Plextor's 708A works just fine at 8X
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've had the Plextor drive in question now for bit over a week. Works like charm. Using Maxell's 4x DVD+R discs, which the drive detects to be 'good enough' for 8X, I've now written about a dozen of these with zero problems. It's a Plextor after all, which roughly translates to being the Ferrari of the optical drives...
So yes, based on my personal experience, while Plextor's 708A costs an arm & leg compared to low end DVDRW drives, it works as advertised and burns at 8X without problems to DVD+R discs. Have not tried DVD-R yet, but according to documentation, it's limited to 4X.
As I noted, these are _special_ policies which are designed to be as hassle-free as possible. Let's see;
Mobile phone stolen - With 'special' insurance, you walk to the closest customer service location, give your details and watch the rep dig out your insurance details + IMEI of your phone to get it blocked, file a notice about the theft (which is usually FAXed on the spot to the police so there is an official report filed in case the phone later turns up), and then get a new phone + new SIM card.
- With home insurance, you file a claim, dig out receipts showing how much you paid for it, then insurance company deducts from that based on how old the phone was, and then there is a portion of the loss that the consumer pays himself. Once all the paperwork has gone thru, you get money that doesn't cover the full cost of buying a new one - which you actually had to buy few weeks earlier or you would have been without a phone for quite a while. Then you need to go thru the hassle of getting your SIM card replaced separately.
It's called 'a specialized value-added insurance policy to minimize the hassle of being without a phone'. Also this way your phone's IMEI is always known as it's written into the insurance details, so the phone gets automatically blocked - of course around here most stolen phones end up in russia, but...
You americans are slow - in Finland operators are already offering special insurance policies that cover your mega-expensive cellphones against just about everything (including theft, accidental fall off a great height to a concrete surface.. ya name it), with special service to ensure that you get a new phone quickly. Sure, it costs money, but what doesn't?
Anyway, people have also figured out that any good home insurance should cover these things already - check the small print on your policy...
Anyone unable to upgrade from old POS Win98/ME setup to a modern computer is probably not in Apple's target demograhic (that being 'consumers who have money')
Note that the finnish system I explained is for *internet banking*. ATMs are kinda bit more secure (can't install keyloggers like on Kinko's public machines) and for those we use just 4-digit pins.
Bank snailmails me a set of one-time passwords regularily (one sheet is usually good for like 6 months, and if it's used up faster, they snailmail new well in advance). This sheet does not have your account ID.
To log in, you need to input your Account ID (a separate string of numbers, basically 'username', except its just string if numbers so its hard to guess), then one password from this one-time-codelist. If you keylog that, all you got is this first 'username' part, and a worthless one-time password.
Also when you actually transfer money etc, you need to 'approve' the inputted data by typing yet another passcode - each password list paper also has I think 24 different codes each labelled A-Z. When you go to verify your transactions, bank system says, for example, 'input verification code H' and you need to look up the 'H' code from the list. These codes change whenever the password list changes.
Password list alone is useless without the ID number, ID number alone is useless without a new passcode list (which can be revoked in an instant if you lose it or anything). If someone has copy of your list, you notice it the moment somoene uses up one of your passcodes as you are instructed to 'cross over' each used code. If the system fails to accept your next unused code, boom, someone has been there without your consent, and you immediately call to nuke the passcode list & start investigation.
I'd say pretty good defence against keyloggers, and OK system considering how old it is (online banking here was done already when modem equalled to 2400bps:) - tho back then it was naturally a clumsy char-based telnet session thingy)
Considering they put out Mac OSX version of everquest, I wouldn't rule out Mac version completely.
PS2 wont be able to handle the game. They might do a bastardized version with same name, but it wont be the same game. X-Box version was in the cards, but it's development was recently halted (temporarily?) - one would assume it'll come sooner or later, but...
There is a distributed project ran by monkeys who cannot understand math behind the odds of cracking 2048bit key.
Even if they could harness every damn CPU on the planet, the sun would die out before they had any realistic chance of finding the key.
