While working for Elcomsoft Co.
Ltd. of Moscow, Sklyarov
came up with ways around those restrictions so electronic
books could be transferred from one computer to another or used in
text-to-speech programs, for example.
Such programs are legal in Russia but banned under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The "here's my school" posts are going to get out of hand really quick; but oh well...
Here's a link to the Rose-Hulman Solar Phantom
The Solar Phantom VI captured the No. 1 starting position by winning the Formula Sun
Grand Prix in May at Topeka, Kan., by a record 284 miles. It was the latest achievement
for the team, which has placed among the top three finishers in its last five races.
So, we can watch our dock bounce up and down,
equalizer style, to the music! Maybe just maybe
that will make most of us forget that we still
can't burn CD's with OS X/iTunes.:-(
I was going to post the same wrt the relative dvd/theater costs. I know that translators don't command that type of pay -- for evidence, wait until November (or maybe next year) when Mononoke is due to be released. A shiny 500 yen piece bets that it will cost more than the US $25, and come without the "extra" English track. There are other anime titles that follow the same pattern.
The "cultural asset protection" law is only for books/magazines. DVD's are just like the 120 yen vending machine cola -- No price fixing here.;-)
Given the book law, it's a wonder that Amazon has even tried to open up shop here. It's great for me to order English books (they freely discount them from the suggested Japanese retail price, so it ends up being close to what you'd pay in the US); but is the market really that large??
It's not so much that the Australian studios can't make DVD's to sell anywhere
that they want; but that the big American studios are the only ones which produce
(a scarcity) of region 4 titles for viewing in Australia. Small studios without the
"foresight" to make a region 4 disk are shut out
of the marketplace; and the major studios
only have to offer a select few movies -- not the
entire catalogs available in the US.
Here in Japan, we have the same problem, but it's nothing that a region-free player and (choose your favorite mail-order firm)
can't solve....
Usen has been quietly laying out fiber throughout Japan for several years. Up until now, they've mostly served "cable radio" to houses and stores. I think that system is capable of 440 channels of audio. Their founder (who died a few years ago) got into a little trouble for hijacking utility poles for his cables, but the son who took over has straightened out that mess. Many of us have been waiting for this, because they are really the only nationwide competitor (in terms of infrastructure) to NTT. The regional power companies could conceivably build a comparable network, but Usen has a huge head start.
I first saw this in the local newspaper about a month ago; but figured it wouldn't be much use to post to slashdot without a translation. When it first came out, the "major cities" were supposed to be active by 10/2001. That was quickly changed to "all of Tokyo" by then, and the major cities by 4/2002, with the rest of Japan to be connected (100%) by 4/2003. The JapanToday article is probably a little bit mixed up when it quotes 4/2003 for the major cities.
In essence, the hard work has already been done. I think they could throw a few switches and be providing access to over 90% of the country right now; but they probably want to work out the bugs first.
In Japan, one very good argument you could make involves two trends:
Aging of the society
More women working
In a common case where the elderly mother/father lives together with the family, a degree of freedom is often necessary to deal with certain problems that might pop up.
Child care is another good point; but elderly care doesn't follow the same types of schedule that is usually involved with school-aged children, and thus requires even more flexibility.
The Japanese have skipped a technology here, and are working on the next, because what you think is state of the art isnt attractive enough. Its only dumb dotcom fever advertising in the US that makes people think they're missing out on something insanely great. The reality is its insanely boring
Technologically, yes the Japanese are skipping forward a generation. But, I still think that it would be useful to develop the intermediate technology. Most people I know won't want to
stream video over their iMode; and even if there were a phone -> TV adaptor, the speed of wireless that most Japanese consumers have is nowhere close to what a cable or ASDL connection can provide.
Don't try to tell me that all of the shops who pay the USEN cable radio company $70 a month would not rather plop down a cheap PC and get their BGM off the internet. (Nevermind the basic consumers who subscribe to USEN) It wouldn't need to be a bulky PC with a 20 inch monitor either. I've read about telephone sized "radio tuners" on sale in America that just require a constant modem or ethernet connection.
NTT charges a lot for fixed lines, sure, but nobody cares, they buy cellphones for extra lines instead.. for higher speed web access than dialup, Japanese has affordable ISDN at flat rates.
