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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."
Thought Nazis unleashed to quash real Nazis. Sounds like a scheme that'll work into perpetuity.
In my experience, Postgre was really easy to get running, as (IIRC) it comes in the Cygwin package - you can choose to install it from the get-go.
;-)
...but as for XFree86, I definitely don't think it's as easy as the other two. Cygwin runs under an internet "stub" installer, whereas with XF you download about eighty packages, then navigate through the directory structure... blah blah. It runs very well - that's not in question - it's just the installation that isn't quite so easy.
As far as Bash goes, I definitely agree - it was wonderful to finally get it running, but even more so was using rxvt right in the Windows environment. Now on my Win95 box (at work we shunned the auto-upgrade policy) I could get a scrolling command prompt! I could finally collect all those wxPython tracebacks...
Comments like that make me really sad. If you don't make the decision to make a change yourself, then no one will do it for you. Come on... take the initiative and do something new.
Let's play a game of "Hello, Obvious!" I'll give you three clues:
One: The original poster could have been referring to a work machine; he never said that this was his own, personal computer.
Two: Perhaps he telecommutes, and his work requires the use of an application which will only run on Windows.
Three: There are likely many other reasons that he needs a Windows machine; just because he doesn't care to ennumerate them here doesn't mean that he's a clueless and/or spineless moron who is incapable of running a Unix-like operating system.
I'm lucky. I'm a sysadmin. I can run Linux, BSD, and Solaris on my home boxen because I run them at work. Not everyone is so fortunate.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
You can get a region free DVD players in most stores here in Sweden. The quality if region 2 DVDs is low, and they have quite annoying "features" and lack what I usually want, i.e. the region 1 with the goodies, no translations (since I translate better myself and knows English better than the translators) and sometimes even DTS sound.
The zones were a terrible misstake according to me. I was happy, at last a cheap (well, kinda) medium which can hold movies at a resonable quality. All of a sudden I wanted to buy movies, but the whole region thing really made me feel screwed over. I even have my computer DVD set to region 1 and I refuse to buy region 2 DVDs now. When I think about it, why did I actually get a region free DVD player (it's an american player, cost me roughly $350 here in Sweden) to begin with?
When they stop trying to screw us over, we'll think about not screwing them over. But until then, happy hacking everyone.
Agreed. I never understand people who whine about 'having to use' Windoze, yet don't make the change for better. Even if it's at work. You can either quit and look for a nicer employer, or shut up and deal with it.
.sig, are you? I like Microsoft about as much as RMS, and don't use their products; but they do hold a very strong position in the business market, and attempting to attack them head-on is like jousting windmills.
Leaving a position you are otherwise happy with simply because they want you to use a very common tool (in this case, Windows) is a very stupid thing to do; and because of the prevalence of Windows in the computer industry, this would be like an auto mechanic refusing to work at a shop that forced him to use the (admittedly buggy-as-hell) electronic diagnostic systems.
In general, nobody should complain about things they can potentially change themselves. And once you're out of Windoze hell, there's no reason to whine. So, sensible people should never whine about anything! Of course if it's not your fault, do complain to the appropriate person.
Sometimes complaint is the most effective form of change. If you feel that strongly about Linux, you should work on promoting it in your organization. Demonstrate its features to those in charge, and provide a comparison between the current solution and your perceived-ideal solution.
I think it's the un-sensible people who don't whine; if you never complain, nobody will ever know that you have a problem.
I don't have to keep bashing M$ because I don't user their products.
You aren't really living up to the first part of that
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
can you think of a better way for MS to get on the "good side" of this community? Plus they want to be THE home entertainment box.
This is a vry good move for MS.
they can always "fix" it later.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, you better look at your own presidential executive orders, after your country has been hit by international terrorism...Me thinks so far Germans have dealt with their own terrorists quite well without resorting to overwriting judicial procedures. Here they are a "done deal" within the stroke of the president's pen.
Just be a little bit more humble and less "smart" and less prejudiced against your perceived German's lack of understanding of civil liberties.
Take a closer look at your own backyard's judicial dealings first, before lecturing Germans and other Europeans about "freedoms".
I use windows to boot my windows games. thats pretty much it. Why would i want to run gnome on a windows box? Other then having to do some cross-platform testing and tweaking, Arcanum and Empire Earth, that is why i have a high-end windows game system, if that stuff came out on the Mac (yes i know, or Linux) at the same time, I wouldn't even need it to be high end.
someone mentioned earlier, if you work for a company that insists you run a Windows OS, then they are sure as shit not going to be pleased with you installing cygwin-gnome. I mean really, i laud the efforts of cyg, god bless those guys. But really now. why should i bother to jack gnome onto windows when i have five *nix boxes all around me that can do it better?
i went through this with OS10.1 on the Mac. Loved interleaving X-Darwin and OSX and running gimp next to photoshop... but once i stopped showing off to friends i had to ask myself this question, "what exactly is this doing to make me more productive or happy?" Yes i realize the difference is that OSX is far more natively *nix friendly since well, it's pretty much FreeBSD, which is why i stopped messing with XFree-Darwin and can launch gimp from a nice terminal shortcut. But my desire to do the same on a 2K box is well... non-existant.
Linux/FreeBSD is my preferred work environment, Macintosh is my preferred design/client support environment... Windows 2000 Professional is one hell of a robust game launcher.
If Halo and Metropol, etc.. etc.. are ported to PC in a timely fashion then I will have vindicated myself by preordering the Game Cube instead of the X-Box. It will sit nicely next to the PS2 and the Dreamcast (which also does not run linux since... well... i have linux boxes). If i am in error, well Microsoft says it's goal is to drive the price of the X-Box down to about $100US, so if I pick one up in a couple of months for twice that, i will have still saved about 55% off what i see it going for now.
