I'm not actually choosing the language for the designer, but I need to come up with cost estimates for designing in-house versus buying a commercial product, so I just wanted to pick a reasonable starting point to say, "If, for example, you pick XYZ, it will cost you $$$." I'm good to go now. Thanks!

By commerical product you mean an existing product - no customization? Then the way you get your inhouse cost is ask your inhouse developer how many hours it take using her preferred language. Then ask your manager what the standard multiplier is for your developers time estimates. (Most developers are optimists.) Unless development time is absolutely trivial you will find your develpers time outweighs by far the cost of the tools she uses.

Fox has started selling some TV shows on the iTunes music store, including Season 1 of Buffy and Firefly.

Meanwhile, Warner will reportedly start selling movies via BitTorrent: [link]

Interesting news for Linux PVR hobbists.

AVerMedia technologies has today announced that it has developed drivers for its Hybrid TV Tuner product range to support the following distributions of Linux; Fedora core3, Fedora core4, Mandriva and SUSE.

[link]

We've just had two cheapo Dell printers die within two months. Time to switch vendors.

Anybody got a favorite vendor for a basic ink-jet printer, used mostly to print school papers and pictures from Web sites? Durability trumps features.

I really like my Epson R200. It has been rock solid, and has the nifty feature of being able to print directly on printable CDs. I can also get cheap ink that has worked quite well in it.

It's now the R220. Information: [link]

Retail Link (for price info): [link]

I've got a Canon that's been nice and reliable. I like the Epson's apart from the way they fuck with you in regards to ink. When the machine reports that any of the 4 ink cartriges is low the entire printer gets shut down until you replace it. There's actually a class action suit against Epson about it. Quite a bit of the time it reports ink cartridges as empty when they are not, and yet it still shuts down your printer.

I have't seen that with the R200, it gives a warning light when a cartridge gets low, but I can keep printing even after it goes entirely dry. It's not a four cartridge printer though, so the others might be different.

The Epson CX line has a known issue where after about 3-4 ink changes, the discharge tube becomes clogged and the printer will only "print" blank pages. There are many many forums with instructions on how to fix this -- basically you have to dismantle the printer and manually clean or replace the discharge tube. Some people report being able to get Epson to replace printers where this has happened, but it's not 100% guarantee, since they don't like to actually admit that it's a problem.

I have a Canon, also, and it's great. Each color gets its own cartridge, so you don't have to throw out everything when you're only out of cyan.