Japan also has cable modems. However, I'm stuck with a 96K cable connection for $50 a month. "Why so slow?" I asked the cable guy as he came to install my Nortel modem. Two reasons, he said. One -- Don't want to tick off NTT, since they still own a good portion of the infrastructure. Two -- Compared to the 64K ISDN service, most people will think that they're getting a deal. Ahhh... ignorance is bliss, I guess
As evidence of the first reason above, NTT has recently become the target of an investigation (granted, it's the government, so nothing is likely to happen) about gouging the independent ADSL companies by charging them 5 million yen ($45,000) for "various set up charges" associated with clearing out a space in the computer room for the other company's routers. They also took MONTHS to decide what date the other companies could come in to configure their boxes. Amazingly, after the government started rattling their swords, the access period suddenly shrunk to 2 days. I think this article was in the Nikkei weekly (English edition) either last week or the week before. Don't know about web access.
Ignoring the Linux aspect (is that legal here?), this is also probably going to give a giant boost to Japan's lagging internet usage. Up until now, the draconian price policy of NTT has more or less prohibited "mainstream" Japanese from accessing the internet. A good estimate is that access now is where the US was at in 1996 or so.
Japanese people _want_ to use the internet; they just don't feel like paying the phone company's local connect charges just to check their email.
Especially in larger cities, the convenience store is a one-stop-for-everything mecca. I have friends who stop at one each morning to pick up a breakfast roll, and on the way home each night to get their dinner. Now, people can add check the email to their list of things to do while waiting for their rice to warm up in the microwave.
It will be interesting to see if these boxes replace the current kiosks which are already in every Lawson store. RIght now, I think they are only connected to a proprietary network for ordering various goods and concert tickets. (never used one; just see them every day)
Maybe newer region free players will have some logic as follows:
Disc> Is player region 4?
Player> Um, yeah-- yeah! I'm region 5!
Disc> Oh -- sorry, only region1 players can play this disc
*RESET/REBOOT*
Disc> Is player region 5?
Player> (Last attempt unsuccessful flag raised!) I'm NOT region 5!
Disc> IS player region 4
and so on...
the DVD player would set the flags and 'remember' boot and try again depending on successful/unsuccessful attempts.
Yeah -- the one thing that the "good guys" have that can't be coded onto a disc is memory about past events.
Of course, the disc can be programmed so that on an incorrect region "match", instead of invalidating the player, it could go on to play alternative video (along the lines of "Because you're using a player that is not approved by the cartel, three members of the MPAA will go to bed hungry tonight")
That's the likely first wave of response to the reset-until-movie-is-played strategy. The player has no way of telling if it is an actual movie that it's playing or not.
Ignore the first pass--there was a slightly confusing typo that's fixed here
Is this new? I seem to remember reading on/. last winter about new discs (Matrix?) which were programmed to challenge the DVD player like this:
Disc> Is player region 3?
Player> Um, yeah-- yeah! I'm region 3!
Disc> Oh -- sorry, only region1 players can play this disc.
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
D> region 4?
P> nope.
D> region 2?
P> nope.
D> region 1?
P> good.
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
Is this new? I seem to remember reading on/. last winter about new discs (Matrix?) which were programmed to challenge the DVD player like this:
Disc> Is player region 3?
Player> Um, yeah-- yeah! I'm region 2!
Disc> Oh -- sorry, only region1 players can play this disc.
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
D> region 4?
P> nope.
D> region 2?
P> nope.
D> region 1?
P> good.
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
One of the niftier features I've heard about is that there is a way to interface with AppleScript from the command-line. Since most MacOS apps have some AppleScript controls already, this means that it should be possible to do most everything (from cleaning up the Finder window to starting a particular MP3 to having IE open up the latest/. story) all from the terminal prompt.
Reportedly, the reverse (BSD interface via AppleScript) will make the final release.
Most Japanese people gawk in amazement whenever I mention that back home in America, we can call "all the way across town" for free. The usual question is "But if NTT did that, everyone would use the phone". (at this point, I shake my head and say -- So??!!?) (Email me for more on this rant -- it doesn't really belong here).
