DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

It’s been a while since my last “If I were to buy a new computer today …” blog, and a lot has changed since then, most notably the introduction of new processor lines from both Intel and AMD.

First, a little bit of history. Back in September 2007, I first wrote about what I would be looking for in a computer if I were buying one today. To get a better idea of the kind of system I’m looking for, please refer to the original blog entry, but to sum up, it would be a system for playing the latest 3D games as well as a system ready for Blu-ray playback, but one that is reasonable in price and without the need for overclocking. But overall, it’s all about the price performance ratio and finding the best system that offers the best ratio (so not necessarily a “budget” system, nor a “high-end” one). 

I will format this post a little different than previously, as I will be explaining the various parts up front, and then listing the specs table. I will also be looking at US parts and prices, despite being located in Australia, since this avoids issues with the exchange rate. Got a lot to go through, so let’s get started …

AMD Phenom II X3 720

CPU: Since the last post, Intel has released its Nehalem series, now called the Core i7. AMD has been busy as well, releasing a less radical processor in the Phenom II. I don’t want to get into it too much, but suffice to say that the i7 is way overpriced at the moment, especially if you add in the cost of expensive motherboards. The Phenom II series make more sense from the financial point of view, although it’s far behind the i7 in terms of performance. I’ve chosen the Phenom II X3 720, as it costs less than the ageing Phenom X4 9950, and offers slightly better performance. Yes, you miss out on one core, but then it offers an extra core compared to Intel’s Core 2 Duo range (which costs a lot more).
Pick: AMD Phenom II X3 720
Alternative: AMD Phenom II X4 810 – an extra core if you really need all four

Motherboard: The choice would be between a AM2+ or AM3 motherboard due to our CPU pick. The basic difference is that AM3 supports DDR3, whereas AM2+ supports only DDR2 – both will support the Phenom II processor. So while AM3 is more future proof, AM2+ is better value at the moment if you add in the cost of RAM. With the economy the way it is, I’m going with AM2+. I’m going with the 790X chipset, since the FX’s quad GPU support is not a must have feature. I’m sticking with a brand I know, Gigabyte. 
Pick: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P
Alternative: Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H – if you don’t need gaming, then the onboard Radeon HD 3300 will provide excellent Blu-ray decoding acceleration for $20 more than the MA790X-UD4P 

RAM: DDR2 is cheap and plentiful. 4GB is enough for today’s applications, especially if you’re still going to use a 32-bit OS. You’ll probably have your own preferences in terms of brand, but I’ve chosen Corsair 2 x 2G DDR2 1066 RAM at CAS 5.
Pick:  Corsair XMS2 PC2 8500 CAS 5 (2 x 2G)
Alternative: Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 CAS 4 (2 x 2G) – if you want an extra bit of performance, go with these CAS 4 rated DDR2 800 RAM

HDD: TB drives are all the rage, so we’re going with two of the Samsung F1’s which are quiet and fast. We’re going with two for a simple RAID 1 setup, but you can grab more or less depending on which RAID you want or don’t want.
Pick: 2 x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD102UJ 1TB
Alternative: Go with just a single drive for a non RAID setup, or a RAID 5 setup with 3 drives

HIS Radeon HD 4850

Video Card: ATI’s 4800 series has been extremely popular, in terms of both price and performance. This is one area where it really depends on your needs, whether you want the best gaming performance, some gaming performance, or none at all (if so, then going with the motherboard with integrated graphics is the best choice – see above). The NVIDIA range seems expensive for the power they provide, and you should really only consider the top range cards for top performance. In the mid range, I still prefer the Radeon HD 4850 series for those who wants to dabble in gaming, but don’t mind turning down a few details here and there. The brand of the card is up to individuals, and you’ll have to look at the included HSF, software bundle and such (I’ve picked the HIS with free copy of S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky until the end of May).
Pick:  HIS Hightech H485FN512P Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Alternative:  HIS Hightech H487FN1GP Radeon HD 4870 1GB – the 4870 comes with more performance, 1GB of faster GDDR5 RAM as well, for those that want the few extra FPS

Sound Card: Still going with a on-board solution, which works well for most people that don’t require audiophile level quality. With ATI’s Radeon HD range, you can output audio via the graphics card’s HDMI as well.

