I've used slider phones, and others with physical keyboards like Nokia and Blackberry. I type faster on my iPhone than on any of those with physical buttons which would be a step backwards. Bigger screens and longer battery life would help but we're in solid evolution territory now. Expecting massive changes in smartphone design seems unrealistic given how well they now work. I've not even bothered to move from my iPhone 4 because the screen, apps and battery life all fit my needs.
I have mod points but what the hell - this is bull. Everyone knew IE wasn't even following the standards of the day. The problem was that MS was busy tying IE and Windows together to migrate one monopoly into another and worse, IIS was serving deliberately broken HTML to make IE appear faster since MS had control of both ends of the equation.
IE was the standard on Windows, and it was even available in Mac and Solaris although those didn't really use the same code base or rendering engine so to say IE was the standard is disingenuous at best because IE on Windows wasn't even compatible with IE on Mac which actually had far better CSS support. Also, lets not forget that before Firefox, there was Mozilla which was the result of Netscape open sourcing Netscape 5 which was in development in the late 90s. Since they pulled a lot of commercial code out of it, the early builds were pretty badly broken but that was all we had on Linux and the web was a mess mainly because of Active X, rather than HTML. And that is where it really comes down to it, you can work around problems with HTML in different browsers, but Active X was an MS only technology developed specifically to do an end run around Java Applets. Both AX and Java Applets were a terrible idea.
Let's look at 2002 or so when IE6 was king of the hill. MS had IE for Mac still but the Solaris port was long gone. Apple looked at Mozilla's Gecko and KDE's KHTML and chose the latter to build a new browser around and they forked it to produce webkit but contributed the changes back as required by the license. In 2003 Safari appeared with OS X Panther and MS threw a shit fit and took their ball home declaring it impossible for them to develop IE on Mac when Apple clearly had info about the platform that would make Safari better (hint MS, only you did that) so the long slow decline of IE started as Apple pushed Webkit forward towards HTML5 standards, Mozilla stripped all the crap (email and news client) and released Firefox and eventually webkit found its way into other browsers, and then dominated tablets. In the end, it is tablets and phones that have proven the undoing of IE because while Firefox and Chrome have done well on Windows, IE is still quite popular, but really people are using desktops less and less and phones and tablets more and more so sites have to work with those and this means the same sites also work well with webkit and gecko based browsers so the thing that kept MS on top is gone.
People knew way back what MS was doing, but managers and developers using MS tools didn't care and so they put out non-standard sites and now that is coming back to bite them. The question is, are we doing it all again with Webkit at the expense of Gecko? Shouldn't MS be claiming to be Webkit rather than Gecko?
"I agree that a TV should not fail after 2.5 years but Samsung's warranty on TVs is for 1 year, similar to all other manufacturers. Name me one TV manufacturer that would fix a 2.5 year old TV for free? You do realize that TVs are deliberately built to last 3 to 5 years? and that it has cost more to repair a TV than buying a new one for the last 10 years or more? and you blame Samsung because you gambled on the manufacturers warranty and lost?"
In New Zealand, we have a little law called "The Consumer Guarantees Act" which means that even if a manufacturer only puts a 1 year guarantee on a TV, it is expected to last a fair and reasonable time for a device costing upwards of $1000 and that means (in the eyes of the law) ten years. We've just had a washing machine and tumble drier from Electroux fail after six years and they tried every trick in the book to avoid fixing it (out of warranty, you'll need to pay for it and we might reimburse you some of the cost, even phoning me directly and hassling me) but I stuck to my guns and dealt with the vendor (you don't have to deal with the manufacturer, just the shop that sold you the device) and I waved the CGA under their nose (Harvey Norman aren't known for following the rules either so know your rights) and after much complaint from them, they complied with the law and fixed both free of charge.
