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Slashback: GSM, Buffy, Wobble
Macrovision, everyone's favorite killjoy. byteCoder writes "Apparently Macrovision marketing is trying to put a good spin on Intuit's plan to eliminate the use of Macrovision's DRM software for pre-paid copies of TurboTax (as discussed last week here). This reminds me of the classic Monty Python line: "I'm not dead yet!""
That's got to be some spin -- An anonymous reader points to Eric Hellweg's Tech Investor on CNN, which suggests that the backlash which triggered Intuit's copy-protection reversal may have cost the company $100 million.
Can I use my Go Phone there? An anonymous reader writes ""In a follow-up to the Slashdot article 'CDMA vs GSM in Post-war Iraq,' The Reg has a story about how MCI has won the contract to rebuild the mobile phone system with GSM. This is a good thing for the people of Iraq that GSM is being used, GSM is the world standard and several U.S. companies (AT&T for one) are switching to GSM."
Adding Money to Insult. Neophytus writes "Remember the 'Star Wars Kid' that waxy.org found a couple of weeks ago? Well after over a million downloads the guy has been found. His name is Ghyslain, a 15-year-old tenth grader living in Quebec. Jish contacted him and got a brief, but interesting, interview."
No unlimited copy privileges in jail. the-dude-man writes "As reported here A 19-year-old pleaded guilty to costing DirectTV for leaking information about the secrets of DirectTV's most advanced anti-piracy technology to hacker websites. As part of the plea deal, Serebryany admitted to copying and distributing 800 megabytes of scanned documents from DirecTV, costing the company $68,000 in investigatory costs. Both sides stipulated to sentencing factors that carry six months to a year in prison under federal guidelines -- assuming no prior convictions. The sentencing court can depart from the guidelines only if the judge finds that the proposed sentence doesn't adequately reflect the facts of the case. According to court records affidavit, Serebryany's adventures began when he found himself with access to some of DirecTV's most coveted technological secrets while working for his uncle at a document imaging company at the office of a Los Angeles law firm, Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue. The firm was representing the satellite TV company in a lawsuit against NDS, the makers of the smart cards DirecTV uses to control access to its signal."
For every 11 discontented customers, there's one of these happy oddballs! RedWingsSuck writes "A few weeks ago, I asked /. users what they thought about the wobble my 12" Power Book has developed. Last week Apple Care told me that I could send my laptop off for repairs. I decided to drive to the local Apple Store, about 15 minutes away, and drop it off. They had my laptop for less than 3 days. When I went in to pick it up, they told me that it was sent in and the BC (bottom cover) was repaired. It doesn't wobble anymore, so I am happy. I was really surprised with how fast it was fixed. I didn't mean to sound like I regretted my AiBook purchase in the last post, and now I even happier."
Relax, it's a television show. HardcoreGamer writes "Buffy creator Joss Whedon responds to questions from New York Times readers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it comes to the end of its 7 season run. He also discusses the now-canceled Firefly and concludes with one of the key reasons why the show is ending: 'I'm simply too tired.'"
I consider myself somewhat an average geek and don't find him pitiful. Who hasn't grabbed a stick and pretended they were Darth Maul or any other Jedi badass? I laugh when I saw this because I was laughing at myself. I could have done the exact same thing and looked just as stupid. If it weren't for some kid at school who found the tape and posted it online this would be just another idiotic teenage fantasy that we've all lived in some form or another. I think the kid should be proud that he is now world renown and maybe gave a little chuckle to a bunch of nerds JUST LIKE HIM.
Consider the "First Evil" arc. They started that one over four years ago!!! Yeah, I know we you like the way he plants clues and goes for a slow buildup. So do I. But that buildup looks like the workers were drunk and AWOL half the time!
The whole series is full of stuff like that. My favorite villain in all of genre fiction is Glorificus, The Fashion Queen from Another Dimension. But I was only able to enjoy her arc by nodding at the plot inconsistencies you could drive a truck through. A willing fan can do that for a while (hence Star Trek), but Buffy fans have less patience.
