But surely in converting the UK DVD player to run with the US mains supply you would be modifying your hardware in such a way as to allow you to bypass the DVD region encoding.
Actually, virtually all electrical hardware in Europe will run quite happily on 110V AC (and likewise, virtually all US electrical hardware is happy on 220-240V AC). All that's different is the plug, and you can get 'travel converters' that'll do that for you. I've cross-Atlantic'ed TVs and DVD players...even kettles, but they're no good without a step-up transformer.;-)
from the article: (quote starts) But top music executives, such as Jim Urie, president of Universal Music and Video Distribution, still contend that CDs are a great product.
"The dissing of CDs is just a ridiculous self-justification for stealing the music," Urie says. "I hate to see what's going to happen when DVD burning becomes as prevalent as burning CDs. How are people going to justify stealing a movie by saying it isn't any good after the movie's already a $100-million hit?"
Urie says his company doesn't heavily research consumer attitude, noting, "We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes." (quote ends)
What an arrogant fool Urie is. Consumers are not compelled to buy his product : he must give them *what they want*. And he'll never know what they want if he doesn't ask. He appears fixated on the alleged losses caused by Internet Piracy, rather than dealing with the salient facts : that CD album prices rose by, on average, 4.4% in 2001 (RIAA figures), while inflation rose by merely 1.2% (bls.gov). People don't think $18 for a CD is good value! It's as simple as that!
I've never taken a CS class, but I'm not a young puke, and I write code as part of my job. I'm...baffled to think that folks ask for handwritten code in an exam. I mean...why?
One of the first things I learned with C++ was code a little, debug. Rinse, repeat. That's good practice...and requiring someone to write more than one or two lines of code on paper in an exam seems stupid. It teaches exactly the wrong skillset: it's not how many lines of buggy code you can write on paper in 3 hours that's important - it's your ability to write good code and have good debugging skills.
I can understand the need to write a few lines to illustrate an algorythm, but anything more is just silly.
According to the article, it costs 5c per disk to add Macrovision. If Warner decided that the protection afforded by Macrovision costs more to implement than the expect losses to piracy... we know that Warner anticipates to lose the equivilant of less than 5c per disk in lost sales due to piracy. Looks like they realised that: a) the piracy market is not that big, after all and b) folks who pirate wouldn't buy the product at full price anyway, even if there was no other option. Looks like harsh economics wins out over foolish MPAA hyperbole.
> First of all, it wasn't "twice" as many. Second of all, "50% more" is half of "twice" as many. You meant 100% more seats. However, 50% more is closer to what actually happened.
No, I didn't mean 100% more seats. It was close on twice the number of additional screens, but these extra screens were mostly smaller theaters with lower capacities, so the actual number of additional seats was closer to 50%.
For crying out loud, Spiderman opened in almost *twice* the number of screens as Attack of the Clones! Lucas refused to let it show on *any* screen unless the cinema guaranteed it four weeks in that theater. So Lucas was jerk about distribution, and he paid for it. But when one film has almost 50% more seats available to it in the first week than another, you'd *expect* it to take more money. It's surprising AOTC did as well in comparison. But don't take it as some measure of Star Wars' failure.
All this talk about 'But how can they tell?' is driving me nuts. They don't have to tell if you're using a VPN or not ; they just block IP type 47 (GRE) packets. That's what Comcast does in certain regions - I know, as my company has run into this specific problem and been given this specific answer from them.
In case you don't know, your standard, Microsoft software-based VPN solution makes an initial connection over TCP port 1723, then sends all encrypted traffic in IP:47 (Generic Routing Encapsulation?) packets. Completely seperate from your normal, TCP/UDP web games/https/ftp traffic.
GRE is used for pretty much nothing but PPTP / software VPN, and it's easy to filter at the router. They don't need to packet sniff to see if you, personally, are trying to use a VPN. They just block the lot.
Don't be anti-social alone. Game with your friends!
I don't know if it's an axiom yet or not, but I firmly believe that the couple who games together, stays together. The Wife and I regularly play MUSHes, MMORPGs and other games together.
I've just found that it is vitally important that you both have equally-powered computers. I could only live for so long with "But your machine is more powerful than mine!" before I caved in and upgraded my belov'd Box'O'Fun.:-)
My company owns around 60 Latitude CPs and CPx...and we've lost count of the number of times we've had to have Dell replace motherboards and keyboard trays. It seems this series has a problem with the 8,i,k and , keys...they just break. And since Dell's fix to this has been to replace the motherboard, I can only assume that it's the motherboard's keyboard connector that's buggy.
On top of that, we've had Latitudes (same series) that just die. One day : blam! No force on Earth can get the suckers to turn on. Fortunately for us, we chose the Next Business Day complete care policy. Since Dell has been called out around 100 times (at a guess) for 60 units in the last 18 months, I'm guessing that it's not a winning profit situation for them.:-)
That said, I'm pretty sure their repair techs are recycling motherboards that get pulled out of broken units, so they're not exactly helping the situation.
Back to the drawing board, folks. Nothing here to see. Literally.;-)
Re:mediaone (at&t broadband) has not cut access
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 1
I'm in Boston, on Mediaone/ATT, and they're blocking port 80 at the first point they can : somewhere *upstream* of your local node. I can get to port 80 from either side of my router, and get to other folks' web sites in my subnet (gee, thanks, CodeRedII, for 500+ unique IPs of infected MORONS on my subnet!). BUT I can't connect to TCP80 on my server from off the ATT network.
They started blocking the Cambridge branch several days ago, according to my tests and my logs.
I agree. An Educated Computer user (and we all like to think ourselves of as such, even those who read Newsforge:-) ) would find this article self-evident.
While such discourse is appropriate in some forums (say, perhaps, zdnet's Newbie Corner), it's perhaps a little below the bar for both/. and Newsforge.
Maybe there's some secret 'You post to my channel, I'll post to yours' backscratching going on amongst the VA Linux partners to drive up traffic. Hell, now they don't have a hardware business, the cash has to come from somewhere, right?;-)
Of course, those rational beings amongst us are capable of comparing the relative pricing of CPUs and making our own decision on where our own 'sweet spot' is.
The early adopters, who want the absolute best, regardless of cost, will pay a premium.
Those who want to wait a while will get a price break as newer processors come to market.
Those who are on a budget buy the really cheap units that are flooding the channel.
It's called economics. Specifically, a little thing called 'supply and demand'.;-)
One thing has changed, though : AMD has driven prices down across the board by having a credible alternative to Celeron/PIII. That's called competition. That's also simple Economics.
So, what was the point of this article again?:-)
In other news, Intel just got slapped by analysts for preparing another price war with AMD : this time over P4 market share. Looks like 50% reductions in the P4 1.8Ghz are on the cards for September....they wouldn't be doing that if AMD wasn't around.
My wife's a doctor, and went to a conference last year attended by a bunch of military types. There was a presentation on biowarfare. The CDC had done a test...
They'd sent Anthrax samples to the 15 or so facilities in the US that are capable of detecting the toxin, without telling them, to see if they'd detect it.
The vast majority of those facilities mis-diagnosed (I think it was 13?), mostly thru laziness.
So if there *was* an Anthrax outbreak in the US, the chances of the labs picking it up in a timely manner is VERY LOW INDEED.
Needless to say there's been some follow-up on this, but it's scary as all hell that the labs would miss Anthrax (even though I'm told it's similar to some very common germ - one of the streps, I think).
The smallpox vaccine is only good for a dozen years or so. We're ALL vulnerable to it, and there's nowhere near enough synthetic vaccine to make much of a difference. More is being made (big facility in the UK is gearing up) but we're a good six - ten years away from start of production.
Norton released patches for Sircam on the 18th, and even AICN reported on this virus before slashdot.;-)
That said, I popped in to work this weekend to upgrade my servers AV protections (liveupdate refuses to work on my email servers. grr.) and, sure enough, I've been averaging one infected document every two hours. So it's possible we'll see a whole host of fun come Monday, 9am, when all those folks who got infected emails over the weekend open them up...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, virtually all electrical hardware in Europe will run quite happily on 110V AC (and likewise, virtually all US electrical hardware is happy on 220-240V AC). All that's different is the plug, and you can get 'travel converters' that'll do that for you. I've cross-Atlantic'ed TVs and DVD players...even kettles, but they're no good without a step-up transformer. ;-)
from the article:
(quote starts)
But top music executives, such as Jim Urie, president of Universal Music and Video Distribution, still contend that CDs are a great product.
"The dissing of CDs is just a ridiculous self-justification for stealing the music," Urie says. "I hate to see what's going to happen when DVD burning becomes as prevalent as burning CDs. How are people going to justify stealing a movie by saying it isn't any good after the movie's already a $100-million hit?"
Urie says his company doesn't heavily research consumer attitude, noting, "We tend to ask how can we make more money and sell more product, not deal with consumer gripes."
(quote ends)
What an arrogant fool Urie is. Consumers are not compelled to buy his product : he must give them *what they want*. And he'll never know what they want if he doesn't ask. He appears fixated on the alleged losses caused by Internet Piracy, rather than dealing with the salient facts : that CD album prices rose by, on average, 4.4% in 2001 (RIAA figures), while inflation rose by merely 1.2% (bls.gov). People don't think $18 for a CD is good value! It's as simple as that!
The BBC doesn't do it for a profit. They can't. No adverts, and paid for by the government.
It's probably just co-incidence that they have one of the best news services on the planet, though.
One of the first things I learned with C++ was code a little, debug. Rinse, repeat. That's good practice...and requiring someone to write more than one or two lines of code on paper in an exam seems stupid. It teaches exactly the wrong skillset: it's not how many lines of buggy code you can write on paper in 3 hours that's important - it's your ability to write good code and have good debugging skills.
I can understand the need to write a few lines to illustrate an algorythm, but anything more is just silly.
According to the article, it costs 5c per disk to add Macrovision.
If Warner decided that the protection afforded by Macrovision costs more to implement than the expect losses to piracy... we know that Warner anticipates to lose the equivilant of less than 5c per disk in lost sales due to piracy.
Looks like they realised that:
a) the piracy market is not that big, after all and
b) folks who pirate wouldn't buy the product at full price anyway, even if there was no other option.
Looks like harsh economics wins out over foolish MPAA hyperbole.
> First of all, it wasn't "twice" as many. Second of all, "50% more" is half of "twice" as many. You meant 100% more seats. However, 50% more is closer to what actually happened.
No, I didn't mean 100% more seats. It was close on twice the number of additional screens, but these extra screens were mostly smaller theaters with lower capacities, so the actual number of additional seats was closer to 50%.
Thanks for playing, though.
For crying out loud, Spiderman opened in almost *twice* the number of screens as Attack of the Clones! Lucas refused to let it show on *any* screen unless the cinema guaranteed it four weeks in that theater. So Lucas was jerk about distribution, and he paid for it. But when one film has almost 50% more seats available to it in the first week than another, you'd *expect* it to take more money. It's surprising AOTC did as well in comparison. But don't take it as some measure of Star Wars' failure.
I did the same thing on our NT SAM database a while back. 75% of all passwords fell in about five seconds. ;-)
Anything less than six characters, no matter what they are, goes so fast it's not even funny. Well, it is funny, but not in a good way.
We now have a password policy of 8 chars, letters and numbers, and we run cracks against them every so often to make sure folks are complying.
...someone would already have slapped an injunction on them under the DMCA. Wheeee!
In case you don't know, your standard, Microsoft software-based VPN solution makes an initial connection over TCP port 1723, then sends all encrypted traffic in IP:47 (Generic Routing Encapsulation?) packets. Completely seperate from your normal, TCP/UDP web games/https/ftp traffic.
GRE is used for pretty much nothing but PPTP / software VPN, and it's easy to filter at the router. They don't need to packet sniff to see if you, personally, are trying to use a VPN. They just block the lot.
I don't know if it's an axiom yet or not, but I firmly believe that the couple who games together, stays together. The Wife and I regularly play MUSHes, MMORPGs and other games together.
I've just found that it is vitally important that you both have equally-powered computers. I could only live for so long with "But your machine is more powerful than mine!" before I caved in and upgraded my belov'd Box'O'Fun. :-)
On top of that, we've had Latitudes (same series) that just die. One day : blam! No force on Earth can get the suckers to turn on. Fortunately for us, we chose the Next Business Day complete care policy. Since Dell has been called out around 100 times (at a guess) for 60 units in the last 18 months, I'm guessing that it's not a winning profit situation for them. :-)
That said, I'm pretty sure their repair techs are recycling motherboards that get pulled out of broken units, so they're not exactly helping the situation.
Back to the drawing board, folks. Nothing here to see. Literally. ;-)
They started blocking the Cambridge branch several days ago, according to my tests and my logs.
While such discourse is appropriate in some forums (say, perhaps, zdnet's Newbie Corner), it's perhaps a little below the bar for both /. and Newsforge.
Maybe there's some secret 'You post to my channel, I'll post to yours' backscratching going on amongst the VA Linux partners to drive up traffic. Hell, now they don't have a hardware business, the cash has to come from somewhere, right? ;-)
And we all know Taco astroturfs. ;-)
The early adopters, who want the absolute best, regardless of cost, will pay a premium.
Those who want to wait a while will get a price break as newer processors come to market.
Those who are on a budget buy the really cheap units that are flooding the channel.
It's called economics. Specifically, a little thing called 'supply and demand'. ;-)
One thing has changed, though : AMD has driven prices down across the board by having a credible alternative to Celeron/PIII. That's called competition. That's also simple Economics.
So, what was the point of this article again? :-)
In other news, Intel just got slapped by analysts for preparing another price war with AMD : this time over P4 market share. Looks like 50% reductions in the P4 1.8Ghz are on the cards for September....they wouldn't be doing that if AMD wasn't around.
[root@oberon httpd]# grep default.ida www.access_log | wc -l
94
[root@oberon httpd]# grep XXXXXXXXXX www.access_log | wc -l
4
[root@oberon httpd]# grep NNNNNNNNNN www.access_log | wc -l
90
And that 90's been in the last few hours. Yowza.
Anyway, my class-C's been scanned >200 times by CodeRedII infected clients in the last 90 minutes. Yay.
We're still talking about an IIS4/5/PWS vulnerability that just defaces the default web page and trys to propagate itself, right?
They'd sent Anthrax samples to the 15 or so facilities in the US that are capable of detecting the toxin, without telling them, to see if they'd detect it.
The vast majority of those facilities mis-diagnosed (I think it was 13?), mostly thru laziness.
So if there *was* an Anthrax outbreak in the US, the chances of the labs picking it up in a timely manner is VERY LOW INDEED.
Needless to say there's been some follow-up on this, but it's scary as all hell that the labs would miss Anthrax (even though I'm told it's similar to some very common germ - one of the streps, I think).
The smallpox vaccine is only good for a dozen years or so. We're ALL vulnerable to it, and there's nowhere near enough synthetic vaccine to make much of a difference. More is being made (big facility in the UK is gearing up) but we're a good six - ten years away from start of production.
And don't get me started on Anthrax...
That said, I popped in to work this weekend to upgrade my servers AV protections (liveupdate refuses to work on my email servers. grr.) and, sure enough, I've been averaging one infected document every two hours. So it's possible we'll see a whole host of fun come Monday, 9am, when all those folks who got infected emails over the weekend open them up...