Considering that X-Box will be technologically obsolete within 3-5 years, Microsoft is (at best) laughing at these guys. Winning 100 times in a row in a statewide lottery is highly more probable than these guys finding the key.
This guy is a moron. He's crying wolf to FBI when all that happened is that he got spyware on his personal computer. Running IE and executing everything it puts out in front of you should be grounds for lobotomy.
Having worked on end user tech support, I can understand why sleazy companies keep putting out more and more spyware crap - most people don't understand or even care. I once debugged end-user's crash issues and found out that he had half dozen different spyware proggies installed. I asked if he had noticed anything strange before, and he did say he was pissed due to his IE doing funny stuff (changing homepage etc..) - but he didn't care as long as he could open whatever webpage he wanted to get into. Only after his computer started to crash every time he launched IE he figured out that something wasn't right.
Companies pushing spyware/malware should be taken down hard and made to pay for the extra support costs and bandwidth their 'applications' cause.
"" Yes, Xbox (v1) is losing $1 billion/year. They're basically giving it away in an effort to kill off competing consoles.""
And they are promptly failing. Numerous buggy PC-grade games with no gameplay coupled with rather high game prices and VERY few exclusive must-have titles has effectively made X-Box an 'also-ran' in the console business. PS2 *still* dominates, and nothing points to a change before Sony puts out their next console. Nintendo failed even more horribly with their small non-DVD discs - Gamecube titles have smaller disc size compared to PS2 and X-Box, making porting games a painful excercise of cutting content or splitting the game to multiple discs. Gamecube also lost ton of sales due to inability to play DVD movies. Sure, they're also more pirate-resistant, but that's small victory when developers are jumping ship left and right due to lousy system sales. Zelda Wind Walker helped a bit, but it's too little too late.
Regarding X-Box... funnily X-Box is most popular with the techincally adept people. Hacking X-boxes to run stuff from pirated games to linux distros is a popular pastime, and every X-box sale to modders is a big loss to MS. I'd be VERY interested to know the ratio of sold X-Boxes and sold games. I know many people with PS2 and 20+ titles, all paid and original. I also know many X-Box owners with modchips and DVD-R drives, with Halo being commonly the single paid game on the shelf. Yes, there is plenty of PS2 piracy as well, but absolute numbers mean little - it's all about ratio of paying people to freeloaders. My gut feeling is that a lot higher percentage of X-Boxes are modded (most of them for playing pirated copies) when compared to PS2.
I personally wonder how long MS keeps pumping money into the bottomless pit that is X-Box. I know they can afford it, but at some point their stockholders will start making noises. Publicly they cannot show ANY sign of weakness at this point - otherwise every damn developer thinks twice about the next X-Box project, as everything depends on MS staying in for the long haul.
I guess at this point the ball is at Sony's court... PS3 is still a HUGE question mark.
Point naturally being that I doubt US will watch happily as european companies get an advantage. US is not taxing stuff sold EU->US are they?
Either US will start whining (backed with rather impressive trade war tools), or US will respond with similar system for sales from EU to US customers.
Granted, US->EU is way more common than EU->US, so europeans come out on top, but before we get to this situation, there will be lots and lots of messy whining by govts and retailer interest groups on both sides of the big pond...
Problem is, we europeans already have horrendous income taxes and on top of that the phat VAT taxes (22% here in Finland). Don't know about corporate taxes, but I doubt they are low either.
Then again european countries are not generally 48 trillion USD in the hole like US govt is... so maybe it's a Good Thing when we get to watch the whole damn US govt going bankrupt sooner or later.
But... this VAT change will just hurt US net retailers. Shipping costs + VAT + local customs fees = no point in buying from the states. Prices were competitive when the VAT wasn't in the equation. Add 15-25% to the price and this is no longer true.
""It's not clear that the exodus actually prevented further action on the bill, but the legislative session ended on 6/2/2003. The next regular session will not start until January, 2005. ""
Stupid question. how on earth can any legislative system work if NOTHING is done for ALMOST TWO YEARS?!?!?!
