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.

1. I don’t know why our government feels the need to waste the money, but it seems we’ve exhausted our 1+ billion dollar budget for DTV coupons already. I ask myself: why is the government funding people getting digital television converters in the first place?
2. If you are getting your television from the cable company (like most people I know), then you DO NOT NEED A DTV CONVERTER.
3. If you have a box from your cable company, you DO NOT NEED A DTV CONVERTER.
4. If you have a newer TV capable of receiving OTA (over the air) digital channels, you DO NOT NEED A DTV CONVERTER.

However…

If you are using rabbit ears, or an antenna on your roof or something, you WILL need a DTV converter.

However…

There’s no guarantees you’ll be able to get much of anything. Some stations are broadcasting digital signals from different towers than the analog signals, so your antenna may need to be pointed in an entirely different direction, or it simply may not work any longer. Your mileage may vary.

If you’ve got a 30 gig Zune like me, you may have woke up this morning to find this:

It appears I’m not alone. Gizmodo is reporting that all 30 gig Zunes have apparently “failed” today. I’m guessing it’s a firmware/software bug (with 3.1). It’s pretty funny if you think about. Oh, nevermind, I guess it’s not.

Microsoft has this on their support page:

Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!

So there is hope, my friends. I’ll keep you posted.

Update: Microsoft has said that the problem will fix itself if you let the battery drain and reconnect/recharge it tomorrow, after 4am PST. Lame solution, but better than nothing I guess.

Xobni (inbox backwards) is an add-on for Outlook that seems to fill in all the missing spaces that Microsoft forgot about:

Looks pretty spiffy. I really want to get into the beta, and you probably do too if you use Outlook. Click this link to check it out:

I’m sorry I rant so much, but these things are really upsetting me lately. Maybe you can relate to some of the topics?

Dell – A friend of mine, Nicole, brought me her Dell laptop to take a look at, since it will no longer boot. I figure it’s a bad hard drive.. the signs point to that, so I order a drive and stick it in, preparing to reinstall Windows. System can’t find the drive.. or wait, it can, oh wait.. it can’t. It randomly just doesn’t see the hard drive. I check online, and find that the world pretty much agrees that the Dell Inspiron 5150 is the crappiest model of laptop to ever roam this earth, plagued with engineering flaws that cause chips to crack, the CPU to overheat (2), and power plugs to short out. This led to Dell getting a class-action lawsuit brought against them, and them losing. As part of the settlement, they must pay for repairs up until Sept. 30th, 2007.

Now, Nicole’s already had the motherboard replaced by a tech once before, sent the laptop in for repair, had yet another motherboard replacement, a power adapter replacement, etc… and it’s still not working right. I had her speak to Dell again and get another motherboard. They say they can’t send one at first, citing some policy that once a motherboard’s been sent out, they can’t send out another (what?!) but the tech eventually agrees to send one out. They receive it the next day, and I examine it. The “new” board is actually refurbished from 2005 and looks terrible. I decide to swap it out anyway, and what do you know? It doesn’t work.

I’ve heard that some people have had luck e-mailing the “Customer Advocate” team at Dell (Customer_Advocate@Dell.com) and I did e-mail them six days ago, but haven’t heard a peep. I’m e-mailing them back tonight and asking for them to at least respond. I’m seriously doubting they’ll bother responding back.

Microsoft/Windows Vista – I had to completely re-install Vista two days ago, because SQL Management Studio stopped connecting to servers. Just straight up would not connect to any server anymore. Just gave me a generic fatal network error message. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, cleaning out the registry, deleting files, etc… just couldn’t get it to work. And seeing as SQL Management Studio is pretty much a requirement to do my job, I had to reinstall everything to get it working again. Ugh.

Then, I decided to upgrade my laptop’s hard drive and memory, since I had skimped on it before, but now that I use it for work, I need it to be much faster. Bought a 100 gig 7200 RPM laptop hard drive and two gigabytes of RAM. Put the new hard drive in, and Vista says it’s now deactivated. What?!

Maybe you know that I’ve had problems with Vista’s lame activation in the past. How about the time I put in a soundcard? Or the time I reinstalled Vista (after having it installed for months beforehand?) Now I get it for installing a hard drive. Of course I have to call, read off a number to a guy in India, and then he reads me back another code, and I’m activated again. What a waste of my time.. and there was really no reason to get “deactivated” in the first place.