Competition is a healthy thing. Last month, NTT announced a "breakthrough" price discount for local long distance calls. Basically, I can call from northern Japan to southern Japan for 60 yen instead of 80 or 90. For some reason, it still only costs 40 yen (or less) per minute to call to the US. The only reason for the price break is that the government is moving to allow competition, and NTT had to appear to be making an effort to meet the other companies' prices.
Anyway, all information coming out of Japan regarding the internet is first passed through some sort of reality distortion field.
The gov't here thinks that having a plan is the most important thing. For example, their newest plan is to overtake the US as the internet leader in either 2002 or 2003. Seriously. This jibes with the 'plan' announced in the main story. I'll start paying attention when these "plans" turn into "implementations".
Another oft-quoted statistic about Japan's internet growth is the number of wireless internet subscribers. If the Japanese government thinks that they can truly catch up to the US by stocking the 20-something girls in Shinjuku with phones to send mail to each other arranging meeting times/places, then more power to them. The amount of "real" wireless internet accesses that is going on is miniscule.
The mouse pad also keeps the little plastic tabs on the bottom of the mouse from scratching up one's wooden desktop.
To be fair, M$'s first version was much worse about this than the latest ones; but I'm not going to give the new one a chance to carve faint swirly patterns like the older one did.
Actually, the convenience store network here is quite different from in the US. All of the following points have contributed to this.
For one thing, alot of normal stores still keep 10-9 hours during the week. For some salarymen, this severely limits the places where they can go shopping after a long work day. Convenience stores are open 24/7. So, by nature, the stores stock some essential items like porno mags, playstation games, and Hello Kitty toothbrushes.
A few years ago, Nintendo (it may have been Sony; but I think it was Nintendo) experimented with using the convenience stores as a huge distribution point for game cartridges/CD's
Most convenience stores can be used as drop-off points for the equivalent of FedEx or UPS. This has been true for a long time. You could take a package down to the corner to send it to your friend on the other side of the country.
Most stores also have a basic "online shopping" kiosk where wide variety of goods can be bought.
All of this has contributed to the convenience-store-as-shipping-depot model that has been born. The rationale is that if the (UPS) guy stops at 7/11 every day to make pick-ups, he can also make deliveries on the same paycheck. This is rapidly becoming a common distribution method in Japan and the convenience stores are turning into gauche versions of Mailboxes Etc.
Now, referring to the original subject, the recall notice on Sony's page was very amusing. They actually have the audacity to state "because some overseas disks that shouldn't be playable are playable, we want to exchange your disk for free" (extremely rough translation -- the link is here if someone else wants to take a shot at it). Kent
I think you could fill an entire Slashdot article with things Sony makes for Japan and nowhere else. The slim Vaio, the CX-1 with a camera, etc. were all on sale here in Japan about a year before they hit the streets in the US.
But for a huge wow-factor, check out this mini-tower computer. I nearly fell over when I saw this a couple of weeks ago.
In case you're wondering, the three slots on the front panel are for slot-in DVD, 3.5", and MD. As far as I could tell from the demo model, the MD cannot be used for digital data recording from the computer (only audio); but it's still a pretty cool piece of work.
It's taken for granted thet you can't go buy a book, Xerox it's contents and hand it out on the street corner, why should music be different?
I don't think the issue is about handing out books, CD's, or any other medium.
But, let's say the book's print is too small for me to read -- would I become a criminal if I enlarged every page for my OWN use?
Or, what if I want to read one chapter a day of a huge hard-cover book while riding the train to work. Twenty sheets of paper are much easier to deal with than 800 pages of bound material.
Compare and contrast that to the most common reasons for creating MP3 versions of songs.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like there are at least a couple of fans in the uncovered box here
Here's a link to the Rose-Hulman Solar Phantom
The Solar Phantom VI captured the No. 1 starting position by winning the Formula Sun
Grand Prix in May at Topeka, Kan., by a record 284 miles. It was the latest achievement
for the team, which has placed among the top three finishers in its last five races.
More info can be found here
Actually, it was because nobody could figure out how to keep the references to evil monopoly from pointing here
Um, aren't there still several (ie, Que) drives that aren't supported for any type of burning yet?
So, we can watch our dock bounce up and down, :-(
equalizer style, to the music! Maybe just maybe
that will make most of us forget that we still
can't burn CD's with OS X/iTunes.