Optical Drive: Still sticking with a Blu-ray reader drive. My thinking is that when Blu-ray media becomes cheap enough for everyday use, then drives will be dirty cheap and much faster than current offerings, so it’s not worth buying a Blu-ray burner drive at the moment. Of course, if you really must have 50GB of storage per disc, regardless of the price, then these drives are not too expensive.
Pick: LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray/HD DVD reader, CD/DVD burner
Alternative:  LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray/CD/DVD burner, HD DVD reader – add Blu-ray burning for $70 more

Samsung T240HD

Monitor: 22″ seems to be the sweet spot in terms of price, but I prefer 24″. You can spend a little, or a lot here, and it really depends on your needs. But I like to spend a bit more on your monitor, because a good one can last several computers, and it’s the only part of your PC that you have to interact with everyday. Most people would probably want a 16:10 ratio monitor, this will give you 1920×1200 resolution. However, there are more monitors carrying the 16:9 ratio (1920×1080, 1080p), which is the same ratio used by widescreen TVs and is most suited for connecting to game consoles or Blu-ray players. The problem with these 1080p displays is that it lacks the vertical resolution of 16:10 monitors (1200 lines versus 1080 lines), and so you won’t be able to display resolutions like 1600×1200 for example, despite having a horizontal resolution that’s greater than 1600.  I went with the Samsung T240HD because it had HDMI input (the more popular 2443BWT does not). If you are serious, then look for S-IPS or VA type displays, including the Dell UltraSharp range.
Pick: Samsung T240HD 24″
Alternative: ASUS VW246H – A cheaper 24″ with 16:9 as opposed to 16:10 (lower vertical resolution), good for Blu-ray

Case: I’m keeping with the Antec Sonata Designer, which comes with a quality 500W power supply that is more than enough to power the above system. 
Pick: Antec Sonata Designer 500
Alternative: RAIDMAX SMILODON ATX-612WBP – a more fancier, yet cheaper option, also with a 500W power supply

So that’s the system picked out. All you need is to add an OS (get XP, and then wait for Windows 7), and a keyboard/mouse combo. Here’s the full system spec and prices (note that comparison with October 2008 prices removed since that was for Australian prices, and this time, we’re using latest Newegg.com prices) – changed parts in blue, unchanged in black:

So that’s a system that will play all the latest games, albeit not always at the highest quality, and will play Blu-ray movies without breaking a sweat. It’s not the cheapest system available, but it’s full of quality parts and it will last you many years.

For the next issue, it will all be about waiting for the Core i7 prices to drop, perhaps Intel could release a few lower spec’d models at lower prices to compete with the AMD chips. Otherwise, the Core 2 Duo line-up doesn’t fare too well compared to the new Phenom II’s. 

See you in a few month’s time …

So the secret is out. The new section I had been working on is called the Amazon Blu-ray Price Index. It’s just another way to find Blu-ray titles from Amazon, with emphasis on price sorting/filtering and some automated functions to spotlight the bargains that are to be had. It’s not terribly exciting, but it was just something that I needed personally and I thought I might as well share my scripts with the whole world. More information about what exactly the new section does here. Let’s get through the WNR quickly this week, because I have to go out soon, it is Mother’s Day after all.

Let’s quickly start with Copyright news. After the “successful” Swedish The Pirate Bay verdict, the Italians want to do something similar as well. They could have been a bit more creative to go after an Italian Pirate Bay style website, but they’re going after The Pirate Bay as well. They should probably also wait until the many levels of appeals are settled before advancing with their own trial, because the outcome is far from certain in Sweden at the moment.

Is this the end of Mininova?

The Pirate Bay repercussions continues, with both the RIAA and MPAA website’s known exploits being used to publish torrent related news and content. I guess it does highlight that sometimes a website or individual could be taking part in piracy related actions without their own knowledge of the fact, as some people with un-secured Wi-Fi has found out all too late. And possibly related to TPB verdict, Mininova has came out with a rather strange statement about introducing content filtering into their torrent archives. The first time I read it, I thought it was a belated April Fools joke – Mininova filtering copyrighted content is like Playboy removing pictures from their magazines. The comments to their blog post announcing this has been brutal, which was to be expected. Maybe this was just an attempt to appease their lawyers, to show that they are serious about copyright, and perhaps it might not lead to any major changes. Remember that Mininova has a trial pending in a month’s or two’s time, so perhaps they need to show some effort in trying to clean up their content, or at least allow content owners a way to get content removed. Of course, I don’t think the MPAA or whomever can be appeased until they get a verdict against Mininova and similar sites and get these sites closed, so it may all be quite pointless (and harmful, maybe, because the MPAA could now say that since they have tried to reduce it, Mininova are aware of a piracy problem on their website and so they cannot claim that they are not violating copyright).

