That is what they say, but it does not explain why dvds of movies made in the seventies, say Cheech and Chong go to Mexico, are released with region encoding. That thing went through the theatres 30 years ago, yet they still region encode them.
The fundamental reason is to enable price differentiation, "charging what the market will bear". They can charge more in europe so they do so, and want to stop US content getting in.
They have to charge less in Asia, so they charge less there, and want to use region encoding to stop asian content getting into the US.
If you go to the dvd forum and download the compliance specs for manufactuers (I forget the url, but rememeber that I had to look at some form's source to bypass the registration process and go to the redirect), you will see it is full of stuff about region encoding. They even have some formal review committee to deal with reported encoding hacks, some board of peers who enforce the region rules. They care seriously about maximising profit against all odds.
But lets be fair: you can often get DVDs for less than the sound tracks to go with them, so in rip-off terms, the MPAA arent *quite* as bad as the RIAA. Though I hear that pricing is being done to undermine the near-monopolies of Blockbuster and Hollywood in the rental industry, who have too much control of the aftermarket for the movie industry's liking.
what about all those MUD bots? There was lots of research in that area, and one good take-in of some idiot who thought the bot had become his girlfriend.
Why attack DNS when DHCP is there for anyone else to play with.
I wonder what would happen if I set my home cable modem based server to act as a DHCP server to other systems on the shared cable segment, re-issuing their existing IP addresses and telling them to talk to me for DNS.
my response to the DOJ findings was that I would be asking for how to write a completely new subsystem, so we could do a unix subsys that worked, the way the posix one didnt (it was crippled; no socket support). The posix subsys was only ever there so customers could check off 'Posix support' in their criteria.
um, actually the initial fees being asked for were quite reasonable, some flat rate and then do what you want with it -probably the kind of deal that sony has.
but then this $1 per port thing came out, and that totally cripped rollout of 1394. $2-$3 per PC for the external ports? another $10 if the internal HD, CD, DVD and floppy interconnects added firewire? Forget it.
So yes, economics did work: apple's demands resulted in alternate technology. It's a shame, I like firewire and think it should be on everything, but no, we have to worry about usb2 driver support instead.
>You are quite paranoid.
Of course: it is a key requriement for a PC business where people like Intel and MS are your strategic partners:) Doesnt mean I dont recognise attempts to put pcs at a disadvantage w.r.t Macintosh boxes.
didnt know that, but I do know that there is some protocol for HDD over 1394, what is is , SBP-2 or something, and I assume that it has its own reliabliloity.
compared to ATA, 1304 would have been good. and if we had had it in everything, from printer to monitor to disk, then the user experience would be a lot better. plus the wiring harness inside a PC is messy and adds cost.
um, when apple suddenly demanded $1 per port they pretty much kick started USB2.0 and serial ATA and pretty much killed the notion of using 1394 as the HDD interconnect inside a PC. I was working in the PC biz at the time, I remember these things. I also remember the belief that this was a Steve jobs deal to hurt PCs compared to macs. well, he hurt us users.
How well does subversions WebDAV API work with arbitrary webdav clients? I want to have things like framemaker connect into the system as well as classic IDEs
I've found that the polis respond reasonably quickly to a 'I think there's some joyriders a stolen car' call in bristol, which can apply to anyone driving a cavalier or similar vehicle manically. They just dont care about the 'some incompetent pensioner opened the door of their renault clio into me', indeed, they dont even want to deal with the paperwork when you go to the station. Here in the US (where I currently am), they even care about the minor things, apprehending the people who threw stuff at me while cycling. but they dont care about people driving with firearms in their vehicle, something that would definately get a reaction in the UK. In the Seattle area they think doing 73mph on a freeway is something to get excited about, which may explain the popularity of cruiser bikes over sport bikes.
In the UK the govt are trialling elapsed distance speed traps...and I think they changed the law a while back to make such traps legal. I dont know if you need good OCR, just pattern matching to detect the speeding, then human intervention to get the#. Youd need to sustain the wheelie for some distance to get out of that, or make sure your average speed is below the limit, even if you go to 130+ on occasions.
ok, point about phones being switched off on a motorbike taken. I have my switched on cycling as its easier to call the polis when somebody endangers my life in a way think they care about.
cell coverage can be large; many tens of miles in the obscure areas where demand is low, and shrink them down when demand is high (cities). 3G cells are reall y small BTW. With an octagonal antenna array you can pinpoint a phone to an octet of a cell...I dont know if the systems bother to record the octet.
