Posts by Luca

WRONG TITLE

The woman was not jailed for texting while driving. She was jailed for causing and accident and killing somebody, there's a BIG difference.

Finally...

I fly over 30,000 miles every year, now they can finally feel the way I feel. Why should I get all the baby-crying fun?

How it compares?

>How does this technically impressive but inherently unstable layer

>cake compete against inexpensive, stable, and fast hard drives?

You think the first hard drives were big and stable? Or any other technology for that matter?

>Priced a BD disk recently?

Uh, yes. A 25GB BD goes for about $12 now, prices already dropped since last year's $20.

A BD has a shelf life of approximately 200 years, a HD doesn't get anywhere close and it's subject to mechanical failure.

As a professional photographer I rather burn a few coasters and have my photos safely backed up on several BD than several HDD.

You know, not everybody needs storage to save their illegally downloaded games, videos and music.

AWFUL REVIEW

70%?

I'm a professional photographer and I use Canon equipment. I use higher end DSLRs but still think the new 450D is a great camera.

Reviews in photography magazine in the U.S. place it as the best and fastest camera for under $2000, even better than the 40D (although it's not as sturdy and lacks higher ISO).

A score of 70% shows that the person who wrote the review has no understanding of how cameras work and how to measure quality factors.

Job Vs Gates

I don't know you but these days I like Bill Gates a lot more than Steve Jobs. At least Gates gives hundreds of million of dollars to research possible cures to common diseases.

No thank you!

I'm an elite member in my favorite airline (Continental. Ok free advertising since they do a good job) which means I fly at least 25,000 actual miles a year (more than that I assure you) and I go to the bathroom a lot (I drink a lot of water on the plane to stay hydrated) to the point that on intercontinental flights I pick an aisle seat for not bothering my neighbors, but if my airline implemented something like this I'd stop flying with them. It's a pain in the neck already all the ridiculous useless security I have to go through (recently they threw away my Passion Fruit Jam purchased in Hawaii for my mother saying it was a security risk).

I'm sick and tired of paranoia. Security YES, overzealous security agents cutting off on my freedom NO.

I'd Leave Comcast

I have Comcast and I'm a photographer, which means that I use bandwidth to promote my activity. If Comcast put a cap to hurt me I would quit them in a heartbit, even if the solution I choose ended up being more expensive, but it's a matter of principle. I'm tired of corporations telling me what to do.

You're crazy!

>We say that New York has a right to its tax money.

And I say that you are crazy. The law is clear and NY has no right to anything. Amazon does not reside in NY nor does it hold any office/warehouse. By the same reasoning then NY should start taxing merchandise purchased by mail/net order in other countries. And then all the other 49 states should do so.

Re: @Michael Compton

I'm not sure what you mean that layers are easier to add to HD-DVD than BD. I still have to see any HD-DVD DL in the market.

BD-RE are pretty cheap nowadays, the price has dropped a lot, single layer discs are going for just over 10 Dollars each here in the States and double layers (50GB) are still expensive but price will drop and quickly (just a year ago one BD-RE SL was 24 dollars).

Also, in the works is a 4L disc with 200GB capacity.

I'm a professional photographer and disc capacity is the thing I'm most interested in and that's why I backed BD since the start. HD-DVD simply was never an option to me.

BD DL = 50GB, HD-DVD DL=30GB, that's 20GB difference: HUGE!

Luca

Yes it is over

For the people claiming that a majority of the Blue Ray players are PS3 and therefore should not be counted: GET A CLUE!

A lot of people have bought a PS3 because of the Blue Ray and they use it to watch BD movies so I don't see any reason why it should not be counted.

Plus, you might want to read Slashdot and around the web on Wal-Mart, the biggest US retailer of anything, saying that they are dropping HD-DVD and Toshiba about to announce the end of it. Not only, more and more sources are claiming that Toshiba already has one or two Blue Ray players ready for release because they cannot afford to fall behind the market.

Good bye HD-DVD was nice meeting you (not really, I never cared for 20GB less capacity than BD).

NUMBERS DO NOT MATCH!

I live in the US. The above numbers do not take into consideration sales of PS3 (with a PS3 40GB package for $399 including BD Spider-Man), and also do not take into consideration that you can buy everywhere a HD-DVD player for about $100 with a coupon for 5 free movies. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's about 50 GBP.

Luca

@ Ed: S&H fees

I'm one of those people that sell with high S&H fees and I plan to keep it that way. Why?

Because if I sell a DVD that I bought for $15 for 1 penny plus $19.99 S&H fees I have to pay ebay the closing fess only on 1 penny. Note that they already charged me for insertion fees and for PayPal. At that point I made, maybe, a $2 profit, which is really nothing.

If I have to post that same DVD for $17 plus $3 S&H I'm paying much more for insertion and closing fees at which point I make no profit so to make the same $2 I have to sell the DVD for $19.50 plus $3 S&H.

In the first instance you pay $20, in the second you pay $22.50

WHICH ONE DO YOU PREFER?

I have friends that got negative feedback for selling a DVD for $1 and $15 SH&, the same DVD that sells in store for $21.99 (Plus tax, often)

If you're not happy with the price don't buy it on ebay and get it for more in the store. But if you are smart, you will look at the total price, you don't care about the S&H per se.

Downloads NOT GOING to substiture Blue-Ray

Jobs should know better. Even after all this time download of music from iTunes and similar service is a minority of sales when compared to actual CDs sold.

Not only the bandwidth is not there for HD download but:

1) HD download is not the same quality of a BD disc. No studio is going to put a 40GB file to download, they'll be compressed to something like 4GB, at that point why inventing BD and HD-DVD at all since that could fit a regular DVD?

2) People like to collect movies. I own over 500 DVDs and I'm not the only one

3) Can you imagine the nightmare of your hard drive crashing and having to re-download the whole HD content? What if the downloading service has closed down or you don't have the file with the license anymore (their downloads would be protected for sure).

Just today I downloaded a 45 minutes TV show from Amazon Unbox, I have broadband and yet it took 11.5 hours to download. That's bullcrap! Imagine a 2.5 hours High-Def movie... Much faster to go to my local video store and buy/rent the Blue Ray.

Talking about prices...

Somebody here is forgetting that when the first DVD-R came out it was sold on the market for $5000 (and people, some, bought it).

Stop whining about high prices of BD and HD-DVD, it's normal, new technology costs. Prices will come down in the future when more people puchase and the Second Generation of devices is out. It happens with every format.

That said: long live BD. ;-)

Something to do with BD ?

Since the news are out that Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD 2:1 in the States, it would be stupid of Microsoft not to consider an eventual external BD Drive for the 360.

Regardless of the merits of the HD-DVD format, we all know (in denial or not) where the format war is heading.

Personally, I'm waiting until the second Generation of the format to go out and buy a BD-RW for storing all my photos (I'm a photographer) on a whopping 50GB disc :)

Luca Diana