Wolverine was released to the cinemas last week. As you may be aware, a very early draft version of the movie was leaked online a couple of months ago, and it was thought that this would seriously impact on the box office results. But guess what? Wolverine topped the box office at release, and it appears the publicity over the piracy story may have even helped it. Of course, the studio has come out and said that results would have been even higher without the pirated version, but that’s a nothing statement that can’t be proved. I can say that Wolverine would have done worse at the box office without the pirated version and Fox cannot disprove this either. Anyway, it’s a pretty average movie anyway and if you want a real summer blockbuster, Star Trek is the movie you need, for trekkies/trekkers and normal people alike (I’m a trekkie, btw – death to trekkers and normal people!).  

Teachers should camcord DVDs - The MPAA has outdone itself in the stupidity stakes this time

The MPAA wants teachers to camcord DVDs because they don’t want them to use rippers and the like. They even made a video demonstrating how great and easy camcording DVD is. The reason they are doing this is because the DMCA has provisions which allow it to be broken for educational purposes, and teachers creating their own educational videos might have to occasionally rip a DVD or two. The MPAA doesn’t want even this, which has absolutely zero effect on piracy. And you can’t just connect a VCR or DVD recorder to a DVD player and record like that, thanks to the stupid Macrovision copy protection. So camcording becomes the only way, in the MPAA’s eyes. This is copyright control gone crazy, because the next thing you know, the MPAA will request teachers to close all blinds, turn of all mobiles, and make sure they are completely alone before they are allowed to camcord away. They will then force the students to sign a document stating that they won’t try to pirate this camcorded version before they are allowed to watch it. And then the camcorded copy must be registered online and then sent to the MPAA for destruction. I hope I haven’t given the MPAA any ideas.   

And this week saw the latest downloadable content for Fallout 3 released, the Broken Steel add-on that everyone’s been waiting for (me included). Well, at least the initials BS does seem rather appropriate, because the released PC version was extremely “Broken”, thanks largely to some screw-up involving Microsoft’s DRM scheme. Meanwhile, the people who pirated the game and add-on were playing it quite nicely, while the rest had to wait two days for Microsoft to fix the problem. My story was the same as most people who rushed to buy and download the DLC, only to see a cryptic “cryptographic message” error message pop up when trying to install the damn thing. So piracy *not* stopped, and genuine consumers stuffed – DRM’s work is done for today!

Let’s move on to HD news. Rumours abound that Apple will finally add Blu-ray drives to their systems and add Blu-ray playback to iTunes. I’ll believe it when I see the Apple press release, and not a minute sooner. At least they’ve backed off on the Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360 rumours.

BBC's iPlayer: heavy bandwidth usage required

Lots of hoo-ha about Blu-ray player sales being great, thanks to lower prices. Really? Lower prices equals better sales? I hope Sony’s gaming division is listening. As for the sales figures, I hope they’re comparing it to something meaningful, as opposed to say last year’s figures because sales were pretty low back then and the only way since was up.

Still more hoo-ha about HD video downloads replacing discs and all that. Not yet, is my opinion, but it will happen. But to look at one of the difficulties involved with video downloads, we have this article about the BBC’s iPlayer that talks about how much bandwidth it used. 7 Petabytes per month sounds quite amazing, especially when you consider that iPlayer is not available in most countries in the world. I don’t even know what a Petabyte was until I did a Google, but it is 1,000 TB, or 1,000,000 GB or 125,000 DVDs or only 20,000 Blu-ray discs. If you put it like that, then Blu-ray discs are still capable of “carrying” more data to more people more economically right now I think, because I don’t think the BBC could afford thousands of PBs of transfer, which is what might be required for a global based video download service. 

