• Friday, November 16th, 2007
I wasn’t planning to only write about this kind of thing but by the time I was done with these topics the post was already larger than I’d like and I thought I should stop. Might do another post on other topics soon to compensate.
It looks to be a good time for gaming currently as usually happens in the run up to Christmas. I’ve mostly been playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2 followed by 3 on Nintendo DS during the last few weeks but I think this will end up on the back burner for a while. I’ve been anticipating The Witcher on PC for quite a while now and I just got word of my copy shipping today. On top of that Assassins Creed is due on PS3 next week. The PS3 version seems to have a slight graphical edge over the 360 version making it a bit of a no-brainer which to pick up. Mass Effect is due on Xbox360 next week too but I’m managing to hold back on this one for now (along with Call of Duty 4). No doubt I’ll pick Mass Effect up some time in the January/February games drought. I’m also looking forward to Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune which ships for the PS3 in early december. The only big Wii title on the way seems to be Super Mario Galaxy but I’m not into these games at all so it just means more dust collection for the Wii. Shame Nintendo let Super Smash Bros Brawl slip into next year, it’s not going to sell anywhere near as well as it would if it hit during a Christmas season. I still want to play more Persona 3 on PS2 but I really need to sit down to it for a period of time and things have just been too busy in recent weeks to find any time like that.
Speaking of PC games, I’m planning to do a graphics card upgrade sometime. Maybe next week. Maybe six months from now. As usual the card I actually want to buy doesn’t exist but I’m tempted to pick up ATI’s new HD 3870 anyway. It has cheap-ish prices, very low power consumption, a small board and it’s capable of driving games at native res on my monitor with maximum quality settings for everything but Crysis. I’m not buying any card with less than 1GB of RAM on it though and I really want HDMI support too so if they can satisfy both I might bite. Yes, I can’t really use HDMI to it’s full potential yet but the emphasis is on “yet”. Something I’m hoping to remedy sometime during the course of the next year. Maybe.
I’ve talked a few times (not here) about how I should stop procrastinating and finish my custom transformer box for driving my headphones. Despite this the procrastination continues. Theoretically it should sound a lot better so motivation shouldn’t be hard. I’ve already done the hard part and got the custom made very large transformers already. All that remains is to sign up to Digikey and order the handful of electronic components to make a 580V bias supply to finish it off. Some of these innocuous components are for some unfathomable reason not sold locally in New Zealand. It’s not going to cost much either since the transformers are the most costly part. Yeah, I should just do it.
I wasn’t planning to talk about MacOS 10.5 any more but I found a few other things worth mentioning. First and most annoying are the kernel panics I’ve been seeing when the wireless network subsystem is under heavy load. When I say “heavy load” I mean hundreds of open connections and this isn’t necessarily as unlikely a situation as it may sound. The panics themselves appear to be due to a bug in the driver when managing memory. I’ve been reporting each instance to Apple and have been supplying the full stack traces but it’s still not fixed in 10.5.1. Frustrating.
It also appears that Firmtek SATA cards have issues with sleep mode 10.5. Put a machine to sleep with one of these in there and chances are it won’t wake up again without a power down. This is of course more a problem with the cards than MacOS and supposedly new firmware is on the way to fix this. I do happen to have one of these in my G5 and have hit this issue too. Also frustrating.
I also noticed Finder behaving oddly in certain cases although it took me some time to figure out what was going on. At first it appeared that the concept of finder Windows holding state like size, view, position and colour had become a casualty of the constant war between the spatial and browser metaphors of user interface design. At first I thought it was a bug but after some time experimenting and reading around on the net I see it’s actually intended behaviour. For someone like me that relies on at least some spatial cues and dislikes a one-size-fits-all browser view this is potentially quite a blow. Thankfully it is possible to override this behaviour although it requires that you manually set a flag on each folder where you want to preserve the view. This is good in the sense that it will cause the state to be held but is a pain in that you have to do so manually on all the folders you care about.
I have to say, this has turned out to be the most flaky MacOS release I remember since 7.5.2 back in the day. I’ve actually been tempted to go back to 10.4 until Leopard has a few more patches under it’s belt but at this point it still seems like an overreaction. It’s a shame it’s not as good as it should be since some of the features are very welcome. There’s so many little things that just work better or make more sense. Good to see Apple admitting the new firewall is broken although as of yet they haven’t really fixed much. I’ve been brushing up on my Objective-C/Interface Builder and am tempted to just re-implement the old Firewall GUI on 10.5. The other firewall programs around seem to either over-complicate things unnecessarily for basic use or just look plain ugly/gaudy. If that makes me a UI snob then I guess I have to live with that nom de guerre.