I know lawmakers take summer vacations (pretty excessive ones at that), and have breaks due to elections etc., but *two years*..?
Earth turns, does it not? Basically the huge dish sees what's right above it at any given time. 24h time allocation lets the reobservers see the whole sky. They just 'listen in carefully' at each reobservation point as the sky turns.
They can also (I assume) do limited 'pointing' by turning the reception gear that is hanging at the center of the huge dish.
Right now, TIA and other similar orwellian laws and systems are pushed, but they are not going thru unopposed. Should any of the more extreme ones pass, they would immediately be challenged by civil liberties groups and would probably not survive an encounter with the supreme court. There is still some common sense left in the system.
However... there has been recent rumors that the Bin Laden 'boys' are planning yet another terror attack - on US soil (those car bombs in africa etc are not big enough of a deal).
Should there be a serious terror attack now on US soil, and you could bet your farm that all the people opposing these orwellian measures would be quickly silenced (regardless of the fact that most of these measures have little to do in catching actual terrorists).
As it stands right now, US system is on the brink. It only needs a small push (another few hundred dead in a 'big name' US mainland target clearly linkable to muslim terrorist groups) and we have scary situation in the US. Just like right after 9-11, US passed laws that would never go thru today in the name of 'fighting terror'. They could pass all kinds of loony stuff in the wake of another terror hit.
First of all, we can count. No store clerk will wonder anything if you give some coins on top of that 5 or 10 bill to minimize the amount of coins you get back. They do moan a bit over old ladies who like to take this minimization into an artform and spend many minutes digging thru their purse while doing so, but this is mainly due to the other people on the checkout queue starting to roll their eyes after the first minute or so...
And, when changing from our old national currency to euros, we rejected 1urocent and 2urocent coins. While there are 1 and 2 cent coins in europe, they are not used in Finland. Most finnish versions* of those coins are from 'collectors sets' that included one of each type of eurocoin. If you have 1 or 2 cent coins from some other euro system country, they are valid money and are accepted, but all cash transactions are rounded to closest 5 cents - even if you did have exact change to the cent on hand, machines automatically do the rounding. Payments using debit/credit cards and bank account transfers are charged to the exact cent. You can _theoretically_ save a teeny bit of money by 'exploiting' this and paying by cash when the rounding is going in your favour, and using a card when it's not. Of course we are talking about a gain of 1 or 2 cents/purchase, so you have to be really anal over it:)
There was some whining from people with no math skills how they would 'lose money' due to automatic rounding to closest 5 eurocents (which was outright stupid since during the use of markka, everything was rounded to closest 10 pennies for ages, and to closest 5 pennies before that). It seemed hard for some loud but clueless idiots to understand that over long term the rounding would even out. Sure, if you continously buy single items priced at *.99, you could lose a cent every time its rounded to *.00, but when doing, say, grocery shopping, it's rather random how the final total ends up, so in the long run it's meaningless. And as I stated, if you REALLY care, you can just choose to use a debit or credit card instead of cash.
*) Each euro-zone country manufacturers their own coins. Their 'front' side is identical everywhere, but 'back' side is different in every country. All different versions are valid currency everywhere in the eurozone, and it's kinda cool to notice when ya receive, say, a greek version of some coin in change. Early on the coin pool hasn't mixed that much, but over time you can find ton of different-looking coins from your purse from all over the europe. Those 1 and 2 cent finnish versions are quite rare as they are not in general circulation.
'No patches for warez versions' creates a nice side-effect.
World full of unpatched warez windozes, ready to be exploited & zombified.
I'm not saying MS should hand out patches and support even to those who steal their software, but the block will have this side-effect, and it may, in the long term, be a problem. In a perfect world every system would be secure and patched. In the real world most normal luser systems tend to be spotty on the patches, but if you intentionally block out illegal copies, you ensure that certain, rather high percentage of world's computers will be 0wnz0rable on demand. The users won't care, or consider the risk lesser than the price of actually paying for their windoze.