And finally in gaming, the rumour this week is that Microsoft is going head to head with the Wii with their own motion sensing system. The twist, however, is that Microsoft’s system won’t require a controller at all. Instead, your body movements are all that’s needed for the system to work. True or not, we’ll find out eventually, but I do question how accurate such a system will be, when you consider that even with a controller, the whole motion thing is a bit hit and miss if you need to do anything accurate with them. 

Okay, that’s it for this week. Don’t forget to check out the Amazon Blu-ray Price Index – it’s delicious and healthy, and can form part of your daily nutritional needs. Guaranteed!

Regular readers of my Weekly News Roundup should be aware that I’ve been working on this new secret addition to Digital Digest. Well, the secret is out, and the Amazon Blu-ray Price Index section is now online:

http://www.digital-digest.com/amazon_blu-ray/ 

So what is it exactly? In short, it’s another way to search for Blu-ray movies to buy on Amazon.com. Why do you need it? Well, the way the search function works on Amazon, it is actually hard to sort discs by prices, or to filter in/out discs based on prices. The Amazon Blu-ray Price Index allows you to do all of these things, plus more:

• Sort Blu-ray discs by price
• Search for Blu-ray discs that are higher/lower than a certain price
• See Blu-ray pricing history to determine when’s the best time to buy
• Find Blu-ray discs with the biggest discounts (off retail pricing), or with recent price drops
• Integration with our Deals & Freebies section so you see all the Blu-ray sales on offer at any one time at a quick glance

The new section uses data from Amazon and dvdloc8.com to ensure the latest pricing data and disc information (obviously, prices change quite often on Amazon, so there will be minor discrepancies). Basically I thought at one point it would be nice to be able to see all Blu-ray discs that were under $10 and was surprised that Amazon didn’t really have the search functions that would give me accurate results, and so that’s why I set out to build this new section to see if it could be done. 

And yes, it could be done 🙂

Hello. Another week, another WNR. Running out of things to say in the intro though, especially when I’ve been a lazy boy this week and haven’t done a thing of note to talk about. I did continue working on the new project I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped it would be ready before May, but it looks like I missed that deadline as well. I really should stop talking about it, because I’m just building up the hype and no doubt you will be disappointed at what I actually managed to do. So I should now lower expectations by saying that this thing is quite run of the mill, you see it on lots of other websites and they’ve done it better too, and it’s not great looking and it has bad breath. In fact, if you see it, you should run away immediately. Expectation lowered!

Copyright news is first. The repercussions from the Pirate Bay trial continues, as the defence tries to work up an appeal. The first point of appeal may be the judge, as TPB lawyers believe the judge of the case may be biased due to his past affiliations with a copyright organization.

Sweden's new copyright laws are forcing ISPs to take action

The recent Swedish anti file sharing laws has also produced a strange side-effect that may actually help piracy. Swedish ISPs have stopped retaining usage data in the fear that they may have to turn over this data to the authorities. Not sure if the government will stop them from doing this, but this is quite an effective way to circumvent the law. Of course, this may make the fight against serious computer crime harder, but one can’t expect anything else if government is so keen to infringe the privacy of its own citizens at the behest of multi-national corporations – they have lost the moral high ground on the ability to selectively invade the privacy of citizens for the greater good of society, which is something that needs to to occur from time to time, such as in the fight against child pornography. But to prevent people from downloading MP3s is not sufficient reason to violate a fundamental principle of democracy and human rights.

Meanwhile, the MPAA says that jobs will be saved by the fight against piracy. I have no doubt that *jobs at the MPAA* will be saved if the expensive fight against piracy, which has yielded no results, is set to continue. Meanwhile, the anti-piracy industry sells DRM and other useless things which eats into the profit margins of content owners and means job losses everywhere else. Not to mention the consumer confusion that causes less sales to occur. And the MPAA can at the very least employ few more people to manage the security of their own website, because apparently it can be exploited to allow people to browse The Pirate Bay through the website.

The BBC’s new broadcast TV DRM continues to be under attack by critics. The biggest criticism is that it doesn’t really work, because anyone with a DVB card can easily record the programs without any limitations. It’s only the average Joe that don’t know how to do it, that will be affected, and they’re not the ones uploading TV shows onto the net I can assure you. But this kind of DRM was never meant to stop online piracy – it’s just another way to control the average TV viewer and “steer” them towards a system where they will have less and less control about what they can watch, when they can do it and how many times they can do it. Less control for consumers equals more control for the producers, and someone will then try to squeeze more money out of people just for the right to be able to record anything.

