Take me as an example, i want anime, but havent got a single one of evangelion dvd's because they are imported region 1 dvd's, ive only got a cheap GL dvdrom that says it can only be changed its region up to 5 times (which means only 4 more).
How old? I have an old (rpc-1) pioneer DVD drive which can't play CD-ROMs to save its' life anymoire, but DVDs aren't a problem for it. Plus, the regions not locked in hardware.. So it's just a software hack that is needed to change the region. That's why I've kept the drive.
so i have not got any imported stuff because i wont buy another dvdrom just to have 2 regions AND i am not rich (as in to buy 5 drives) not to say they wont fit in my pc.
If it came to it, I'd happily buy two drives to be able to play region 4 and region 1 DVDs. However, these days Australia seems to get the new releases on DVD pretty soon after they've left the theatre. There's hardly any reason to import region-1 disks anymore unless you want anime .
I wanted Harry potter, and os i bought it region 4, what happened? the version i got is in 3/4 format, when i expected to get a wide screen (i didnt realize that it was written invery small leters at the back of te cage at the bottom).
That's unusual... I haven't come across many DVDs that aren't released in wide-screen format. Usually the conversion to 3/4 format is accomplished through choosing the required function on your DVD player.
Perhaps, but don't you think the average hick (no offense, I shop at Walmart too) that walks into Walmart and see's a new 1GHz computer for $399 will buy now and worry about the OS later *wink wink*. Regardless of their target audience, I think they'll find their core customer base is just as interested in these machines.
No, because all it will take is an advertising campaign "educating" consumers against the "evils" of buying a PC without windows, and the (mostly ignorant) consumers will be forever scared away from buying a PC without the OS - even if they buy the OS seperately (which is probably better for Microsoft from a profit point-of-view anyway...).
Companies do whatever they can get away with. Consumers (mostly ignorant and/or lazy) allow companies to get away with anything. Government lets "market forces" (read : companies screwing consumers) sort things out.
And so the cycle continues...and most consumers are either too ignorant or lazy to do anything about it:-( Until consumers start growing some teeth, things will not change.
Sounds like a good idea. There's a group over here in Australia that are looking at doing the same thing as these guys. They're called the "commpunity broadband project"...It's not so much a commercial venture as a group of knowledgeable members of the broadband community (read : users) whom are trying to get together a more affordable broadband solution for Australians.
Still, these vista guys seem somewhat further advanced in their endeavor - they've actually launched!
Hell, I'm a geek too and prefer things that can give me more flexibility, but that's not the case with most people. Proof in this comes from a friend who works at Tower Records. People bitch about the price of CDs, she TELLS them there's a record store down the street that sells the SAME CDs cheaper, and they STILL buy at Tower. Go FIGURE. (ok, in this case, it is stupidity, but most people just don't know better.)
I beg to differ. It's most likely habbit more than anything else. If people usually buy from one store, they may bitch and complain about the store every now-and-again, but they'll still buy from it.
I can understand how the popularity of pinball dropped in favor of video arcade games, but it is unfortunate that the manufacturers are no longer producing spare parts. I guess there just isn't any profit in it.
I find that hard to believe... With such a short supply, I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be a good business opportunity for an internet / mail-order company, Even if the parts had to be made by hand (if they couldn't be sourced from scrapped machines)....
Quoted directly from the article on Yahoo (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020120/wr/colum n_livewire_dc.html) :
"Only one firm, privately-held Stern Pinball (http://www.sternpinball.com/), is still making pinball machines. The Melrose Park, Ill.-based company was spun off from gaming giant Sega Enterprises Ltd (7964.T) when the company left the pinball industry in the late 1990s."
so, the article DOES mention Stern pinball... Though whether it was edited later to add the fact or not, I don't know...
Please mod parent up. It's absolutely true what he said, and if you had him for your communications and IT minister you'd be pulling your hair out in frustration too. The guy is too thick to hold office, and we need a new communications & IT minister pronto.
It's easy enough to ignore it when it's not happening in your country, but you'll think differently when it comes to your doorstep.
It is not understanding PC users that brings Gates to the top. It is the fact that he uses monopolistic powers and bully tactics to force people and competitors to use his sytems. Maybe Steve Jobs just isn't that mean.
Well actually, I believe that gates ISN'T that mean either. I think he is/was generally a nice-guy. IMHO Ballmer(sp?) is the arsehole (There's gotta be a good reason why so many Microsoft execs etc jumped ship when Balmer(sp?) took the reigns - and that's most likely it).
Jobs is incredibly eccentric. It's a good thing:-) But it's not as if he's not mean, just that he's mean in a different way.
One would have to wonder how Apple (and Jobs) would act if MS's and Apple's market positions were reversed....
All that would do is make it a LOT more financially rewarding to hack, with a LOT more incentive to go sell your services. that upper 10% would include a lot of those who sell pirated DVDs / CDs. Do you think that, if they had the skills and the skills were a relative scarcity, they wouldn't sell their skills?
