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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."
I find this feature particularly strange... Perhaps this was a "forgotten feature" in the DVD pack. After all, based upon reputation, Microsoft should be close allies with the MPAA and RIAA. But, i'm not complaining. Only if the xbox supported progressive scan dvd playing, I would be a happy man... (seems strange that it doesnt. It's more then capable of such a feat).
Of course, i havent owned a console since the Sega Genesis... That system was technically impressive, but alas, not many good games were made for it, and i've never brought a console since. I'm highly considering buying the dreamcast... what a steal for $50!!!!! Of course, that's 50 bucks i could be spending on a geforce3, an xbox, a gamecube, a dual processor motherboard, a car, the ability to press the 'submit comment' button... Wait i can press the............
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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...
Cygwin is a little more akin to WineLib -- it's a reimplimentation of the *NIX API. (Plus they throw in a lot of precompiled libs and helper programs like bash, which is nice.) For this, yes, having open-source software makes it a hell of a lot easier, since you know exactly what the hell the API you're trying to target is.
I still don't understand why region coding isn't ruled illegal as a per se violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Oh yeah, Hollywood owns both parties, lock stock and barrel - I forgot.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
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
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/