Sure, the shops try everything to avoid following the law, but the law exists and you just have to keep reading the clause that says a device should last a reasonable amount of time. They have to fix it if it is a manufacturing or design fault regardless of the length of their warranty. In the case of my Samsung BD player, the CGA meant that after they tried and failed to fix the player I returned it with a letter stating that I rejected the player and my reasons (Samsung screwed the firmware and haven't fixed it) so the shop happily took the player back and swapped it for a Panasonic of equal value (Noel Leeming in this case, much better than Harvey Norman who I no longer shop from due to their repeated attempts to avoid their CGA duties)
Having bought a few pieces of Samsung gear myself, I'm not in the least surprised. It was a blu ray player that did it for me - they pushed out a firmware update that knocked the sound out of sync and then didn't release a fixed one. Ever as far as I know because I got sick of waiting months and not being able to watch a film so I returned the player, it was replaced with another of the same model which didn't have the audio sync problem until I tried to play a new BD and then it insisted I had to update the firmware and bang, sound was out of sync. I returned the player as unfixable and switched to a Panasonic which has been flawless and continues to get updates despite being four years old now. Samsung doesn't seem to care about their older gear, just the new shiny.
The funny thing about ARM is that back in the late 80's and early 90's when the first ARM processors were being shipped, they were going out in desktop machines in the form of the Acorn Archimedes. These were astoundingly fast machines in their day, way quicker than any of the x86 boxes of that era. It took years for x86 to reach performance parity, let alone overtake the ARM chips at this time. I remember using an Acorn R540 workstation in 1991 that was running Acorn's UNIX implementation and this machine was capable of emulating an x86 in software and running Windows 3 just fine, as well as running Acorn's own OS. ARM may not be the powerhouse architecture now, but there is nothing about it that prevents it being so, just current implementations. ARM is a really nice design, very extensible and very RISC (Acorn RISC Machines == ARM in case you didn't know) so Intel may very well find itself in trouble this time around. The platforms that are all up and coming are on ARM now, and as demand for more power increases, the chip design can keep up. Its done it before and those ARM workstations were serious boxes. Heck, MS may even take another stab at Windows and do a full job this time but even if it doesn't, so what? Chromebooks, Linux, maybe even OS X at some point in the future, and Windows becomes a has-been. It is already around only 20% of machines that people access the internet from down from 95% back in 2005.
" The theory of evolution isn't "a fact" but it is a general truth which is evolving and growing as our understanding grows."
You should complete this - the theory of evolution is just that, a theory in the scientific sense. It is a theory that has been tested many times and while refined, it has remained and is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, theories in modern science. One of the main things the theory of evolution does is explain how evolution works. Note that evolution itself is an observable fact and the theory is there to describe it and explain how it works. Evolution is in no way a theory, it is a fact. It is important to ensure people understand this. The creationists who want to stop discussion of evolution because "it is just a theory" are unable to provide an alternative theory of Evolution that fits the facts as observed. You cannot ignore evolution as it is all around us.
TL;DR - Evolution is an observed fact. The theory of evolution is our best explanation for how it works.
"But that's bigger than the iPad! Nothing can be different than what Apple does, that is the surest sign of failure. I mean, look what happend to 7" tablets. They did not succeed until Apple made one."
Apple made an 8" tablet, not 7". We've got a Nexus 7 in the office and it has a substantially smaller screen because it has a 16:9 aspect 7" screen whereas the iPad mini is a 4:3 aspect 8" screen.
'"And nothing of value was lost", said everyone at the Microsoft R&D center.'
I don't know, the loss of valuable prototype gear is pretty bad. Good job they can just go back to their prototyping organisation (colloquially known as 'Apple Inc') and get some more. Without these important devices, Microsoft wouldn't know what to do next with their production gear.
I have an iPad and a MacBook Air. The air has 7+ hours battery life in my experience and the iPad around 10. The combination is great since I always have a device with enough charge available and in the right form factor. Putting both into one box and dropping the battery life from a combined 17 hours to under 5 is a real step backwards. If I had to choose one I would go with the air because it isn't much bigger than a tablet and works well.
"if you are in the USA there are lots of apps that do transit on iOS."
I'm sure there are, but here in New Zealand they're pretty awful. Besides which, having Google Maps able to deal with any city is great even when I travel the US since it is all in one app. I've tried the Nokia HERE app but it's public transport directions are dire for me suggesting journeys that will take three buses instead of the one I know I can get and pushing the travel time out to 3 hours.
