Jasper

You know, honestly, that's simply the most stupid thing to say ever. People don't buy stuff for their price, they buy them for their marketing. For their hype. Nokia devices aren't interesting, even though they might be fine and well priced, because they are not hyped. A name like Nokia s60? That tells me as much about the phone as a turd tells me about the meaning of life. IPhone? It's got the Apple i in there, it looks great. It doesn't do anything special. It doesn't do anything new. But what it does, it does well. And Apple has learned how to hype and market their stuff, proving that they can market it. Nokia's advertisements don't tell me shit. They're neat pieces of stock video with some Nokia-font-text over it, but it doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't make me want the device. iPhone is hot, no matter how 'overpriced'. No matter how 'standard'.

That's all he needs, me thinks.

There are hundreds of games out for the DS, with 90% being minigames, educational crapware or simply stinking nonsens. Those games you named, none really catches my interest. I am looking forward to Spore, however.

That sentence made the least sense ever. I see where you're going, but sadly enough I don't like GPS. It takes away from the old, classic way of doing things. You know, a good old-fashioned (mushroom-infected, half rotten) map and a woman trying to read it. Then there's a fight, and the man reads the map and drives at the same time, with the woman mad as hell and the children being bullied around. Actually, I prefer GPS now.

iPhone - if it is avaible, yes. It's simply a must-have gadget. The first truly smart phone, with enough RAM to let you surf the web, make calls, and do more stuff than a usual cellphone can. With the SDK out, the future is looking bright for this device. iPod Touch - It's a pretty good thing, though a little high-priced. But if you're the gadget-lover like me, you have it in your pockets right now (next to a knife to protect yourself from potential thieves). But right now, no, wait untill firmware 2.0 gets a release on the device before you're buying into it. Wii - Barely in the line of 'gadgets' but still a must-have device. Although the price is a little steep right now, I'm expecting Nintendo to drop price somewhere soon to keep up their momentum. It's a gadget that's good to have, but not really a must-have. And after closer inspection, this thing looks nothing like Apple Design. It's screws, bends, and flaps all over the place. It looks ugly without the stand. Really ugly. Xbox360 - Certainly not a must-have device, since the chances of breaking it are even higher than losing the lottery, but still a nice 'gadget' (I don't get it: is it even a gadget?) anyway. It's priced competivly now, but don't be fooled! Buying into the full experience, including wifi, HD support (not a necessary feature anymore, though) and hard drive bumps up the price significantly, making it more in the range of the PS3 that comes with all these features and looks much better than the white, clunky plastic that the Xbox is made of. The Xbox's plastic is incredibly ugly in my opinion, and reminds of the computers in the nineties. Microsoft truly is ten years behind, although Apple did release the iMac ten years ago now. (In that retrospect I'm expecting a semi-transparant plastic Xbox reworking this year). PS3 - Buy into it. No Backwards Compatibility, but a console with potential. It's still one of the biggest household names, cheapest Blu-Ray player, potentially best online service (it's free and it tries to be Xbox Live) and it has all the legacy controller stuff in your hands. You pay the extra dollar, you get the extra stuff. MacBook Air - I can't really see why it exists. It's there for an incredibly small fraction of the market - businessmen who want a lightweight next to their desktop. And it's not even consumer-market, the orientation Apple aimed for the past ten-or-so years. This seems like a pointless, expensive piece of kit. Get a MacBook and save yourself €500. DS - Still a pick-up device, but yet no really fantastic third-party games yet. Why are there so many mini-games collections on this thing? Is it never going to stop? Are developers incredibly lazy? PSP - After having one for a week (then having it taken away by someone to serve as an MP3 player for a while, sadly enough) I must say: nice going. It works, and it works brilliantly. It's at a healthy price now and it's a good device. It's a crappy browser (certainly if you're used to Safari on iPod Touch), so don't use that too much.

