Not only do CD companies charge Europeans twice the price, as compared to the US, now they are happy to sell a product that is useless. In the long run BMG will run into one of the following scenarios:
More CDs being returned and piracy going up
Imports of CDs from the US goes up
CD players are manufactured to deal with the issue, so they don't appear crippled
Someone makes money with software which works around the problem
They boost the sales of marker companies - just for the record I bought a copy protected CD at a music concert, so I couldn't take it back. Marking out the outside track really works!
Is it illegal to flash a DVD-ROM with a new firmware which has region restriction disabled? No.
Is it illegal for Apple to do so? No.
Why doesn't Apple do so... ?
Maybe becuase it is too inconveinient, and thus expensive, to flash them. The drives are bought from the manufactures already are RPCII.
Apple's stance is probably about not having to do more than it has to. On the one hand they don't want to move to displease the consumers and the other they don't want to move to displease the media industry. Therefore they do nothing and they appear neutral.
I believe that there is also a general attitude that it is a waste of money and it alienates the customers. It is a waste of money because thatm the millions of dollars that a company spends adding DRM features is overcome by people, working for free, wanting their rights back. It alienates the consumers because they are essentially losing one of killer features and they know that it wasn't with their best interests in mind.
The money is better spent making a better product and making ones that people want to buy. Maybe this is something the film industry should try to understand?
Because of the past and current history of Microsoft everyone has knee-jerk reaction to condone anything they do. I am not a big MS fan myself, but sometimes you just have to wait and see. Just because an enitity can be perceived as being bad, it doesn't stop them from doing things that are out of character.
Two good things that have come out from MS are SOAP (XML over RPC) and RTF.
A PDF style document in XML is a good thing as in theory it makes a more understandable document format than the current PDF format. If it supports SVG, then it will be an good bonus.
The ultimate fear is that Microsoft will make a brilliant alternative to PDF, but you will have to pay for the specs, though in theory this shouldn't be too much of an issue as the XSL should be published to verify the integrity of XDoc documents. Lacking XSL or specs you could reverse engineer the format, though avoid doing this in the USA, because of the DMCA. Though until XDoc is released all this is all speculative FUD.
PDF has the lead, though how much XDoc makes up for the late start is yet to be seen. BTW there is nothing stopping Adobe from releasing their PDF printer driver for free.
Amongst these 200000 bugs are feature requests, duplicates, bugs that aren't really bugs and platform specific issues. What percentage this is of the whole I am not sure, but it would certainly go to reducing the total number.
What would be of interest is how this tallies to any other product where the general public could submit straight to the bug database, rather than going through front-line, second-line and then third-line support.
Add to this that most Europeans are pro DVD-modding simply to be able to play the DVDs they bought - heck I know of a number of shops where its part of the sales pitch. In certain case from the US where they cost half the price.
Part of rge problem with the current system is that it is difficult to get hold of music from artists who aren't known or aren't popular in your country. It is also sometime because the record company simply has no distribution mechenasim for country x. This applies to any country. Thanks to the internet you can often find an online shop in the country where the group is located and order it from there. As mentioned by other people, there do exist small record stores who will sometimes do the leg work for you. Unfortunately most of us tend to visit 'this is what is cool' style record stores.
Here are some good sources:
HMV Canada - their selection of music beats Amazon.com hands down. Doing a search reveals that they sell "Funker Vogt"
Amazon Germany - great source for music tailored to the german market. The only catch is that you need to understand German (quite normal really;)
Amazon UK - great source for music tailored to the german market.
Although the concept of a headless CD/DVD player is new, Asia already has CD/VCD players of similar design. I recently visited China and you could buy for around $50 a portable player that does both CD and VCD, with an video/audio out cable. The other cool feature is that it could generate both NTSC and PAL signals, and you can also use regular rechargable batteries that the unit can recharge. Sure it was a player that was made by a company that is not known here in N. America, but you would have to pay at least $200 to but anything which can do this, and then you you would probably get the PAL signal feature disabled and having to use properity rechargable batteries.
If a webcaster is based outside of the USA and includes a limitation clause that prohibits USA listeners from tuning in, would it be exempt from paying these licenses?
Looking for details on the patent I got the page with the abstract. No one wonder these things get through. Its enough to let anyone want to skip over it and just patent the damn thing.
