called "the gay Star Wars."
:-) ). that list would not include star wars (not trolling, just thought star wars was weak sci fi, good space opera).
are you crazy? i'd consider fifth element to be one of the top 10 sci fi movies of all time (ok may be top 20
less off topic. i have a copy of fifth element on dvd with a shelf load of other movies i liked and bought (i have bittorrents of some but i usually always try and get a legit copy) there is no compelling reason to get a blu ray or hd dvd version.
* the cost of a player alone puts me off (the cheapest is sony ps3 and there's no way i'm going to pay for that power hungry piece of crap).
* as a nerd i hate the drm crap they contain (treat me like a thief and i will behave like a thief!).
* more importantly i'm more likely these days to watch a movie on a handheld of some sort while travelling (nokia 770 currently, i might get an ipod video). this means converting the film i have into a portable format. these new formats make this more difficult and considering i'm lowering the quality of the movie that i will be watching completely pointless to have that extra resolution.
these companies don't get it. sony tried to break into the portable market with the psp umd discs and look how that turned out.
when a format better than dvd with the flexibility of dvd and the cost of dvd or less comes along then maybe i will switch. till then i'll keep checking the bargin bin at my local video shop.
yeah!
;-)
make the buggers suffer! give them a zune!