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Slashback: Regionalism, Rivalry, Zensur
Even the Gates family probably hates being ripped off by region coding. jmcmurry writes: "I just tried out my daughters Winnie The Pooh from Poland, which can only be played (until today) on my Mac Cube running OS X (I did the region free crack when running OS 9). I own an Xbox with DVD player and thought, hey wouldnt hurt to try it out, since I was in the market to buy a Region Free DVD player (which can cost $400 an up) I plugged everything in, put the DVD in, and lo and behold, it plays the DVD from Poland (region code 2) This makes up for the cost of the Xbox ..."
Nein! Nein! Speaking of things that do (or don't) work by region, several readers submitted information which indicates the pooh-poohing of alleged censorship-by-DNS manipulation in Germany's state of Nordrhein-Westfalen was premature. It turns out that some interesting redirects which seemed to be a technical error or a misguided proof-of-concept, and which were quickly turned off, were reinstated shortly thereafter.
Thorsten Hornung was among the several to write on this topic. "Meanwhile ISIS has reblocked the sites, as Heise online reported (German!) due to pressure from the president of the local Government Mr. Büssow.
The local government of Düsseldorf which is responible for media services in North Rhine-Westphalia has posted a statement on its site (German) about the initial lift of the blockade saying that it believes the censoring meassures have been lifted due to complaints by users. Much worse is that furthermore public accuse people complaining about the censorship to be Right Extremists: 'The local government believes, due to the content of many emails it received today, that they [People Complaining] are users of Right Extremist Internet Content.'
The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) does not allow censorship however there are some restrictions on free speech especially regarding Nazi propaganda."
Winners sometimes use Gnomes. Prashant writes: "Cygwin is turning out to be a breeze of fresh air for people stuck on windows for one reason or another. I can use the familiar bash shell on any platform(win, *nix) I am on, and don't have to deal with the DOS prompt. I use all the gnu tools from cygwin distro. rcs, cvs, vim, perl, python, ruby, apache the list goes on. Not only that, I successfully ran postgresql on Cygwin. The XFree86 port of Cygwin itself can be huge cost saving over commercial X-servers for Windows. I have tried KDE on Cygwin version 1.1.2. I was impressed with it. Here is something new: GNOME ported to Cygwin as well. Let the rivalry ontinue on Windows.
It's all about having options. I would love be 100% Linux user but again sometimes it's not you who decides what os runs on your machine. So till Windows gets replaced by Linux by the authorities, happy cygwining."
This addition brought to you by ... Solar Power! basfromasd writes "The winner of the 3000 km World Solar Challenge race from Darwin to Adelaide has reached the finish in a record breaking time. The winning car, Nuna, was built by the Alpha Centauri team, consisting of 10 university students of TU Delft and University of Amsterdam. Some technical details can be found at their site and at ESA. Results and pictures of the race are at the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering of UNSW website. Well done for a first time contestant, showing that skill and intelligence can match the resources of factory sponsored teams. They found some good sponsors though: GaAs solar cells are not cheap. Neither are Li-Ion batteries. Some of the solar cells were used in the Hubble Space Telescope before and brought back to earth in 1993. The other cars did not make it before today's curfew. The runner up, Aurora, stopped just outside of Adelaide for the night and is expected to finish tomorrow morning."
You mean KDE? That's run on Cygwin for a while (as has Gnome) and 2.2.1 was ported a few days ago. It was mentioned here by the way, although I can't link to it as Search is down.
The tone of this submission struck me as funny -- Timothy, and certainly the writer, seem to be under the impression Cygwin isn't ages old. It reminds me of the NewsRadio episode where Matthew discovers Dilbert and insists on doing a story on it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There is a CD available to write some stuff to your memorycard and make your PS2 able to select zone. It takes up a fair bit of the memorycard, and it is cumbersome to change zones.
In case you were curious about the final rankings, you can find them here
Watch out. Most computer DVD drives (which the X-Box uses) come without the region set. It's possible that the X-Box comes this way, and if the first dvd you put into a X-Box is region 2, then you could get a region 2 X-Box forever. Alternately, you could get 4-5 changes of the DVD Region before it locks. It's possible that the X-Box coders let the DVD drive handle the region settings and you'll be locked out after 4-5 region changes.
