You may not be familiar with the term “release window”, but it’s the practice of delaying the release of (or never releasing) a product in a certain part of the world. It was first brought to my attention by DVDs—DVDs have a “region code” that is tied to players sold in each country. If you buy a DVD player or DVD in the United States or Canada, you most likely purchased a “Region 1” DVD. There are “Region ALL” discs that are allowed on any region player, but they’re somewhat rare. Your player must match the region code in order to play back that disc. So if you have a Region 1 player, you cannot play another country’s discs.

Lets say you live in the United States and decided to visit New Zealand. While you’re there you decide to purchase The Lord of the Rings on DVD. On the plane ride back to the States, you find your brand new DVD will not work in your laptop due to the region coding. Dumb.

There are a few reasons that the movie studios do this sort of segmentation, but one of the main reasons is to control what cost the market will bear, selling it for higher or lower prices in different regions of the world. Region codes also allow the movie studios to prevent release dates from being broken across countries; a film may come out in the U.S. earlier than say, China.

While I can understand why movie studios do this, it’s inherently stupid. When people have a demand for a product and the producers cannot supply that demand due to their artificial rules, some people are going to seek out alternate ways of getting that product. In DVD’s case, this means that people will buy “black market” discs or players to get around region coding, or go online and download the movie, etc..

Add in the news that two services I use, Netflix and RedBox, have made deals with a few movie studios to delay their films (up to a month) from being available on those services. I can’t totally fault Redbox and Netflix in this scenario because they are at the mercy of the movie studios, but this is ultimately bad for the consumer enitrely.

The reason for the delay? To try and encourage more DVD/Blu-Ray sales. This logic doesn’t make sense for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the reason I mentioned prior, causing consumers to seek out the material in other ways. Secondly, the movie studios are assuming that people want to buy these films on DVD/Blu-Ray in the first place. Let me fill you in on something, studios: most movies aren’t worth owning on DVD/Blu-Ray, and most people would rather rent than own!. Why do you think Redbox and Netflix have had such successful businesses?

I personally won’t be turning to sketchy methods to get my films; I’ll just wait the 30 days. But it’s important to send a message to the studios that these sort of artificial markets are not going to be tolerated for long by the consumers. With the transition to more digital means of getting our films (through Netflix streaming, Amazon Video on Demand, Zune Video Marketplace, etc.) the movie studios seem to be living in the past; they want to stick to the old mentality of trying to force the consumer to buy media in a package/format they don’t want. I think they’ll find it isn’t going to work. At least not for long.

In case you’re wondering, it’s a remix of Nina Simone – Sinnerman, found on the Verve Remixed, Vol 2 album. I picked up the album (actually the first three Verve Remixed albums) and they’re all excellent. Especially “Speak Low (Bent Remix)” by Billie Holiday found on Vol 3.

Revealing the backside of War Machine.. looks sweet!

I think this comment over at Engadget says it best:

We don't hate on Macs, we hate on the stupid arguments that are put forth by the Apple faithful, and their derision of anything non-Apple.

We hate the arguments that somehow Apple gives you better quality hardware for the higher prices, when the hardware is the same as any Windows computer.

We hate the arguments that Microsoft is evil for some reason, but when Apple does the same, it is perfectly fine (e.g. activation of Windows vs. activation of an iPhone, or how Intel had unique identifiers in their chips accessible by software, but when they do the same in the iPhone - not a problem).

We hate the arguments that Microsoft is evil when 10 year old hardware is not supported (such as when Vista was released), but when Apple cuts suppoprt for 3 year old printers in Leopard, it is the user's fault for not owning the latest hardware.

We hate the arguments that problems with 3rd party hardware drivers it is the fault of Microsoft, but when Apple has problems with 3rd party hardware drivers, it is the hardware manufacturer's fault.

We hate the arguments that Apple never has any problems, but when a problem appears (such as not being able to activate a phone for hours), the user is at fault for not knowing the proper way of using a Mac, just plain stupid, or hate.

We hate the arguments when Microsoft services go down for an hour or two (such as Zune last week), it is said Microsoft provides horrible service and it is a Engadget front page mockery of Microsoft. But when iTunes goes down (http://www.tuaw.com/2009/07/07/itunes-store-and-app-store-problems/) nothing is said, and it really is not a problem.

We hate the argument that before the iPhone, the number of applications available for a platform does not make a difference, it is the quality of the software. After the iPhone is released, all that matters is the number of applications available.

We hate the argument that somehow Apple hardware will last forever, but other computers last only a year or two (this argument is used in this very article). I am typing on a 5 year old Dell laptop, how long does an iPod last?

We hate the argument that somehow Microsoft limits user choioce, when many people use non-Microsoft products. But when Apple limits choice (such as installing alternative browsers on an iPhone), it is in the user's best interest.

We hate the arguments that Microsoft keeps control over their products, but you need to jump through hoops just to develop for the iPhone.

