Posts by Dan Slevin
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Bargain hunters may be interested to know that a double DVD of Vigil & The Navigator (plus the rarely seen In Spring One Plants Alone) was spotted at New World Chaffers for only $24.99.
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As someone who's been using mobile data for 5 years or so now, I just can't get over how little the average cost has changed.
How much did Vodafone pay for Spectrum in the 3G auction? I'm hazy on the specifics but I suspect shitloads.
And they were anticipating selling people phones that would do video calling (a service no one was likely to use) but real-world, high bandwidth internet usage was not in their thinking.
So I suspect they don't really have the capacity yet to allow that many new high demand users. And they've only had about three months since the unilateral announcement from Vodafone parent that the paradigm shift was coming.
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My real world experience for Macs is that they remain useful working machines for much longer than the equivalent PC. Every Mac I've ever owned I have given away on replacement, given away to someone who makes good use of it, sometimes for years.
I have an eight year old PowerBook acting as a music server at home - and I can still take it to meetings or on trips - and the last system upgrade (2007) was the first that it wasn't compatible with.
In fact, every Mac OS upgrade has run faster on the same hardware which I don't think you can say about Windows.
My 2.5 year old iMac is going to my sister and niece at Christmas and I can see them using it for years.
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Tangent: Dan, I was obsessed by 'This Bitter Earth' by Dinah Washington in Killer of Sheep. I went straight to the computer after Auckland Film Society's showing...
And iTunes almost immediately got $1.79 of my money for it - iTunesPlus in fact. I really like being able to buy singles or cherry-pick individual songs like that at a totally impulse-friendly price.
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why Didn't't you suggest that DRM on cd is fine so long as it is accompanied by access to downloadable versions of the tracks free of charge to a legitimate buyer. wouldn't that have achieved the same goal, ie you with your disc and copies on all players you as a legal owner are entitled to, and an amount difficulty in mass copying that an unprotected disc would promote.
I would venture that me suggesting anything to Sony/BMG (or whoever) would have precisely zero effect on that happening. No goal would be achieved.
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iTunes doesn't seem to have much of interest and I have some sort of moral block on illegal downloading.
I wouldn't underestimate iTunes. I watched Charles Burnett's wonderful Killer of Sheep at Film Soc last night, full of great blues, R&B and jazz tracks, and found almost all of them deep in the database.
If you look beyond the front page, you'll find most everything - just, as Russell says, at often low bit rates.
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(OTOH, I'll go with the WaPo Fact Checker's call that the real problem with Obama's statement is that it perpetuates the myth that America liberated Auschwitz and generally won the war all round.)
I think the most important and telling aspect of this anecdote is that Obama raised it in the context of treating post-traumatic-stress-disorder in veterans rather than in aggrandaising the role his family may have played in liberating Europe.
And it was the first time he had ever mentioned it.
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Oh, the humanity!
Or rather Oh, the huge manatee.
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Actually the best train trip in the country used to be the over night trip between Auckland and Wellington ...
I was reminsicing about that just the other day. At 10.00pm the "train manager" came around and switched off the tv and all the lights and at Ohakune they switched the heating on, prompting all of us to unwrap from our sleeping bags and divest of bobble hats and jumpers.
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I cannot really see the need for high speed trains, if you're in that much of a hurry you can always go by air. The train maybe one of the last remnants of a time when speed was not of the essence and a more leisurely pace was the norm.
Bring back the Zeppelin.