Current Music: All I Need - Radiohead - In Rainbows
• Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
So my copy of MacOS X 10.5 aka Leopard arrived Monday after much delay. As usual with these new releases there’s a few issues making the news although as usual the online news sites are focusing on the minor gripes when there’s bigger fish to fry. A lot has been said of issues with Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE), used for user interface tweaks. This apparently causes all sorts of installation problems, blue screens, etc. I don’t know why this is a surprise. Especially to those running it. This product is a system daemon that tinkers with the memory space of running applications, and has been known to cause weird issues and application crashes for years. I’ve seen it crash Finder itself (think “Explorer” if you’re a Windows user). If Finder crashes (as appears to be happening with fresh Leopard installs) then you’re up the creek without a paddle. The solution is not hard. Just don’t use it. I say this in the same way one might say “Don’t fly a kite in a lightning storm” or “Don’t shoot at cops”. Seemingly obvious perhaps with no degree in rocket science needed for understanding, but there are always “some”.
No, far far worse is Leopard’s network firewall. I should point out that a firewall is not a big concern to me since there are always about two hardware firewalls between my computer and the malarkey of constant hacking attempts that is the internet at large. It also helps that I have an idea of how to set up said hardware firewalls knowing what I can get away with and what I can’t. I feel sorry for most end users of Leopard though having to put up with the new firewall. Turned off by default, not only has it transformed into one of those slipshod application level firewalls that all the PC rags ironically think is a good idea but it also could fairly be likened to a kitchen sieve. Responding to time server requests even when the firewall is configured to “Block all incoming connections”? NetBIOS services exposed to the internet under the same conditions?!?! It’s somewhat hard to comprehend that Apple managed to have meetings about this without someone sane being in the vicinity holding a clue-stick. I mean if I paid a visit to Lockwood homes and in a meeting with the big brass advocated walls made out of perspex would it reach production or would I end up sore from the door hitting my backside on the way out? Thankfully MacOS X does still include the BSD ipfw firewall under the hood although that won’t be much consolation for the users who don’t know how to set this up. I think I had better brush up on my ipfw skills…
On the plus side the Coverflow finder view is always great and don’t know how I lived without smart mailboxes. The new network setup is really nice too. The changes under the hood are most impressive of all to me though. It also feels damn fast on the Intel Macs. I think they did some serious tuning on that side of the fence.
Current Music: D.A.N.C.E. - Justice - Cross
• Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
I finally managed to watch the Transformers movie. Given the extreme range of views I really didn’t know what to expect going in. Some really hated it while others thought it was great. In hindsight I think both points of view have merit. There’s a decent movie in there somewhere, but even more than “The Host” mentioned in my previous post Transformers seriously needed some brutal editing to extract that good movie out of the crud that was actually released.
The special effects were great even if the transformer designs were somewhat non-canonical (not that I personally care about such things). The action scenes were well done and exciting. The basic plot was serviceable enough if somewhat contrived (That’s fine, much 80s children’s TV was no different). Where it really went off the rails was spending so much time developing random human characters that no one could give a damn about. I mean seriously. This is a franchise about robots that transform into other objects and fight each other. Yeah there’s some sci-fi serving as a back story but that’s not a big deal. You don’t need hours (literally) of teen angst as if it’s an episode of “The O.C.” or whatever other trashy show Warner Brothers are putting out these days. Unfortunately that’s what they did. It was bad enough that you really could be forgiven for thinking it was a movie about something other than transforming robots. I totally head-palmed at least ten times with them deviating into places they really didn’t need to go.
I can’t say I’m disappointed since I wasn’t expecting any kind of cinematic masterpiece but I can’t help but feel there was a lot of wasted potential here. Michael Bay’s desire to take a movie with the potential to be different and turn it into generic Hollywood tripe is truly astounding.
On unrelated topics, MacOS X Leopard (10.5) and a new hard drive are due at my place on Friday. I’ve already spent quite a bit of time with earlier builds of the new MacOS but it’ll be good to switch my laptop and desktop over to it. It’s a little hard to go back to 10.4 after using Leopard a while. No Blu-ray or HD-DVD playback yet which is a bit of a shame but we can’t have everything. Speaking of HD movies I see Whitcoulls is jumping on the Blu-ray bandwagon although only in a very limited way at this point. The recorders are still a tad too expensive for my tastes but are slowly dropping. All in due time.
