all I know is that anime and manga are the shit now. it helps pay the bills, and the remodelations -- and I'm making it a nice place now, lots of lighting, clean, and well supplied with all kinds of things, but not letting them grow out of control.
I'm trying to make it comfortable for myself. I sort of like comics, manga, anime, etc. But I don't love it. I don't argue with customers about who's the strongest superhero, and I don't look weirdly at girls that buy that yaoi crap. Do I judge them? Yes. But I don't let them know about it.
I'm nice to my customers. A few months after I opened it was my birthday and this girl (yes, a girl. A cute one even -- but totally underage) made a cake for me. So I GUESS I'm doing something right.
I'm more like that guy with the comic book shop across the street from the simpsons. Only that I don't overdo it.
what will happen from now to, say, 1 or 2 years? Will anime go back into darkness? I doubt it, I don't see more 'otakus' now than 10 years ago when I was in high school. Worst case scenario, It doesn't work or I get bored of it. I could hire an employee, open more locations, lots of things. One step at the time.
maybe it's because they really are like that. In my city there's a comic book shop, focusing on comic books. I went there to ask for some manga, and the guy was barking that manga is crap, he doesn't sell that shit, etc... the guy was really the simpsons comic book guy, only thinner and with short hair.
So, I decided to open my own shop (yeah), and I focus mostly on manga, but I also keep some american comics. I understand the guy, kids drive you crazy and all, but it's part of the job. If you don't have the patience to deal with 14 year olds, then you shouldn't run a comic book shop.
Background: I used to work at my dad's electronics repair shop, and people get really ballistic when their brand new $50 DVD player, still under warranty, fails after months of heavy use. They don't have to pay to get it fixed, but they do get mad and yell. After taking that shit for years, anything else is just downhill.
agreed. I'm from Argentina and I know first hand what you're talking about. the state of communications here is a mess:
Fibertel (the 2nd-largest ISP) proxies their users, DNS-redirects them to local servers (using another DNS server doesn't work, you get a blank page).
The largest one, Telecom has a more decent network but still vulnerable to fiber cuts (there's a fiber ring, not a mesh. a few weeks ago we had a fiber outage and nothing, including cell phones, long distance or internet worked). Also last-mile is completely destroyed (it was replaced completely in the early 90s and it was pretty good until the last 5 years when they didn't fix it anymore)
There's nastier stuff: no local peering. G4 (Telecom, Telefonica, Fibertel and Impsat) don't peer with "independent" ISPs (Gigared, Telecentro...).
PRIMA wasn't visible from Chile because there's no peering between PRIMA and some Chilean ISPs, and Telecom (or any other G4) refuses to transit, it has to get routed through US and there are no transit agreements.
PRIMA is now part of Fibertel, formerly a competition with Flash, both companies are part of CableVision and Multicanal respectively, government let Cablevision buy Multicanal, allowing them to monopolize cable TV in most areas (large urban areas sometimes have alternatives, and there's always DirecTV, but still).
And the worst part is the "CORPORATE BUSINESS" model. Anything that's not for home users, is called CORPORATE BUSINESS (with big capital letters). It's always the same service as Residential, only more expensive, 50% to 100% more. They don't offer quicker support or anything. Telecom's mail servers are in almost every spam blacklist, and they're unavailable (you can't retrieve your mail) 9 out of 10 times in peak hours. Every day.
In rural areas where Mom and Pop Wireless ISPs grow at an amazing rate, Telecom sells 1Mbps for about USD 1500. That's right, a whopping megabit per second for 1.5k. In urban areas that price quickly drops to about USD 200, and residential connections are 3Mbps for less than USD 20. Fastest connection is 5mbps/256k for DSL and in some ares, 20m/256k (yes 256k up for 20 megabits).
Hosting/Housing have the same problem, only huge sites are located in here (like news sites, which are often part of a multimedia group like Clarin, which also owns an ISP), the rest is US-based because it costs 1/10 to 1/100 of what you get here. And usually, if you do rent a server, it really can't handle high traffic. There are very very few game servers here, but hundreds in the US. Dallas is one of the favorite locations for colo/housing for Latin America.