That said, software gets better over time and as I said, Google Maps wasn't great when it appeared and I believe Apple's Maps app just needs time to improve. As for in car navigation, I use the paid for (ad free) version of Nav Free which uses Google search for POI and address finding and that works really well most times, except in Alabama it would appear. I checked in Street View on Google itself and it really does put my friend's address two miles further down the road than it is. If I didn't have a photo of his house I would have had a hard time finding him at all.
I was a frequent user of MapQuest when Google Maps appeared and for a good while there were glitches with Google Maps just like Apple is experiencing so I stuck with MapQuest. Google Maps are only as good as they are now because of all the time invested but even now they get it wrong. I was visiting a friend in Alabama and Google put his street address two miles away from the actual location.
The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.
OSX is based on NextStep (which came to Apple with Steve Jobs return) which was in turn based on BSD. No Linux there.
Apple did adopt KHTML to develop WebKit but they've contributed back since it was GPL and the result is that there are other significant browsers in the market based on WebKit (Chrome for example) and since there are now several strong rendering engines, the MSIE hegemony has been broken. MS has borrowed plenty of code from open source too and have also contributed back where it suited them but of all the things Apple has done, OSX and WebKit are the things which have made a substantial change to the computing landscape.
Er, handbrake and AppleTV. They're our discs, we just prefer to have them kept in the box and put them all on iTunes since we have two AppleTVs. This also saves wear and tear on the discs, especially kid's shows. And best of all, no adverts or trailers, just the program we want instantly.
Don't park your kid in front of a TV all day, but a little TV has to be fine. We would go insane if we didn't have some down time while the TV provided entertainment. The main thing we do is stick to DVDs rather than live TV to limit exposure to all those adverts.
I moved from the UK to NZ five years back and brought all my computer gear. I made sure I took the laptops and my backup discs in my carry on luggage but shipped everything else. Since power sockets are different here, I also shipped a bunch of distribution boards so I could still use my original cables and power bricks. Over time, I've retired some with replacements but I can't begin to say how much cheaper it was to keep it all. I didn't bring any white goods or my TV, but everything else I brought. The shipping company packed it all up but I had kept the boxes for everything do it all arrived in perfect condition.
"And here's a youtube [youtube.com] of a Range Rover t-boning a Civic."
Mitsubishi Shogun (Pajero) actually, and the video wasn't making the case that the 4x4 was the better choice, and in fact the segment was about the compatibility problem of having these lumbering beasts sharing the roads with normal cars since the chassis height is wrong for the safety design of the regular car. Also, the tendency for 4x4s to roll over makes them a very dangerous choice despite their size. Sure, you can flatten other cars on the road, but once you start rolling you're in trouble and a 4x4 can roll when there isn't anything else on the road.
Size isn't everything and it would be better if all cars were built to a safety standard and of similar size. SUVs on the road requires everyone to drive them which is pretty much what you see in many places.
We typically get charged $130-150 for new console games. The PC equivalents are around $100 so a bit cheaper. The NZ$ is currently worth 80 US cents so you do the maths.
The part that really disgusts me is that NZ salaries are significantly lower than the US and yet entertainment costs are way higher. Heck, I can buy Blu ray discs from the UK for half the cost delivered than I can just by going to JB Hifi down the road. Shame that Amazon UK won't sell us games too because the UK prices on those are typically half the cost of the same game here too.
The remastered TOS Blu ray has the new SFX but you can also switch to original effects and sound if you just want the best quality old school feel. I like the new FX because I think it improves the shots and you don't just keep getting the same stock footage but e fact tha the original version is there but in 1080p makes this the he's set to have. I hope they can do the same with the Next Gen release but I suspect because it was all edited on film they're limited to going back to the film and reediting and recompositing so you won't be able to have the original versions in HD, but SD would be good enough for purists.
"Could be why all of those displays in Best Buy have the glasses not just tethered but locked into a position."