I think if Joss Whedon is going to remain a major player (and I do hope he manages to revive Firefly) he's gonna have to rethink his working style. TV and movies are collaborative media, yet he insists that all the big insights be his and his alone. That prevents people from hijacking his vehicles (as happened with the Buffy movie) but also prevents people from telling him when his clothes are no invisible, but missing. No wonder Buffy got so far off track.
This is not wholly accurate. TDMA is old, obvious, and proven technology, requiring nothing more complicated than a uniform source of timing, and is possibly less demanding on the handset hardware than CDMA. Telecommunications carriers tend to be conservative, because the upfront investments are astronomical.
Secondly, according to Qualcomm's own information, CDMA by 1995 offered only 10x improvement (over analog cellular) of the bandwidth utilization. By contrast, TDMA offers somewhere from 3x to 8x, so the case for ripping out all your expensive network hardware is not as compelling back then.
Today in Iraq, starting from scratch, the equation is obviously different. When GSM's time comes, however, it should be remembered as a reliable workhorse, not something that was always inferior to CDMA except for patents. GSM was the first mobile phone system that offered global roaming, a feature taken for granted today, but causing so many problems back then that several horribly expensive satellite based solutions were built.
SIMM card
Only one "M". It stands for "Subscriber Identity Module".
Did anyone notice the reference to Trogdor the Burninator in Buffy? It was rad!
Wil
wiki
GSM is cheap because its old. Cheap GSM stations and cheap GSM phones. I might be able to pay $1000 for a PDA CDMA phone but an Iraqi might only have $50 for his basic GSM (I'm sure he'd love to have the phone I threw away 4 years ago because it was getting tacky)
GSM is implemented throughout the Middle East - allowing roaming and phone exports/transfers over the border.
GSM is well known to technicians.
GSM works well in environments like Iraq. You might live in some isolated part of the huge US of A where GSM sucks but Iraq is an urban and concentrated country. Most people live near the cities or the river valleys.
GSM does not suck. It allows clear voice transmissions and gives an acceptable data transfer rate (not for internet browsing but for email okay).
Iraq does not need an expensive data network with bells on it. It needs one that works. And GSM works excellently - as Europe can testify.
GSM is not the future. But its the working present.
I don't think that season 6 was much darker than its predecessors, though it did hurt that they tried to carry off the humor element of the season with the season antagonist, the Trio, who could have worked well as a monster of the week but who were grating rather than amusing when their antics were repeated week after week.
Continuity with prior seasons was abandoned, both in terms of character and in setting. The most egregrious example was magic becoming addictive. Wouldn't Tara or Giles have ever mentioned that magic is the equivalent of crack to Willow, especially since there are "dealers" and magic crack houses? The magic addiction arc is especially frustrating as it not only hijacked the promising power corrupts arc for Willow, but it was completely useless as part of the dark Willow arc since it was Tara's death, not magic crack, that made Willow the nemesis in the final episodes.
The writing has many other flaws such as Buffy coming to an epiphany every week about her depression then ignoring it the following week and Spike going to get his chip out (which not only the dialog implies but the actor was told was to happen) but ends up with a soul. Let's take a quick look at the dialog. Some of the worst dialog ever on the show again comes from the addiction arc, especially in the final episodes when Willow's saying things like "I'm so juiced," and at the very end, Xander saving the world with his yellow crayon speech was just embarrassing.
There were many ideas with great potential in season six like the dark Willow arc we almost saw, but the execution was so poor that it's almost impossible to enjoy them. It's not the issues they brought up, such as depression, bad boyfriends, or even addiction that were the problem, but how they handled them compared to earlier seasons.
Look at how they handled the deaths of Joyce or Miss Calendar compared to Tara. Both of the prior deaths carried so much more meaning and emotion for the characters. The ending also lacks originality. We just saw Willow go off for revenge after Tara was hurt at the end of last season, and we saw Giles do the same when Miss Calendar died before that. The "dead lesbian/evil lesbian (saved by the good man)" ending has been done dozens of time in other books and movies, with Alyson Hannigan not only playing that ending in Buffy that year, but she also played that in the movie Rip It Off just before that. And of course, Willow has to destroy the world; we're not quite sure how that comes out of her character, but Buffy villains do that so she has to do that too. Why couldn't they have done something remotely original?