I haven’t been watching any anime lately which is a little odd for me. It probably doesn’t help that Madman (i.e. the new Madman) hasn’t released anything lately. They did manage to destroy their forums (aka Madchan), or perhaps just neglected to notice they were broken?…who knows. Kind of lucky notMadchan was around as a backup. Sometime I should investigate the difficulty of turning my custom phpBB code changes into a proper mod (it’s easy enough) and retrofitting them to work on a phpBB3 install to see how it goes. No rush though, PHPBB3 hasn’t even passed release candidate at this point.
Current Music: Ice Cream - New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom
• Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
I always seem to be complaining about having trouble catching up with everything that has to be done but once again it seems to be the case. Overall things are fine though. I upgraded Wordpress on my hosting account to version 2.3. The idea of just updating everything via Subversion appeals, I’ll have to see how it works. It seems a lot of plugins broke but my own custom ones appear to be fine. The Themes all seem uglier or somewhat broken currently. I think I’m going to have to do some hacking around myself to sort that out.
It’s been a while since I’ve last posted anything here although that’s not due to a lack of starting posts. I seem to have a habit of writing something and then saving it with the thought of finishing it later. Of course I don’t and then said post becomes redundant and/or contradictory and ends up being scrapped. I really should just write smaller posts more often.
I saw the South Korean film “The Host” last night. I liked it to a degree but I came off a somewhat disappointed given the rave reviews it has received. There are many reasons for the disappointment but the biggest is probably that it comes across as being unsure of what it’s really trying to achieve. It’s sort of a drama/comedy/social commentary/political commentary movie with a monster tacked on the side. It’s not even close to being scary enough to be a horror and with jokes and slapstick that misfire too often to be a comedy it ends up attempting to cover too many bases and in turn failing to do justice to any of them. There’s a whole subplot that is devoted a significant amount of screen time which turns out to have little purpose other than to take a few potshots at the Americans. Last but not least it’s overlong and at the end of that time you are left with a depressing ending; something I approve of in many cases, but here it just makes your time spend watching all the unnecessary filler feel like a waste of time. It’s shame because with some judicious editing and a simpler/more focused story it could have been really great. What saves the movie from total disaster is the monster itself which is original and well rendered (by Weta workshop no less) and the occasional tension building scenes of one of the characters in the monster’s lair which are well acted and compelling.
Current Music: Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2 - Frédéric Chopin - Played by Ivor Kureschy
• Tuesday, September 04th, 2007
I felt like I should post something here but there’s really not been too much happening with me lately. Work has been busy for a few weeks now and I’ve been putting in quite a bit of overtime to help get things out of the way. The last few days have been rather hectic and draining too due to something bad happening in the family but it’s not really my news to talk about.
I’ve played and beat Bioshock getting the “good” ending. I don’t have any motivation to play for the bad ending, it’s well known what happens and it’s not especially different. Overall I think it’s a great game. The reviews have all been glowing and most of what they praise is justified but I couldn’t help feel a little disappointed in that it does not succeed in ways it is widely considered to have done so.
A lots of noise has been made by the gaming press on the “moral choices” the player has to make in this game but really this is just hype, by and large there isn’t effectively any such choices from a cost/benefit standpoint. There are places in the game where you get the choice to gain lots of an item that makes you powerful very quickly which kills a “little sister” as a side effect. You can also choose to save them and get half the amount of the item and receive an unspecified benefit later. The problem is that in practice the game is easy and you can become powerful without much effort by following either path and there are limits as to how powerful you can get which aren’t really that different at the end of the day. You also find out pretty quickly what the “unspecified benefits” to following the “good” path are and it’s made pretty clear that you get more overall benefits by going that way. Like so many games that try to implement these moral choices there’s just no real reason or benefit to following the bad path. It’s not that I expect them to favour the bad path, but in real life there are times when doing the right thing is the harder option with no tangible benefit other than to our conscience. Jade Empire is currently my benchmark in this regard and that game didn’t even handle moral choices especially well either but there were genuine pros and cons to many decisions. Disappointing.