Umm. And this is the great U S of A? I knew you were in the Mobile Phone Stone Age, but having also a broken emergency call system regarding mobile phones?
Oh my.
In Finland, when calling to 112 (our version of 911) the call is routed to closest center based on the link station your phone is using. Naturally if you cannot then speak anything to the phone, they may not take the step to find you based on cellphone location data (there are sadly too many misdials from pocketed phones with no keypad lock on), but if you can speak out a plea for help, they have system in place to get the (rough) location of the mobile phone and police/ambulance will be searching for you. If you can speak out an address or general idea where you are and what kinda emergency you have, the closest police/firestation/ambulance station gets alerted no matter where it is. Considering that you are not tied to a landline when placing the call, this is obiviously superior to placing the call from a landline which may or may not be next to you when you have the emergency.
Of course Finland is a lot smaller place than USA, but one would imagine that such basic things would be in order in any civilized country.
Ah, but there is little money to be made with such system. There is little to no corporate lobbying to get the system fixed, and nothing proceeds in the US without corporate interests paying the lawmakers off first... your great system at work...
Oh and 'lousy reception'.. dunno bout USA, but in Finland you have to be pretty far in the woods, many kilometers from nearest road or house, and next to a blocking hill or something to end up in a place where one of the two national major carriers doesn't have GSM signal up. Only places where GSM may not be suitable as only communications tool is outer islands on the coast (there ya can end up outside reception range or get randomly switched between finnish and estonian/swedish carriers depending on which cell is closer) and some rather remote wilderness in northern finland, where nobody lives anyway. And even there the old analog NMT system works (or it at least used to work - I think they are about to discontinue it as nobody is using it anymore...)
Also don't know about US systems, but using GSM you can always make an emergency call if there is any kind of network signal up. Even without a SIM card, and even using otherwise blocked phone. Emergency number Always Works - assuming of course that you have power in the phone and any kind of network is in the area.
Panasonic/JVC/Sony etc can only blame the braindead region coding system for their lousy DVD player sales.
I'd love to buy a good-quality 'brand name' DVD player and even pay a bit of premium for it, but I won't buy a crippled product. Yes, there are workarounds and hacks for most major players, but why bother (and most of the time pay extra to some small company doing the physical mods) when I can buy a cheaper 'noname' brand player that is outright region free (or the region is switchable thru menus via 'unofficial' keypresses)
Region coding system killed 'brand name' DVD player sales at least in the europe. Pioneer and few other 'high end' brands had some luck - usually by making sure their product is clearly superior in quality, and is easy to modify to be region free, but massmarket buyers steered clear of the name brands - either due to word of mouth telling them to avoid them, or by finding out thru trial and error that their first DVD player was not only expensive, but also crippled.
Movie Bosses IQ going down by the week...
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's see. The major advantage of a movie theater vs. DVD or warez rips is the quality of presentation.
Lets mess up the quality of presentation in the name of 'copy protection' and make the paying customer suffer. Borrow the idea straight out of the CD business - copy protection with CDs is going down with the customers SO well!
Really smart...
(Yeah yeah, supposedly you cannot see the flicker. I belive it when I (don't) see it - until then I assume this degrades the image quality.)
Now if this is limited to 'pre-release' preview screenings where the people are not, by default, paying to see the movie - then I have little issue with this - go ahead and muck the picture as badly as you want if the screening is a freebie. However, if I'm paying for it, I don't want crappier quality in the name of 'copy protection'.
And you are the guy who's gonna challenge the EULA in court? Point is that MS can press the issue and very few have resources to even fight it, no matter how right either party is.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the Plextor drive in question now for bit over a week. Works like charm. Using Maxell's 4x DVD+R discs, which the drive detects to be 'good enough' for 8X, I've now written about a dozen of these with zero problems. It's a Plextor after all, which roughly translates to being the Ferrari of the optical drives...
