Certainly blue-ray discs will be more expensive in the short term, but eventually they have to get to the $15 price point or people just won't buy them. Sort of what's happening now. Since blue ray players all play regular DVDs, I expect the Andy Griffin show DVDs to still be $2 for the foreseeable future. The consume will think this disc is only worth $2, I'm not paying $30 for it! I've already seen $299 Blu-ray players in the store, they will be cheap soon enough. When the PS3 goes below $200 I'm in. You point of always being higher profit is hard to tell on the VHS-DVD conversion. I recall VHS tapes being quite expensive in the day (for new movies, before DVDs were around). Now new movies are often $9.99 - $15.
This can stream to a 360 via Windows media 11. Yes you need all the DRM bells and whistles to make it happen, but maybe not a bad deal if your in for it anyway:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/ontv/ref=sv_atv_2
Has all the details for you.
This is like those political ads that try to make us think some guy with huge incomes and power is "just like us". In the time it took to try on those shoes bill gates probably made enough money to buy the entire store, if not the chain.
Or troll down to your local best buy/target/etc and pick up a copy on release day. Gamestop-o sometimes holds games if you didn't pre-order, but other than Wii games that come with a plastic gadget I've never seen places not have plenty of discs in this day and age.
I think his point is that the cable card sucks. And it does. I have a Tivo with cablecard and Time Warner. I'm limited a lot to what I can get because of it. No pay-per-view, no on-demand, and no about 20 channels that I'd never watch. Why can't I get those channels without a set top box? Because they only stream them when someone wants to watch them. Now granted they are 20 channels that no one watches, but maybe this guy wants to, his point is that the cable companies have been doing more and more with "2-way" services which current cable cards can't do. Doesn't bother me in practice, but it bothers me in principle.
Bravo! This is what we need. Solar breakthru of the weeks are getting old when every time I ask it's 20k to put in a system on my roof with a 15 year payoff. I don't care what technology you use, give us solar with 3 year payoff and every person and business in the country will line up.
I have AT&T and I think they got more bars in more places by using this simple formula. I now NEED 3 bars to reliably make a call. I used to be able to have some hope at 1 or 2, but not in the last year or so. I realize the point of this article is that bars don't mean anything anyway, but I feel they have been adjusted a lot recently.
I've had an iphone for a year and my bill has never been different. The AT&T store here even went to great effort to print out an example bill before I signed showing all the charges. My experience has shown that the AT&T clerk can do whatever they want on their fancy store computer, but many are lazy or don't know how. I suggest going to a different AT&T store.
I have only one connector of every type. I have a slightly older HDTV (2 years or so) when connectors weren't as common. I have one HDMI, one component, one s-video etc. For a long time I didn't have an xbox and just had a Wii. The DVD player functionality was one of the things that I bought the Xbox for (among many others, but it was a factor). For a while I had a component switch box that sucked, good HDMI ones are fairly pricey, and I like the look of less junk around my TV.
It's about boxes around the TV and connectors on the back of it. I use my xbox to play DVDs. Sure I could get a DVD player for $30, but why would I want an extra remote, extra box, extra connection etc.
I wonder if it was the early 360s that were so loud? I got the 20G model around Christmas when it was on it's second (or 3rd?) hardware revision that supposedly was new and improved with 20% less RROD. I've never felt it was loud watching movies or in game play. I think the fans can spin up to be fairly loud on a temp dependent basis, after playing bioshock for a few hours and going back to the dashboard I would notice the fans being louder than normal, still not loud enough to hear over game sounds. I also have mine in a well vented area and the power supply in a slightly separate place, maybe all jammed together the fans detect more heat and spin faster? just my 2 cents.
I have to agree, I have a D-link ultra extreme speedboost plus extra intense extreme rangeboost 4,000 router that I put in my attic. I've never rebooted it, it's on for months at a time between power glitches with no problems. Maybe it's all those extremes (pardon me X-tremes) that they put on the package.
I remember about 15 years ago all the news stations in my area upgraded their radars and would go on like used car salesmen about them: "Our radar is so powerful we can tell you where it's raining down to the square inch!". "Our radar will destroy their radar" and the like. I look forward to a new round of Doppler max 4,000 + eXtreme range boost.
Perhaps the oldest, but it only requires a G4 866 or better, which includes a lot of late model iBooks with 30G drives. I'm just saying I always run out of space on laptops (even with a newer 80G macbook). Lots of stuff can't be compressed, but I'd like those few extra gigs when it can be. I have a 1TB external drive at home, but defeats the point of a laptop to lug it around.