Is it me, or does it look like Mac a lot? It has coverflow, those info lists on the bottom of 'finder'-windows, circly closing buttons, and a bar without a windows button, this time on the bottom... Well, if you steal you better do it well - and this seems a pretty good steal.

Haha about 72 million people do. That's a little more than people who own a Zune. RoadKill, you suck for makiung such a childish remark.

Uhuh. It's the windows on windows you use to browse yuour files. You know, when you open a documents window or somethin..? Mac or Windows might avoid this question.

Streaming your music is easy with iTunes and an Airport Express: just use AirTunes. You can this way also stream film through Apple TV (though any setup would) so that would be a good choice there too. I'm talking Apple because I know from my experience those work for that purpose, and I haven't really seen any alternatives to the ease of AirTunes. I would, however, hold of from wireless speakers. They require batteries, synching, in short: a whole hurdle of problems that you don't have with wires. If I were you and was willing to pay a good price for it, I'de say that the Apple streaming solution would be the best. Not because it's Apple, but because it's easy and quickly done. An airport express (about €100), an Apple TV (I think that one is €300) and a free copy of iTunes on all PC's make it managable to have surround sound everywhere, stream all PC libraries around your house, buy and rent movies, and so on. It would be my solution, but if somebody knows better stuff than say so, since I only know Apple who support AirTunes or something similar, and the AppleTV doesn't really have a great alternative except Xbox360, but that doesn't have a big library like iTunes.

Honestly, he was golng to stick with Avid, so I'm pretty sure that in comparison Premiere is still a simple tool. This is a note of caution: Avid is not compatible with Vista. The developers have decided to hold of for a while to test the application and rewrite it a little, so untill then: stick nicely to xp and watch microsoft die a horrible death. Premiere Pro CS3, however, is compatible.

Premiere 2 is about, say, eight years old now. If any version of premiere, you should get a Premiere Pro. But I assume you're talking about Pro 2, since version 2 was mac only and is now not eight, but sixteen years old. I think it should work just fine. I personally prefer Premiere because it has a very accustomed interface: you'll get used to it and once you learn the basics you know enough to find your way to the difficult stuff yourself. I haven't been able to try Avid since my Windows emulation is simply not sharing files with my mac, but as soon as I get it fixed I'm installing it. I've got it right here, so it's not a problem.

So your three major things are that it's for windows, free and not anjnoying. Okay, you have two. In the free category you wo'nt find anything decent (look at WIndows Movie Maker: it isn't even half-decent). If you're willing to pay (or crack, but I don't condone that) for Premiere Pro CS3 - it's not the easiest to get on with but if you know Adobe Apps, you'll find your way around it. And it really has lots of possibilities. Avid is a good choice to, but that's a little higher than Premiere Pro - it's really meant for the uber-professionals that don't work with FInal Cut and wanted to stick to Windows.

Just like newsapers still exist, even with television, radio and intrnet, means that media can coexist. There will always be people who love their stuff phsyical, though I'm sure e'll all go digit&l sooon. Maybe Matrixlike?

If you're not the tech enthousiast young adult, you couldn't care less about HD. Like with parents, HD is just a dishwasher with extra functionality but they couldn't care less. I think it's not really something that will play out to be a big role in the future of gaming, honestly. Wii supports DVD and it's doing fantastic. Well, it doesn't support DVD - but it does have that storage. I know it isn't HD, but I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing lots more of DVD the coming years, and digital distribution afterwards - no Blu-Ray in between.

