You failed to notice the following: The only reasons why IE is free, were (1) to drive Netscape Navigator out of the market, (2) to get people hooked into using IE since IE would become the new front-end (just as DOS and Windows were before) to Microsoft's future Web ventures (like.NET, MSN, etc).
Besides, now that IE is basically king, and it runs on 95% of all machines (the remaining is IE on the Mac, and Netscape on Unix flavors), you ARE paying for it by having a Winsows OS!!!
In other words, in the coming future, IE,.NET and Windows will blend in such a way, that even if they give any one of those three "free" to you, you will have to pay for the other two!!!
I'm scared of seeing so much power on only one company.
A few nitpicks. First, languages have no bearing on region codes. Even if they did, it wouldn't be Region 2, which has only one Spanish speaking country (Spain).
You'll find the same language scattered amongst multiple regions. Spanish, to use your example, is found in half of the 6 regions. Region 1 (Puerto Rico), Region 2 (Spain), Region 4 (most of the South American countries).
I know that. Also like you pointed out, the Dominican Republic is in Region 4. However that proves my point even more: we, the people who live here do not even know what our region is supposed to be!!! - not even DVD distributors you ask know anything about DVD zones!!!
Most "mainstream" Region 1 discs are either Spanish dubbed or subtitled. French is also very common, those being the most common languages after English in Region 1. My girlfriend is Spanish speaking and we notice these things.
You said it, mainstream, but I'd say over 50% aren't, and that's unaceptable.
It is interesting to note that DVD Zoning is not respected or enforced in the Dominican Republic. Here 100% of all DVD players and movies are Region 1 (U.S.), and yet since we're a spanish-speaking country we're supposed to be in Region 2.
Note only that, but there is no way anyone can force people to change, since it is a cultural thing here for everyone to buy things from the US (half the domininican population in the world lives in New York), and besides people here do not like being last in getting movies out. In the end, this only helps american movie distributors as Region 2 distributors are already obsolete here.
I have the feeling that this is the case also in many countries and the DVD Forum is blinded to this reality (which also affects their market perception, since they probably think for example that in the Dominican Republic DVDs have a low penetration rate since NOBODY buys Region 2 DVDs, while the reality is that in the middle and high classes VHS tapes are being quickly replaced by DVDs).
The bad thing is that many people here do not speak english, so it is VERY annoying having to buy Region 1 DVDs with no spanish subtitles, which in turn hurts the whole DVD phenomenom.
Proposal: We live in a GLOBAL economy, release the darn DVDs in a region-free state to ALL countries SIMULTANEOUSLY and avoid this control-freak stupidity.
A product from Borland call JDataStore, is a very high performance pure Java database system which has the particularity (in addtion to being a JDBC/SQL compliant DB) to also being able to store documents of any type directly into a built-in file system.
The examples that come with the distribution actually show you how to store and load files from it. You can then use an upload Servlet, and coouple that with a few JSP (Java Server Pages), and voila you got something which works anywhere.
Note that you will still need to program a way to keep older versions of documents, and a way to implement a locking mechanism for people to check out and check in files. I'm sure any competent programmer can accomplish all this in about a 2 weeks of work, and add another week for fine tuning and testing.
Note however that I assume that (1) storage space is not an issue, considering how cheap hard drives are these days, and (2) that you will not write any sophisticated mechanisms to store only the changes to a document, but rather that you will save ALL versions of all the documents, along with the choice to erase older versions (either with a fixed ptogramatically-fixed time variable, a user command, or both).
Please spare all the flames please, I KNOW there are commecial solutions, I KNOW this is a very simple solution, I'm JUST offering ONE possible solution to the poster's problem. Please spare all the "you can do this better with PHP or ASP, etc". Use the tools you want.
Note that I have already implemented systems which can do all this as outlined above, just not for the same problem domain, so I know what I'm talking about.
I hope this helps.
p.s.: You can use the free Tomcat Servlet/JSP engine to do this.
How about this for software distribution: Give people the choice of selecting either a "buy everything and own it forever plan, while paying for future updates" or "lease the application, and as long as you pay a subscription fee you can keep using the latest version of the application".
That way, we have the choice of buying or renting the software according to our needs (for example, I might want to simply rent the software initially at a very low cost, and if I like it I might just buy it forever).
Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek actually developed a product called DigiView to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.
Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!!:-)
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You failed to notice the following: The only reasons why IE is free, were (1) to drive Netscape Navigator out of the market, (2) to get people hooked into using IE since IE would become the new front-end (just as DOS and Windows were before) to Microsoft's future Web ventures (like .NET, MSN, etc).
.NET and Windows will blend in such a way, that even if they give any one of those three "free" to you, you will have to pay for the other two!!!
Besides, now that IE is basically king, and it runs on 95% of all machines (the remaining is IE on the Mac, and Netscape on Unix flavors), you ARE paying for it by having a Winsows OS!!!
In other words, in the coming future, IE,
I'm scared of seeing so much power on only one company.
A few nitpicks. First, languages have no bearing on region codes. Even if they did, it wouldn't be Region 2, which has only one Spanish speaking country (Spain).
You'll find the same language scattered amongst multiple regions. Spanish, to use your example, is found in half of the 6 regions. Region 1 (Puerto Rico), Region 2 (Spain), Region 4 (most of the South American countries).
I know that. Also like you pointed out, the Dominican Republic is in Region 4. However that proves my point even more: we, the people who live here do not even know what our region is supposed to be!!! - not even DVD distributors you ask know anything about DVD zones!!!
Most "mainstream" Region 1 discs are either Spanish dubbed or subtitled. French is also very common, those being the most common languages after English in Region 1. My girlfriend is Spanish speaking and we notice these things.
You said it, mainstream, but I'd say over 50% aren't, and that's unaceptable.
It is interesting to note that DVD Zoning is not respected or enforced in the Dominican Republic. Here 100% of all DVD players and movies are Region 1 (U.S.), and yet since we're a spanish-speaking country we're supposed to be in Region 2.
Note only that, but there is no way anyone can force people to change, since it is a cultural thing here for everyone to buy things from the US (half the domininican population in the world lives in New York), and besides people here do not like being last in getting movies out. In the end, this only helps american movie distributors as Region 2 distributors are already obsolete here.
I have the feeling that this is the case also in many countries and the DVD Forum is blinded to this reality (which also affects their market perception, since they probably think for example that in the Dominican Republic DVDs have a low penetration rate since NOBODY buys Region 2 DVDs, while the reality is that in the middle and high classes VHS tapes are being quickly replaced by DVDs).
The bad thing is that many people here do not speak english, so it is VERY annoying having to buy Region 1 DVDs with no spanish subtitles, which in turn hurts the whole DVD phenomenom.
Proposal: We live in a GLOBAL economy, release the darn DVDs in a region-free state to ALL countries SIMULTANEOUSLY and avoid this control-freak stupidity.
A product from Borland call JDataStore, is a very high performance pure Java database system which has the particularity (in addtion to being a JDBC/SQL compliant DB) to also being able to store documents of any type directly into a built-in file system.
The examples that come with the distribution actually show you how to store and load files from it. You can then use an upload Servlet, and coouple that with a few JSP (Java Server Pages), and voila you got something which works anywhere.
Note that you will still need to program a way to keep older versions of documents, and a way to implement a locking mechanism for people to check out and check in files. I'm sure any competent programmer can accomplish all this in about a 2 weeks of work, and add another week for fine tuning and testing.
Note however that I assume that (1) storage space is not an issue, considering how cheap hard drives are these days, and (2) that you will not write any sophisticated mechanisms to store only the changes to a document, but rather that you will save ALL versions of all the documents, along with the choice to erase older versions (either with a fixed ptogramatically-fixed time variable, a user command, or both).
Please spare all the flames please, I KNOW there are commecial solutions, I KNOW this is a very simple solution, I'm JUST offering ONE possible solution to the poster's problem. Please spare all the "you can do this better with PHP or ASP, etc". Use the tools you want.
Note that I have already implemented systems which can do all this as outlined above, just not for the same problem domain, so I know what I'm talking about.
I hope this helps.
p.s.: You can use the free Tomcat Servlet/JSP engine to do this.
How about this for software distribution:
Give people the choice of selecting either a "buy everything and own it forever plan, while paying for future updates" or "lease the application, and as long as you pay a subscription fee you can keep using the latest version of the application".
That way, we have the choice of buying or renting the software according to our needs (for example, I might want to simply rent the software initially at a very low cost, and if I like it I might just buy it forever).
I think that's a reasonable compromise.
Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek actually developed a product called DigiView to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.
:-)
Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!!