Compression! It is the one feature that I'm jealous of on windows machines. I constantly run Linux on older machines and which for a default file system that offered compression. I know hard drives are cheap, but not free. The same thing comes up on slightly older Mac hard drives all the time. 10GB was a standard laptop drive on older powerbooks and ibooks, these machines still run leopard fine, but it takes half their hard drive!
I hate gamestop as much as the next guy (I always refer to them as GameStop-o in a M$ style rant) But they are the only folks locally that take in games. I know I can sell them on eBay/Amazon whatever, but that's a lot of hassle. I can just hand them to GameStop and get my 50 cents. I know a lot of people keep games forever, I play a game til I beat it or am sick of it, then trade it in. Very few games survive in my house more than 2 months. When I can sell my steam game back to gamestop I'll consider them.
Seriously I've seen a "Solar Tech breakthrouh!" article about once a week for going on 3 years now, but I still have to special order panels at huge cost if I want to make my own little installation. Things have gotten better, but not much. Really only about 10% improvement in the last 5 years at the end user price point per watt. When I can buy a 2000 watt system to run a few plugs at home depot for $350, give me a call.
The killer here will be if they can get newer movies. Of course it'll never happen. $8.95 for unlimited new movie watching? HBO/starz/etc all go under. This is the box we've all been waiting for, just needs a little more content to be worth it, of the 60 movies in my netflix queue, only 4 are ok for instant viewing. Looking around there is stuff I may watch, but nothing super great. Now what I rally want is the rumored $5 disc you can pop into your Xbox to do this.
I agree with everything you said. "teh sexy" to me is nice to only have one quiet box on my desktop at home, my main machine is an older white intel iMac, I don't like the looks of the new ones at all but that's just my opinion. USB does have higher overhead, I use some external drives to store big files that I don't use that much. I replaced my internal drive with a 500G one that more than meets my fast size needs. (the internal drives are user replaceable on iMacs, you don't have to get raped by apples overpriced drive upgrades, you won't void your warranty). Need are different and yours are no less valid than mine, I used to have a 21" CRT and when I got rid of it I had so much desk space I was shocked.
I think most of us really want the mac mini pro, a mac mini in a mini tower with room for a card or 2 and few full size hard drives. Seems like apple could make money selling that at $800 and make a lot of geeks happy.
It seems like the defined similar as one you could put more hard drives and cards into. Based solely on CPU the mac mini has it beat on price. Spec wise this looks more like a $1100 iMac, minus the 20" monitor and teh sexy. Also the reviews I've read say it's power hungry, power is a real calculation in a 3 year computer life span for TCO. The rise of USB and the dumb consumer has made the mac far more upgradable than it was 5 years ago, now you can get almost anything that used to be an internal component on USB. Not video cards I know, but honestly I don't play games on my mac, I've even *shudder* found the built in intel graphics to be more than sufficient for photo and video editing. I'm glad to see competition, this isn't the cheap good upgradeable Mac that we've been waiting for though. It's the not that cheap, not that good, upgradable Mac that may get it's support sued out of existence.
hmm, why would I want to run this when Windows XP runs fine on my eeePC. I have to run it for some controllers we use at work (my guess is 10% of their customers don't use Linux, but they make the software GUI windows.net only. At least they publish the commands so you can roll your own (cymod controllers for the interested)). Remember that XP came out a lifetime ago in the hardware cycle. That 600Mhz Celeron with 512MB of RAM looks pretty good to a base XP install.
Not to be a troll, but if you're seriously concerned get yourself an eeePC, draws 13 watts most times. Now if you hook up an external keyboard/mouse/ monitor you've got a darn decent setup for web/email/light compiling for probably around 35 watts (if you get a low power monitor). I love my little eeePC, I'm always surprised by how decent it is for my tasks.
Giving it some more thought, what we actually need is the capacity of the battery (which the Prius gives in the manual, I'm sure this car will as well), and the number of kWh it takes to go a mile. I realize this varies greatly like you mention, but so do MPG depending on terrain, etc. If I recall the company that makes the add on battery for the Prius claims you can get 2-3 miles per kWh. Probably a generous claim since the company is trying to sell you this system. Then a little maths says at $.15 a kWh and $3.50 a gallon that the Prius costs 5 cents a mile electric and 7 cents a mile gas. For The poster who claimed I forget about the mainland, I lived in Maryland when I bought the Prius and at the time electric was about $.12 kWh, and gas around $2.80.