Very likely. The issue is that stereoscopic 3D works well only if the images are the same distance apart as they were when shot. For large screens such as at the cinema, the scale means most viewers are within the region where this works. The smaller the screen, the more critical the position becomes otherwise the image starts to change in scale. View a typical domestic 3D set from the optimal distance and the effect is good but move back and scale seems to change since the images you're seeing are getting smaller and closer together so your brain processes this as the objects being smaller so people start to look like models rather than real people. I watched a stage performance and this effect was very marked. Now move off axis and the picture again starts to look wrong. Add to that bleed from the two channels giving ghosting and the stress of trying to focus on objects that can't be focused and it all becomes very stressful. This is true even at the cinema and I actively avoid 3D movies these days since I get bad headaches and this is the case for a significant fraction of the viewing public (30% is a number I've seen) so once you exclude the size portion of your audience, and add in the expense and less than optimal domestic experience, well, 3D is dead in the water.
I experimented with a 50" 3D set on display and found that if I was any further away from it than about 6 feet the scale on screen was all wrong. Basically, for stereoscopic TV to work, you have to fill your field of view such that the images hitting your eyes are the right distance apart. Change that distance and the scale changes so people start to look like marionettes rather than real people. This is especially bad in a typical home setting where you wouldn't sit so close or so face on. I can see 3D for home cinema and I might consider replacing my current 100" HD front projector with a 3D rig but for regular TV use it doesn't work.
3D drove me away. I can't tolerate it and it is actually getting difficult to find a 2D showing at a convenient time. I have a 100" DLP HD projector at home so I wait for the BD release, rent that and enjoy the movie in glorious 2D for far less money. The cinemas can't compete with the comfort of my sofa, the sound and picture quality are comparable if not better at home (most 2D showings I've seen lately have been from 35mm film and isn't as clear as BD on my projector) and I don't have to take out a mortgage for snacks.
While VHS didn't kill cinema, BD and home theatre certainly can.
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I've used slider phones, and others with physical keyboards like Nokia and Blackberry. I type faster on my iPhone than on any of those with physical buttons which would be a step backwards. Bigger screens and longer battery life would help but we're in solid evolution territory now. Expecting massive changes in smartphone design seems unrealistic given how well they now work. I've not even bothered to move from my iPhone 4 because the screen, apps and battery life all fit my needs.
I have mod points but what the hell - this is bull. Everyone knew IE wasn't even following the standards of the day. The problem was that MS was busy tying IE and Windows together to migrate one monopoly into another and worse, IIS was serving deliberately broken HTML to make IE appear faster since MS had control of both ends of the equation.
IE was the standard on Windows, and it was even available in Mac and Solaris although those didn't really use the same code base or rendering engine so to say IE was the standard is disingenuous at best because IE on Windows wasn't even compatible with IE on Mac which actually had far better CSS support. Also, lets not forget that before Firefox, there was Mozilla which was the result of Netscape open sourcing Netscape 5 which was in development in the late 90s. Since they pulled a lot of commercial code out of it, the early builds were pretty badly broken but that was all we had on Linux and the web was a mess mainly because of Active X, rather than HTML. And that is where it really comes down to it, you can work around problems with HTML in different browsers, but Active X was an MS only technology developed specifically to do an end run around Java Applets. Both AX and Java Applets were a terrible idea.
Let's look at 2002 or so when IE6 was king of the hill. MS had IE for Mac still but the Solaris port was long gone. Apple looked at Mozilla's Gecko and KDE's KHTML and chose the latter to build a new browser around and they forked it to produce webkit but contributed the changes back as required by the license. In 2003 Safari appeared with OS X Panther and MS threw a shit fit and took their ball home declaring it impossible for them to develop IE on Mac when Apple clearly had info about the platform that would make Safari better (hint MS, only you did that) so the long slow decline of IE started as Apple pushed Webkit forward towards HTML5 standards, Mozilla stripped all the crap (email and news client) and released Firefox and eventually webkit found its way into other browsers, and then dominated tablets. In the end, it is tablets and phones that have proven the undoing of IE because while Firefox and Chrome have done well on Windows, IE is still quite popular, but really people are using desktops less and less and phones and tablets more and more so sites have to work with those and this means the same sites also work well with webkit and gecko based browsers so the thing that kept MS on top is gone.
