Posts by Rich

3,400 votes vanish from Florida election

Could be worse

In Seattle, when they "recount" the votes they always "find" thousands of perviously uncounted ballots. In 2004 when the losing candidate was still down by thousands of votes after the second recount, she won the third hand recount (since everyone knows that a candidate hiring someone to count your ballots manually is always more accurate than having an unbiased machine count it), they still managed to "find" a few thousand "uncounted" ballots, which allowed her to win the 4th ballot counting bu around 150 votes and is now the governor. Unlike Gore who didn't win any of the Florida recounts and thus never had enough electoral votes to win.

Paris because she's smarter than the people running the elections around here.

Comcast mulls overage fees for bandwidth lovers

Per Month?

I often use more bandwidth than that per week! I'm constantly moving large files between home and work and school via ftp servers. Plus I stream video to/from my TiVo across the net, occasionally play games online, and constantly stream music via online radio stations. 250GB per month is completely unworkable for me, especially when I'm already paying extra for more bandwidth from Commiecast.

HD DVD sales still solid despite format's failure

Good Deal

I rushed out and bought an Xbox 360 HD-DVD player to hook up to my media center PC when they dropped the price to $50. They also threw in 6 free HD-DVD discs, on top of the discounts they offered on other movies. Many of the stores here in Seattle still carry HD-DVDs and constantly receive new shipments of new release movies on HD. Warner Brothers may have announced a switch to BR, but they’re still releasing new HD-DVDs every week. Sadly the price of the discs has gone back up to an average of $5 more than DVDs, but they’re still cheaper than BR. Even the Blockbuster by my house still carries HD-DVDs and those that work there say they’ll carry them as long as there’s still a demand.

Vote now for your fave sci-fi movie quote

Back to the Future

I also voted for Doc Brown, yet it still shows only 2 votes. I think I'm the 4th person to comment that they've voted for that one.

Inventor promises bottle-o-wind car in a year. Again

Still cheap to drive

I’ve wanted one of these since I first saw them on Beyond Tomorrow and year or two ago. The only reason I want one is because they’d be cheap to operate. I could fill the thing for free at work with our compressors. That would bring my cost per mile pretty close to zero. I rarely drive more than 100km per day and if I’m going farther than that I’m usually transporting stuff that weighs a ton or so, so I’ve got my pickup for that. So an air powered car would be perfect for someone like me assuming they aren’t too expensive to purchase once they become available.

Plunging player prices to reveal Blu-ray vs HD DVD winner?

Who says only one format can win?

What if one format wins on one continent and another wins on another? If they have regional encoded DVDs today to keep people from importing/exporting unreleased movies all over the world, how much better would it be for the studios if each region had its own format? In the U.S. high def discs will take off in late 2008 or early 2009 as all people will need either a digital TV or converter box to watch TV as all broadcast TV in the U.S. must switch from analog to digital by February 2009. Only then will we see wide adoption of either/both HD formats.

The only people who should be looking into buying either format are those of us who currently own large 1080p TVs. No one else will see much/any improvement over cheaper DVDs.

Blu-ray outsells HD DVD 2:1 in US

Are they really sales?

Do these sales of HD movies only count the ones where cash was exchanged for a disc? Most players offer coupons for 1-5 free discs when you buy the player. Are those free discs counted into those sales numbers? What about the Spiderman discs that are shipped with the PS3, do those count into that mix as well?