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I saw this post today Torrent of Free Bits and it reminded me of something I’d thought about. First, let me make it clear. Piracy of games pisses me off. It’s my job to make games, it’s damn hard work. 15 to 100 people for two years, 1/4 to 1/2 of that time is often 60 to 80 hour weeks. For someone to pirate it and tell me it’s not worth the $40 we ask for all our effort. ***K THEM! For other media there are other arguments possibly. I was amazed at all the responses I got to my last big blog entry. Sometimes I thought about responding but I always felt like I’d just be defensive of the advice or ideas so I held off. I’ve been sick for over friggen 3 weeks now. I came down with a cold the saturday after I went to TGS, 9/25 and I haven’t been well since. It hasn’t been a bad cold but it has been extremely annoying. After only like 2 years of thinking about it I finally got an HDD recorder (think Tivo). The biggest reason I didn’t get one earlier is they are EXPENSIVE in Japan. Tivo was the first in the states (I think) and their business model was sell you the hardware cheap and make you pay for the service. No one has really done that in Japan. Almost all the various units are not attached to any service. That means instead of like a Tivo which is/was $300~$400 the Japanese HDD recorders were more like $1000~$1500!!! This last year they came down to around $600 at the low end but still that was more than I wanted to spend. Maybe I just have no search abilities but so far I have been unable to find any benchmarks comparing standard consumer video cards to high end FireGL video cards. FireGL cards cost from 25% to 4-6 times more than a top end consumer graphics card. In the past, before consumer graphics cards existed these cards were amazing but now in the current market, as far as I can tell, they do nothing special. While I can read lots of opinions all over the net that believe they are faster and therefore the cost is justified I have yet to find a single one backed up by any facts.
In Japan most of the big beverage companies have lots of contests. Most of them work on the point system where for each drink you get some kind of stamp or sticker. You put them on a postcard. When you fill the postcard you send them in and you are entered in some raffle for the prizes. Common prizes are things like bikes, DVD players, stereo systems, TVs etc. Often they are special contest only items like a bright red Coke Sony TV for example. Just happened upon the latest super cute cell phone from AU. I’ve been renting quite a few movies lately being stuck at home with a cold. I recently rented “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” which I was told was pretty bad but I was in the mood for a popcorn movie. Anyway, it wasn’t quite as bad as I was lead to believe, probably because I watched with the right attitude but it did raise a few questions. |
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Everything here is © me except those things which are not. |
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Suntory has been running this campaign in Japan where they are giving away 4000 iPods. As I don't have an iPod and I enjoy Suntory Oolong Tea I thought I'd give it a try.
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