People knew way back what MS was doing, but managers and developers using MS tools didn't care and so they put out non-standard sites and now that is coming back to bite them. The question is, are we doing it all again with Webkit at the expense of Gecko? Shouldn't MS be claiming to be Webkit rather than Gecko?
"I agree that a TV should not fail after 2.5 years but Samsung's warranty on TVs is for 1 year, similar to all other manufacturers. Name me one TV manufacturer that would fix a 2.5 year old TV for free? You do realize that TVs are deliberately built to last 3 to 5 years? and that it has cost more to repair a TV than buying a new one for the last 10 years or more? and you blame Samsung because you gambled on the manufacturers warranty and lost?"
In New Zealand, we have a little law called "The Consumer Guarantees Act" which means that even if a manufacturer only puts a 1 year guarantee on a TV, it is expected to last a fair and reasonable time for a device costing upwards of $1000 and that means (in the eyes of the law) ten years. We've just had a washing machine and tumble drier from Electroux fail after six years and they tried every trick in the book to avoid fixing it (out of warranty, you'll need to pay for it and we might reimburse you some of the cost, even phoning me directly and hassling me) but I stuck to my guns and dealt with the vendor (you don't have to deal with the manufacturer, just the shop that sold you the device) and I waved the CGA under their nose (Harvey Norman aren't known for following the rules either so know your rights) and after much complaint from them, they complied with the law and fixed both free of charge.
Sure, the shops try everything to avoid following the law, but the law exists and you just have to keep reading the clause that says a device should last a reasonable amount of time. They have to fix it if it is a manufacturing or design fault regardless of the length of their warranty. In the case of my Samsung BD player, the CGA meant that after they tried and failed to fix the player I returned it with a letter stating that I rejected the player and my reasons (Samsung screwed the firmware and haven't fixed it) so the shop happily took the player back and swapped it for a Panasonic of equal value (Noel Leeming in this case, much better than Harvey Norman who I no longer shop from due to their repeated attempts to avoid their CGA duties)
Having bought a few pieces of Samsung gear myself, I'm not in the least surprised. It was a blu ray player that did it for me - they pushed out a firmware update that knocked the sound out of sync and then didn't release a fixed one. Ever as far as I know because I got sick of waiting months and not being able to watch a film so I returned the player, it was replaced with another of the same model which didn't have the audio sync problem until I tried to play a new BD and then it insisted I had to update the firmware and bang, sound was out of sync. I returned the player as unfixable and switched to a Panasonic which has been flawless and continues to get updates despite being four years old now. Samsung doesn't seem to care about their older gear, just the new shiny.
The funny thing about ARM is that back in the late 80's and early 90's when the first ARM processors were being shipped, they were going out in desktop machines in the form of the Acorn Archimedes. These were astoundingly fast machines in their day, way quicker than any of the x86 boxes of that era. It took years for x86 to reach performance parity, let alone overtake the ARM chips at this time. I remember using an Acorn R540 workstation in 1991 that was running Acorn's UNIX implementation and this machine was capable of emulating an x86 in software and running Windows 3 just fine, as well as running Acorn's own OS. ARM may not be the powerhouse architecture now, but there is nothing about it that prevents it being so, just current implementations. ARM is a really nice design, very extensible and very RISC (Acorn RISC Machines == ARM in case you didn't know) so Intel may very well find itself in trouble this time around. The platforms that are all up and coming are on ARM now, and as demand for more power increases, the chip design can keep up. Its done it before and those ARM workstations were serious boxes. Heck, MS may even take another stab at Windows and do a full job this time but even if it doesn't, so what? Chromebooks, Linux, maybe even OS X at some point in the future, and Windows becomes a has-been. It is already around only 20% of machines that people access the internet from down from 95% back in 2005.
" The theory of evolution isn't "a fact" but it is a general truth which is evolving and growing as our understanding grows."
