J Larsen

Those $15 dvds don't have to price in the cost of restoration. Criterion's primary market is video rental stores. Criterion on the subject of their pricing: Personally, I don't understand the need to own many films on DVD (how many times are you going to watch the same movie???), and am happy that I can rent excellent quality DVDs of hundreds of great movies thanks to Criterion's work. Especially given the highly limited market for their films, their pricing simply seems realistic to me.

Also noteworthy is Criterion's policy of never letting anything go OOP, no matter how poorly it is selling. The only exception is when they lose the rights to a title, and this has only happened in a handful of cases.

125th between 7th and 8th ought to be renamed James Brown St.

Overpriced and overrated are two different things. I can't imagine anyone saying that their product is overrated - every Criterion I've seen (especially the recent ones) have had stunning video and audio quality, especially given the source they had to work with. Just as one of a multitude of possible examples, if you get a chance compare the older edition of Nights of Cabria to the Criterion. Now on the pricing, they are obviously spendy. But it is unbelievably expensive to restore a feature length film (I've been told around $1 million), and they are restoring farily niche market films. I think it is pretty clear that their business plan to to achieve a very modest return, primarily off sales to video stores. I don't think they could put out the quality product they do without charging $30 -$40 a movie, I don't think consumer sales are a big part of their business model, and I think if they were to focus on consumer sales they would fail (or at least not be able to continue they way they have in the past).

The pilot (starring William Shatner) is out on DVD. I would conjecture that if it sells, we'll see the full series. http://www.amazon.com/Studio-One-Defender/...=UTF8&s=dvd

God! How I wish I could live without cable! That's my wife's life's blood, however. I was born in 1970, so I'm sure we watched the same shows, including Six Million Dollar Man (6 mil sure wouldn't get you far today!), and yes, it was total cheese! BTW, did anyone else watch Jacques Cousteau? Wild Kingdom? National Geographic? Add in Mission Impossible and the original Star Trek, and you have my childhood TV viewing habits.

Secret Agent is probably my favorite show of all time. The Avengers was a fun show, too, but nowhere near Secret Agent in my book.

I saw it today. I think it just may be my favorite film (er... video?) of his; which from me is saying a lot, seeing as Eraserhead is one of my favorite movies of all time. While far from straightforward, I didn't find it nearly as impenetrable or incoherent as many reviews had led me to expect. I can't really say anything substantive about it - this work needs to speak for itself. Oh yeah - Laura Dern rocked.

This may be a dumb question, but was it a good show?

Seems like a lot of musicians to fit on the Iridium's stage...

I'm put off by the name Sparklehorse, but if Fennesz is involved I'll check it out.

B&B or Benedictine in a snifter for me.

I was pretty disappointed with every rock record I was looking forward to this year (Dylan, Bonnie Prince Billy, Built to Spill, Xiu Xiu, Flaming Lips etc.), which was really a bummer becuase I thought '05 was a half decent year. Off the top of my head, in '06 I really liked the Joanna Newsome and Sonic Youth records. The TV on the Radio record was better than I expected, and the Cat Power record is fine. I haven't had time to follow hip hop in the past year (I've put in 3,000+ hours at work!!), so maybe this weekend I'll pick up all the cds that have been generating a buzz and go through them.

Looking forward to Compulsion. If I'm remembering the details of the OOP Mosaic box correctly, that will mean that all of the material on the first six discs will be on the market.

I prefer RC without a bow in his hand.

Have you started yet? Yes... I'm not nearly that bad. It's already over 400 pages. However, I'm finding that editing a document of this length poses unique challenges - my previous record was something like 125 pages.

Man, we're a bunch of wet blankets. I have a 400+ page report due on... drum roll please... the morning of January 2.

Fair point.

What did he do? Put them next to a big magnet?

Hopefully this will convince Apple to get rid of their stupid format. Guy I thought the current arrangement was the best they were able to negotiate with the RIAA at the time. Maybe I'm remembering that incorrectly. The iTunes store, IMO, offers terrible value for the money, so I don't use it. For a price similar to that of a new cd, you get a very high-loss format and no notes, artwork, etc. So why not just buy the cd? I guess one time you might be tempted to use the iTunes store is if it is offering a recording that is otherwise unavailable. But I'd personally spend my money on any of the hundreds of in-print cds that I'd like to own rather than on a very poor rendition of an otherwise OOP recording.

Just a quick note on harddrive failure: It's often the read/write head in harddrives that fails; if this happens, you can get a tech person to recover the data (at non-neglible expense). When the disc fails it is almost always because the head has scraped against it, causing physical damage to the magnetic layer. In this case, too, it is normally possible to recover most of the data, though again it ain't cheap. I'm just writing this so that if you ever end up with a dead harddrive with really important data you know that all hope is not lost.

That guy obviously has it really bad. I've heard there are cases where the sufferer can not hear most external sounds because their tinnitus is so loud. I'm happy to say that mine has been back to normal (noticable only in a quiet room) for the past week.

I'll agree with that to an extent - when I was shopping, I noticed a distinct difference between the "quality" big name brands (e.g. Sony, Sharp) and the "budget" big name brands (e.g. Westinghouse, Polaroid, several others). But I personally didn't see a whole lot of difference between the product of the quality brands. Of course, it could also be that the stores set the lesser brands to look crummier compared to the pricier brands to improve their margins. I'd be midly surprised if that were the case, but not shocked.

Rock - it's not because of the reason you posted either - the 80GB and 74.3GB are using the same definition of GB. It's just that Apple is advertising the unformatted capacity. You end up using a certain percentage of the harddisc to assign "addresses" to the data storage sites on the discs, boundary information, etc.

5.7 GB for the OS. Are you sure your's is not short a few gigs. The OS when I looked on line is a few hundred MBs. Right - they advertise the unformatted capacity (which is a little shady if you ask me, but everyone does it). Formatting the disc diminishes its capacity by a few percent.