When I last bought a PC (Feb 2003), I bought almost the best you could get. At the time the best (fastest) chip was the P4 3Ghz but it was insanely expensive. I went for 2.4Ghz which sat at a nice level of speed vs. price.

I got two 80Gb hard drives. 120Gbs were available but again, very expensive. Two 80s cost the same as one 120 I believe. Today a 300Gb drive seems fairly standard. A 300Gb drive today is less than $100.

Broadband was pretty new. I got Optus cable, then shortly after I got ADSL when Optus wouldn't install cable in the flat I moved to. I still have ADSL. It's got a 2 on the end though. And it's faster than cable. 1Gb networks arrived, but I have still yet to set up a network.

I bought a Winfast TV2000 video capture card. I had every intention of playing with video capture for the band, hence the large hard drives. Today everything is digital. All TV cards have digital tuners and "capture" by just saving the digital file.

Today I've dumped the internal capture card for an external firewire capture device. Infinitely less hassle and immediately portable. Every periferal I purchase from this day forth with be external and USB 2.0 or Firewire.

Speaking of which... USB 2.0 was new, and nothing has come since to beat it, except that Firewire has gained more acceptance in the PC work (previous it was for Mac freaks only).

I also bought the PC with the intention of doing a lot of demo recording (including effects and multitracking). Which we did. I added to the setup the expensive but super high quality MAudio Audiophile 2496 soundcard. This was at a time when surround sound was the next big thing. This card was stereo and only recorded and played back. No bells. No whistles. Turns out the big deal there was software (eg. ProTools). All of which is very expensive. And still is.

The fact the card was internal (PCI) was a constant irritation. Today they have the same card but as a firewire plugin. I would buy that today in a second. Much easier to lend to band members.

Windows XP was new but had been out for a little while. I bought XP Pro as I wanted to play with IIS and I'd heard XP "Home" locked a lot of stuff away from you.

Researching a new PC now (for far in the future, mid or end of the year) I'm surprised by a few things.

When I bought my PC, 3Ghz CPUs were available. Today, 3Ghz seems to still be the upper limit. Now though we have multi-core, more cache, more efficiency (thus less hot, thus more over clocking) and all that jazz.

1Gb of RAM was seen as a little over the top at the time but not completely insane. Today, PCs are still sold with 512Mb RAM without blinking. 1Gb RAM is still an extra on Budget PCs.

Most people still want XP. Vista has arrived but hasn't stuck. In five years no "better" operating system has arrived from Microsoft.

Graphics cards are still the big thing for gamers and ignored by everyone else. Newer and bigger and faster cards come out every day, each with more on-board fans. When I bought a PC I didn't even check what graphics card I got with it, except to make sure it wasn't on the motherboard. Today I want to play Portal, which apparently means DirectX9.

I remember when DirectX was a joke.

The biggest most visible change would have to be LCDs, and the fact many are widescreen. Widescreen is the new VGA.

But beyond that, I can't help but think PCs have barely moved in five years. The Ghz are the same, just stacked on top of each other. Everyone still has the same amount of RAM, they all still have AC97 on-board sound or a Creative soundcard, they all still have either no graphics card or one that fills most of the inside of the PC.

Boring.

Where, I ask, is my flying car?

The US share market isn't doing so well as a whole, but it's apparently still newsworthy. The fall of Warner Music Group's shares has been large enough that market commentators are starting to suggest possible buyers.

Undercover.com.au:

As of close of trade today, the company had a market cap (value) of $738.64 million. A year ago it was valued at more than $4 billion.

[...]

Names being tossed around as potential interested parties include Google, Apple and Amazon. News Corporation has also been mentioned as a potential buyer. News used to own Festival Records and later Mushroom Records in Australia and sold the combined company to Warner.

Warner this week announced that the company would be soon supplying non-DRM downloads to Amazon and the acquisition of independent music site Insound.com.

Not that long ago I equated buying a record company with buying their catalog. So I had thoughts of someone like Google buying Warner and opening an Amazon MP3 type store to sell their product, or use Warner music product in their adverts. I used to joke that Coke could buy out the whole industry and give away their music with each bottle.