So why do some countries use US-based services? For reasons like those.
that's exactly my point. local editions of manga cost around $18 (USD 5), up to $25 (USD 7) for deluxe editions.
spanish editions (all are in spanish, by spanish edition I mean "printed in spain") cost $30 for a few items in promo to the average of $45 (USD 12-13).
at my store, local editions outsell imports 20 or 30 to 1. maybe even more. so the price is an important factor after all. I'm pretty sure that if games were cheaper, they will sell.
also, there are NO game rental shops. there were at some point in the mid-90s when anyone had a NES and a lot of people had a SNES or Sega Genesis.
but they don't sell original games at an affordable price anyway. Also, games are usually in English, while games for Spain are in Spanish, for Finland they are in Finnish, etc, all that PAL vs NTSC issue. Apparently, NTSC systems don't allow for Spanish translations, it's a technical limitation of the system. (do I have to clarify that the last part was a joke?)
Movies, for example have a different dub for Latin America and another for Spain. Disney movies even have regional dubs for the biggest markets. BTW, movie tickets where I live range from AR $5 to $7. That's about USD 1,50 to USD 2.
yes. the business model of only feeding the "important" market, such as the US/Canada, Europe and Japan.
For example, here in my country (Argentina) the Wii and the PS2/PS3 are the only consoles "officially" sold by Nintendo and Sony (the only ones you can get from a Big Retailer), the rest is just bootlegs/imports. Available original games are usually just the one that came with the console. But why? because they have to be bootlegged.
OTOH, PC games are available legally. There are thousands of titles at a decent price (ranging from $50 to $110, that's argentine pesos), while PS2/3 and Wii games are well over $250.
So how much is that? Well, monthly salaries are $900 to $1500 for middle class. You don't really expect middle class to pay $250 for a game, do you?
There is the fact that the Wii retails for $2400 or about USD 650. Take the US retail price of $250, then add a 50% customs tax, thats USD 375. Still far from the USD 650 retail price. Why? Why is it cheaper in countries with a higher purchase power? Why don't they sell it at the same price, or just a little higher, and also sell the software at an affordable price for us?
This isn't just whining. The PC game industry does. Coca cola does. McDonald's does it too, Pepsi, and thousands of other multinational companies that have adjusted to the local market's prices and tastes.
Give us "poor people" a chance, will ya? We might surprise you. For example, I own a comic book shop and I have lots and lots of comic books, manga, etc. Things you can get for free off the internet... and I still sell a lot.
I doubt it has anything to do with Energy Star cause those TVs are designed in Europe. All decent quality electronics stuff (as opposed to cheap chinese-designed) draw really little power, and that includes microwave ovens, dvd players, microwave ovens... even cordless phones.
A good way to know if it's an "efficient" power supply is the "finger test". You let it run in stand by for a whole day, then touch the supply. If it's cold then it's very efficient: even 1W of power in those almost-airtight cases will get pretty warm in a few hours.
My laptop comes with a 90W supply, no fans or anything. It's amazing how cool it stays compared to an inefficient desktop PSU which will die if it has no fans (yes, the brick gets really hot to the touch, 50C). And when I unplug it (laptop-side), it quickly cools down.
LOL! And I don't know what kind of refrigerator you have. I have a really old-school one with a thermostat. When it's off, it's off. It disconnects the compressor and no power runs through it or anywhere else on the fridge. I've seen the new models with lots of LEDs and buttons and I keep asking myself "why?"... "party mode"? "vacation mode"? dude, who the fuck uses those "features"?
what? first: a 100mA 4.5V wall-wart uses 0.45W at full-load and inefficiency load makes it use 0.9W. even on 1% load it still draws about 50% of its rating.
second: where do you get the single-wattage power converter idea???? at least Philips TVs, even the cheapest one sold for about USD 150 here in Argentina has dual power supplies. A so-called "burst" psu which makes it use less than 0.5W on standby. That's the "standby" psu. It also has a full-power psu. the microprocessor is constantly going into "sleep" mode to save even more power, it uses so little energy that you can unplug it and the standby led will stay on for a couple of minutes (!). Newer models don't even have a standby led to save even more power (it turns itself off after a few seconds).
Philips audio sets also have "eco-power": they even turn off the VFD and don't show the time while on standby.