Yep, SearchKings search algorithm doesn't work too well either. I put in the name of the company I work for (kept anonymous), and it didn't appear top. Given that the name of the company is two words I am suprised that it came up with references to the company, before it even listed the companies web site? Google shows the company's web site first. Hmm, try searching both sites for 'slashdot' for example.
Since this patent is about method of detection, surely we could digitize the data and then perform a simple diff on the genes? 'diff' being a few decades old unix tool is definetly too old for a patent and genes can not be patented (only their method of detection), therefore this method of detection would surely be patent free?
If I am missing something in my utopic vision, could someone please point it out to me?
If you look at the GSM coverage map of China you will see that it has a large coverage for country so large. From what I undestand the reason for this, which is along the lines of the last mile, is that China did not have any cabled phone network covering that area to start with. Since it was going to cost them as much to wire such a large area and that mobile phones were growing in popularity they decided to go the wireless approach.
The reason I bring the story up, is because once you are in a rural area it becomes increasingly more expensive to connect to homes. The problem is that you get less inhabitants per length of telephone cable, thus making it extremely more expensive short and long term. The long term cost is the inspection of such a coverage of phone lines. The wireless approach allows a much larger area to be covered, and it ends up being cheaper as there is there are less inspection points. It also provides the advantage that the phone company also gets money from visitors to the area and not just the inhabitants. Additionaly, for a farmer, this is great as it allows him/her to phone home when they are somewhere in the middle of their land. This sort of solution could be easily applied to other countries with the last 100 miles problem, not just the last mile.
The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?
I believe part of the whole problem is dependence on another nation for manned space missions. Europe, Russia and Japan all have solutions for sending satellites into orbit (and some are even better than the current American offerings), but none of them has anything that allows them to send people to space to service these satellites, for this the all depend on NASA. For this reason their manned missions depend on the politics of the USA. The way round this issue is to create their own shuttle. In doing so their aim is not necessarily to do anything better than the space shuttle, but to make something that does the job just as well.
Long term the other space launch capable countries probably are researching alternatives. The only thing is research takes time and money. Basing your immediate solution on something that is known to work is the best alternative. While very similar the solution is likely to have innovations, that will make a difference. A good analogy are automobiles, since they all look more or less the same, but each have varying features based on what the manufacture feels is important. It does the job, so why change the approach?
You could use a PPC chip, but that would mean that you would have to buy a stove to do the cooking. Intel is ahead of the game having converged computing with the kitchen.
The other problem is that neither Windows, nor MacOS X, support Ogg Vorbis standard. Currently you have to know where to look to download the codec. Until Ogg Vorbis is supported native by either Windows Media Player or Quicktime, we aren't going to see portable media players supporting this format. After all, what's the point of including support for a media format that the average person can't encode to in the first place. Once the situation changes on the OS side, then we are likely to see the situation change on player side. Sure these companies may just prove me wrong, but that doesn't bother me:)
The first iteration of these chips, if Apple buys from IBM, are likely to be desktop only. Only once Apple is content with the power consumption and heat immition will we see these in portables. Also, Apple might also want to sell a line of towers before they start seling portables with these.
I know this doesn't answer the question, but there isn't really much in the way of specs at the moment.
If you take the DVD option, then you could use this a media center and plug it into your Hi-Fi and TV.
The other solution is a small discrete home network server. Though, for this sort of use a less powerful CPU would do the job and would also help save energy for an always-on device. Though if it has energy saving capbilities, you could send a wake on LAN signal when you need to access data on it.
I would love to see one of these with a translucent case. That way I could spray paint it to the colour of my liking - the finish always looks better if you spray the inside of transparent plastic.
The difference between 4-pin and 6-pin, is that 6-pin Firewire includes two lines for power. This is cool if you want to connect a device in that does not have its own power supply. For example, if you have an iPod it will charge the device.
As for the other ports: Until someone comes up with a USB terminal, the serial port is useful. As for the PS2 and the parallel ports I couldn't agree more. Most new mice these days are USB with a PS2 adaptor and most printers are either ethernet or USB based. As for keyboards, I really don't understand why nobody can't sell a USB keyboard with a PS2 adaptor, as they do with mice.?
The PCMCIA slot would probably take a wireless card and you can buy USB based Bluetooth adaptors, such as the this one from D-Link. Even better, if you have a USB keyboard such as the one used on Macs, you can plug the adapator straight into the keyboard.
