October 2010 - Christian Rios' Blog

Wordless Wednesday – Pumpkins

How does Sony fail at making a remote?

Sony is supposed to be an experienced manufacturer of electronic devices that require remote controls. You’d figure they have immense talent. However, they have done the worst implementation of a remote control for the PlayStation 3. The PS3 does not come with a remote control. It has to be purchased separately for $25 at retail. So, when they tell you how great the PS3 is as a Blu-ray player for $300, remember you still do not have a remote control. The remote is Bluetooth so that you just need to be nearby the PS3 for it to work. It is not like a regular IR remote that requires line of sight and pointing to the device.

The problem with this though is that the PS3 remote does not have a way to communicate to IR devices. This means that if you want to change the volume on your television, you will require a separate remote. What is even worse, if your TV remote can control your Blu-ray player, it will not be able to control your PS3 because it does not have a IR port. Which begs the question, what was Sony thinking and do they even have a plan in effect to fix this? Microsoft on the other hand gets the remote control right, even though they do not have a history of making decent hardware. The Xbox 360 remote retails for $20 and you can control your TV with it just fine. It even glows in the dark. The Xbox 360 does not play Blu-rays but works pretty well as a media extender hooked to a bedroom TV, for example.

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Male Date Drug Warning

Police are warning all men who frequent clubs, parties & local pubs to be alert and stay cautious when offered a drink by any woman. Many females use a date-drug on the market called “Beer”.

The drug is found in liquid form and is available anywhere. It comes in bottles and cans, or from taps and in large kegs. Beer is used by female sexual predators at parties and bars to persuade their male victims to go home and sleep with them.

A woman needs only to get a guy to consume a few units of Beer and then simply ask him home for no-strings-attached sex. Men are rendered helpless against this approach. After several Beers, men will often succumb to the desires to sleep with horrific looking women to whom they would never normally be attracted.

After drinking Beer, men often awaken with only hazy memories of exactly what happened to them the night before, often with just a vague feeling that “something bad” occurred. At other times these unfortunate men are swindled out of their youth, health, or life’s savings in a familiar scam known as “a relationship”… In extreme cases, the female may even be shrewd enough to entrap the unsuspecting male into a longer-term form of servitude and punishment referred to as “marriage”.

Men are much more susceptible to this scam after Beer is administered and sex is offered by the predatory females. Please forward this warning to every male you know. If you fall victim to this “Beer” scam and the women administering it, there are male support groups where you can discuss the details of your shocking encounter with similarly victimized men.

For the support group nearest you, just look up “Golf Courses” in the phone book.

Somebody forwarded this to me in an email so credit goes to whoever wrote it

Wordless Wednesday – Back Home

Why don’t we get digital property?

When I was teenager, there was suddenly this huge boom of CD stores in my hometown. They were more than anything places to hang out with your friends and people who share your taste in music. You would come to the store, have a chat and whatnot. Even if you did not buy a CD that day, it was very likely you bought a soft drink, a poster, or a piece of gum. It was the social network of its day in a way.

Then, manufacturers just as they did with cassettes recorders on its day, started selling upgrades to the CD players called CD writers or recorders. Soon, the bootleggers started charging a fraction of the price of the original because they only had to cover the cost of the media they were selling illegally. At this moment in time, lust for the sheen of money made consumers buy these bootlegs without a hint of the ramifications of the laws they were breaking. This managed to cause most of the stores to shut down and those that did not had to severely down size.

This is the part I think people do not get about stealing digital property. It is not that Lady Gaga is not going to make as many millions or had to downgrade from her Jet 4 to a Jet 3, it is the fact that Jet 3 does not need as many engineers to maintain the Jet putting them out of a job. All of the stores in my hometown paid rent, employed clerks, cleaning crew, and people for repairs. People do not seem to get that stealing digital property not only affects the artist but it also affects the economy, which affects you.

When you buy a book on your Kindle, you are not paying for text that cost nothing to be copied. You are paying for the effort, the work of the author, the editors, and even the people that clean the place where the editors work. If we don’t get this, it will get to a point where nobody will have any incentive to create anything as it will not put food on the table.

All trademarks and copyrights contained in this document are owned by their
respective trademark and copyright holders.