(Disclaimer: I work as an authorized philips repair technician. I learned all that in training)
why on poweroff??? it should be done on power ON! a cold boot attack works by pressing the RESET switch and booting off a USB stick or something. that, and epoxy your DIMMs and that's it.
that's because N at 270Mbps only works on the 5GHz band, if you have a cheap AP it will only have 2.4 and work at 120mbps. You need a dual-radio, I have a WRT600N and I get full speed. The WRT600N is great: 3 antennas with 3 independent radios. MIMO, N, 2.4+5.8, etc. Plus you can flash it with DD-WRT and get some extra functionality (warning: only one particular old version of dd-wrt gives 270mbps, it's a known bug, I don't know if it has been fixed). I suggest that AP/router hands down. Don't get the WRT610N, while it might seem a little better (610 > 600, right?), it only has internal antennas.
can't you just get a USB case? they sell for like $10. I even used a HDD IDE-USB case with an old IDE DVD drive and it worked OK to install XP to an EEE 4G. or take apart your USB CD-RW. chances are that it has an USB to IDE/SATA bridge inside.
I just buy wherever I get discount. I'm a customer of "Standard Bank" (formerly BankBoston) and "Santander Rio". If I need electronics stuff I buy at "Garbarino" cause they give me 15% off. If I need groceries, I buy at "Carrefour" cause I get 15% off on thursdays. Both with Santander. If I buy a phone, I get it from "Personal" cause they give me 15% off with the Standard Bank cards. If I had an account at BBVA I would be shopping at "Fravega". All the retailers have the same stuff at the same price. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Argentina that's how they do business.
so, you never buy in circuit city. sooner or later radio shack will fuck you. then best buy. then wal-mart. then mcdonald's. don't you get it? there is no point in "not buying from them again" because it's the SAME FUCKING THING with every retailer out there.
actually not even civilian Argentines are welcome there. not even the relatives of the dead soldiers that want to come to visit the graves. the people from the islands made such a big fuss about the argentine relatives showing an argentine flag at the cemetery... I don't think they even allow flights from Argentina, only from Chile
You just don't get it, do you? The fact that your telco charges you for pinging/polling/whatever term they use, doesn't mean it costs money for them. You can't base everything on a "cost-per" scale. Just look at what happens when americans go to Europe with iphones and the iphone stars polling your mail server. Back home you get a USD 7000 bill, for nothing.
I call 4 stupid because text messages aren't plants. They don't need manpower, water, sun, land, transportation, cleaning, pesticides. They don't need to be in a cold room for storage for several months, don't need to be individually packed, weighed, labeled, and don't need gas for delivery... I think I can go on but you and OP get the point already.
OP was justifying carriers for their high prices. How many messages are sent a day in the US? Let's say "a billion", at 20c each, it's 200M a day. At 10c each it's still 100M a day. at ONE CENT it's TEN MILLION DOLLARS A DAY, or about USD 3B a year. And some asshole tries to justify "costs" of the network.
I think we're confusing terms here: "the associated message flows between the network control systems are costly". Costly in what sense? Bandwidth? CPU power? Certainly NOT costly in the economic sense. When you make 3Bn a year (ok, let's make it 1Bn a year) off a service that's already built in your infrastructure...
1. it doesn't use the control channel: sms can be sent over GPRS which is a data channel. 2. 160 bytes isn't much data. period. even 1 second of voice require MUCH MORE routing: each packet needs to be routed individually. 3. IT DOESN'T COST MONEY TO COMPANIES! WHERE DO YOU GET THAT IDEA? Dude, seriously: it doesn't. Period. They have their own networks, data flows freely inside the network, why the hell does it cost money? Once infrastructure is paid (and with billions of text messages sent every day, it's paid for pretty quickly), it's FREE. The only cost is electricity, which is a few dollars a day for each cell out there. 4. Your argument for the banana is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Seriously dude, you need to rethink a lot of things if you think you can compare bananas in a supermarket to text messages.
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all I know is that anime and manga are the shit now. it helps pay the bills, and the remodelations -- and I'm making it a nice place now, lots of lighting, clean, and well supplied with all kinds of things, but not letting them grow out of control.