The other aspect of Bioshock that has been heavily talked about was the driving concept of a society who have driven themselves insane through excess and quest for perfection. They are in effect shells of the people they used to be and only glimpses of their humanity show through on occasions. Now the implementation of this idea is not itself 100% convincing but reviewers have tended to talk of how this concept helps immerse the player into the game by allowing us to relate to the characters and perhaps see how we could end up the same way if we were in their shoes. Well perhaps I may be taking an optimistic view of society but I just don’t find this plausible any more than William Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies”. As much as we may like to pessimistically generalise about society at large we are all driven by different things and the idea of such a society is to me no more believable than a society where everyone is a saint.
Current Music: Lacrimosa - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem Mass in D minor
• Saturday, August 04th, 2007
So I was helping someone from work setup an ADSL connection so that they could connect to the office VPN. They’d signed up with Xtra which I’d assumed was fine, ADSL is just ADSL after all. The router had come from Xtra and they had pre-configured the username to something that looked sensible. I’d done the rest of the configuration in advance too just to make things as easy as possible.  When everything was eventually connected, the ADSL synced correctly and once we put the account password in it appeared that the connection was up and running. This is how things should have progressed but of course the connection wasn’t actually active otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this now.
Name resolving worked implying there was actually some connection but nothing else did. We rang Xtra only to be told that we needed to factory reset the router and run their setup CD as the account wasn’t “activated”. I enquired as to what this CD actually did since we didn’t want it messing with all the network settings and all the guy would tell me was that it “converted” the old dial-up account to work with broadband. He told me he could tell it wasn’t working because the domain on the username was “wrong” (remember this is a default set by Xtra). I asked what it should be but he was refusing to elaborate any more so even though I knew it would stuff up the network settings I eventually just gave up and said I would run the CD since it would have never got resolved otherwise (He’d repeated the same instructions of resetting the router and using the setup CD numerous times at that point).
The CD of course didn’t work on the first try, it fell over scanning for a Java Virtual Machine (<sarcasm>because obviously you need one of those for broadband</sarcasm>) and after some fiddling around we gave up on that and tried another computer which thankfully was lying around. I hooked it up to the modem with an ethernet cable and then tried the CD again. This time the JVM test finished. It needed to install Java and it passed all the other prerequisites (one of which was Macromedia Flash of all things). So I had done a factory reset of the router as the Xtra guy suggested but when I got to the point that their CD was trying to scan for the modem it couldn’t find it. I checked the networking and everything was fine, I could load the admin page in a web browser fine. After removing all the unnecessary devices and many more failed attempts at scanning for the modem I decided to disable the Windows firewall. Suddenly the modem can be found. The installer asked for a few details for both the broadband and the wireless network which I entered and bingo, the internet was available.
So with the main problem out of the way I started looking about what their CD setup had done to the router. Stuffing up the network settings was a given, I was more interested in what they changed. It left the default admin password, default NAT mappings, the wireless was left on the default channel 6 (like everyone else’s) and was discoverable and open to all connections. I fixed these security problems and then tried to find what part of the setup was actually different to what it originally had been before using their CD. Eventually I found it. It was the username. Just the username. They let me stuff around for two hours forcing me to redo all the network configuration on the router and two computers with their broken CD setup for the want of a username. I want my two hours back dammit!
On the slim chance that anyone managing this stuff at Xtra is actually reading this here’s some advice. Make a CD that actually works. Don’t assume people don’t run firewalls. Don’t make the CD setup harder than doing it manually by hand. If you’re going to auto-configure things, do it properly without leaving security holes. You only need to know five details to setup an ADSL connection, a username, a password, VPI, VCI and a connection type. The later three are always “0″, “100″ and “PPPoA VC-MUX” in New Zealand anyway so in practise all we need is a username and password. Don’t hide these from us, just tell us. Send us a fucking bit of paper in the mail with them written on their like all the other ISPs that actually have half a clue. Grrrrrr….
Current Music: The Perfect Me - Deerhoof - Friend Oppourtunity
• Thursday, July 12th, 2007
I’ve been fiddling around with PHP5 and a bit of XSLT recently. I have to admit I was quite surprised to find how lacking support generally is for PHP5. I’d just assumed it something common that was just a simple install using whatever standard packaging system your Operating System has available. Not so it seems, I had to hand compile it on both my Linux webserver and MacOS X laptop along with all the modules I was wanting to use. Of course the fact I can compile it myself on my webserver is a bonus but it would be nice to have a standard package available. The whole experience reminded me of the hassle that is setting up Ruby on Rails. 