So yes, based on my personal experience, while Plextor's 708A costs an arm & leg compared to low end DVDRW drives, it works as advertised and burns at 8X without problems to DVD+R discs. Have not tried DVD-R yet, but according to documentation, it's limited to 4X.
As I noted, these are _special_ policies which are designed to be as hassle-free as possible. Let's see;
Mobile phone stolen
- With 'special' insurance, you walk to the closest customer service location, give your details and watch the rep dig out your insurance details + IMEI of your phone to get it blocked, file a notice about the theft (which is usually FAXed on the spot to the police so there is an official report filed in case the phone later turns up), and then get a new phone + new SIM card.
- With home insurance, you file a claim, dig out receipts showing how much you paid for it, then insurance company deducts from that based on how old the phone was, and then there is a portion of the loss that the consumer pays himself. Once all the paperwork has gone thru, you get money that doesn't cover the full cost of buying a new one - which you actually had to buy few weeks earlier or you would have been without a phone for quite a while. Then you need to go thru the hassle of getting your SIM card replaced separately.
It's called 'a specialized value-added insurance policy to minimize the hassle of being without a phone'. Also this way your phone's IMEI is always known as it's written into the insurance details, so the phone gets automatically blocked - of course around here most stolen phones end up in russia, but...
You americans are slow - in Finland operators are already offering special insurance policies that cover your mega-expensive cellphones against just about everything (including theft, accidental fall off a great height to a concrete surface.. ya name it), with special service to ensure that you get a new phone quickly. Sure, it costs money, but what doesn't?
Anyway, people have also figured out that any good home insurance should cover these things already - check the small print on your policy...
Haven't you heard? the 'Best before' date on your OS came and went about three years ago.
5 years is an eternity in the field of computers. Either you upgrade, or you cry, whine, bitch, moan and THEN upgrade... your choice.
Anyone unable to upgrade from old POS Win98/ME setup to a modern computer is probably not in Apple's target demograhic (that being 'consumers who have money')
Actually, they are seriously slashdotted right now. I tried few times, but could not get a complete file. BitTorrent, however, is working flawlessly.
Note that the finnish system I explained is for *internet banking*. ATMs are kinda bit more secure (can't install keyloggers like on Kinko's public machines) and for those we use just 4-digit pins.
Finnish system:
:) - tho back then it was naturally a clumsy char-based telnet session thingy)
Bank snailmails me a set of one-time passwords regularily (one sheet is usually good for like 6 months, and if it's used up faster, they snailmail new well in advance). This sheet does not have your account ID.
To log in, you need to input your Account ID (a separate string of numbers, basically 'username', except its just string if numbers so its hard to guess), then one password from this one-time-codelist. If you keylog that, all you got is this first 'username' part, and a worthless one-time password.
Also when you actually transfer money etc, you need to 'approve' the inputted data by typing yet another passcode - each password list paper also has I think 24 different codes each labelled A-Z. When you go to verify your transactions, bank system says, for example, 'input verification code H' and you need to look up the 'H' code from the list. These codes change whenever the password list changes.
Password list alone is useless without the ID number, ID number alone is useless without a new passcode list (which can be revoked in an instant if you lose it or anything). If someone has copy of your list, you notice it the moment somoene uses up one of your passcodes as you are instructed to 'cross over' each used code. If the system fails to accept your next unused code, boom, someone has been there without your consent, and you immediately call to nuke the passcode list & start investigation.
I'd say pretty good defence against keyloggers, and OK system considering how old it is (online banking here was done already when modem equalled to 2400bps
Considering they put out Mac OSX version of everquest, I wouldn't rule out Mac version completely.
:)
PS2 wont be able to handle the game. They might do a bastardized version with same name, but it wont be the same game. X-Box version was in the cards, but it's development was recently halted (temporarily?) - one would assume it'll come sooner or later, but...
Linux version? You must be joking
There is a distributed project ran by monkeys who cannot understand math behind the odds of cracking 2048bit key.