The proposal to retain all this data was that old NCIS document that snuck out onto the net, probably via ISPs, for some national data warehouse, keeping stuff on spinning media for seven years. See
statewatch.
BTW I dont think they'd bother to catch this particular motorbike; more insidious is they can use phone velocity to work out your speed down, say, the M5 over an afternoon. Like how in belgium pre-schengen they used to tell you off at the border if you had crossed the country in less time than was legal.
you can assume that pretty much everyone in the UK over the age has a cellphone switched on at all times, though maybe motorbiking is the exception.
The record keeping proposal that the UK government wants is for seven years worth of 'traffic data', where traffic data includes where you are when you made or received a call, even an unsuccessful one.
I dont know if the companies log the track of cellphones while they are on, which is something they can do by recording their transition from cell to cell and the times, and inferring things. So you may not get the A14, but you could say 'was going between these cells above a cetrtain speed'.
Maybe the copper will just get in touch with the cellphone companies and get a list of all handsets recorded as going down the A14 at at an outrageous speed, then cross-corellate that with motorbike registrations...
As someone who has driven in boston and london, I have some news for boston residents: really, it isnt that bad. The other drivers are a lot more friendly and forgiving (its all relative), and will give way rather than risk collisions with their vehicles. Now Paris, that city scares me. And it did have all its main streets reworked after the french revolution.
However, I dont think Boston is that optimised for cars, and the big dig isnt going to solve all the problems. Take the most car-optimised areas of the US -say LA and the bay area, and look what you get: more sprawl, same commute time as ever.
yes if you go for a real wireless cloud. in high density areas you could jut route among peers to a shared T1 access points, maybe at amenable universities.
So in a way, universal WLANS do threaten the cable companies, not just with bandwidth theft but with rendering the need for cable obsolete. Same for 3G cellular telcos.
I've done things with the I2C bus that most Pcs and laptops have around; you can put simple displays on that bus and its easy to integrate. Well, easy on a laptop because I2C comes out at the dock and the battery; desktops need to have an access port or something.
I just hope your ops department are more competent than mine, because I have been accidentally deleted from a domain. And no, you can never quite come back as the same person.
Come across that too. But I think they do that to make sure the person getting on the plane is the same person who checked in, because when you go to board they have a screen that pops up your photo when you hand them your ticket.
No, I dont know what happens to the photographs after the flight.
Well, I'd rate the xbox as more hackable than PS2, not because it comes from MS, but because it has a hard disk, which means once it is owned, it can stay owned. PS2 has memory sticks though right?
I'd defend ant as it does a good job of compensating for deficiences in the compilers. Depends does a lot, and is even better in ant1.5. No, we dont work with compilers yet, because there is no 'standard format' to work with; give us an XML one in jikes and javac and we will play.
The issue with compiling more files than you ask for? That's javac or jikes for you; they pull in things they need, whether you ask for them or not.
Finally, you need to play with cruise control or ant hill. Have something on the net do clean builds and tests for you instead of you doing it yourself.
well, like "depends" does your dependency checking, and it is better in ant1.5. All we cant hack are static final imports, not until someone parses the java source builds more dependency info.
but get this. "Ant clean deploy" works because it is so fast, esp. with jikes, that it doesnt matter. Only the tests take time, and you were going to run those anyway, right
well, as someone who deals with 'I cant even read the error messages before filing reports on bugzilla' requests, I will observe that some people do need an ant book.
Ant:tdg is an introductory book, however, which combines an intro to using ant and writing tasks with a quick reference guide.
Our own forthcoming epic on ant dev,
Java development with ant
will show you how to do things in Ant you aint done yet, unless you cross-test Java web services in C#, build JNI libraries with the task, or use XDoclet for all your metadata needs. So I say wait a few weeks before shopping for ant books. Ant 1.5 will have shipped by then too, which will be good.
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I believe you are completely correct -differential pricing is "the explanation that dare not speak its name", when it comes to region encoding.
The companies just cite piracy as an excuse, when legal grey-markets are the real threat to their margins.
Whatever happened to that EU investigation on region encoding?