I’ve been following the reviews of the new Transformers movie. Most reviews seem to either say it’s one of the best movies ever or that it’s one of the worst movies ever. I like good special effects in movies but I’m by no means a special effect junkie and I don’t accept good effects as alternative for good story and acting. Ah well, guess I’ll see it sometime and decide for myself, I don’t really feel a lot of motivation to see it immediately so I’ll probably hold off till the Blu-ray release which has already been announced.
As always I’ve been listening to plenty of music, I really should comment on what I’m listening to more than I do and that’s what I’m about to do here. At risk of going off on a tangent I must say I’m looking forward to George Bush leaving office even if it’s for nothing more than to stop the constant stream of anti-Bush albums being put out by musicians everywhere. I’m no fan of Bush by any means (quite the opposite even) but most of these albums have been pretty dire. The recent Nine Inch Nails album “Year Zero” has been about the only one I’ve heard with any real merit but it’s impact is lessened by Trent’s lyrics which have the subtlety of a sledgehammer. But I digress. Currently I’ve been checking out the new album by the reformed Smashing Pumpkins, Zeitgeist. This is one of these anti-Bush albums although it’s not taken to the point of distraction in this case thankfully.
I’ve always enjoyed the Smashing Pumpkins albums, they kept me company through my university years so it’s hard not to look back on them with a degree of nostalgia. The critics and fans have been all over the place on this one. Some say that it’s not truly the Smashing Pumpkins any more which is a fair point given there’s only two band members from previous albums but I doubt any would deny Billy Corgan has always been the driving force behind the band. Some critics suggest this album is Billy mis-remembering the past or trying to invoke the pumpkins of old and failing. He’s accused of focusing only on the band’s harder rock sound of the latter Machina albums in his quest to prove this is the real Smashing Pumpkins even with the missing band members. I think these reviewers are missing the point.
This album would be very much at home under the name “Machina 3″ as a follow up to the last album released before the band split a few years back. Clearly Billy isn’t interested in going backwards and reinventing the wheel as appealing as that may be to fans (especially casual fans) of their earlier works. One may wonder if when album is viewed as a natural progression from Machina 2 does it really sound like the Smashing Pumkins? Yes it does so in spades. Is it better than their most exalted works of the past? I don’t believe so. The most obvious comparison is to to the first Machina album and this one has nothing that rocks as hard as “The Everlasting Gaze” or something as beautiful as “Stand Inside Your Love”. If anything it has a bit of a feel of their debut album Gish in that the promise is there but it isn’t quite achieved. It comes close a few times but never quite manages to hit the mark with the album as a whole lacking emotion and disappearing to some degree into a wave of distortion. I do think it’s still a good album, I think I’d give it a 6 out of 10 but it wouldn’t be honest for me to say I’m not hoping for that little bit extra in their next release.
Current Music: Doomsday Clock - Smashing Pumkins - Zeitgeist
• Tuesday, June 26th, 2007
Finally managed to get my Wordpress blog install updated to the 2.2.x branch. I’d tried once before but it crashed and burned returning blank webpages so I reverted to the pre-install backups. Turned out to be plug-in incompatibilities. Since no one makes the exact plug-ins I want I’m still rolling my own or custom modding those written by others. Despite the incompatibility issue I like the API changes and widgets make things so much easier and go a long way to help prevent similar incompatibility problems in the future. Hopefully the Livejournal syncing still works too.
I started playing Tenchu-Z on the Xbox 360 although I’ve been a bit to preoccupied with other things to have more than a cursory glance so far. Needless to say there will be comments to come. On an unrelated note, the new 120GB Xbox 360 hard drive includes a device that lets you transfer saves from your old hard drive to your new one. It seemed to me this device was really just a bus powered USB to SATA adaptor so I thought I’d experiment a bit. Seems I was right, both MacOS X and Windows XP recognised it fine and let me repartition and format the old drive. Quite handy really, most “bus powered” external drives seem to need an external power adaptor to really work properly whereas this one works fine. I’ve found some good uses for it now.
Oh, it was my birthday a few days back. I seemed to be acquiring leather things including a very nice laptop bag and a wallet as birthday presents. A few days before I’d ordered some super thin leather gloves from overseas, the idea being I could keep my hands a bit warmer while still retaining enough flexibility to type and write. I’d wanted some for years and looked in various “bricks and mortar” stores to no avail. Don’t know why I didn’t look at online ones sooner really. Looking forward to them arriving.