Even if they could harness every damn CPU on the planet, the sun would die out before they had any realistic chance of finding the key.
Considering that X-Box will be technologically obsolete within 3-5 years, Microsoft is (at best) laughing at these guys. Winning 100 times in a row in a statewide lottery is highly more probable than these guys finding the key.
This guy is a moron. He's crying wolf to FBI when all that happened is that he got spyware on his personal computer. Running IE and executing everything it puts out in front of you should be grounds for lobotomy.
Having worked on end user tech support, I can understand why sleazy companies keep putting out more and more spyware crap - most people don't understand or even care. I once debugged end-user's crash issues and found out that he had half dozen different spyware proggies installed. I asked if he had noticed anything strange before, and he did say he was pissed due to his IE doing funny stuff (changing homepage etc..) - but he didn't care as long as he could open whatever webpage he wanted to get into. Only after his computer started to crash every time he launched IE he figured out that something wasn't right.
Companies pushing spyware/malware should be taken down hard and made to pay for the extra support costs and bandwidth their 'applications' cause.
"" Yes, Xbox (v1) is losing $1 billion/year. They're basically giving it away in an effort to kill off competing consoles.""
And they are promptly failing. Numerous buggy PC-grade games with no gameplay coupled with rather high game prices and VERY few exclusive must-have titles has effectively made X-Box an 'also-ran' in the console business. PS2 *still* dominates, and nothing points to a change before Sony puts out their next console. Nintendo failed even more horribly with their small non-DVD discs - Gamecube titles have smaller disc size compared to PS2 and X-Box, making porting games a painful excercise of cutting content or splitting the game to multiple discs. Gamecube also lost ton of sales due to inability to play DVD movies. Sure, they're also more pirate-resistant, but that's small victory when developers are jumping ship left and right due to lousy system sales. Zelda Wind Walker helped a bit, but it's too little too late.
Regarding X-Box... funnily X-Box is most popular with the techincally adept people. Hacking X-boxes to run stuff from pirated games to linux distros is a popular pastime, and every X-box sale to modders is a big loss to MS. I'd be VERY interested to know the ratio of sold X-Boxes and sold games. I know many people with PS2 and 20+ titles, all paid and original. I also know many X-Box owners with modchips and DVD-R drives, with Halo being commonly the single paid game on the shelf. Yes, there is plenty of PS2 piracy as well, but absolute numbers mean little - it's all about ratio of paying people to freeloaders. My gut feeling is that a lot higher percentage of X-Boxes are modded (most of them for playing pirated copies) when compared to PS2.
I personally wonder how long MS keeps pumping money into the bottomless pit that is X-Box. I know they can afford it, but at some point their stockholders will start making noises. Publicly they cannot show ANY sign of weakness at this point - otherwise every damn developer thinks twice about the next X-Box project, as everything depends on MS staying in for the long haul.
I guess at this point the ball is at Sony's court... PS3 is still a HUGE question mark.
Point naturally being that I doubt US will watch happily as european companies get an advantage. US is not taxing stuff sold EU->US are they?
Either US will start whining (backed with rather impressive trade war tools), or US will respond with similar system for sales from EU to US customers.
Granted, US->EU is way more common than EU->US, so europeans come out on top, but before we get to this situation, there will be lots and lots of messy whining by govts and retailer interest groups on both sides of the big pond...
Problem is, we europeans already have horrendous income taxes and on top of that the phat VAT taxes (22% here in Finland). Don't know about corporate taxes, but I doubt they are low either.
Then again european countries are not generally 48 trillion USD in the hole like US govt is... so maybe it's a Good Thing when we get to watch the whole damn US govt going bankrupt sooner or later.
But... this VAT change will just hurt US net retailers. Shipping costs + VAT + local customs fees = no point in buying from the states. Prices were competitive when the VAT wasn't in the equation. Add 15-25% to the price and this is no longer true.
