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For about two years now we've owned a wonderful laster printer, made by Lexmark. It's really great and has served us well so far. About a third of the stuff printed pertains to work, school work and such, while the rest is spent on Marli's biggest hobby:
fan fiction. So far, we've gone through about 22.000 pages.
o_O Ouch...
Seeing how Marli will probably not stop reading fan fiction any time soon, I'm thinking of saving both us and the environment a lot of hassle. I'm thinking of purchasing an
eBook reader for Marli. By now the
Hanlin V3 (made in China by Jinke) is starting to look pretty good. I could
buy it locally for E299, or import it from China for E239 which is quite a difference.
That's still a pretty steep price, but when
compared to other eBook readers it's actually not that bad. The dutch
Iliad is fscking expensive at around E500 :(
Of course, the biggest question would be if Marli would even like using the device. Would it be easy enough for her to put new books and chapters on? Would she like reading from electronic paper? (Remember, these aren't LCD screens!) Would she get used to the buttons and such? It's a shame that there isn't a shop in the Netherlands where we could try a few different models out in person.
Maybe later... Maybe later...
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Consumerist is reporting that current Blu-Ray players won't correctly play future discs. The article goes on to talk about how current players only support certain profiles of discs, and that discs with newer profiles won't have all their features enabled for older players.
It's crap like this that makes me think that even though Blu-Ray may have beat/may be about to beat HD-DVD, it's a long ways away from getting full mainstream consumer adoption. I'm pretty technical, and even I don't understand all the nuances associated with the different profiles. When consumers are faced with making a choice, they'd just as often not make the choice for fear that if they do choose, they will choose incorrectly. I think this will happen to Blu-Ray and is just another reason why the next-gen format war will be won by the Internet. So why let this profiles garbage even happen? Consumerist reports:
When asked why current players were released to the market when in such a primitive state, manufacturers blamed the release of HD DVD and said it forced them to come to market too soon. "We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation."
Of course, blame it on the other guys for making a mess of your own format. Why even worry have these profiles as "features"? I haven't seen anything like this plague the HD-DVD camp.
Regardless, we now have this mess on our hands. At least the early adopters can help spread the word of how great Blu-Ray is despite these small technical issues, right? Wrong. It seems like Blu-ray will be alienating those early adopters, instead of embracing them: 'Regarding current Blu-ray player owners, Blu-ray developers told BetaNews, "They knew what they were getting into."'
The high-def format war is far from over. Even after beating HD-DVD, Blu-ray faces an even greater foe: the consumer.
Technorati Tags: Sony, Bluray, Playstation 3, HD-DVD, high definition, video
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Blu-Ray About To Win (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin
TechCrunch is reporting that Paramount, one of the last major studios on the HD-DVD side, will be announcing that it is switching to Blu-ray. This leaves Universal as the sole studio in the HD-DVD camp. I haven't been keeping up with the details of the format war, but I imagine the PS3 might have had something to do with it. Knowingly or not, people bringing home PlayStation 3's this holiday season were also bringing home Blu-ray players. With a much larger installed base of Blu-ray players, Sony had more leverage in negotiations with the last hold-out studios. I wonder how different things would be if the XBox 360 had HD-DVD built-in instead of as an optional add-on, given that it had a year (and effectively a two-year) head start.
I personally wouldn't go out and buy a PS3 just for Blu-ray support, and in fact was thinking about buying an XBox 360 because I like more of the games and because of the XBox Live (and Arcade) experience. That said, I wouldn't go out and buy any other Blu-ray player either. I doubt I would buy any Blu-ray movies since Netflix has been working wonders for me and on top of that, I would favor digital distribution over physical distribution at this point. I think many others do too, which makes me wonder if this was a war worth fighting over.
Technorati Tags: Sony, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, PlayStation 3, XBox 360, digital, high-definition, movie studios
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PS3: The New 3DO? (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin
People are still making games for mid-90s console failures the 3DO and Jaguar. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is a comment on that post that offers a quote from the 3DO's Wikipedia page:
The success and quality of subsequent next generation systems which began coming onto the market in the mid-90's, the limited library of titles, the lack of third-party support, and a refusal to reduce pricing till almost the end of the products life were among the many issues that led to the platform's demise. For a significant period of the products life cycle, 3DO's official stance on pricing was that the 3DO was not a video game console, it was a high-end audio-visual system and was priced accordingly, so no price adjustment was needed (emphasis mine).
Sound familiar?
Technorati Tags: Panasonic, 3DO, console, video games, PS3, Sony, Playstation 3
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DigitalLife 06 (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin
I attended the DigitalLife show this past Saturday. I got a chance to see some interesting little toys, get some hands-on time with the PS3 and got a chance to hang with Robert Heron, Patrick Norton and Jim Lauderback of dl.tv/PCMag. Here are some of my impressions:
- The new Treo 680 is a nice (but incremental) improvement over the 650. It definitely does not reflect the two year gap between the 650 and the 680. It loses the antenna, but keeps the awful VGA camera and same processor.
- Dell was everywhere. I didn't see many non-Dell/Alienware machine on the floor.
- The 20" Dell notebook is a hoss. I can't imagine anyone buying it and actually taking it anywhere. If it would actually fit on an airplane tray table, I can see the table just snapping off under the sheer weight of this machine. Even for LAN parties, I think a Shuttle box and separate display might be easier to manage, and would be a whole lot more upgradeable.
- While I didn't get to hold the controller, I did see the Wii on display. The system is about the size I expected, but the controller looks a lot smaller than I thought it would be. Elebits was the game on display, and while it didn't look particularly fun, it did do a good job of showing off the Wiimote.
- The PS3 controller is a nice incremental improvement over the PS2 controller. I like the way R2/L2 were converted to semi-trigger buttons and the slightlly smaller grip felt a bit better.
- Sonic on the PS3, although 70% complete, was pretty buggy. Lots of clipping issues were apparent and the 360 version (85% complete) felt a lot faster. The graphics on the PS3 were great, although they didn't seem that much better than the 360.
Technorati Tags: DigitalLife, New York City, Javits Center, dl.tv, Robert Heron, Patrick Norton, Jim Lauderback, Palm, Treo 680, Dell, Alienware, games, Nintendo, Wii, Wiimote, PS3, Sega, Sonic the Hedgehog
Posted in:
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