Microsoft/XBox 360 – My XBox 360 recently started getting the red rings of death. It wasn’t so bad at first, but then it got ridiculous, locking up like 20 minutes into a DVD, etc… so I decided to send it in. The first call, I spent about an hour waiting and talking to a tech, leading me through troubleshooting steps (which obviously aren’t going to fix the red rings problem.) Of course I get disconnected in the middle of this, so I give up for that night and try again a short while later. This time, the tech tells me that their computer systems are down, and I need to call back in 30 minutes. Ok.. so I do call back, and the automated voice prompts tell me that I can just do a service request online. Well why didn’t you say so in the first place?

So I file a request, they send me a little box to package up my XBox 360, and I send it back (to somewhere in Texas.) You can check the status of your repair via their http://service.xbox.com/ site.. at first it said my unit had not yet been received, then it changed to received.. and now it says “No Repair”, and that my warranty is invalid. Obviously I freaked a little, and snooped around online for “no pending repair”. Looks like this means they swapped it out for a refurbished console. Okay, that makes sense, but why should the service status be so misleading? Why can’t it say “swapped out” or “replaced” or “replacement shipped”? Instead, I have no way of even knowing if the accepted my repair, shipped it, etc.. talk about lame.

I guess I’ll wait a few more days and see if an XBox 360 comes to my door via UPS. If not, I’ll have to call and deal with a guy in India.. (gee doesn’t that sound familiar?)

Nissan – I love my car. No really, I do. The navigation system needs work, but other than that, gravy. Except I keep having a problem where my driver’s seat has it’s leather “unhooked” from the seat itself, near where the seat touches the center console. I attribute it to me being a bigger guy, but still, it shouldn’t be coming undone. I’ve had Nissan fix this twice now, and it still keeps popping off. So I e-mailed corporate and they e-mailed me back days later, asking for my mileage and where I last had it serviced. I send them back the information, and they say a “specialist” will be in touch with me by the following business day. It’s been two days, and nothing. I’m not that upset yet, but when you say following business day, you probably should mean it.

But even if they do contact me.. say, tomorrow.. what is this “specialist” going to do for me? Just tell me to bring it in to get fixed? It obviously keeps happening.. it seems like an engineering problem to me. I don’t sit in my car funny, aka slamming your butt onto the seat as you jump in. And I always try to be “centered” in my seat, so I just don’t get it.

Anyways, I’m sorry for such a long rant. But maybe you can relate to some of these. I don’t think I’m expecting too much from these companies, and it just goes to show how little they care for their customers in general.

Apple announced all new iPods today, and whoopty-do, they manage to screw it up pretty bad.

1. Ringtones cost extra — Yeah, I really want to spend .99 cents more to take a PIECE of a song I already paid .99 for and make it into a ringtone. I also DO NOT WANT the ability to use tracks I ripped myself and convert them to ringtones. Bind my hands, please.
2. iPhone is now $200 cheaper — All you suckers who paid top dollar for the privilage of having an iPhone right away.. I am pointing and laughing at you. I still don’t want an iPhone, even with the cheaper price point.
3. The new Nano looks terrible — I know some people will disagree with me and say it’s beautiful, but I’m sorry, you’re wrong. It’s like a hobbit made love to one of the new “classic” iPods. Rumors of terrible performance (coverflow is jerky, etc.) and the small video screen don’t help my desire to get one at all.
4. The new iPod “touch”, oh wait, don’t you mean IPHONE? — Jeez, you might as well buy an iPhone. Or wait for iPhone v2, where they finally put WiFi into the iPhone. Shouldn’t they also have changed the form factor just a tad? I mean, it’s skinnier, sure, but what about making the screen bigger? Or changing up the face.. just anything to make it stand out against an iPhone. And don’t just disable things, either, *cough*e-mail*cough* on the iPod Touch to make it not compete with the iPhone.
5. Starbucks integration; who cares? — So, your iPod Touch will light up like Christmas every time you walk past a Starbucks? And you’ll get to see what artist/song is currently playing? And be able to buy it?!? It sounds like you want to force advertising in my face. And for all that, I don’t even get free WiFi internet access? Boohoo, Starbucks. Hopefully you can turn this “feature” off. I’m sure Starbucks and Apple will make gakillions of dollars, though. Whatever.
6. No WiFi syncing — Isn’t this obvious? You’ve got an iPod now with WiFi capabilities.. why can’t someone sync it when they get home automatically through the power of WiFi?