That is what they say, but it does not explain why dvds of movies made in the seventies, say Cheech and Chong go to Mexico, are released with region encoding. That thing went through the theatres 30 years ago, yet they still region encode them.
The fundamental reason is to enable price differentiation, "charging what the market will bear". They can charge more in europe so they do so, and want to stop US content getting in.
They have to charge less in Asia, so they charge less there, and want to use region encoding to stop asian content getting into the US.
If you go to the dvd forum and download the compliance specs for manufactuers (I forget the url, but rememeber that I had to look at some form's source to bypass the registration process and go to the redirect), you will see it is full of stuff about region encoding. They even have some formal review committee to deal with reported encoding hacks, some board of peers who enforce the region rules. They care seriously about maximising profit against all odds.
But lets be fair: you can often get DVDs for less than the sound tracks to go with them, so in rip-off terms, the MPAA arent *quite* as bad as the RIAA. Though I hear that pricing is being done to undermine the near-monopolies of Blockbuster and Hollywood in the rental industry, who have too much control of the aftermarket for the movie industry's liking.
what about all those MUD bots? There was lots of research in that area, and one good take-in of some idiot who thought the bot had become his girlfriend.
Do you have to take over a DNS server?
Why attack DNS when DHCP is there for anyone else to play with.
I wonder what would happen if I set my home cable modem based server to act as a DHCP server to other systems on the shared cable segment, re-issuing their existing IP addresses and telling them to talk to me for DNS.
my response to the DOJ findings was that I would be asking for how to write a completely new subsystem, so we could do a unix subsys that worked, the way the posix one didnt (it was crippled; no socket support). The posix subsys was only ever there so customers could check off 'Posix support' in their criteria.
um, actually the initial fees being asked for were quite reasonable, some flat rate and then do what you want with it -probably the kind of deal that sony has.
:) Doesnt mean I dont recognise attempts to put pcs at a disadvantage w.r.t Macintosh boxes.
but then this $1 per port thing came out, and that totally cripped rollout of 1394. $2-$3 per PC for the external ports? another $10 if the internal HD, CD, DVD and floppy interconnects added firewire? Forget it.
So yes, economics did work: apple's demands resulted in alternate technology. It's a shame, I like firewire and think it should be on everything, but no, we have to worry about usb2 driver support instead.
>You are quite paranoid.
Of course: it is a key requriement for a PC business where people like Intel and MS are your strategic partners
didnt know that, but I do know that there is some protocol for HDD over 1394, what is is , SBP-2 or something, and I assume that it has its own reliabliloity.
compared to ATA, 1304 would have been good. and if we had had it in everything, from printer to monitor to disk, then the user experience would be a lot better. plus the wiring harness inside a PC is messy and adds cost.
um, when apple suddenly demanded $1 per port they pretty much kick started USB2.0 and serial ATA and pretty much killed the notion of using 1394 as the HDD interconnect inside a PC. I was working in the PC biz at the time, I remember these things. I also remember the belief that this was a Steve jobs deal to hurt PCs compared to macs. well, he hurt us users.
How well does subversions WebDAV API work with arbitrary webdav clients? I want to have things like framemaker connect into the system as well as classic IDEs
I've found that the polis respond reasonably quickly to a 'I think there's some joyriders a stolen car' call in bristol, which can apply to anyone driving a cavalier or similar vehicle manically. They just dont care about the 'some incompetent pensioner opened the door of their renault clio into me', indeed, they dont even want to deal with the paperwork when you go to the station. Here in the US (where I currently am), they even care about the minor things, apprehending the people who threw stuff at me while cycling. but they dont care about people driving with firearms in their vehicle, something that would definately get a reaction in the UK. In the Seattle area they think doing 73mph on a freeway is something to get excited about, which may explain the popularity of cruiser bikes over sport bikes.
In the UK the govt are trialling elapsed distance speed traps...and I think they changed the law a while back to make such traps legal. I dont know if you need good OCR, just pattern matching to detect the speeding, then human intervention to get the#. Youd need to sustain the wheelie for some distance to get out of that, or make sure your average speed is below the limit, even if you go to 130+ on occasions.
cell coverage can be large; many tens of miles in the obscure areas where demand is low, and shrink them down when demand is high (cities). 3G cells are reall y small BTW. With an octagonal antenna array you can pinpoint a phone to an octet of a cell...I dont know if the systems bother to record the octet.