Funny, I thought it was "CIAagentsareweenies".
The "cultural asset protection" law is only for books/magazines. DVD's are just like the 120 yen vending machine cola -- No price fixing here. ;-)
Given the book law, it's a wonder that Amazon has even tried to open up shop here. It's great for me to order English books (they freely discount them from the suggested Japanese retail price, so it ends up being close to what you'd pay in the US); but is the market really that large??
that they want; but that the big American studios are the only ones which produce
(a scarcity) of region 4 titles for viewing in Australia. Small studios without the
"foresight" to make a region 4 disk are shut out of the marketplace; and the major studios
only have to offer a select few movies -- not the entire catalogs available in the US.
Here in Japan, we have the same problem, but it's nothing that a region-free player and
(choose your favorite mail-order firm) can't solve....
Usen has been quietly laying out fiber throughout Japan for several years. Up until now, they've mostly served "cable radio" to houses and stores. I think that system is capable of 440 channels of audio. Their founder (who died a few years ago) got into a little trouble for hijacking utility poles for his cables, but the son who took over has straightened out that mess. Many of us have been waiting for this, because they are really the only nationwide competitor (in terms of infrastructure) to NTT. The regional power companies could conceivably build a comparable network, but Usen has a huge head start.
I first saw this in the local newspaper about a month ago; but figured it wouldn't be much use to post to slashdot without a translation. When it first came out, the "major cities" were supposed to be active by 10/2001. That was quickly changed to "all of Tokyo" by then, and the major cities by 4/2002, with the rest of Japan to be connected (100%) by 4/2003. The JapanToday article is probably a little bit mixed up when it quotes 4/2003 for the major cities.
In essence, the hard work has already been done. I think they could throw a few switches and be providing access to over 90% of the country right now; but they probably want to work out the bugs first.
Is this really M$ fault?? I mean, every _other_ X-* site has some touched-up ;-)
pictures for download, and nobody seems to complain about them.
In Japan, one very good argument you could make involves two trends:
In a common case where the elderly mother/father lives together with the family, a degree of freedom is often necessary to deal with certain problems that might pop up.
Child care is another good point; but elderly care doesn't follow the same types of schedule that is usually involved with school-aged children, and thus requires even more flexibility.
Technologically, yes the Japanese are skipping forward a generation. But, I still think that it would be useful to develop the intermediate technology. Most people I know won't want to stream video over their iMode; and even if there were a phone -> TV adaptor, the speed of wireless that most Japanese consumers have is nowhere close to what a cable or ASDL connection can provide.
Don't try to tell me that all of the shops who pay the USEN cable radio company $70 a month would not rather plop down a cheap PC and get their BGM off the internet. (Nevermind the basic consumers who subscribe to USEN) It wouldn't need to be a bulky PC with a 20 inch monitor either. I've read about telephone sized "radio tuners" on sale in America that just require a constant modem or ethernet connection.
NTT charges a lot for fixed lines, sure, but nobody cares, they buy cellphones for extra lines instead.. for higher speed web access than dialup, Japanese has affordable ISDN at flat rates.
Japan also has cable modems. However, I'm stuck with a 96K cable connection for $50 a month. "Why so slow?" I asked the cable guy as he came to install my Nortel modem. Two reasons, he said. One -- Don't want to tick off NTT, since they still own a good portion of the infrastructure. Two -- Compared to the 64K ISDN service, most people will think that they're getting a deal. Ahhh... ignorance is bliss, I guess
As evidence of the first reason above, NTT has recently become the target of an investigation (granted, it's the government, so nothing is likely to happen) about gouging the independent ADSL companies by charging them 5 million yen ($45,000) for "various set up charges" associated with clearing out a space in the computer room for the other company's routers. They also took MONTHS to decide what date the other companies could come in to configure their boxes. Amazingly, after the government started rattling their swords, the access period suddenly shrunk to 2 days. I think this article was in the Nikkei weekly (English edition) either last week or the week before. Don't know about web access.
Japanese people _want_ to use the internet; they just don't feel like paying the phone company's local connect charges just to check their email.
Especially in larger cities, the convenience store is a one-stop-for-everything mecca. I have friends who stop at one each morning to pick up a breakfast roll, and on the way home each night to get their dinner. Now, people can add check the email to their list of things to do while waiting for their rice to warm up in the microwave.