I usually think this sort of stuff is a bit over the top, but this brake-light conversion/mod is great. I’d totally get it on my Altima, and use the “cylon scanning” mode all the way home…

[Queue 2001: A Space Odyssey Music]

It’s allliiiive! All the parts arrived and were assembled. The most nerve-racking part of the build was actually putting the CPU cooler on. The instructions are mostly what some would call “English”, but the diagrams leave something to be desired. There are arrows on top of four posts that go into the motherboard to secure the cooler, and you’d think they’d be pointing the direction you’re supposed to twist to secure the cooler. You’d be wrong. They’re actually indictating how to remove the cooler. Go figure.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the results, the machine screams. The only real bummer thing I just discovered is that this motherboard only supports up to 800MHz memory. I have 1066 MHz memory. That’s 266MHz the board can’t use, and paid more for. Oh well, I guess. Maybe MSI, the motherboard manufacturer, will come out with a BIOS update to increase the speed? Really doubtful. I wonder if it’s a BIOS limitation or an actual hardware limitation? Hrm.

Since Intel just dropped the price of their Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor, I decided it was time for me to upgrade my main computer at home.

This weekend, NewEgg’s prices for the Q6600 dropped to $299.99 — a huge discount from the $500 or so it used to be. But now if you look at their product details page, they’re out of stock and have increased the price to $345. Guess I got lucky

Anyhow, my current rig is a XPS 400 with a Pentium D 3.2 processor. It’s fast, but less power efficient and slower than the newer Core 2 Duo processors out there. I’m selling it to a friend of mine, so that takes care of that.

As for the new system, I picked out almost the same components list as Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood did for Scott’s new “Ultimate Developer Rig”. Jeff’s been posting excellent “how to build a PC” type articles on his blog about those components, and I’ve been following along. Here’s what I chose from NewEgg:

• $119.95 – Antec Sonata III Black 0.8mm cold rolled steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 500W Power Supply - Retail
• $149.99 – MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
• $99.99 – Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM
• $299.99 – Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80562Q6600 - Retail
• $32.99 – Scythe SCMN-1100 100mm Sleeve CPU Cooler - Retail
• $92.99 – mushkin 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model 996529 - Retail
• $11.49 – Rosewill RCR-103 USB 2.0 Card Reader - Retail

Grand total: $807.39 — not too shabby, methinks.

I’m really looking forward to getting the parts this week and throwing it all together. I’ll make another post as soon as that happens, probably with assembly pictures, notes on anything I run into, etc.

I might overclock, too, similiar to what Jeff/Scott are doing, but maybe not to the “edge”. We’ll see, as I’ve never overclocked before. Should be interesting!

Of course Microsoft does this, right after I sell my XBox 360 on eBay. Well, the bidder hasn’t paid me yet, and might not. So maybe I haven’t officially sold it yet.

But yeah, a few weeks ago I got the dreaded three red rings of death on my XBox 360, while watching an HD-DVD with Heather. If you know me, you know I hardly touch my XBox 360, except to watch DVDs or play arcade games. And I keep it flat (not standing), and not locked inside some entertainment center. For all intents and purposes, the game console should’ve lasted me years. The fact that it just failed watching a movie was unacceptable, but there wasn’t much I could do.

Before calling Microsoft’s support line, I found a forum post online from someone who had fixed the problem by just blowing out the dust with a can of air. I took it outside and did that, and quite a bit of dust was released from the box. Brought it back in and turned it on, and I was up and running again. Heather and I watched half of King Kong, and then shut it off. Looks like the problem was fixed for now. Well, it’s not my problem anymore technically, since it’s sold on eBay, but yeah.

Before today, if I had kept my XBox 360, the next time the red rings came up, I would’ve had to shell out like $150 to get my console fixed. But now, Microsoft’s extended the warranty to the consoles from the past three years. There’s even an “apology” letter of sorts from Peter Moore.

But in my opinion, it’s far overdue. When the console launched, I didn’t want to listen to all the people having problems. I just assumed they were being dumb, and using the console without ventilation, etc… but then I started to hear about friends having the problem, and then myself… it’s obvious there is a core hardware problem with the XBox 360 itself, either involving cooling or the placement of components inside. It’d be great if Microsoft went the extra mile and gave full disclosure about their findings. It’s ridiculous that retailers and the public were both complaining about the return rate of the console, and Microsoft kept saying that the returns/etc. were well under the industry standard. Riiight.