Actually, PAL is 25 "frames per second", or more precisely running at 50Hz interlaced (50 half-frames per second, where three half frames make up two complete frames). NTSC runs at roughly 60Hz interlaced (roughly, because as you pointed out it's just slightly less than 30 "frames per second", and so it would be just slightly less than 60 Hz interlaced), meaning 50 half-frames per second. Now munge those numbers around, and I'm sure you can find some reason why a video in PAL format is dropping frames on an NTSC machine (and since the XBox has not had a European release yet, and the rest of the world uses various forms of NTSC, it's not so surprising the US XBoxes don't have correction for 50Hz->60Hz conversion).
I could be wrong but I believe that in some parts of the world they only sell region free players. You can buy region-free players, from most major brands, in both Hong Kong and Japan.
Does anyone else know anything about this?
As I am typing this on WindowsXP, I have vim6.0 in the background as well as Apache 1.3.2. I also have perl 5.6, python, php4, and Mysql installed. There is also a port of Xemacs for Windows for VI haters.
I would not recommend running native unix apps with cygwin on win32 if there is a native version for the platform. The native win32 port of vim for example can integrate with visual studio so you can replace the visual c++ editor with VIM. Very cool stuff! Also according to the documentation of VIM 6, you an also integrate it with Visual Basic applications! I haven't tried this though. Also I have com+ and ole support with the win32 port of perl and python. The win32 version of apache can run ASP. Not optimized yet but its diffenitely possible and will be there soon.
Running the compilied unix versions of these apps with cygwin can introduce compadibility problems as well as integration limitations. E.g. I can't integrate VIM with Visual Studio. I heard strange things happening on postgresSql with cygwin. Also according to the apache documentation, the threading model of Windows is a problem because its optimized for Unix style threads. The win32 version has its own more windows friendly threading which would not be there under cygwin. Remember that cygwin is close to Unix but tts not a %100 unix environment. PostgresSQL may be fixed but you need a particular source just for cygwin so it won't crash or exhibit bugs. This is the problem since most opensource apps will either not compile at all under cygwin or will compile but be buggy. I prefer a native win32 port of gnu apps on Windows and I will run Linux for the Unix ports.
http://saveie6.com/
Actually, it's not slow, for the same reason Wine isn't slow. It's not an emulator, it's an API translation layer. Cygwin just copied the APIs from Unix, then modified them so instead of actually doing things, they call the relevant Windows APIs. The non-API parts of the program run unmodified, therefore, programs (at least the majority of them that don't spend much time in API calls) run very close to native speed. Your idea about the laptop hibernation is a good one, I have thought about something like that too.
PAL - Phase Alternation by Line, 1967
625 vertical lines, 50 half frames (sets of odd or even lines) displayed per second
Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina (PAL-N), Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brunei, Cameroon, Canary Islands, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Gibralter, Greece (also SECAM), Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, North Korea, Kuwait, Liberia, Luxembourg (also SECAM), Madeira, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay (PAL-N), Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (also SECAM), Siera Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay (PAL-N), Yeman (the former Yeman Arab Republic was PAL, and the former People's Democratic Republic of Yeman was NTSC ), Yugoslavia, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
PAL-M -
525 lines, 60 half frames per second.
Brazil only
NTSC - National Television System Committee, 1953
525 vertical lines, 59.94 half frames displayed per second.
USA, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Burma, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greenland, Guam, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, St. Kitts, Saipan, Samoa, Surinam, Taiwan, Tobago, Trinidad, Venezuela, Virgin Islands.
SECAM - Systeme Electronique Couleur Avec Memoire, 1967
625 lines, 50 half frames per second.
Albania, Benin, Bulgaria, Congo, former Czechosolvakia, Djibouti, Egypt, France, French Guiana, Gabon, Greece (also PAL), Guadeloupe, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Libya, Luxembourg (also PAL), Madagascar, Martinique, Mauritius, Monaco (also PAL), Mongolia, Morocco, New Caledonia, Niger, Poland, Reunion, Romania, Saudi Arabia (also PAL), Senegal, Syria, Tahiti, Togo, Tunisia, former USSR, Viet Nam, Zaire.