-
Turns out that the electricity crisis triggered by the multiple tragedies in Japan is the result of never having fixed the standards duality in the power supply that arose from having two strong players in their market claiming their standard needed to be respected and instead of picking one, permitting the “two standards” oxymoron to survive.
-
Caterina (co-founder of Flickr) has an insightful take on the psychological game that social networking plays to get us addicted.
-
Here’s one of the reasons I’m not investing in Blu-Ray. In the name of addressing “piracy”, the movie industry is artificially crippling Blu-Ray so that its most loyal customers are repeatedly punished for buying it. Meanwhile, actual criminals who sell illegal copies of the movies are barely inconvenienced becuase they have access to the raw digital content. Digital restriction measures do nothing to protect the industry and simply harm customers.
-
I was kindly sent a copy of this report, and would warmly recommend it. The opening article, which is the subject of Cory’s item here, is full of discoveries (or at very least full of research-based support for the things I already believed).
-
Excellent (serious) visualisation of the amounts of radiation in the environment and their effects from xkcd. Full of discoveries, worth spending the time to study this.
Filed under: Links |
Wild Webmink 
Interesting links, Simon.
I bought a PlayStation 3 a couple of years ago. The main reason was to play around with the Cell BE, which I did for some time, interesting learning experience, I loved getting OpenJDK to run on Linux PS3…
The games were cool too, and the quality of the Blu Ray is amazing. I accumulated few titles, and decided that I would have not looked back at DVDs because the details of the visuals are so crazy that watching a DVD on an HD TV is like watching an old video cassette tape!
Life was fun and perfect, until Sony decided that Linux is a pirate thingy and that it had to be banned… Funny joke, considering that Sony imported the PS3 in Europe pretending it was a PC to save taxes…
I had to decide if continue to use my PS3 for Linux or being able to still watch my films and play my games… I decided for the games… Can you blame me for that?
I got a new computer, and moved in the meantime, so I left my PS3 at home, but kept the movies.
The machine I wanted was with Blue Ray only. Fine, I can watch Blue Rays on Linux isn’t it? Well, wrong… I own lots of titles, and can’t watch any!
I installed a tool called MakeMKV. It rips the Blue Ray disc and produces hight quality MKV ones. It doesn’t work well for streaming, so I need to decide a couple of hours before what Blue Ray I want to watch, but at least I’m able to access the content once stored on the disc. Burning the content back to a blue ray cost almost like buying again the original copy, so I have to store them on the hard drive and remove them from time to time…
I bought the license for this tool, it cost few euros but gave me back my freedom. It will be so until the Industry will kill those guys for providing a “pirate” tool, or they will revoke the keys of my player or something similar.
All this is funny, I could have been less nice and just download the movies from pirate bay or such, and never spent one cent in supporting this people, which is what I should have done probably. But I’m a nice guy, I keep telling people that the reason why we are so screwed up by the corporations is because we keep downloading stuff for free from the net. I’m old fashioned and I like the feeling of touching the labels, unpacking the boxes and so on. So I buy all my music and films, but I can’t access them.
I just wanted to share this funny story with you, but now I go back, need to leave the computer’s resources free, tonight I’m going to watch a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica 🙂
You probably meant “oxymoron”, not “tautology“.
Probably, yes 🙂 Thanks.