I'm trying to make it comfortable for myself. I sort of like comics, manga, anime, etc. But I don't love it. I don't argue with customers about who's the strongest superhero, and I don't look weirdly at girls that buy that yaoi crap. Do I judge them? Yes. But I don't let them know about it.
I'm nice to my customers. A few months after I opened it was my birthday and this girl (yes, a girl. A cute one even -- but totally underage) made a cake for me. So I GUESS I'm doing something right.
I'm more like that guy with the comic book shop across the street from the simpsons. Only that I don't overdo it.
what will happen from now to, say, 1 or 2 years? Will anime go back into darkness? I doubt it, I don't see more 'otakus' now than 10 years ago when I was in high school. Worst case scenario, It doesn't work or I get bored of it. I could hire an employee, open more locations, lots of things. One step at the time.
ok, ok. I meant to say focusing on AMERICAN comic books. there.
maybe it's because they really are like that.
In my city there's a comic book shop, focusing on comic books. I went there to ask for some manga, and the guy was barking that manga is crap, he doesn't sell that shit, etc... the guy was really the simpsons comic book guy, only thinner and with short hair.
So, I decided to open my own shop (yeah), and I focus mostly on manga, but I also keep some american comics. I understand the guy, kids drive you crazy and all, but it's part of the job. If you don't have the patience to deal with 14 year olds, then you shouldn't run a comic book shop.
Background: I used to work at my dad's electronics repair shop, and people get really ballistic when their brand new $50 DVD player, still under warranty, fails after months of heavy use. They don't have to pay to get it fixed, but they do get mad and yell. After taking that shit for years, anything else is just downhill.
agreed. I'm from Argentina and I know first hand what you're talking about. the state of communications here is a mess:
Fibertel (the 2nd-largest ISP) proxies their users, DNS-redirects them to local servers (using another DNS server doesn't work, you get a blank page).
The largest one, Telecom has a more decent network but still vulnerable to fiber cuts (there's a fiber ring, not a mesh. a few weeks ago we had a fiber outage and nothing, including cell phones, long distance or internet worked). Also last-mile is completely destroyed (it was replaced completely in the early 90s and it was pretty good until the last 5 years when they didn't fix it anymore)
There's nastier stuff: no local peering. G4 (Telecom, Telefonica, Fibertel and Impsat) don't peer with "independent" ISPs (Gigared, Telecentro...).
PRIMA wasn't visible from Chile because there's no peering between PRIMA and some Chilean ISPs, and Telecom (or any other G4) refuses to transit, it has to get routed through US and there are no transit agreements.
PRIMA is now part of Fibertel, formerly a competition with Flash, both companies are part of CableVision and Multicanal respectively, government let Cablevision buy Multicanal, allowing them to monopolize cable TV in most areas (large urban areas sometimes have alternatives, and there's always DirecTV, but still).
And the worst part is the "CORPORATE BUSINESS" model. Anything that's not for home users, is called CORPORATE BUSINESS (with big capital letters). It's always the same service as Residential, only more expensive, 50% to 100% more. They don't offer quicker support or anything. Telecom's mail servers are in almost every spam blacklist, and they're unavailable (you can't retrieve your mail) 9 out of 10 times in peak hours. Every day.
In rural areas where Mom and Pop Wireless ISPs grow at an amazing rate, Telecom sells 1Mbps for about USD 1500. That's right, a whopping megabit per second for 1.5k. In urban areas that price quickly drops to about USD 200, and residential connections are 3Mbps for less than USD 20. Fastest connection is 5mbps/256k for DSL and in some ares, 20m/256k (yes 256k up for 20 megabits).
Hosting/Housing have the same problem, only huge sites are located in here (like news sites, which are often part of a multimedia group like Clarin, which also owns an ISP), the rest is US-based because it costs 1/10 to 1/100 of what you get here. And usually, if you do rent a server, it really can't handle high traffic. There are very very few game servers here, but hundreds in the US. Dallas is one of the favorite locations for colo/housing for Latin America.
So why do some countries use US-based services? For reasons like those.
and when google (another US-based company) starts blocking them, what?