""It's not clear that the exodus actually prevented further action on the bill, but the legislative session ended on 6/2/2003. The next regular session will not start until January, 2005. ""
Stupid question. how on earth can any legislative system work if NOTHING is done for ALMOST TWO YEARS?!?!?!
I know lawmakers take summer vacations (pretty excessive ones at that), and have breaks due to elections etc., but *two years*..?
I think it's called 'a good deal' :p
Earth turns, does it not? Basically the huge dish sees what's right above it at any given time. 24h time allocation lets the reobservers see the whole sky. They just 'listen in carefully' at each reobservation point as the sky turns.
They can also (I assume) do limited 'pointing' by turning the reception gear that is hanging at the center of the huge dish.
Right now, TIA and other similar orwellian laws and systems are pushed, but they are not going thru unopposed. Should any of the more extreme ones pass, they would immediately be challenged by civil liberties groups and would probably not survive an encounter with the supreme court. There is still some common sense left in the system.
However... there has been recent rumors that the Bin Laden 'boys' are planning yet another terror attack - on US soil (those car bombs in africa etc are not big enough of a deal).
Should there be a serious terror attack now on US soil, and you could bet your farm that all the people opposing these orwellian measures would be quickly silenced (regardless of the fact that most of these measures have little to do in catching actual terrorists).
As it stands right now, US system is on the brink. It only needs a small push (another few hundred dead in a 'big name' US mainland target clearly linkable to muslim terrorist groups) and we have scary situation in the US. Just like right after 9-11, US passed laws that would never go thru today in the name of 'fighting terror'. They could pass all kinds of loony stuff in the wake of another terror hit.
First of all, we can count. No store clerk will wonder anything if you give some coins on top of that 5 or 10 bill to minimize the amount of coins you get back. They do moan a bit over old ladies who like to take this minimization into an artform and spend many minutes digging thru their purse while doing so, but this is mainly due to the other people on the checkout queue starting to roll their eyes after the first minute or so...
:)
And, when changing from our old national currency to euros, we rejected 1urocent and 2urocent coins. While there are 1 and 2 cent coins in europe, they are not used in Finland. Most finnish versions* of those coins are from 'collectors sets' that included one of each type of eurocoin. If you have 1 or 2 cent coins from some other euro system country, they are valid money and are accepted, but all cash transactions are rounded to closest 5 cents - even if you did have exact change to the cent on hand, machines automatically do the rounding. Payments using debit/credit cards and bank account transfers are charged to the exact cent. You can _theoretically_ save a teeny bit of money by 'exploiting' this and paying by cash when the rounding is going in your favour, and using a card when it's not. Of course we are talking about a gain of 1 or 2 cents/purchase, so you have to be really anal over it
There was some whining from people with no math skills how they would 'lose money' due to automatic rounding to closest 5 eurocents (which was outright stupid since during the use of markka, everything was rounded to closest 10 pennies for ages, and to closest 5 pennies before that). It seemed hard for some loud but clueless idiots to understand that over long term the rounding would even out. Sure, if you continously buy single items priced at *.99, you could lose a cent every time its rounded to *.00, but when doing, say, grocery shopping, it's rather random how the final total ends up, so in the long run it's meaningless. And as I stated, if you REALLY care, you can just choose to use a debit or credit card instead of cash.
*) Each euro-zone country manufacturers their own coins. Their 'front' side is identical everywhere, but 'back' side is different in every country. All different versions are valid currency everywhere in the eurozone, and it's kinda cool to notice when ya receive, say, a greek version of some coin in change. Early on the coin pool hasn't mixed that much, but over time you can find ton of different-looking coins from your purse from all over the europe. Those 1 and 2 cent finnish versions are quite rare as they are not in general circulation.
'No patches for warez versions' creates a nice side-effect.
World full of unpatched warez windozes, ready to be exploited & zombified.