As much as some people like to think that piracy is a "shades of grey" issue where 90% eradication is good enough, it's really a black-and-white issue. You've either eradicated it or you haven't.
The only way to eradicate piracy is to make the content so cheap to access / purchase in the first place that it isn't worth the effort to pirate it.
Yeah you're right. Not long before you have teams of profesionally-employed hackers working behind-the-scenes to change court records (Not as if this doesn't already happen, it will just become a lot more obvious and enticing to those who would think of it.)...
If it can be hacked, it will be hacked. And if it's on the net, it can be hacked.
Also turns out that the price difference between the Duron and Athlon CPUs has increased since I last cared to look (which isn't often, I'd rather go with the Athlon anyway...) and duron is now about 130 dollars cheaper...
Just had a look at my favorite online computer gear store, and it seems that I'm wrong, there are a few well-priced Athlon mobo's out there...but I'd still rather go for a decent board that will set me back about 300 or so bucks...
The problem with Athlon-esque CPUs is that the motherboards are still rather expensive (at least over here in Oz), thus although AMD CPUs are cheaper to purchse, you end up spending more on the motherboard anyway and the whole price advantage that the Duron has over the Celeron is negated. The price difference between the Athlon and Duron, last time I checked, was so small that the Duron doesn't really compete.
For this fact alone, if I had a choice between building a Duron box or a Celeron box, I'd choose to build an Athlon box instead:-)
Yeah, but you didn't see what happened later on in the night outside the bar, where Duron called on his big pal SledgeHammer to dish out some "rough justice":-)
Re:It's not as easy as it sounds, dude
on
Future of Music Summit
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sounds like a business opportunity there...
A company that provides most of the services a record company often does, but has providing a service to artists as its' main purpose rather than furthering its' own agenda.
Or at least a register of companies willing to provide discount services to new talent.
I can see that there could very well be money in that, but then I guess that's pretty much what the indies do, right?
Slashdot Mirror
You could always move to Australia, where we get FarScape on free-to-air tv (channel 9)...
How old? I have an old (rpc-1) pioneer DVD drive which can't play CD-ROMs to save its' life anymoire, but DVDs aren't a problem for it. Plus, the regions not locked in hardware.. So it's just a software hack that is needed to change the region. That's why I've kept the drive.
If it came to it, I'd happily buy two drives to be able to play region 4 and region 1 DVDs. However, these days Australia seems to get the new releases on DVD pretty soon after they've left the theatre. There's hardly any reason to import region-1 disks anymore unless you want anime
.
That's unusual... I haven't come across many DVDs that aren't released in wide-screen format. Usually the conversion to 3/4 format is accomplished through choosing the required function on your DVD player.
Haha... gotta love the humour in that one..
tho personally, I'd like captions such as "Certified troll" for extreme low karma, and "should get a life" for high...
Add a bit of humour to the equation - I've noticed that many slashdotters have a habbit of taking themselves a little too seriously.
But then, I'm Australian....
Perhaps, but don't you think the average hick (no offense, I shop at Walmart too) that walks into Walmart and see's a new 1GHz computer for $399 will buy now and worry about the OS later *wink wink*. Regardless of their target audience, I think they'll find their core customer base is just as interested in these machines.
No, because all it will take is an advertising campaign "educating" consumers against the "evils" of buying a PC without windows, and the (mostly ignorant) consumers will be forever scared away from buying a PC without the OS - even if they buy the OS seperately (which is probably better for Microsoft from a profit point-of-view anyway...).
This is so screwy it's not funny...
:
:-(
Problem is this
Companies do whatever they can get away with.
Consumers (mostly ignorant and/or lazy) allow companies to get away with anything.
Government lets "market forces" (read : companies screwing consumers) sort things out.
And so the cycle continues...and most consumers are either too ignorant or lazy to do anything about it
Until consumers start growing some teeth, things will not change.
The analyst was right. I wouldn't dream of buying a pre-made PC from Wal-mart, even if I *DID* live in America!
Real techs build their own PCs
I have two words for you :
Software Piracy.
If it's too expensive, Apple will suddenly find itself with a huge piracy problem...and no sales of its' OSX86...
There's so many different flavours of DSL now that I'd be surprised if there WASN'T a Wireless DSL standard somewhere out there...
Earlier I mentioned a group of australians getting together a project like this one that Vista is doing. Here is the homepage for those guys :
http://www.bvc.com.au/online/
looks like it's broken at the moment tho...:-(
sorry...that was meant to read "community"...
Sounds like a good idea. There's a group over here in Australia that are looking at doing the same thing as these guys. They're called the "commpunity broadband project"...It's not so much a commercial venture as a group of knowledgeable members of the broadband community (read : users) whom are trying to get together a more affordable broadband solution for Australians.