These days the large artists are dumping the big labels as quickly as legally possible. The only reason an artist would stay at a label is if they're making them more money then they could do independently.

A buyer may wish to buy Warner for Led Zeppelin, only to find Led Zepp buys themselves out of their contract. To keep making money the label would have to keep signing new artists who get big... which just isn't happening.

Not that long ago buying a major label would have meant buying a major load of big artists. Today many of the big artists are going indie, and rising from indie labels.

Someone like Amazon may buy them just to get access to their whole archived catalog, not just the stuff they let them sell. It seems unlikely though.

We watched a lot of TV in 2007. Much of it rubbish.

We "enjoyed" many of hours of "reality TV", the best of which would have to be the always entertaining, So You Think You Can Dance? I couldn't tell you the names of any contestants, or who won, but watching the chorography was fun. I hold out little hope for the Australian series which begins this year...

2007 was the year we gave up completely on Australian Idol and Big Brother and barely watched Biggest Loser, although the Australian version sold me on the 30 second edit of Shannon Noll's Lift. If only all pop songs were 30 seconds long.

We gave a few new US shows a go (Life, Starter Wife, Bionic Woman, Californication, Ugly Betty) and kept up with Heroes, the sometimes-food Supernatural and NCIS and the always fun Mythbusters.

Bionic Woman was never really very promising. It's a bizarre mix of family "I have a secret" drama and action that never really worked. We lasted four episodes.

Californication was just... weird. One episode.

Ugly Betty had us going for about five episodes but really, it's mindless fluff isn't it?

We really enjoyed Life. It's a nice antidote to the million and one police dramas out there. I'm looking forward to it starting again.

Katie likes Starter Wife... but I don't.

I was going to start watching Journeyman but I hear that it probably won't get another season. I'm unwilling to put effort into a show that has only one open ended season. Maybe if they let them do one "end it" episode... It did tempt me to go back and watch Quantum Leap although perhaps that is best left in my head.

On all fronts, I found the week long wait and adverts insanely disrupting. None of the shows were good enough for me to bother borrowing a DVD set to watch in my own time... except perhaps Life.

On the game show front, we really enjoyed The Con Test but it failed in the ratings and died. Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader is also surprisingly entertaining.

We're extremely happy to see Antiques Roadshow and Bargain Hunt appear on real TV, but they're on too early to see (5pm).

Heroes Season 2 slowly shaped up to an interesting point... and then "ended" due to the writers' strike. Dang it.

On DVD we started rewatching The Prisoner. We love it, but it puts us to sleep. We watched all of Black Books and loved every minute of it. I started watching Micallef from the beginning. The first Season really is rubbish, but second season it picks up enormously, even though the format isn't much different. Punchier editing and more jokes helps.

We discovered many cartoons/animations series from the US. We bought the first season of Robot Chicken based on the Star Wars episode downloaded from the net. I got the second season for Xmas, along with Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Squidbillies. Unfortunately Drawn Together later seasons appear to be rubbish. The six part first season was excellent.

But the biggest celebrations come in the form of the glorious piece of musical genius that is Metalocalypse and the serial killer cop show/drama, Dexter.

We spent our holidays devouring Dexter and can't get enough of it. It's the perfect Six Feet Under replacement.

I hold out hope for Channel 7's introduction of Tivo in 2008, but strongly believe it will be overpriced and under featured. And possibly just that little bit too late.

Did you know Napster was still going but as a subscription service? Bet you didn't.

They now have plans to drop DRM and sell MP3s [rollingstone.com], just like Amazon MP3.

Once completed, all of the main music sellers in the US that I know have will have dropped DRM on at least some of their product.

Rumours are that SonyBMG plans to allow their product to be sold DRM free soon.

All of this is America only of course. Boring.

iTunes in Australia sells some iTunes Plus (DRM free, higher quality) material, and at the same price as the DRM lower quality stuff, but not for any tracks I've been interested in.

The other major music sellers, Telstra BigPond Music and Destra music, still seem to sell DRM (Windows Media) files only.