And in HD news, but still copyright related, Paramount is set to license BD+, the Blu-ray copy protection system commonly used by Fox, for their own Blu-ray discs. This is bad news, but how bad really depends on how Paramount plans to use BD+.

Paramount adopting BD+ hopefully won't mean region coded Blu-ray's

If it is just a copy protection mechanism, then that’s fine because it’s not as if BD+ is unbreakable. However, if they are going to copy what Fox does with Blu-ray releases, and that means adding region protection to movies, then that’s bad news. For the record, Paramount does not use region coding at all on its Blu-ray releases so far. Not for the people who are willing to take the risk of circumventing the copy protection mechanisms and disable region checking, but for the average consumer who wants to buy the occasional disc from another country.

And speaking of Blu-ray copy protection, this article explains some aspects of the Blu-ray licensing scheme and how it does no favours for small publishers. One of the key differences between the approaches of the HD DVD group, and the Blu-ray people, is their opinions towards home publishing. HD DVD encourages it (and just before it died, it had a partnership with Amazon to allow people to create and sell their own content on HD DVD), while Blu-ray (most supporters are from the traditional movie business side) don’t really want people to be making their own movies at home. Which is why AACS is mandatory on Blu-ray, but only optional on HD DVD (which is more in line with DVDs, as DVD”s CSS copy protection is optional as well). It’s not just the trouble of being forced to put copy protection on content that the producers may not even want copy protection on, but it’s also the added cost, which could go into the thousands for just a small project.

And finally in gaming, Sony says the PS3 will win in 3 to 5 years. I really hope that’s not another way of saying that the nearest price cut is 3 to 5 years away, because even an idiot like me can predict that a price cut right now will really help the PS3 catch up to the Xbox 360, possibly by the end of this year.

Build-a-Lot: Good fun for a few spare minutes

Personally, I’ve not had that much free time recently so I’ve been limited to playing games that won’t take too long. I’ve been playing a lot of Big Fish games that I managed to download for free thanks to coupon codes, which I have posted in the Free Games from Big Fish thread on the Deals & Freebies section. It’s no longer available, but the Build-a-lot series was good fun. I’m now playing Mystic Inn (which sadly, is also no longer available for free – you have to be quick with these types of deals). They are mostly point and click games, bigger than your average flash game, but has strategy elements added so it’s not just a mouse bashing exercise. There are also card games, mystery games … you can’t argue with the price though, and I’ve managed to get about $200 worth of games for free so far.

Another game I’ve been playing is the online time-waster My Brute. This online game lets you create a character that does (automated) battles with other user created characters. It’s a bit of nonsense for first thing in the morning. My brute, ApAzzard, has a webpage where you can challenge me (and become my student, which gives me more experience points).

That’s it for this week. More WNR next week. I wanted to write something funny and witty in this outro, but screw it, I’m going to play Mystic Inn before I get back to work.

Welcome to yet another WNR. I hope you’ve had a nice week. It’s getting colder now here in Melbourne, and I’m starting to see the downside of having a new Core 2 Duo – it just doesn’t generate enough heat as compared to my old computer. I published the March 2009 NPD video game sales analysis earlier in the week. It’s the first time in a long time that sales have declined, all except for the cheap Xbox 360, so the economy will affect the gaming industry, despite previous months showing otherwise.

First up is copyright news. The fallout from The Pirate Bay verdict is still being felt this week, as protesters turned up in Sweden to protest the decision. As reported last week, the fight is far from over (in fact, it’s just barely begun), so it could be years before we know the fate of TPB. IFPI, the organisation suing TPB, has had its own website under attack by supporters of TPB as well.

Protesting The Pirate Bay Verdict

Still, even if TPB was taken down, it does not mean the end of piracy. TorrentSpy, Suprnova were all once as big as TPB, but both were taken down and torrent downloads did not cease (in fact, Suprnova was taken over by the TPB and re-launched). The only way to stop torrents is to offer a legal alternative, and it’s as simple as that. The copyright side of things apart, another problem with torrents is the amount of bandwidth it saps from networks. ISPs can deal with this by either banning of throttling P2P traffic, but this has a very negative effect on customer satisfaction. So the alternative is to optimize P2P traffic, by prioritising local based exchanges, and some ISPs are doing this to both save money and improve P2P speeds. Of course, this puts ISPs at greater risk of prosecution, not just from private companies like the MPAA, but also from governments. The German government, for example, has gotten German ISPs to agree to web filtering, which they will say it’s for inappropriate sites, but can also be used against sites like TPB. As you may know, Australia is currently debating this sort of thing and our system could be the envy of authoritarian regimes worldwide, as well as organisations like the MPAA. 