Current Music: End of the Line - Traveling Wilburys - Traveling Wilburys Collection
• Monday, June 18th, 2007
Argh, I hate dealing with Systems Administrators from other companies. Well, that’s probably not entirely true, but there is one I have to deal with on occasions who somehow manages to make everything as difficult and as painful a process as he possibly can for everyone else involved. Almost every comment he makes implies somehow that the other person has done something stupid or he is just outright insulting them. I’ve actually had people in the company he works for ring me on the verge of tears pleading for me to deal with him for them. What’s worse is that he’s the only guy at the company with the authority and system access to do the job. If he’s away, tough luck, even the most important business plans have to be delayed with no apologies. How someone as abrasive as this keeps their job is beyond me. Needless to say he was up to his old tricks again today. It’s almost like he’s trying to be the personification of the Bastard Operator From Hell. If so, he’s succeeding well.
During the weekend I took my PS3 over to a friend’s place as he had a largish 1080p capable Dell monitor. It was nice and overall looked very impressive (although lacking contrast) but unfortunately it couldn’t manage true 1080p. I must say it’s frustrating how many displays are being advertised as “HD ready” or “1080p” capable that just aren’t. The problem we ran into is that the display was 1920×1200 and 1080p is 1920×1080. Not a problem you might think, just turn off the scaler and let it fall into 1:1 pixel mode. Unfortunately with a 1080p signal the scaler could not be disabled. A small thing perhaps but it made the aspect ratio look wrong. Also I just don’t understand why anyone would ever want to design a screen of that resolution that could not do a 1:1 pixel ratio. Seriously, it makes no sense.
Quite a while back now I commented on the Dead or Alive movie adaptation criticising the Hollywood casing and mostly agreeing with the game creator Tomonobu Itagaki’s choices. I do actually own the movie on DVD now but part of me just refuses to watch it. I did make the comment at the time though that purely on looks I felt model Leah Dizon would have been a far more appropriate choice to play Kasumi than Devon Aoki who ended up playing the role. Well now that Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma is coming out on PS3, who should be chosen to front the advertising campaign but, you guessed it, Leah Dizon. If I didn’t know better I’d wonder if Itagaki-sama was reading my blog. Apologies for falling into weeaboo mode there but that guy is my hero. XD
Oh, and I saw my 5th dead Xbox 360 today. It’s freaky how many of these things have started dying since the warranty ran out. I’m one of the lucky ones so far.
Current Music: Life on MTV - Miss Kittin and the Hacker - First Album
• Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
I’ve been somewhat preoccupied for quite some time hence the lack of updates or replies. It’s not that I haven’t had free time but with everything else going on at work and at other times any spare time has been used to relax and switch off the brain watching some stuff, playing some games or lurking in (trolling?) some forums.
The leg I broke in 2004 has been bothering me lately making sitting rather uncomfortable. Been to the doctor a few times and had some x-rays done. My doctor is pretty sure it’s due to the titanium rod in my leg although the x-rays don’t show any problems with it. He wants to take it out and has referred me to a specialist. I’m not convinced it’s the problem but I’ll see what the specialist says. I don’t mind it being taken out if it’s the problem but I definitely wouldn’t want it being opened up again otherwise.
All’s quite on the gaming front. None of the “next gen” platforms have had anything interesting lately and there’s little on the near future lists either. Looks like they’re dragging things out till September at least much like last year.
Speaking of recent technology there still seems to be a lot of feeling around that Blu-ray and HD-DVD aren’t going anywhere and that DVD is here to stay. It’s an understandable view in many ways, many DVD stores aren’t even stocking these new discs. I have noticed something strange going on though that would seem to go against this school of thought.
Now I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but mainstream DVDs in NZ have got very expensive lately getting back to their old 2001-era prices where it was a new format without the mass sales of today. A year or two back new releases could be had for as low as $22.95 and you might have got bonus items and loyalty bonuses on top of that. $24.95 was common and $29.95 was the regular price. Now stores are trying to claim $29.95 is “special” for a bare bones release and the normal price of DVDs seems to be going north of $34.95 even reaching $40. Clearly it’s not the exchange rate putting prices up so what’s the deal? Now as someone who can actually play all of these formats I may be one of the few currently in a position to choose here and I don’t know about anyone else but this is not 2001 and I’m not paying $30+ for DVDs. It begs asking…are the suppliers charging more to push the new formats?…are the retailers skimming profits from what has become a huge market?…is there some kind of price collusion going on here? Needless to say I’m suspicious.
Current Music: Those Dancing Days Are Gone - Carla Bruni - No Promises