We hate the arguments that Microsoft releases poor products that do not work and you need to wait for SP2 for it to be useful, is MobileMe working yet?

We hate the arguments that Microsoft does not deliver what was promised, Apple is just now delivering push notification - a year after it was promised.

We hate how some say everything was invented, created, designed, or innovated by Apple first, and everybody creates cheap knock-offs of Apple, when there is proof of it being done years before by other companies.

We hate the arguments that products such as Tablets, Netbooks, etc. are useless crap, but rumored products such as the Apple Tablet, or Netbook will be the savior of man.

We hate the argument that somehow opening a store, something that has existed for 1000s of years since somebody found they could trade a basket of vegetables for a chicken, is an Apple creation, and from now on no other company is permitted to open stores.

And, among the many others (but the last I will list), we hate the argument that somehow Apple is allowed to air commercials that lie about Microsoft and Apple's own products, but when Microsoft airs commercials that are true (a Windows computer is lower priced than an Apple computer), somehow Microsoft is evil and must stop now.

So no, we do not hate Apple - I have a Mac, an iPod, and iPhone. We just get sick of the pathetic fanboys who attack anybody who do not drink the kool-aid and do not give glowing reviews of anything Apple.

If you use the online financial service Mint, and you also have a Chase account, you may (or may not) have noticed that for the past 5-6 days Mint cannot pull in your Chase account data.

Mint has posted information in their forums regarding the issue:

Chase was down this weekend and Checking/Savings and Chase Loan are now working again. However, we do have a problem with Chase Credit and our data provider is actively working to resolve this. Sorry for the frustration this is causing.

They say the Checking/Savings stuff should be back up, but at least for me it’s not. I have no idea what is going on, but it’s just giving me another reason to ditch Chase. First reason being my paychecks “pending” for days in my account. We’ll see what happens, but I’m guessing within the next few weeks, my wife and I will be migrating to a different bank.

Disney has finally released all three posters for Tim Burton’s new “Alice in Wonderland” adaptation. If you place them all side by side they make one large poster, so I’ve provided both formats below. Enjoy!

Update: Fixed the links to the full-size images. Sorry!

Have you ever tired to access the administrative (C$, D$, etc) shares on a Vista or Windows 7 machine, and even though you’re using an account that has access, it won’t let you in? Usually says, “Access Denied”. Well, this post is for you.

I run into the problem myself sometimes, forgetting that by default, if UAC (User Account Control) is enabled under Windows Vista/Windows 7, it doesn’t allow access to the admin shares. You have to add a registry key then reboot to enable them (basically making them work like they did before).

To manually add this registry key, visit the following path using REGEDIT:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

In that folder, create a new DWORD item with a value of “1”, and name it “LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy”. Reboot your computer and you should now be able to access administrative shares remotely.

If you’d rather just double-click on a .REG file and import it into your registry, I’ve provided that below. Hope this helps out at least one other person!

Download EnableAdminShares.zip

You might have come across this problem in your travels, I know I have. Basically if you’re using jQuery UI’s Dialog and have a <form runat=”server”> inside of that dialog, your postback is not going to work. What’s going on?

jQuery UI is taking the dialog DIV content and moving it outside of the <form runat=”server”> tag. This makes your postback no longer function as expected.

Luckily we can fix this fairly easily with jQuery itself.

var dlg = $('#divMyDialog').dialog({
                    autoOpen: false,
                    modal: true,
                    width: 400,
                    resizable: false,
                    overlay: {
                        background: "black",
                        opacity: 0.5    
                    }
                });
dlg.parent().appendTo(jQuery('form:first'));

The special logic lies in the last line—using the reference to our created dialog, we get the parent container and move it back to the first <form> on the page. After that, all is well.

I forgot to point out that it comes with a little remote for your steering wheel that worked great. Enjoy my first video review.

If you’ve used ASP.Net for any amount of time, you quickly realize how much it loves to dump into the viewstate. Now, I’m not claiming I’m a saint in this area, but I have been learning as I go to recognize what operations will fill the viewstate and work to prevent them.

One trick I learned recently is to re-bind your DropDownList on every postback, inside of the DropDownList’s Init event handler. You can also pull in the postback value from the Request.Form collection and set the DropDownList’s SelectedValue to what it should be. Observe the following example:

Protected Sub ddlMyDropDownList_Init(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles ddlMyDropDownList.Init
    Dim db = New MyDataContext()

    Dim q = From s In db.States _
            Order By s.StateName _
            Select New ListItem(s.StateName, s.StateAbbrev)

    ddlMyDropDownList.Items.AddRange(q.ToArray())

    Dim r = Request(ddlMyDropDownList.UniqueID)
    If r IsNot Nothing Then ddlMyDropDownList.SelectedValue = r
End Sub

Don’t forget to set “EnableViewState=False” on your DropDownList.