I love XBMC. too bad the Xbox is not powerful enough to do 720p video.
that's exactly my point. local editions of manga cost around $18 (USD 5), up to $25 (USD 7) for deluxe editions.
spanish editions (all are in spanish, by spanish edition I mean "printed in spain") cost $30 for a few items in promo to the average of $45 (USD 12-13).
at my store, local editions outsell imports 20 or 30 to 1. maybe even more. so the price is an important factor after all. I'm pretty sure that if games were cheaper, they will sell.
also, there are NO game rental shops. there were at some point in the mid-90s when anyone had a NES and a lot of people had a SNES or Sega Genesis.
but they don't sell original games at an affordable price anyway. Also, games are usually in English, while games for Spain are in Spanish, for Finland they are in Finnish, etc, all that PAL vs NTSC issue. Apparently, NTSC systems don't allow for Spanish translations, it's a technical limitation of the system. (do I have to clarify that the last part was a joke?)
Movies, for example have a different dub for Latin America and another for Spain. Disney movies even have regional dubs for the biggest markets. BTW, movie tickets where I live range from AR $5 to $7. That's about USD 1,50 to USD 2.
yes. the business model of only feeding the "important" market, such as the US/Canada, Europe and Japan.
For example, here in my country (Argentina) the Wii and the PS2/PS3 are the only consoles "officially" sold by Nintendo and Sony (the only ones you can get from a Big Retailer), the rest is just bootlegs/imports. Available original games are usually just the one that came with the console. But why? because they have to be bootlegged.
OTOH, PC games are available legally. There are thousands of titles at a decent price (ranging from $50 to $110, that's argentine pesos), while PS2/3 and Wii games are well over $250.
So how much is that? Well, monthly salaries are $900 to $1500 for middle class. You don't really expect middle class to pay $250 for a game, do you?
There is the fact that the Wii retails for $2400 or about USD 650. Take the US retail price of $250, then add a 50% customs tax, thats USD 375. Still far from the USD 650 retail price. Why? Why is it cheaper in countries with a higher purchase power? Why don't they sell it at the same price, or just a little higher, and also sell the software at an affordable price for us?
This isn't just whining. The PC game industry does. Coca cola does. McDonald's does it too, Pepsi, and thousands of other multinational companies that have adjusted to the local market's prices and tastes.
Give us "poor people" a chance, will ya? We might surprise you. For example, I own a comic book shop and I have lots and lots of comic books, manga, etc. Things you can get for free off the internet... and I still sell a lot.
Chillax dude... don't get so defensive.
I doubt it has anything to do with Energy Star cause those TVs are designed in Europe. All decent quality electronics stuff (as opposed to cheap chinese-designed) draw really little power, and that includes microwave ovens, dvd players, microwave ovens... even cordless phones.
A good way to know if it's an "efficient" power supply is the "finger test". You let it run in stand by for a whole day, then touch the supply. If it's cold then it's very efficient: even 1W of power in those almost-airtight cases will get pretty warm in a few hours.
My laptop comes with a 90W supply, no fans or anything. It's amazing how cool it stays compared to an inefficient desktop PSU which will die if it has no fans (yes, the brick gets really hot to the touch, 50C). And when I unplug it (laptop-side), it quickly cools down.
LOL! And I don't know what kind of refrigerator you have. I have a really old-school one with a thermostat. When it's off, it's off. It disconnects the compressor and no power runs through it or anywhere else on the fridge. I've seen the new models with lots of LEDs and buttons and I keep asking myself "why?"... "party mode"? "vacation mode"? dude, who the fuck uses those "features"?
what? first: a 100mA 4.5V wall-wart uses 0.45W at full-load and inefficiency load makes it use 0.9W. even on 1% load it still draws about 50% of its rating.
second: where do you get the single-wattage power converter idea???? at least Philips TVs, even the cheapest one sold for about USD 150 here in Argentina has dual power supplies. A so-called "burst" psu which makes it use less than 0.5W on standby. That's the "standby" psu. It also has a full-power psu. the microprocessor is constantly going into "sleep" mode to save even more power, it uses so little energy that you can unplug it and the standby led will stay on for a couple of minutes (!). Newer models don't even have a standby led to save even more power (it turns itself off after a few seconds).
Philips audio sets also have "eco-power": they even turn off the VFD and don't show the time while on standby.