What we really could use is a smart hybrid that knew the price of gas and electric, and could switch between which was more economical at the time.
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Certainly blue-ray discs will be more expensive in the short term, but eventually they have to get to the $15 price point or people just won't buy them. Sort of what's happening now. Since blue ray players all play regular DVDs, I expect the Andy Griffin show DVDs to still be $2 for the foreseeable future. The consume will think this disc is only worth $2, I'm not paying $30 for it! I've already seen $299 Blu-ray players in the store, they will be cheap soon enough. When the PS3 goes below $200 I'm in. You point of always being higher profit is hard to tell on the VHS-DVD conversion. I recall VHS tapes being quite expensive in the day (for new movies, before DVDs were around). Now new movies are often $9.99 - $15.
This can stream to a 360 via Windows media 11. Yes you need all the DRM bells and whistles to make it happen, but maybe not a bad deal if your in for it anyway: http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/ontv/ref=sv_atv_2 Has all the details for you.
This is like those political ads that try to make us think some guy with huge incomes and power is "just like us". In the time it took to try on those shoes bill gates probably made enough money to buy the entire store, if not the chain.
Or troll down to your local best buy/target/etc and pick up a copy on release day. Gamestop-o sometimes holds games if you didn't pre-order, but other than Wii games that come with a plastic gadget I've never seen places not have plenty of discs in this day and age.
I think his point is that the cable card sucks. And it does. I have a Tivo with cablecard and Time Warner. I'm limited a lot to what I can get because of it. No pay-per-view, no on-demand, and no about 20 channels that I'd never watch. Why can't I get those channels without a set top box? Because they only stream them when someone wants to watch them. Now granted they are 20 channels that no one watches, but maybe this guy wants to, his point is that the cable companies have been doing more and more with "2-way" services which current cable cards can't do. Doesn't bother me in practice, but it bothers me in principle.
I live on a remote pacific Island (Hawaii) you insensitive clod! I can't drive more than 80 miles away from my house.
Bravo! This is what we need. Solar breakthru of the weeks are getting old when every time I ask it's 20k to put in a system on my roof with a 15 year payoff. I don't care what technology you use, give us solar with 3 year payoff and every person and business in the country will line up.
I have AT&T and I think they got more bars in more places by using this simple formula. I now NEED 3 bars to reliably make a call. I used to be able to have some hope at 1 or 2, but not in the last year or so. I realize the point of this article is that bars don't mean anything anyway, but I feel they have been adjusted a lot recently.
I've had an iphone for a year and my bill has never been different. The AT&T store here even went to great effort to print out an example bill before I signed showing all the charges. My experience has shown that the AT&T clerk can do whatever they want on their fancy store computer, but many are lazy or don't know how. I suggest going to a different AT&T store.
I have only one connector of every type. I have a slightly older HDTV (2 years or so) when connectors weren't as common. I have one HDMI, one component, one s-video etc. For a long time I didn't have an xbox and just had a Wii. The DVD player functionality was one of the things that I bought the Xbox for (among many others, but it was a factor). For a while I had a component switch box that sucked, good HDMI ones are fairly pricey, and I like the look of less junk around my TV.
It's about boxes around the TV and connectors on the back of it. I use my xbox to play DVDs. Sure I could get a DVD player for $30, but why would I want an extra remote, extra box, extra connection etc.
I wonder if it was the early 360s that were so loud? I got the 20G model around Christmas when it was on it's second (or 3rd?) hardware revision that supposedly was new and improved with 20% less RROD. I've never felt it was loud watching movies or in game play. I think the fans can spin up to be fairly loud on a temp dependent basis, after playing bioshock for a few hours and going back to the dashboard I would notice the fans being louder than normal, still not loud enough to hear over game sounds. I also have mine in a well vented area and the power supply in a slightly separate place, maybe all jammed together the fans detect more heat and spin faster? just my 2 cents.
I have to agree, I have a D-link ultra extreme speedboost plus extra intense extreme rangeboost 4,000 router that I put in my attic. I've never rebooted it, it's on for months at a time between power glitches with no problems. Maybe it's all those extremes (pardon me X-tremes) that they put on the package.
That's more like now. When I was young I got a hot meal on a flight, even one that was 2 hours long, in economy class!