You should complete this - the theory of evolution is just that, a theory in the scientific sense. It is a theory that has been tested many times and while refined, it has remained and is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, theories in modern science. One of the main things the theory of evolution does is explain how evolution works. Note that evolution itself is an observable fact and the theory is there to describe it and explain how it works. Evolution is in no way a theory, it is a fact. It is important to ensure people understand this. The creationists who want to stop discussion of evolution because "it is just a theory" are unable to provide an alternative theory of Evolution that fits the facts as observed. You cannot ignore evolution as it is all around us.
TL;DR - Evolution is an observed fact. The theory of evolution is our best explanation for how it works.
"But that's bigger than the iPad! Nothing can be different than what Apple does, that is the surest sign of failure. I mean, look what happend to 7" tablets. They did not succeed until Apple made one."
Apple made an 8" tablet, not 7". We've got a Nexus 7 in the office and it has a substantially smaller screen because it has a 16:9 aspect 7" screen whereas the iPad mini is a 4:3 aspect 8" screen.
'"And nothing of value was lost", said everyone at the Microsoft R&D center.'
I don't know, the loss of valuable prototype gear is pretty bad. Good job they can just go back to their prototyping organisation (colloquially known as 'Apple Inc') and get some more. Without these important devices, Microsoft wouldn't know what to do next with their production gear.
I have an iPad and a MacBook Air. The air has 7+ hours battery life in my experience and the iPad around 10. The combination is great since I always have a device with enough charge available and in the right form factor. Putting both into one box and dropping the battery life from a combined 17 hours to under 5 is a real step backwards. If I had to choose one I would go with the air because it isn't much bigger than a tablet and works well.
"if you are in the USA there are lots of apps that do transit on iOS."
I'm sure there are, but here in New Zealand they're pretty awful. Besides which, having Google Maps able to deal with any city is great even when I travel the US since it is all in one app. I've tried the Nokia HERE app but it's public transport directions are dire for me suggesting journeys that will take three buses instead of the one I know I can get and pushing the travel time out to 3 hours.
That said, software gets better over time and as I said, Google Maps wasn't great when it appeared and I believe Apple's Maps app just needs time to improve. As for in car navigation, I use the paid for (ad free) version of Nav Free which uses Google search for POI and address finding and that works really well most times, except in Alabama it would appear. I checked in Street View on Google itself and it really does put my friend's address two miles further down the road than it is. If I didn't have a photo of his house I would have had a hard time finding him at all.
I was a frequent user of MapQuest when Google Maps appeared and for a good while there were glitches with Google Maps just like Apple is experiencing so I stuck with MapQuest. Google Maps are only as good as they are now because of all the time invested but even now they get it wrong. I was visiting a friend in Alabama and Google put his street address two miles away from the actual location.
The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.
OSX is based on NextStep (which came to Apple with Steve Jobs return) which was in turn based on BSD. No Linux there.
Apple did adopt KHTML to develop WebKit but they've contributed back since it was GPL and the result is that there are other significant browsers in the market based on WebKit (Chrome for example) and since there are now several strong rendering engines, the MSIE hegemony has been broken. MS has borrowed plenty of code from open source too and have also contributed back where it suited them but of all the things Apple has done, OSX and WebKit are the things which have made a substantial change to the computing landscape.
I don't pirate - I just buy the discs (usually when they're on special) and rip them using Handbrake (unless they come with a digital copy already.)
Er, handbrake and AppleTV. They're our discs, we just prefer to have them kept in the box and put them all on iTunes since we have two AppleTVs. This also saves wear and tear on the discs, especially kid's shows. And best of all, no adverts or trailers, just the program we want instantly.
Don't park your kid in front of a TV all day, but a little TV has to be fine. We would go insane if we didn't have some down time while the TV provided entertainment. The main thing we do is stick to DVDs rather than live TV to limit exposure to all those adverts.
I moved from the UK to NZ five years back and brought all my computer gear. I made sure I took the laptops and my backup discs in my carry on luggage but shipped everything else. Since power sockets are different here, I also shipped a bunch of distribution boards so I could still use my original cables and power bricks. Over time, I've retired some with replacements but I can't begin to say how much cheaper it was to keep it all. I didn't bring any white goods or my TV, but everything else I brought. The shipping company packed it all up but I had kept the boxes for everything do it all arrived in perfect condition.