Looks like we just found a use for the technology that alien abducties always told us about. We didn't listen and just assumed that they were nutters, now they were right the whole time.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it illegal for Apple to do so? No.
Why doesn't Apple do so... ?
Maybe becuase it is too inconveinient, and thus expensive, to flash them. The drives are bought from the manufactures already are RPCII.
Apple's stance is probably about not having to do more than it has to. On the one hand they don't want to move to displease the consumers and the other they don't want to move to displease the media industry. Therefore they do nothing and they appear neutral.
I believe that there is also a general attitude that it is a waste of money and it alienates the customers. It is a waste of money because thatm the millions of dollars that a company spends adding DRM features is overcome by people, working for free, wanting their rights back. It alienates the consumers because they are essentially losing one of killer features and they know that it wasn't with their best interests in mind.
The money is better spent making a better product and making ones that people want to buy. Maybe this is something the film industry should try to understand?
Because of the past and current history of Microsoft everyone has knee-jerk reaction to condone anything they do. I am not a big MS fan myself, but sometimes you just have to wait and see. Just because an enitity can be perceived as being bad, it doesn't stop them from doing things that are out of character.
Two good things that have come out from MS are SOAP (XML over RPC) and RTF.
A PDF style document in XML is a good thing as in theory it makes a more understandable document format than the current PDF format. If it supports SVG, then it will be an good bonus.
The ultimate fear is that Microsoft will make a brilliant alternative to PDF, but you will have to pay for the specs, though in theory this shouldn't be too much of an issue as the XSL should be published to verify the integrity of XDoc documents. Lacking XSL or specs you could reverse engineer the format, though avoid doing this in the USA, because of the DMCA. Though until XDoc is released all this is all speculative FUD.
PDF has the lead, though how much XDoc makes up for the late start is yet to be seen. BTW there is nothing stopping Adobe from releasing their PDF printer driver for free.
Amongst these 200000 bugs are feature requests, duplicates, bugs that aren't really bugs and platform specific issues. What percentage this is of the whole I am not sure, but it would certainly go to reducing the total number.
What would be of interest is how this tallies to any other product where the general public could submit straight to the bug database, rather than going through front-line, second-line and then third-line support.
Since all EULAs pretty much has the same goal in mind, here is a simpler version:
In purchasing, pirating or using this product you have lost all your rights. All your bases belong to us.
Add to this that most Europeans are pro DVD-modding simply to be able to play the DVDs they bought - heck I know of a number of shops where its part of the sales pitch. In certain case from the US where they cost half the price.
In related news Intel has now partnered with a major US energy company to use Pentium 4s in place of oil as a heat source.
- HMV Canada - their selection of music beats Amazon.com hands down. Doing a search reveals that they sell "Funker Vogt"
- Amazon Germany - great source for music tailored to the german market. The only catch is that you need to understand German (quite normal really
;)
- Amazon UK - great source for music tailored to the german market.
- HMV UK
- HMV Germany
- FNAC - online version of the French media store
There are others, but these are the ones that I know of. BTW The Funker Vogt web site is here: Funker Vogt website.BTW If you want to know what is hot in th UK, then BBC1 Radio 1 is a good site, and IMO is info-marketing ratio is 9:1, which is nice to see.
And here is Google's entrance to the NYT article
Although the concept of a headless CD/DVD player is new, Asia already has CD/VCD players of similar design. I recently visited China and you could buy for around $50 a portable player that does both CD and VCD, with an video/audio out cable. The other cool feature is that it could generate both NTSC and PAL signals, and you can also use regular rechargable batteries that the unit can recharge. Sure it was a player that was made by a company that is not known here in N. America, but you would have to pay at least $200 to but anything which can do this, and then you you would probably get the PAL signal feature disabled and having to use properity rechargable batteries.
If a webcaster is based outside of the USA and includes a limitation clause that prohibits USA listeners from tuning in, would it be exempt from paying these licenses?
Looking for details on the patent I got the page with the abstract. No one wonder these things get through. Its enough to let anyone want to skip over it and just patent the damn thing.
Yep, SearchKings search algorithm doesn't work too well either. I put in the name of the company I work for (kept anonymous), and it didn't appear top. Given that the name of the company is two words I am suprised that it came up with references to the company, before it even listed the companies web site? Google shows the company's web site first. Hmm, try searching both sites for 'slashdot' for example.