I remember about 15 years ago all the news stations in my area upgraded their radars and would go on like used car salesmen about them: "Our radar is so powerful we can tell you where it's raining down to the square inch!". "Our radar will destroy their radar" and the like. I look forward to a new round of Doppler max 4,000 + eXtreme range boost.
Perhaps the oldest, but it only requires a G4 866 or better, which includes a lot of late model iBooks with 30G drives. I'm just saying I always run out of space on laptops (even with a newer 80G macbook). Lots of stuff can't be compressed, but I'd like those few extra gigs when it can be. I have a 1TB external drive at home, but defeats the point of a laptop to lug it around.
Compression! It is the one feature that I'm jealous of on windows machines. I constantly run Linux on older machines and which for a default file system that offered compression. I know hard drives are cheap, but not free. The same thing comes up on slightly older Mac hard drives all the time. 10GB was a standard laptop drive on older powerbooks and ibooks, these machines still run leopard fine, but it takes half their hard drive!
I hate gamestop as much as the next guy (I always refer to them as GameStop-o in a M$ style rant) But they are the only folks locally that take in games. I know I can sell them on eBay/Amazon whatever, but that's a lot of hassle. I can just hand them to GameStop and get my 50 cents. I know a lot of people keep games forever, I play a game til I beat it or am sick of it, then trade it in. Very few games survive in my house more than 2 months. When I can sell my steam game back to gamestop I'll consider them.
Seriously I've seen a "Solar Tech breakthrouh!" article about once a week for going on 3 years now, but I still have to special order panels at huge cost if I want to make my own little installation. Things have gotten better, but not much. Really only about 10% improvement in the last 5 years at the end user price point per watt. When I can buy a 2000 watt system to run a few plugs at home depot for $350, give me a call.
The killer here will be if they can get newer movies. Of course it'll never happen. $8.95 for unlimited new movie watching? HBO/starz/etc all go under. This is the box we've all been waiting for, just needs a little more content to be worth it, of the 60 movies in my netflix queue, only 4 are ok for instant viewing. Looking around there is stuff I may watch, but nothing super great. Now what I rally want is the rumored $5 disc you can pop into your Xbox to do this.
I agree with everything you said. "teh sexy" to me is nice to only have one quiet box on my desktop at home, my main machine is an older white intel iMac, I don't like the looks of the new ones at all but that's just my opinion. USB does have higher overhead, I use some external drives to store big files that I don't use that much. I replaced my internal drive with a 500G one that more than meets my fast size needs. (the internal drives are user replaceable on iMacs, you don't have to get raped by apples overpriced drive upgrades, you won't void your warranty). Need are different and yours are no less valid than mine, I used to have a 21" CRT and when I got rid of it I had so much desk space I was shocked. I think most of us really want the mac mini pro, a mac mini in a mini tower with room for a card or 2 and few full size hard drives. Seems like apple could make money selling that at $800 and make a lot of geeks happy.
It seems like the defined similar as one you could put more hard drives and cards into. Based solely on CPU the mac mini has it beat on price. Spec wise this looks more like a $1100 iMac, minus the 20" monitor and teh sexy. Also the reviews I've read say it's power hungry, power is a real calculation in a 3 year computer life span for TCO. The rise of USB and the dumb consumer has made the mac far more upgradable than it was 5 years ago, now you can get almost anything that used to be an internal component on USB. Not video cards I know, but honestly I don't play games on my mac, I've even *shudder* found the built in intel graphics to be more than sufficient for photo and video editing. I'm glad to see competition, this isn't the cheap good upgradeable Mac that we've been waiting for though. It's the not that cheap, not that good, upgradable Mac that may get it's support sued out of existence.
hmm, why would I want to run this when Windows XP runs fine on my eeePC. I have to run it for some controllers we use at work (my guess is 10% of their customers don't use Linux, but they make the software GUI windows .net only. At least they publish the commands so you can roll your own (cymod controllers for the interested)). Remember that XP came out a lifetime ago in the hardware cycle. That 600Mhz Celeron with 512MB of RAM looks pretty good to a base XP install.
Not to be a troll, but if you're seriously concerned get yourself an eeePC, draws 13 watts most times. Now if you hook up an external keyboard/mouse/ monitor you've got a darn decent setup for web/email/light compiling for probably around 35 watts (if you get a low power monitor). I love my little eeePC, I'm always surprised by how decent it is for my tasks.
What we really could use is a smart hybrid that knew the price of gas and electric, and could switch between which was more economical at the time.