The proposal to retain all this data was that old NCIS document that snuck out onto the net, probably via ISPs, for some national data warehouse, keeping stuff on spinning media for seven years. See statewatch.
BTW I dont think they'd bother to catch this particular motorbike; more insidious is they can use phone velocity to work out your speed down, say, the M5 over an afternoon. Like how in belgium pre-schengen they used to tell you off at the border if you had crossed the country in less time than was legal.
you can assume that pretty much everyone in the UK over the age has a cellphone switched on at all times, though maybe motorbiking is the exception.
The record keeping proposal that the UK government wants is for seven years worth of 'traffic data', where traffic data includes where you are when you made or received a call, even an unsuccessful one.
I dont know if the companies log the track of cellphones while they are on, which is something they can do by recording their transition from cell to cell and the times, and inferring things. So you may not get the A14, but you could say 'was going between these cells above a cetrtain speed'.
Maybe the copper will just get in touch with the cellphone companies and get a list of all handsets recorded as going down the A14 at at an outrageous speed, then cross-corellate that with motorbike registrations...
As someone who has driven in boston and london, I have some news for boston residents: really, it isnt that bad. The other drivers are a lot more friendly and forgiving (its all relative), and will give way rather than risk collisions with their vehicles. Now Paris, that city scares me. And it did have all its main streets reworked after the french revolution.
However, I dont think Boston is that optimised for cars, and the big dig isnt going to solve all the problems. Take the most car-optimised areas of the US -say LA and the bay area, and look what you get: more sprawl, same commute time as ever.
ask them about their multicast IP support too. The mbone is all about shared bandwidth, yet it isnt always accessible
yes if you go for a real wireless cloud. in high density areas you could jut route among peers to a shared T1 access points, maybe at amenable universities.
So in a way, universal WLANS do threaten the cable companies, not just with bandwidth theft but with rendering the need for cable obsolete. Same for 3G cellular telcos.
they still have that funny ebcdic stuff, and they make sure that apache code supports it.
yeah, it is blandness exemplified.
Maybe the tech-savvy customer isnt buying it because they have listened to it over Kazaa or Internet radio, and realised that it is simply NO GOOD.
But it is just to easy to blame the net for mediocrity. Why doesnt he blame the radio too, for letting people recognise its blandness.
I've done things with the I2C bus that most Pcs and laptops have around; you can put simple displays on that bus and its easy to integrate. Well, easy on a laptop because I2C comes out at the dock and the battery; desktops need to have an access port or something.
That is really cool.
I just hope your ops department are more competent than mine, because I have been accidentally deleted from a domain. And no, you can never quite come back as the same person.
Come across that too. But I think they do that to make sure the person getting on the plane is the same person who checked in, because when you go to board they have a screen that pops up your photo when you hand them your ticket.
No, I dont know what happens to the photographs after the flight.
Well, I'd rate the xbox as more hackable than PS2, not because it comes from MS, but because it has a hard disk, which means once it is owned, it can stay owned. PS2 has memory sticks though right?
I'd defend ant as it does a good job of compensating for deficiences in the compilers. Depends does a lot, and is even better in ant1.5. No, we dont work with compilers yet, because there is no 'standard format' to work with; give us an XML one in jikes and javac and we will play.
:)
The issue with compiling more files than you ask for? That's javac or jikes for you; they pull in things they need, whether you ask for them or not.
Finally, you need to play with cruise control or ant hill. Have something on the net do clean builds and tests for you instead of you doing it yourself.
-steve
Yes I do work on ant
but get this. "Ant clean deploy" works because it is so fast, esp. with jikes, that it doesnt matter. Only the tests take time, and you were going to run those anyway, right
stated biaS: Ant committer; co-author of
Java Development with Ant, the forthcoming competitor.
Ant:tdg is an introductory book, however, which combines an intro to using ant and writing tasks with a quick reference guide.
Our own forthcoming epic on ant dev, Java development with ant will show you how to do things in Ant you aint done yet, unless you cross-test Java web services in C#, build JNI libraries with the task, or use XDoclet for all your metadata needs. So I say wait a few weeks before shopping for ant books. Ant 1.5 will have shipped by then too, which will be good.