Since this patent is about method of detection, surely we could digitize the data and then perform a simple diff on the genes? 'diff' being a few decades old unix tool is definetly too old for a patent and genes can not be patented (only their method of detection), therefore this method of detection would surely be patent free?
If I am missing something in my utopic vision, could someone please point it out to me?
If you look at the GSM coverage map of China you will see that it has a large coverage for country so large. From what I undestand the reason for this, which is along the lines of the last mile, is that China did not have any cabled phone network covering that area to start with. Since it was going to cost them as much to wire such a large area and that mobile phones were growing in popularity they decided to go the wireless approach.
The reason I bring the story up, is because once you are in a rural area it becomes increasingly more expensive to connect to homes. The problem is that you get less inhabitants per length of telephone cable, thus making it extremely more expensive short and long term. The long term cost is the inspection of such a coverage of phone lines. The wireless approach allows a much larger area to be covered, and it ends up being cheaper as there is there are less inspection points. It also provides the advantage that the phone company also gets money from visitors to the area and not just the inhabitants. Additionaly, for a farmer, this is great as it allows him/her to phone home when they are somewhere in the middle of their land. This sort of solution could be easily applied to other countries with the last 100 miles problem, not just the last mile.
The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?
I believe part of the whole problem is dependence on another nation for manned space missions. Europe, Russia and Japan all have solutions for sending satellites into orbit (and some are even better than the current American offerings), but none of them has anything that allows them to send people to space to service these satellites, for this the all depend on NASA. For this reason their manned missions depend on the politics of the USA. The way round this issue is to create their own shuttle. In doing so their aim is not necessarily to do anything better than the space shuttle, but to make something that does the job just as well.
Long term the other space launch capable countries probably are researching alternatives. The only thing is research takes time and money. Basing your immediate solution on something that is known to work is the best alternative. While very similar the solution is likely to have innovations, that will make a difference. A good analogy are automobiles, since they all look more or less the same, but each have varying features based on what the manufacture feels is important. It does the job, so why change the approach?
I take it that this doesn't quite work if two or more people are looking at the screen?
You could use a PPC chip, but that would mean that you would have to buy a stove to do the cooking. Intel is ahead of the game having converged computing with the kitchen.
The other problem is that neither Windows, nor MacOS X, support Ogg Vorbis standard. Currently you have to know where to look to download the codec. Until Ogg Vorbis is supported native by either Windows Media Player or Quicktime, we aren't going to see portable media players supporting this format. After all, what's the point of including support for a media format that the average person can't encode to in the first place. Once the situation changes on the OS side, then we are likely to see the situation change on player side. Sure these companies may just prove me wrong, but that doesn't bother me :)
The first iteration of these chips, if Apple buys from IBM, are likely to be desktop only. Only once Apple is content with the power consumption and heat immition will we see these in portables. Also, Apple might also want to sell a line of towers before they start seling portables with these.
I know this doesn't answer the question, but there isn't really much in the way of specs at the moment.
Several reasons:
If you take the DVD option, then you could use this a media center and plug it into your Hi-Fi and TV.
The other solution is a small discrete home network server. Though, for this sort of use a less powerful CPU would do the job and would also help save energy for an always-on device. Though if it has energy saving capbilities, you could send a wake on LAN signal when you need to access data on it.
I would love to see one of these with a translucent case. That way I could spray paint it to the colour of my liking - the finish always looks better if you spray the inside of transparent plastic.
The difference between 4-pin and 6-pin, is that 6-pin Firewire includes two lines for power. This is cool if you want to connect a device in that does not have its own power supply. For example, if you have an iPod it will charge the device.
As for the other ports: Until someone comes up with a USB terminal, the serial port is useful. As for the PS2 and the parallel ports I couldn't agree more. Most new mice these days are USB with a PS2 adaptor and most printers are either ethernet or USB based. As for keyboards, I really don't understand why nobody can't sell a USB keyboard with a PS2 adaptor, as they do with mice.?
The PCMCIA slot would probably take a wireless card and you can buy USB based Bluetooth adaptors, such as the this one from D-Link. Even better, if you have a USB keyboard such as the one used on Macs, you can plug the adapator straight into the keyboard.
Looks like we just found a use for the technology that alien abducties always told us about. We didn't listen and just assumed that they were nutters, now they were right the whole time.