Still, these vista guys seem somewhat further advanced in their endeavor - they've actually launched!
Hell, I'm a geek too and prefer things that can give me more flexibility, but that's not the case with most people. Proof in this comes from a friend who works at Tower Records. People bitch about the price of CDs, she TELLS them there's a record store down the street that sells the SAME CDs cheaper, and they STILL buy at Tower. Go FIGURE. (ok, in this case, it is stupidity, but most people just don't know better.)
I beg to differ. It's most likely habbit more than anything else. If people usually buy from one store, they may bitch and complain about the store every now-and-again, but they'll still buy from it.
Most people are creatures of habbit.
What about "Indiana Jones and the Floggers Of The Dead Horse" ?
Unfotunately, I don't think truth in advertising is in at the moment...:-)
Hands up if you want to hear the plot...
...especially when a big bricks-and-mortar retailer (K-Mart) is going bust (or close to going bust) the very same day...
I can understand how the popularity of pinball dropped in favor of video arcade games, but it is unfortunate that the manufacturers are no longer producing spare parts. I guess there just isn't any profit in it.
I find that hard to believe... With such a short supply, I can't see any reason why that wouldn't be a good business opportunity for an internet / mail-order company, Even if the parts had to be made by hand (if they couldn't be sourced from scrapped machines)....
Quoted directly from the article on Yahoo (http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020120/wr/colum n_livewire_dc.html) :
"Only one firm, privately-held Stern Pinball (http://www.sternpinball.com/), is still making pinball machines. The Melrose Park, Ill.-based company was spun off from gaming giant Sega Enterprises Ltd (7964.T) when the company left the pinball industry in the late 1990s."
so, the article DOES mention Stern pinball... Though whether it was edited later to add the fact or not, I don't know...
Please mod parent up. It's absolutely true what he said, and if you had him for your communications and IT minister you'd be pulling your hair out in frustration too. The guy is too thick to hold office, and we need a new communications & IT minister pronto.
It's easy enough to ignore it when it's not happening in your country, but you'll think differently when it comes to your doorstep.
It is not understanding PC users that brings Gates to the top. It is the fact that he uses monopolistic powers and bully tactics to force people and competitors to use his sytems. Maybe Steve Jobs just isn't that mean.
:-) But it's not as if he's not mean, just that he's mean in a different way.
Well actually, I believe that gates ISN'T that mean either. I think he is/was generally a nice-guy. IMHO Ballmer(sp?) is the arsehole (There's gotta be a good reason why so many Microsoft execs etc jumped ship when Balmer(sp?) took the reigns - and that's most likely it).
Jobs is incredibly eccentric. It's a good thing
One would have to wonder how Apple (and Jobs) would act if MS's and Apple's market positions were reversed....
All that would do is make it a LOT more financially rewarding to hack, with a LOT more incentive to go sell your services. that upper 10% would include a lot of those who sell pirated DVDs / CDs. Do you think that, if they had the skills and the skills were a relative scarcity, they wouldn't sell their skills?
As much as some people like to think that piracy is a "shades of grey" issue where 90% eradication is good enough, it's really a black-and-white issue. You've either eradicated it or you haven't.
The only way to eradicate piracy is to make the content so cheap to access / purchase in the first place that it isn't worth the effort to pirate it.
Yeah you're right. Not long before you have teams of profesionally-employed hackers working behind-the-scenes to change court records (Not as if this doesn't already happen, it will just become a lot more obvious and enticing to those who would think of it.)...
If it can be hacked, it will be hacked. And if it's on the net, it can be hacked.
Also turns out that the price difference between the Duron and Athlon CPUs has increased since I last cared to look (which isn't often, I'd rather go with the Athlon anyway...) and duron is now about 130 dollars cheaper...
Just had a look at my favorite online computer gear store, and it seems that I'm wrong, there are a few well-priced Athlon mobo's out there...but I'd still rather go for a decent board that will set me back about 300 or so bucks...
The problem with Athlon-esque CPUs is that the motherboards are still rather expensive (at least over here in Oz), thus although AMD CPUs are cheaper to purchse, you end up spending more on the motherboard anyway and the whole price advantage that the Duron has over the Celeron is negated. The price difference between the Athlon and Duron, last time I checked, was so small that the Duron doesn't really compete.
:-)
For this fact alone, if I had a choice between building a Duron box or a Celeron box, I'd choose to build an Athlon box instead
Yeah, but you didn't see what happened later on in the night outside the bar, where Duron called on his big pal SledgeHammer to dish out some "rough justice" :-)
Sounds like a business opportunity there...
A company that provides most of the services a record company often does, but has providing a service to artists as its' main purpose rather than furthering its' own agenda.
Or at least a register of companies willing to provide discount services to new talent.
I can see that there could very well be money in that, but then I guess that's pretty much what the indies do, right?