(Disclaimer: I work as an authorized philips repair technician. I learned all that in training)
why on poweroff??? it should be done on power ON! a cold boot attack works by pressing the RESET switch and booting off a USB stick or something. that, and epoxy your DIMMs and that's it.
that's because N at 270Mbps only works on the 5GHz band, if you have a cheap AP it will only have 2.4 and work at 120mbps. You need a dual-radio, I have a WRT600N and I get full speed. The WRT600N is great: 3 antennas with 3 independent radios. MIMO, N, 2.4+5.8, etc. Plus you can flash it with DD-WRT and get some extra functionality (warning: only one particular old version of dd-wrt gives 270mbps, it's a known bug, I don't know if it has been fixed). I suggest that AP/router hands down. Don't get the WRT610N, while it might seem a little better (610 > 600, right?), it only has internal antennas.
can't you just get a USB case? they sell for like $10. I even used a HDD IDE-USB case with an old IDE DVD drive and it worked OK to install XP to an EEE 4G. or take apart your USB CD-RW. chances are that it has an USB to IDE/SATA bridge inside.
I just buy wherever I get discount. I'm a customer of "Standard Bank" (formerly BankBoston) and "Santander Rio". If I need electronics stuff I buy at "Garbarino" cause they give me 15% off. If I need groceries, I buy at "Carrefour" cause I get 15% off on thursdays. Both with Santander. If I buy a phone, I get it from "Personal" cause they give me 15% off with the Standard Bank cards. If I had an account at BBVA I would be shopping at "Fravega". All the retailers have the same stuff at the same price. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Argentina that's how they do business.
so, you never buy in circuit city. sooner or later radio shack will fuck you. then best buy. then wal-mart. then mcdonald's. don't you get it? there is no point in "not buying from them again" because it's the SAME FUCKING THING with every retailer out there.
actually not even civilian Argentines are welcome there. not even the relatives of the dead soldiers that want to come to visit the graves. the people from the islands made such a big fuss about the argentine relatives showing an argentine flag at the cemetery... I don't think they even allow flights from Argentina, only from Chile
yeah because when these guys attack they don't speak english, don't blend in, don't wear jeans and t-shirts and don't shave those huge beards.
all of you are just plain stupid.
You just don't get it, do you? The fact that your telco charges you for pinging/polling/whatever term they use, doesn't mean it costs money for them. You can't base everything on a "cost-per" scale. Just look at what happens when americans go to Europe with iphones and the iphone stars polling your mail server. Back home you get a USD 7000 bill, for nothing.
I call 4 stupid because text messages aren't plants. They don't need manpower, water, sun, land, transportation, cleaning, pesticides. They don't need to be in a cold room for storage for several months, don't need to be individually packed, weighed, labeled, and don't need gas for delivery... I think I can go on but you and OP get the point already.
OP was justifying carriers for their high prices. How many messages are sent a day in the US? Let's say "a billion", at 20c each, it's 200M a day. At 10c each it's still 100M a day. at ONE CENT it's TEN MILLION DOLLARS A DAY, or about USD 3B a year. And some asshole tries to justify "costs" of the network.
I think we're confusing terms here: "the associated message flows between the network control systems are costly". Costly in what sense? Bandwidth? CPU power? Certainly NOT costly in the economic sense. When you make 3Bn a year (ok, let's make it 1Bn a year) off a service that's already built in your infrastructure...
you, sir, are an asshole.
1. it doesn't use the control channel: sms can be sent over GPRS which is a data channel.
2. 160 bytes isn't much data. period. even 1 second of voice require MUCH MORE routing: each packet needs to be routed individually.
3. IT DOESN'T COST MONEY TO COMPANIES! WHERE DO YOU GET THAT IDEA? Dude, seriously: it doesn't. Period. They have their own networks, data flows freely inside the network, why the hell does it cost money? Once infrastructure is paid (and with billions of text messages sent every day, it's paid for pretty quickly), it's FREE. The only cost is electricity, which is a few dollars a day for each cell out there.
4. Your argument for the banana is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Seriously dude, you need to rethink a lot of things if you think you can compare bananas in a supermarket to text messages.
I'm in Argentina. Coca-cola labels say it has HFCS.
yeah but it can be funny, like this
funny doesn't count for karma anyway.