It will be interesting to see if these boxes replace the current kiosks which are already in every Lawson store. RIght now, I think they are only connected to a proprietary network for ordering various goods and concert tickets. (never used one; just see them every day)
Disc> Is player region 4?
Player> Um, yeah-- yeah! I'm region 5!
Disc> Oh -- sorry, only region1 players can play this disc
*RESET/REBOOT*
Disc> Is player region 5?
Player> (Last attempt unsuccessful flag raised!) I'm NOT region 5!
Disc> IS player region 4
and so on...
the DVD player would set the flags and 'remember' boot and try again depending on successful/unsuccessful attempts.
Yeah -- the one thing that the "good guys" have that can't be coded onto a disc is memory about past events.
Of course, the disc can be programmed so that on an incorrect region "match", instead of invalidating the player, it could go on to play alternative video (along the lines of "Because you're using a player that is not approved by the cartel, three members of the MPAA will go to bed hungry tonight")
That's the likely first wave of response to the reset-until-movie-is-played strategy. The player has no way of telling if it is an actual movie that it's playing or not.
Is this new? I seem to remember reading on /. last winter about new discs (Matrix?) which were programmed to challenge the DVD player like this:
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
Whereas, "compliant" players would pass:
In other words, a false challenge would be issued first. Fully region free players would fail this every time, while the "approved" players would work fine.
from the command-line. Since most MacOS apps have some AppleScript controls already, this
means that it should be possible to do most everything (from cleaning up the Finder window to
starting a particular MP3 to having IE open up the latest
Reportedly, the reverse (BSD interface via AppleScript) will make the final release.
Competition is a healthy thing. Last month, NTT announced a "breakthrough" price discount for local long distance calls. Basically, I can call from northern Japan to southern Japan for 60 yen instead of 80 or 90. For some reason, it still only costs 40 yen (or less) per minute to call to the US. The only reason for the price break is that the government is moving to allow competition, and NTT had to appear to be making an effort to meet the other companies' prices.
Anyway, all information coming out of Japan regarding the internet is first passed through some sort of reality distortion field.
The gov't here thinks that having a plan is the most important thing. For example, their newest plan is to overtake the US as the internet leader in either 2002 or 2003. Seriously. This jibes with the 'plan' announced in the main story. I'll start paying attention when these "plans" turn into "implementations".
Another oft-quoted statistic about Japan's internet growth is the number of wireless internet subscribers. If the Japanese government thinks that they can truly catch up to the US by stocking the 20-something girls in Shinjuku with phones to send mail to each other arranging meeting times/places, then more power to them. The amount of "real" wireless internet accesses that is going on is miniscule.
The July issue of Wired has another article on the subject.
To be fair, M$'s first version was much worse about this than the latest ones; but I'm not going to give the new one a chance to carve faint swirly patterns like the older one did.
All of this has contributed to the convenience-store-as-shipping-depot model that has been born. The rationale is that if the (UPS) guy stops at 7/11 every day to make pick-ups, he can also make deliveries on the same paycheck. This is rapidly becoming a common distribution method in Japan and the convenience stores are turning into gauche versions of Mailboxes Etc.
Now, referring to the original subject, the recall notice on Sony's page was very amusing. They actually have the audacity to state "because some overseas disks that shouldn't be playable are playable, we want to exchange your disk for free" (extremely rough translation -- the link is here if someone else wants to take a shot at it).
Kent
But for a huge wow-factor, check out this mini-tower computer. I nearly fell over when I saw this a couple of weeks ago.
In case you're wondering, the three slots on the front panel are for slot-in DVD, 3.5", and MD. As far as I could tell from the demo model, the MD cannot be used for digital data recording from the computer (only audio); but it's still a pretty cool piece of work.
I don't think the issue is about handing out books, CD's, or any other medium.
But, let's say the book's print is too small for me to read -- would I become a criminal if
I enlarged every page for my OWN use?
Or, what if I want to read one chapter a day of a huge hard-cover book while riding the train
to work. Twenty sheets of paper are much easier to deal with than 800 pages of bound material.
Compare and contrast that to the most common reasons for creating MP3 versions of songs.