I'm not saying MS should hand out patches and support even to those who steal their software, but the block will have this side-effect, and it may, in the long term, be a problem. In a perfect world every system would be secure and patched. In the real world most normal luser systems tend to be spotty on the patches, but if you intentionally block out illegal copies, you ensure that certain, rather high percentage of world's computers will be 0wnz0rable on demand. The users won't care, or consider the risk lesser than the price of actually paying for their windoze.
I have a few concerns (to put it mildly) with the bandwidth and server capacity of NTBUGTRAQ.
Umm. And this is the great U S of A? I knew you were in the Mobile Phone Stone Age, but having also a broken emergency call system regarding mobile phones?
Oh my.
In Finland, when calling to 112 (our version of 911) the call is routed to closest center based on the link station your phone is using. Naturally if you cannot then speak anything to the phone, they may not take the step to find you based on cellphone location data (there are sadly too many misdials from pocketed phones with no keypad lock on), but if you can speak out a plea for help, they have system in place to get the (rough) location of the mobile phone and police/ambulance will be searching for you. If you can speak out an address or general idea where you are and what kinda emergency you have, the closest police/firestation/ambulance station gets alerted no matter where it is. Considering that you are not tied to a landline when placing the call, this is obiviously superior to placing the call from a landline which may or may not be next to you when you have the emergency.
Of course Finland is a lot smaller place than USA, but one would imagine that such basic things would be in order in any civilized country.
Ah, but there is little money to be made with such system. There is little to no corporate lobbying to get the system fixed, and nothing proceeds in the US without corporate interests paying the lawmakers off first... your great system at work...
Oh and 'lousy reception'.. dunno bout USA, but in Finland you have to be pretty far in the woods, many kilometers from nearest road or house, and next to a blocking hill or something to end up in a place where one of the two national major carriers doesn't have GSM signal up. Only places where GSM may not be suitable as only communications tool is outer islands on the coast (there ya can end up outside reception range or get randomly switched between finnish and estonian/swedish carriers depending on which cell is closer) and some rather remote wilderness in northern finland, where nobody lives anyway. And even there the old analog NMT system works (or it at least used to work - I think they are about to discontinue it as nobody is using it anymore...)
Also don't know about US systems, but using GSM you can always make an emergency call if there is any kind of network signal up. Even without a SIM card, and even using otherwise blocked phone. Emergency number Always Works - assuming of course that you have power in the phone and any kind of network is in the area.
Panasonic/JVC/Sony etc can only blame the braindead region coding system for their lousy DVD player sales.
I'd love to buy a good-quality 'brand name' DVD player and even pay a bit of premium for it, but I won't buy a crippled product. Yes, there are workarounds and hacks for most major players, but why bother (and most of the time pay extra to some small company doing the physical mods) when I can buy a cheaper 'noname' brand player that is outright region free (or the region is switchable thru menus via 'unofficial' keypresses)
Region coding system killed 'brand name' DVD player sales at least in the europe. Pioneer and few other 'high end' brands had some luck - usually by making sure their product is clearly superior in quality, and is easy to modify to be region free, but massmarket buyers steered clear of the name brands - either due to word of mouth telling them to avoid them, or by finding out thru trial and error that their first DVD player was not only expensive, but also crippled.
Let's see. The major advantage of a movie theater vs. DVD or warez rips is the quality of presentation.
Lets mess up the quality of presentation in the name of 'copy protection' and make the paying customer suffer. Borrow the idea straight out of the CD business - copy protection with CDs is going down with the customers SO well!
Really smart...
(Yeah yeah, supposedly you cannot see the flicker. I belive it when I (don't) see it - until then I assume this degrades the image quality.)
Now if this is limited to 'pre-release' preview screenings where the people are not, by default, paying to see the movie - then I have little issue with this - go ahead and muck the picture as badly as you want if the screening is a freebie. However, if I'm paying for it, I don't want crappier quality in the name of 'copy protection'.
And you are the guy who's gonna challenge the EULA in court? Point is that MS can press the issue and very few have resources to even fight it, no matter how right either party is.
And end users have no alternative to speak of...