I do not see the great functionality replacing my microwave's interface with a ba$h prompt. i don't want to logon to my car audio system.
You're right in that we don't have the right to say what German's can and can not do. It's just that we're afraid of the same thing you are: having some other country's values slowly pushed upon us. We don't want that kind of censorship pushed upon us in the US.
Yeah, so we have to tolerate a bunch of weird groups in our country. I don't like anything Nazi as much as you. But give an inch and they'll take a mile. What happens when the people in charge don't like what the EFF is saying? Well, if they can censor the Nazis (as an example), why not the EFF? What stops them? The general public won't care, because they won't know the EFF's message.
So we have to let the Nazis talk. We don't have to listen to them. And that allows us to make sure that other minority groups that should be heard, are heard.
(Man, did I ever bite the flamebait from that AC...hehhe)
Every time a guy gets a threesome, somewhere in heaven an angel gets his wings. --Cary Tennis
So, which country do you think knows more about its own Nazi movement ? The U.S. or Germany ?
I am pretty sure the U.S. doesn't know much about its right-wing potential Nazi movement. Here it runs under other names and is nicely embedded and hidden in other political movements, which don't have an equivalent in Germany and don't exist.
Because everybody in the U.S. believes it's an open and free society (as if Germany isn't since over forty years), they can't believe that there might be underground Nazi movements in the U.S, right ?
And the U.S. believes, because Nazi propaganda is forbidden in Germany, the whole Nazi movement in Germany must be underground and therefore is not known in its size, right? You must be kidding. Germany has its Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of Anti-Neo-Nazis.
The U.S. has Neo-Nazis and then it has a lot of apolitical ignorants, who think ignoring political movements, they don't like, is a solution to everything. Your pathetic usage of freedom of speech to justify any shit is NOT the cure for everything imaginable on earth, you know.
I don't see how censorship-by-DNS could actually work. The user could point their machine at any DNS server in the world that will take them. Surely there is at least one such server, and it will have accurate DNS records for the banned sites. Why aren't Germans doing this if they want access to the banned sites?
Comments like that make me really sad. If you don't make the decision to make a change yourself, then no one will do it for you. Come on... take the initiative and do something new.
I think you might be missing the point of that comment. The fact of the matter is that a lot of developers, etc., are stuck with whatever OS their company demands of them. I can't just format my work machine and put on Solaris or RedHat, since my office is a MS shop. The same would be true in reverse, too.
I would love to be idealistic and put Linux on my work machine and have IT change every machine in the company, but if you work in a large environment, its a pipe dream. Large companies only care about the bottom line, not about their developers favorite OS. This type of software IS needed. Sad but true.
<conspiracytheory>For such a feature to have gone "unnoticed" proves either the incompetence of MS' designers, or their savvy marketing practices. Just ask Sony how gravely this same leaked "feature" on first-generation Japanese PS2s affected their sales...I'm sure it did nothing but boost initial sales. Just watch, sometime in the next year, all of Microsoft's own released games will install a service pack on the HD which will also permanently and completely fix this "recently-discovered bug." Won't happen till after the holiday season though. ^_-</conspiracytheory>
May I recommend Sonic 1, Sonic CD Japanese version, Gunstar Heroes, Phantasy Star 2-4, Herzog Zwei, Shining Force (1, 2, and Sega CD version), Landstalker, and Thunder Force 2 & 3, just off the top of my head? They were all at least pretty good games. Installments of Street Fighter, Castlevania, Dragon Ball Z, and other X-plat game series also graced this system.
Well, now's a pretty good time to be in the market for consoles, especially if you're mainly a gaming enthusiast, and not just some convergence maniac who also plays games. As of today in the U.S., approximately $300 plus tax will nab you a Nintendo Gamecube, a Sega Dreamcast, AND either 1-3 good games for the DC, or one game for the 'Cube (plus the bundled DC game demo disc). Or, for that price, you can get one PS2 (with no bundled games, HD, or modem/ethernet), or one xbox that won't play DVDs right out of the box and no games. $330 plus tax should get you a PS2 with Gran Turismo 3, or an xbox w/DVD pack (but still no games).
I don't mean to advocate my admiration of both Nintendo and Sega, but GC+DC+games is a killer combo for this holiday season IMO, especially if you already have a DVD player (even a reliable old cheapie). A $300 xbox that requires an additional DVD pack to play movies isn't in my short- or long-term budget, and a PS2 will only start to make sense to me at $250 in its current state, or $300 with a bundled hard drive, modem, and/or DVD remote control...and even then only after a reliable import mod has been implemented on such systems (for Guilty Gear X Plus and Metal Gear Solid 2 Japanese version). PSOnes will look fairly-priced at $200, when bundled with Sony-branded 5" LCD screens early next year, but are overpriced right now considering its limited capabilties vs. Dreamcast, and the current $129 price tag on the official Sony LCD (which is expected to drop).
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
But many of us aren't PC developers - we're network hackers, or consultants, or router developers, and that PC on our desk is a communication tool maintained by some IT department that wants to make sure we can word-process, print, email, surf, dial up from the road, and fill out forms in a compatible fashion, so to them we're just Users. In that environment, most of them don't care what extra tools you use as long as you don't ask them for support and don't mess up the tools they do support in confusing ways. So sure, if you've got the disk space, install Cygwin and X and GNOME and EMACS, and just make sure that when you send the HR folks the Excel spreadsheet that says what projects you worked on this month and which customers to charge for it, you're using their favorite macros and column headings. And use that other removable disk drive tray to run Linux with WINE on top :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks