If you have 6GB (or more, such as 20GB which can be had with the PJB-100 or NEO 25) you don't need a computer to change the media either, since you don't need to change the media. The unit can hold your complete music collection. That is the decisive advantage of these devices.
I know they are expensive for now, and thus as a trade-off one might rather go for CD-based MP3 players. But I'm sure that for those that can afford it, and in the future for everyone, HDD based MP3 players are the way to go.
It is distributed by the same company, but has completely different origins (i.e. not Compaq research like the PJB). Thus, the Linux SDK for the PJB won't work for the Treoplayer. If one ever appears remains to be seen.
On paper it has the same characteristics as the PJB, but is cheaper. Shorter battery life though.
One of the strong points of the PJB is it's excelent sound quality, even if you connect it to a hifi installation the difference at 128kbps is hardly and at 192kbps is not audible. This cannot be said from any other MP3 player (due to excellent encoding/decoding from Fraunhofer and to good D/A components in the player).
Whether the Treoplayer matches this quality remains to be seen; I think not (it won't be cheaper for nothing, even when sold by the same company). But if you're patient, you might want to wait until it is on the market to see how it really compares to the PJB.
I was looking for screenshots on the website. Since it's so visual I assumed there must be graphical examples etc. But I could not find anything. The whole website only contains text and formulas.
In fact, I've seldom seen a website since 1994 that contains so little images as this one (not a single). The author must be a very non-visual, text oriented person.
Whether the code is light or not, is not that important these days (maybe fvwm is somewhat faster, but still twm is not exactly bloated either).
More important: the look&feel of twm is light. There are no large borders, no 3D effects, no taskbars, menues, icons everywhere taking up valuable space on your screen.
I use twm 6-8 hours a day, I tried many (all) other window manager the last 12 years but I always come back to twm. It is the ideal window manager that does exactly what a window manager has to do: manage windows, no more and no less.
Using keybindings (if you want) you can work very fast and switch between windows etc. Btw., should you give it a try, then don't forget the icon manager! It replaces the need for icons (disable icons) and you get a kind of taskbar (but better) where you can open/iconize apps and switch the input focus between them. Once you're used to it, you won't settle for less. In fact the lack of a similar icon manager in any other window manager has been the reason for me to return to twm each time.
For transport and temp. storage, use a CD R/W, you can reuse it.
Backup: must be reliable, otherwise you might as well not make a backup. What is the point in backing up to a media that is even less reliable as harddisk. It is beyond me why people ever made backups to floppy or zip etc. The only sensible backup are CD-R or (good) tapestreamers.
With todays >40GB HDD's, CD-R doesn't make much sense for backup (let alone ZIP disks), you need at least tapes that store >10GB.
.NET runtime can only be installed on MSFT platforms, the JVM can be installed everywhere in principle.
JVM spec is published, thus you see JVM implementations from different makers, all executing the same Java classes. Yes, Sun does not (and cannot) support each platform in existance, but you yourself could (given time and intellectual capabilities) implement a JVM for any platform you like.
In contrast,.NET runtime is not an open spec (the parts that are open depend on non-open things that are only available for the MSFT platforms), thus it is impossible for anyone but MSFT to make a.NET implementation for a random platform. I consider this to be a crucial difference.
Are you mad? Most users access a SUN box via X-window over the network; not many sit behind one, and those that do use it to access (GUI) programs from other Unix boxes via X too. The Window-system must be network based and compatible to the rest of the (UNIX) world. Face it, X is there to stay and still exists long after Corba has been forgotten.
Please, don't transplant your limited Linux/Gnome world to everyhwere else.
It is extremely unfair to compare Sun to Microsoft w.r.t open standards. Yes Sun may not be saints, and they may not be doing exactly what you want (you have not bought the company I think), but at least they use open standards where possible (without embraced and extend policies) and when they make something new they publicize the (real, full) specs at least, and sometimes even give the source code.
I'd give Debian a try, but only when it has FreeBSD's unique update system, called cvsup.
Really, read a bit on cvsup, and you'll see how apt-thing is a pale shadow of it. Nothing comes close to cvsup w.r.t ease of use for keeping the whole OS up-to-date.
Is a (huge) improvement to the UFS filesystem, combining performance of asynchronous (metadata) writes with reliability of synchronous.
Linux has asynchronous metadata writes, deemed unreliable by most other UNIX vendors (on a crash, you can loose your filesystem or get inconsistencies). Others use either journalling filesystems (fast) or synchronous (but slower)
FreeBSD OTOH has synchronous metadata writes, or Softupdates which does a reordering of writes such that sudden power loss, even when not all writes have been synced to disk, the filesystem status is guaranteed to be consistent.
As a good side-effect, this makes fsck orders of magnitute faster. Just try fsck on a 40GB ext2fs filesystem and compare with a 40Gb UFS+softupdates filesystem.
Though technically different, softupdates somewhat behaves like a journalling filesystem. When (if?) Linux finally gets a journalling filesystem it might enjoy the same filesystem performance/reliability that FreeBSD already has.
With more developers, Linux will progress at a faster rate than the BSD's. That's not to say the BSD's won't.
Practice shows it isn't.
More developers does not imply faster development! First, please make a difference between developers on kernel, tools, apps.
Most apps and tools are easily portable, so apps made for Linux appear as a FreeBSD port (KDE, GNOME, whatever).
Kernel: A single highly complex piece of software cannot use unlimited numbers of developers. Especially when/if it is not neatly modularized (like the Linux kernel is not), developers will get in their way, break each others' code etc. Adding more developers will even slow rate of progress.
What is more important is not the # of developers (well, you need a minimum amount, and both Linux and FreeBSD satisfy that condition) but the structure/organization and cleanlyness of the code. Messy code leads to difficult maintenance and overview, leading to slow development with lots of bugs. It decreases the # of developers that effectively work on it.
It is good if your code ends up in Windows. Sooner or later, you'll find a security problem in your code, you quickly fix it for FreeBSD, but the backdoor will be in windows for ages to come.
Very inefficient. For every single file, a grep process is forked/execd.
xargs was created for this: it will gather the maximum (system dependant) number of arguments from stdin, then fork/exec the process with all arguments.
Say your find finds 10000 files, and there is room for about 1000 arguments on the command line, then your variant will start grep 10000 times, whereas find . | xargs grep will start grep only 10 times.
Luckily, these remarks don't apply to many other countries. In most european countries 'health plans' are no issue, since empoyers don't ever have anything to do with health (everyone takes a health insurance for about $150 a month himself, low income get subsidies for that).
Paid sick days etc: In all countries I know you are (automatically, and obligatory) insured for sickness up to one year (that is, one year you can be sick) for 80-100% of your last income, after that you get into disability insurance.
So, maybe for the US contract work is not for people with a family, but for me (holland, switzerland) with a non-working wive and two small kids it is no problem and has absolutely no risks or drawbacks compared to a regular job.
Yes, of the rate the customer pays you pay 20% in social security (mandatory), but for that you get:
sickness insurance
pension plan
disability insurance
income insurance (if you get out of a job, or in between two jobs, you get 80% of last income for a while)
accident insurance
when the income insurance expires, there is a minimum allowance (for everyone, whether you have been insured or not) to stay alive, eat and have some place to live in.
If you don't work through an agency you can skip some of these, but it would be very unwise to do so.
As an employee you pay only 10% (the other half is paidd for by the employer), so contrcting, while earning double or more, costs 10% extra, still leaving at minimum 90% increase without much risk.
I keep wondering why not most computer people here go contracting. The Swiss (and europeans in general) are very risk avoiding, that may be the cause. The thought of being out of work for a while and not being able to find something new (one must be very bad in these times not to find something) scares them so much.
One big drawback: as a contractor you don't make any management career internally in a company. If that is what you want, and you believe you can achieve that, it may be better to be patient. In the end when and if you become a high level manager, you'd earn more than as a contractor.
Prepare for a 30, 60, or 90 day billing cycle. This means the work you did in January will result in a check sometime in March. Part of what an agency can give you is the regular pay. They absorb the cycle
If you use an agency (W-2), expect them to keep 30% or more
Wise advice, most of it also applies to Europe, where I am a contractor (a dutch living in Switzerland). But the two points above I have a question about:
If you work through an agency in the US, do you still have that 60 or even 90 day billing cycle?!? Here, if you go through an agency the agency pays you regularly (monthly) and they are responsible to see they get the money from the client (i.e. I am on their payroll). Every month I report my # of hours, and within 10 days I get the money transferred. That is what you pay your percentage to the agency for (among others).
30% for the agency, that is gross. I pay 25%, but that includes mandatory social security and pension, so effectively I pay about 10-15% to the agency. In Switzerland working via an agency is mandatory for foreigners b.t.w. since you can't have a business of your own the first 5-10 years.
I very much prefer to work via an agency anyways, since you have to hassle with tax, insurances (all usual pension and social security is arranged for), bookkeeping etc. Even if it costs up to 20%, I think it is worth it. I'm a software engineer/architect, not a bookkeeper!
This tradeoff may be very location dependent however, I could imagine that in the US it makes less sense to use an agency.
but there is a problem -- the shareholding model leaves no one morally responsible
Only if "shareholder value" is all that counts.
For me, it is one of the things that count, but other things are employee wellbeing, customer wellbeing (not only as a means to increase shareholder value, but also as a goal in itself) and value for society as a whole.
For exactly this reason, many european countries have laws that make it mandatory that a company has a "company council" in which are represented the owners, the management, the employees and also civil organisations. This creates a balance between shareholder value and the other reasons of existence for companies.
The only reason for using Windows is playing (3D) games, and Wine isnt't too good at that, so forget about it.
Indeed VMWare is too expensive.
What I do? I run Windows on my gaming machine, for stupid stuff and games, and access my "real" machine running BSD via X-window. The ideal combination of two worlds for me.
OSX won't be a 'threat', since it requires (expensive and closed) mac hardware, and it doesn't bring real advantages w.r.t. the only thing that windows is good for: gameplay.
If they can get the same quality mp3(pro) in 64 kbit that today takes 128 kbit, then those limited memory MP3 players (often only 64MB, just enough for an hour music) can hold twice as much music. That seems a big advantage to me.
The flash memory used by MP3 players is expensive enough to make smaller size at same quality very useful.
UFS on FreeBSD hasn't stood still for 10 years (a.o. softupdates). As a benchmark freak I compared UFS with ext2fs numerous times with numerous benchmarks on numerous disks (SCSI, EIDE) the last years, and UFS is definately faster in all respects (meta-updates, random access, sequential access, concurrent access).
I can't comment on reiserfs, JFS, XFS nor on ext3, but compared to Linux's standard filesystem, ext2fs, FreeBSD wins easily.
Not silly at all, though it wouldn't be stated that obviously. There are blockades going on all the time. At the moment it is about beef (with hormones, which the EU doesn't want but US claims it is only a protective measure), bananas, and countermeasures, and countermeasures on that.
If you would read some (non-US?) papers you would know that global trade is a war going on. And the US is, to put it mildly, not one of the most peaceloving nations in that respect. It uses it's (trade)power to support US domestic industry, at expense of foreign and consumer interests.
US restricts imports from state subsidized foreign companies (which is OK), but at the same time gives special tax cuts for US based companies exports (which is also state subsidizing).
In this context: the US pushes more and more strict copyright and IP laws through, everywere around the world. Almost all pushes towards more stringent Intellectual Property protection, software patents etc come after US pressure. Since they know that most profitors of IP and copyright protection (i.e. media content providers, software producers etc) are located in the US, thus US gains and the rest looses from stricter protection in these areas.
I am very sure that if, say, China would have the worlds major software producers, that the US would not at all be so eager to get more and more stringent IP protection laws such as the DMCA, crazy patent system etc.
Thus, I would not be surprised at all if a future US government would impose trade restrictions upon states that do not enforce the DVD zoning mechanism.
Most shops selling or renting DVDs in Switzerland have about 25% region 1 DVD's, the rest being region 2. This only shows how common it is to have multiregion DVD players.
Btw there is a small difference between multiregion and regionfree: Multiregion means it switches to a region, in a way the DVD cannot "see" it. Some DVD's don't play in regionfree players, but multiregion cannot be defeated (should it not work automatically you can always set the region manually).
Most region free players sold here (Switzerland) also have the option to manually set the region, making it look 100% like a region 1 player, or a region 4 or whatever. This is exactly meant to play such DVD's (they already exist for a while).
The biggest risk is the DVD manufacturers being forced to make DVD players where the zoning is harder (impossible?) to crack. If they don't cooperate they might loose their license to produce them.
OTOH, with prices of players dropping, and also portable DVD players becoming more widespread, you might just buy one or two extra DVD players abroad to get the missing zones. Maybe in the future we'll all have 3 DVD players because of this crazy zoning scheme.
Unless the DVD Mafia even gets to control worldwide trade there's not much they can do about that. Once they try that, politicians might finally realise what bunch of criminals they have been supporting.
So then America would have to blackmail the rest of the world again, threatening with trade war if others (Australia, Europe) don't do as the USA wishes, in order to protect US domestic industry.
This has happened time after time, sometimes with success. It is to be hoped that such an anti-consumer measure as DVD zoning, and US backing of that (with threats and blackmail) would get so much negative public attention in the rest of the world that these maffia practices will no longer be accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?!? According to dmusic.com it's the worst one. Have you actually looked into any of the others?
I know they are expensive for now, and thus as a trade-off one might rather go for CD-based MP3 players. But I'm sure that for those that can afford it, and in the future for everyone, HDD based MP3 players are the way to go.
It is distributed by the same company, but has completely different origins (i.e. not Compaq research like the PJB). Thus, the Linux SDK for the PJB won't work for the Treoplayer. If one ever appears remains to be seen.
On paper it has the same characteristics as the PJB, but is cheaper. Shorter battery life though.
One of the strong points of the PJB is it's excelent sound quality, even if you connect it to a hifi installation the difference at 128kbps is hardly and at 192kbps is not audible. This cannot be said from any other MP3 player (due to excellent encoding/decoding from Fraunhofer and to good D/A components in the player).
Whether the Treoplayer matches this quality remains to be seen; I think not (it won't be cheaper for nothing, even when sold by the same company). But if you're patient, you might want to wait until it is on the market to see how it really compares to the PJB.
In fact, I've seldom seen a website since 1994 that contains so little images as this one (not a single). The author must be a very non-visual, text oriented person.
More important: the look&feel of twm is light. There are no large borders, no 3D effects, no taskbars, menues, icons everywhere taking up valuable space on your screen.
I use twm 6-8 hours a day, I tried many (all) other window manager the last 12 years but I always come back to twm. It is the ideal window manager that does exactly what a window manager has to do: manage windows, no more and no less.
Using keybindings (if you want) you can work very fast and switch between windows etc. Btw., should you give it a try, then don't forget the icon manager! It replaces the need for icons (disable icons) and you get a kind of taskbar (but better) where you can open/iconize apps and switch the input focus between them. Once you're used to it, you won't settle for less. In fact the lack of a similar icon manager in any other window manager has been the reason for me to return to twm each time.
Backup: must be reliable, otherwise you might as well not make a backup. What is the point in backing up to a media that is even less reliable as harddisk. It is beyond me why people ever made backups to floppy or zip etc. The only sensible backup are CD-R or (good) tapestreamers.
With todays >40GB HDD's, CD-R doesn't make much sense for backup (let alone ZIP disks), you need at least tapes that store >10GB.
JVM spec is published, thus you see JVM implementations from different makers, all executing the same Java classes. Yes, Sun does not (and cannot) support each platform in existance, but you yourself could (given time and intellectual capabilities) implement a JVM for any platform you like.
In contrast, .NET runtime is not an open spec (the parts that are open depend on non-open things that are only available for the MSFT platforms), thus it is impossible for anyone but MSFT to make a .NET implementation for a random platform. I consider this to be a crucial difference.
Please, don't transplant your limited Linux/Gnome world to everyhwere else.
It is extremely unfair to compare Sun to Microsoft w.r.t open standards. Yes Sun may not be saints, and they may not be doing exactly what you want (you have not bought the company I think), but at least they use open standards where possible (without embraced and extend policies) and when they make something new they publicize the (real, full) specs at least, and sometimes even give the source code.
I'd give Debian a try, but only when it has FreeBSD's unique update system, called cvsup.
Really, read a bit on cvsup, and you'll see how apt-thing is a pale shadow of it. Nothing comes close to cvsup w.r.t ease of use for keeping the whole OS up-to-date.
Linux has asynchronous metadata writes, deemed unreliable by most other UNIX vendors (on a crash, you can loose your filesystem or get inconsistencies). Others use either journalling filesystems (fast) or synchronous (but slower)
FreeBSD OTOH has synchronous metadata writes, or Softupdates which does a reordering of writes such that sudden power loss, even when not all writes have been synced to disk, the filesystem status is guaranteed to be consistent.
As a good side-effect, this makes fsck orders of magnitute faster. Just try fsck on a 40GB ext2fs filesystem and compare with a 40Gb UFS+softupdates filesystem.
Though technically different, softupdates somewhat behaves like a journalling filesystem. When (if?) Linux finally gets a journalling filesystem it might enjoy the same filesystem performance/reliability that FreeBSD already has.
Practice shows it isn't.
More developers does not imply faster development! First, please make a difference between developers on kernel, tools, apps.
Most apps and tools are easily portable, so apps made for Linux appear as a FreeBSD port (KDE, GNOME, whatever).
Kernel: A single highly complex piece of software cannot use unlimited numbers of developers. Especially when/if it is not neatly modularized (like the Linux kernel is not), developers will get in their way, break each others' code etc. Adding more developers will even slow rate of progress.
What is more important is not the # of developers (well, you need a minimum amount, and both Linux and FreeBSD satisfy that condition) but the structure/organization and cleanlyness of the code. Messy code leads to difficult maintenance and overview, leading to slow development with lots of bugs. It decreases the # of developers that effectively work on it.
It is good if your code ends up in Windows. Sooner or later, you'll find a security problem in your code, you quickly fix it for FreeBSD, but the backdoor will be in windows for ages to come.
This was not a matter of not enough testing.
It was a matter of simply taking a partition ID number for their own purposes, an ID that was already allocated (to FreeBSD).
Just as bad as installing a new network node with an IP address that was already taken.
Very inefficient. For every single file, a grep process is forked/execd.
xargs was created for this: it will gather the maximum (system dependant) number of arguments from stdin, then fork/exec the process with all arguments.
Say your find finds 10000 files, and there is room for about 1000 arguments on the command line, then your variant will start grep 10000 times, whereas find . | xargs grep will start grep only 10 times.
Paid sick days etc: In all countries I know you are (automatically, and obligatory) insured for sickness up to one year (that is, one year you can be sick) for 80-100% of your last income, after that you get into disability insurance.
So, maybe for the US contract work is not for people with a family, but for me (holland, switzerland) with a non-working wive and two small kids it is no problem and has absolutely no risks or drawbacks compared to a regular job.
Yes, of the rate the customer pays you pay 20% in social security (mandatory), but for that you get:
- sickness insurance
- pension plan
- disability insurance
- income insurance (if you get out of a job, or in between two jobs, you get 80% of last income for a while)
- accident insurance
- when the income insurance expires, there is a minimum allowance (for everyone, whether you have been insured or not) to stay alive, eat and have some place to live in.
If you don't work through an agency you can skip some of these, but it would be very unwise to do so.As an employee you pay only 10% (the other half is paidd for by the employer), so contrcting, while earning double or more, costs 10% extra, still leaving at minimum 90% increase without much risk.
I keep wondering why not most computer people here go contracting. The Swiss (and europeans in general) are very risk avoiding, that may be the cause. The thought of being out of work for a while and not being able to find something new (one must be very bad in these times not to find something) scares them so much.
One big drawback: as a contractor you don't make any management career internally in a company. If that is what you want, and you believe you can achieve that, it may be better to be patient. In the end when and if you become a high level manager, you'd earn more than as a contractor.
- Prepare for a 30, 60, or 90 day billing cycle. This means the work you did in January will result in a check sometime in March. Part of what an agency can give you is the regular pay. They absorb the cycle
- If you use an agency (W-2), expect them to keep 30% or more
Wise advice, most of it also applies to Europe, where I am a contractor (a dutch living in Switzerland). But the two points above I have a question about:If you work through an agency in the US, do you still have that 60 or even 90 day billing cycle?!? Here, if you go through an agency the agency pays you regularly (monthly) and they are responsible to see they get the money from the client (i.e. I am on their payroll). Every month I report my # of hours, and within 10 days I get the money transferred. That is what you pay your percentage to the agency for (among others).
30% for the agency, that is gross. I pay 25%, but that includes mandatory social security and pension, so effectively I pay about 10-15% to the agency. In Switzerland working via an agency is mandatory for foreigners b.t.w. since you can't have a business of your own the first 5-10 years.
I very much prefer to work via an agency anyways, since you have to hassle with tax, insurances (all usual pension and social security is arranged for), bookkeeping etc. Even if it costs up to 20%, I think it is worth it. I'm a software engineer/architect, not a bookkeeper!
This tradeoff may be very location dependent however, I could imagine that in the US it makes less sense to use an agency.
Only if "shareholder value" is all that counts.
For me, it is one of the things that count, but other things are employee wellbeing, customer wellbeing (not only as a means to increase shareholder value, but also as a goal in itself) and value for society as a whole.
For exactly this reason, many european countries have laws that make it mandatory that a company has a "company council" in which are represented the owners, the management, the employees and also civil organisations. This creates a balance between shareholder value and the other reasons of existence for companies.
Because there is no CDROM nor a floppy drive.
Thus, you'd have to take out the harddisk, install it somewhere else, then put it back in.
The only reason for using Windows is playing (3D) games, and Wine isnt't too good at that, so forget about it.
Indeed VMWare is too expensive.
What I do? I run Windows on my gaming machine, for stupid stuff and games, and access my "real" machine running BSD via X-window. The ideal combination of two worlds for me.
OSX won't be a 'threat', since it requires (expensive and closed) mac hardware, and it doesn't bring real advantages w.r.t. the only thing that windows is good for: gameplay.
If they can get the same quality mp3(pro) in 64 kbit that today takes 128 kbit, then those limited memory MP3 players (often only 64MB, just enough for an hour music) can hold twice as much music. That seems a big advantage to me.
The flash memory used by MP3 players is expensive enough to make smaller size at same quality very useful.
UFS on FreeBSD hasn't stood still for 10 years (a.o. softupdates). As a benchmark freak I compared UFS with ext2fs numerous times with numerous benchmarks on numerous disks (SCSI, EIDE) the last years, and UFS is definately faster in all respects (meta-updates, random access, sequential access, concurrent access).
I can't comment on reiserfs, JFS, XFS nor on ext3, but compared to Linux's standard filesystem, ext2fs, FreeBSD wins easily.
Not silly at all, though it wouldn't be stated that obviously. There are blockades going on all the time. At the moment it is about beef (with hormones, which the EU doesn't want but US claims it is only a protective measure), bananas, and countermeasures, and countermeasures on that.
If you would read some (non-US?) papers you would know that global trade is a war going on. And the US is, to put it mildly, not one of the most peaceloving nations in that respect. It uses it's (trade)power to support US domestic industry, at expense of foreign and consumer interests.
US restricts imports from state subsidized foreign companies (which is OK), but at the same time gives special tax cuts for US based companies exports (which is also state subsidizing).
In this context: the US pushes more and more strict copyright and IP laws through, everywere around the world. Almost all pushes towards more stringent Intellectual Property protection, software patents etc come after US pressure. Since they know that most profitors of IP and copyright protection (i.e. media content providers, software producers etc) are located in the US, thus US gains and the rest looses from stricter protection in these areas.
I am very sure that if, say, China would have the worlds major software producers, that the US would not at all be so eager to get more and more stringent IP protection laws such as the DMCA, crazy patent system etc.
Thus, I would not be surprised at all if a future US government would impose trade restrictions upon states that do not enforce the DVD zoning mechanism.
Most shops selling or renting DVDs in Switzerland have about 25% region 1 DVD's, the rest being region 2. This only shows how common it is to have multiregion DVD players.
Btw there is a small difference between multiregion and regionfree: Multiregion means it switches to a region, in a way the DVD cannot "see" it. Some DVD's don't play in regionfree players, but multiregion cannot be defeated (should it not work automatically you can always set the region manually).
Most region free players sold here (Switzerland) also have the option to manually set the region, making it look 100% like a region 1 player, or a region 4 or whatever. This is exactly meant to play such DVD's (they already exist for a while).
The biggest risk is the DVD manufacturers being forced to make DVD players where the zoning is harder (impossible?) to crack. If they don't cooperate they might loose their license to produce them.
OTOH, with prices of players dropping, and also portable DVD players becoming more widespread, you might just buy one or two extra DVD players abroad to get the missing zones. Maybe in the future we'll all have 3 DVD players because of this crazy zoning scheme.
Unless the DVD Mafia even gets to control worldwide trade there's not much they can do about that. Once they try that, politicians might finally realise what bunch of criminals they have been supporting.
So then America would have to blackmail the rest of the world again, threatening with trade war if others (Australia, Europe) don't do as the USA wishes, in order to protect US domestic industry.
This has happened time after time, sometimes with success. It is to be hoped that such an anti-consumer measure as DVD zoning, and US backing of that (with threats and blackmail) would get so much negative public attention in the rest of the world that these maffia practices will no longer be accepted.