{"id":411,"date":"2006-02-11T19:41:38","date_gmt":"2006-02-11T19:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wheresdrew.com\/blog\/?p=411"},"modified":"2006-05-07T11:21:33","modified_gmt":"2006-05-07T02:21:33","slug":"the-high-cost-of-being-cheap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/2006\/02\/11\/the-high-cost-of-being-cheap\/","title":{"rendered":"The high cost of being cheap."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>But think of the savings!<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nPeople like to say you&#8217;ve got to spend money to make money, but you can also spend money to save money. You can buy in bulk at Costco or buy higher-priced goods that are more durable.<\/p>\n<p><b>Or you can decide not to pay for stuff at all.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>But even that&#8217;s not cheap. Take gaming for instance. Getting bootleg copies of stuff is cheap, but in addition to the cost of the system to play them, there&#8217;s also the cost of enabling to system to play unauthorized copies. And that ain&#8217;t cheap.<\/p>\n<p><b>It can even cost more than the system itself.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Case in point &#8211; the Nintendo DS. The system goes for about $130. If you want the hardware to make it run backups, that&#8217;ll run you around $100. Oh, and you&#8217;ll need a memory card to load your files on, so tack on another $80 or so.Hmm, system costs $130, and it&#8217;s another $180 to play ROMs&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>Why would anybody do that?!?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Well, for the cost of 5 or 6 games, you open up the possibility of playing a hell of a lot more. (There are currently more than 200 DS titles, never mind the 1,000 or so GBA games.) The initial cash outlay does seem a bit much, but given the benefits, it&#8217;s a deal.<\/p>\n<p>I went with the M3 Adapter and a 1GB compact flash for my DS needs. Not only will the M3 let you run DS and GBA roms (either with the Passkey device or after flashing the DS&#8217;s firmware), but it&#8217;ll also turn the DS into a mini-media center. Now mine can play videos and music, serve as a text reader and even display photos. Sure, I can do all that on my laptop (which I have in my backpack every day when I&#8217;m working), but the PowerBook will hardly fit in my pocket. The DS will.<\/p>\n<p><b>And I think putting that kind of functionality into a slick little package like the DS is more than worth what it&#8217;s cost me.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But think of the savings!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wheresdrew.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}