Indeed. But still, it's not entirely wrong what they're doing. It's still stealing and when you can steal, the government has the right to step in. I just tried to defend myself but it's only later that I noticed I didn't even know what I wrote in the last sentence. There you have it, on paper, my testimony.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080215-uk-isps-dont-want-to-play-umpire-to-three-strikes-rule.html

What can you do in a phone call? Talk. The closest you come to stealing a song with a phone call is singing it, or playing it on your stereo for the other person te hear. What can you do with internet? There's a fundamental difference between phone calls and internet: the possible communication can be dangerous. How does that compare to an airport? Well, why aren't you kept an eye on when you get into a taxi? Because the taxi is like a phone call - just you, really hard to do anything wrong. The airport, however, is a place where a lot of people can exchange a lot of information and so you're more policed. You need to be policed in places where people get together, and that's exactly what the internet is. I don't want to be a sour grape here, but there's a point in this. If you cheat on a test in university, there's no second chance. If you get caught, you're screwed. If you can steal a record from the record store, the store protects itself. They install camera's, they hire security or undercover agents. The internet is this huge store, only, there nobody securing it. It's time there came some laws on the internet, or things will get out of hand. And I'm playing the devil's advocate because your wacky laws don't apply to me. :wink:

That happens, doesn't it? Here's the major difference: the internet isn't like a phone call. It's not like a phone call at all. The internet is like an open market: if you act suspicious, then they can keep an eye on you. On the internet, you're not necesarrily talking straight to someone. In a phone call, you are. But internet has evolved far past the telephone line. If you call someone, then the government shouldn't listen. But on the internet you're not calling to someone, you're calling to everyone. Where everyone is together, a goverment can see to it that there are laws. People have accepted the internet like a black, free market. Everyone buys just what they want for nothing. That can't be accepted of course. Not that I don't watch something online every now and then, but we have to understand that this is nothing like a phone call with personal information. If you carry a gun to the airport, the government can arrest you.

What you do with your shopping bag isn't any business of the state, but if you steal a cd from the record store it is. The internet is a worldwide marketplace, so stealing stays wrong. Not that I find it right, but the State has just as much right to arrest you if you go downtown as if you go on the internet - it's where people meet, wich needs to be policed a little for society's sake.

There is something right about this, copyright and all, but the way of controlling it is plainly wrong... Ah well, the best way to control music is to make CD's less suspectable to riping, like delivering them with DRM (sorry, guys). If they wanted to stop it, they shouldn't have made it this easy (or install spyware with their players (winkwink Sony).

I think it has less effect on those, the one with the most problems is digital downloads themselves. If piracy on the web is so easy, movies will never really become big in digital distrbution. Also, I doubt it's aomsething Blu-Ray worries about since they are almost no Blu-Ray writers out there and download 25 Gb of data is way to much traffic for the regular man (my internet at home, for example, only has 10 Gb of up and download, like most people). DVD could be affected.

I'm not sure what exactly they'll be tracking. Torrentz? 089345A.flv files? I really doubt that anyone will be able to do this, however: you are stating an American Newspaper, so that doesn't ean a lot over here (in Belgium at least). In America this is possible, in Belgium (I'll be locally, I don't know anything about you guys) this is nearly impossible. Because of privacy laws (wich the PAtriot act killed in America) you shouldn't be able to do this. I think, however, this probably concerns peer to peer networks, and not flv downloads or torrentz. On a sidenote, no internetprovider can check the specific contents, like web pages. What is a good trick to download anything is using Safari's Activity Monitor Window, wich will allow you to double click the largest file and download it, the flv file. I Doubt any provider will be able to check this. This is just a law to be able to do this to serious offenders. EDIT: confused newspapers, but can't seem to find any article in the official website of the UK Times, and didn't see anything on our local official news site De Redactie (deredactie.be), wich keep almost up-to-the-minute track of everything. Bullshit, therefore.

Ow for god's sake.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying macs are top of the line anymore after those two years, but Apple does hardware revisions every two years (well, sort-of two years) so that means your hardware won't be replaced with newer untill after those two years. That's all I'm saying. It lasts for two years without seeing better iMac models (except for the ones already avaible, off course). What's up with everyone missing my points today? It's like throwing a stick and being smashed in the face again. Did that last thing even make sense? I don't know, I'm off playing with my friend who I imagen because he's the only one listening when nobody else is around.

Congratz, you've missed my point.