The other big legal news is the official start of the MPAA vs RealDVD trial. With these types of cases, a lot really depends on the Judge, because if you get a tech savvy one that can understand the arguments put forward, then Real Networks may have a chance. If not, then the scare tactics of the MPAA will work in court very well.

Last week, I reported that the BBC is adding DRM. This week, the BBC has started broadcasting propaganda for the MPAA. Next week, the BBC commission a weekly hourly program called “The MPAA: All Hail Our New Masters”. 

While this could possibly be put into the gaming section, I’ll put it here. Sony says that piracy is hurting PSP game sales. And by “piracy”, they are of course referring to the Nintendo DS. Aren’t they? Or perhaps the ease in which the Nintendo DS can be used to play pirated games, and the half-hearted effort from Nintendo to stop the act, is really hurting the PSP, which is harder to mod to make it play homebrew or pirated games. The fact that the DS is more fun than the PSP may also contribute, as PSP sales continue to drop year-on-year as our NPD analysis shows. 

In HD news, the big news of the week is Warner Bros.’s launch of their new red2blu.com website. What this website allows you to do is to upgrade your HD DVD collection to Blu-ray, at minimal cost. 

red2blu.com - Exchange your HD DVDs for Blu-ray's

How it works is that you can upgrade up to 25 HD DVD titles (per household) for $4.95 each, with $6.95 charged for shipping for the entire (up to 25 disc) order. Considering that most people paid peanuts for HD DVDs, this adds up to fantastic savings, especially when you consider that people with the HD DVD versions were able to enjoy the movies in HD for a year now, and still end up paying less than the people who went straight to Blu-ray. I guess my series of HD DVD Fire Sales blog posts wasn’t a waste of time after all. I can only hope that something similar will happen in Australia (unlikely, since HD DVD did not sell that much here), because I managed to pick up lots of discs for around $3-5 each. 

For those who managed to buy cheap HD DVD players before or just after the downfall and want to upgrade them as well, then cheap Blu-ray players are coming as well, according to Samsung: Sub $100 Blu-ray players will be here soon. With Samsung’s latest players, I can definitely see the trend of merging Profile 2.0 (BD-Live) Blu-ray players with online video delivery (OVD) services, such as Netflix, so instead of getting the ultra cheap players, it may be wise to wait a bit see what develops in this area. OVD is growing at an extremely fast rate, thanks to deals with gaming and consumer electronic firms that adds integration into hardware devices like the Xbox 360 or Blu-ray players. Amazon is getting into the game as well, now with HD video service added to support Roku, TiVo and other compatible devices. Watch this space.

Plasma TVs are becoming rarer and rarer, now that Pioneer has pulled out of the game and that their beautiful Kuro range will be discontinued soon. But Panasonic is still sticking with the format, and for good reason: Plasma still wins on quality, if not so much on price or energy efficiency. Panasonic’s new THX certified plasma range looks like the perfect way to replace the Kuro. I was all ready to go LCD after reading reviews of the the latest Samsung series, but it looks like I may have to reconsider. 

And finally in gaming, inside sources are suggesting a possible Sony PSP and PS3 price cut in June. I’ll believe it when I see it in writing on Sony.com. Sony is still rather bullish about the future of the PS3, and from their recent statements, it doesn’t sound like a price cut will be coming anytime soon. But people do want a price cut, as our recent poll shows.

Sony says that the Xbox 360 owns the office, the PS3 owns the living room, and that the Wii owns the closet. I don’t know what owning the office means, but owning the closet means that they think the Wii is not used as much as the PS3, with most gathering dust in the closet. Considering how the Wii continues to outsell the PS3, people must have big empty closets to fill these days. And offices appears to be fun places to be as well, well for those that still have jobs anyway.

That’s all I have for this week. Really, I’m not lying. You can check my pockets if you want to, I have nothing to hide. Well, not much anyway. See you next week.