"And here's a youtube [youtube.com] of a Range Rover t-boning a Civic."
Mitsubishi Shogun (Pajero) actually, and the video wasn't making the case that the 4x4 was the better choice, and in fact the segment was about the compatibility problem of having these lumbering beasts sharing the roads with normal cars since the chassis height is wrong for the safety design of the regular car. Also, the tendency for 4x4s to roll over makes them a very dangerous choice despite their size. Sure, you can flatten other cars on the road, but once you start rolling you're in trouble and a 4x4 can roll when there isn't anything else on the road.
Size isn't everything and it would be better if all cars were built to a safety standard and of similar size. SUVs on the road requires everyone to drive them which is pretty much what you see in many places.
The court declared MS to be a monopoly so who should've believe? You or the court?
We typically get charged $130-150 for new console games. The PC equivalents are around $100 so a bit cheaper. The NZ$ is currently worth 80 US cents so you do the maths.
The part that really disgusts me is that NZ salaries are significantly lower than the US and yet entertainment costs are way higher. Heck, I can buy Blu ray discs from the UK for half the cost delivered than I can just by going to JB Hifi down the road. Shame that Amazon UK won't sell us games too because the UK prices on those are typically half the cost of the same game here too.
The remastered TOS Blu ray has the new SFX but you can also switch to original effects and sound if you just want the best quality old school feel. I like the new FX because I think it improves the shots and you don't just keep getting the same stock footage but e fact tha the original version is there but in 1080p makes this the he's set to have. I hope they can do the same with the Next Gen release but I suspect because it was all edited on film they're limited to going back to the film and reediting and recompositing so you won't be able to have the original versions in HD, but SD would be good enough for purists.
"Yup. It's been called the "dollhouse effect", or, more on-point to what you said, the "puppet theater effect"."
Very apt and quite disturbing.
"Could be why all of those displays in Best Buy have the glasses not just tethered but locked into a position."
Very likely. The issue is that stereoscopic 3D works well only if the images are the same distance apart as they were when shot. For large screens such as at the cinema, the scale means most viewers are within the region where this works. The smaller the screen, the more critical the position becomes otherwise the image starts to change in scale. View a typical domestic 3D set from the optimal distance and the effect is good but move back and scale seems to change since the images you're seeing are getting smaller and closer together so your brain processes this as the objects being smaller so people start to look like models rather than real people. I watched a stage performance and this effect was very marked. Now move off axis and the picture again starts to look wrong. Add to that bleed from the two channels giving ghosting and the stress of trying to focus on objects that can't be focused and it all becomes very stressful. This is true even at the cinema and I actively avoid 3D movies these days since I get bad headaches and this is the case for a significant fraction of the viewing public (30% is a number I've seen) so once you exclude the size portion of your audience, and add in the expense and less than optimal domestic experience, well, 3D is dead in the water.
I experimented with a 50" 3D set on display and found that if I was any further away from it than about 6 feet the scale on screen was all wrong. Basically, for stereoscopic TV to work, you have to fill your field of view such that the images hitting your eyes are the right distance apart. Change that distance and the scale changes so people start to look like marionettes rather than real people. This is especially bad in a typical home setting where you wouldn't sit so close or so face on. I can see 3D for home cinema and I might consider replacing my current 100" HD front projector with a 3D rig but for regular TV use it doesn't work.
3D drove me away. I can't tolerate it and it is actually getting difficult to find a 2D showing at a convenient time. I have a 100" DLP HD projector at home so I wait for the BD release, rent that and enjoy the movie in glorious 2D for far less money. The cinemas can't compete with the comfort of my sofa, the sound and picture quality are comparable if not better at home (most 2D showings I've seen lately have been from 35mm film and isn't as clear as BD on my projector) and I don't have to take out a mortgage for snacks.
While VHS didn't kill cinema, BD and home theatre certainly can.
Noone is going to steal a pink electric scooter. Maybe put some flower stickers on it.