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zacoz

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Posts posted by zacoz

  1. Don't you love seeing Region Coding and DRM back firing on a distributor / producer :lol:

     

    http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1683771,00.html

     

    Spielberg loses out at the push of a button

     

    From Jaws and Close Encounters through to War of the Worlds, Steven Spielberg movies have rarely had trouble connecting with audiences in the UK.

    But the man who put a capital B into the contemporary blockbuster, whose films have grossed billions and whose name is usually the stamp of glorious cinematic success, has been humbled. By a button. Pushed, it seems, mistakenly.

     

    This has had a profound effect on the director's latest opus, at least as far as the members of Bafta are concerned. By tomorrow they have to nominate the films they think worthy of accolade, and Spielberg's Munich was expected to be among them, tipped for awards both in Britain and at the Oscars

     

    But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000 voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.

    Sara Keene at Premier PR, the company coordinating Munich's Bafta campaign, blamed the mistake on human error at the laboratory where the DVDs were encrypted. "Someone pushed the wrong button," she said. "It was a case of rotten bad luck." She insisted that the film's distributor, Universal, was not at fault.

     

    The problem, it appears, was partly down to teething troubles with the limited edition DVD players issued last year to Bafta members. Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies. Munich screeners were encoded for region one, which allows them to be played in the US and Canada, rather than region two, which incorporates most of Europe.

     

    The faulty DVDs only reached Bafta members on Saturday, which meant the film had already missed out on the first round of voting on January 4. In a further twist to the tale, a previous batch mailed out before Christmas were reportedly held up by customs officials in the UK. "It's been quite a cock-up," said one Bafta member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

     

    "We were promised that they were going to send screeners before Christmas, but they never arrived. Now we finally have a copy but there is no way we can watch it.

     

    "The general feeling among members is that the film has now been shut out of the nominations simply because not enough people have actually had the opportunity to see the thing."

     

    Having organised several London preview screenings of Munich before Christmas, Premier PR hastily scheduled three more for this week.

     

    "The trouble is that Bafta members are scattered all over the country," the Bafta voter said. "We're not all based in London."

     

    As arguably Spielberg's most controversial film to date, Munich is a dramatisation of the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes. The plot follows a hit squad from the Israeli secret service, Mossad, on the trail of the Palestinian Black September group behind the kidnappings.

     

    The film has been criticised by Israeli officials for what is perceived as Spielberg's sympathetic attitude towards the Palestinian cause, and for allegedly equating Mossad's actions with those of the terrorists. Reviews in the US have largely been positive.

     

    DVD screeners remain a vexed issue for distributors concerned about the potential for piracy. But the evidence suggests that they play a vital role in raising a film's profile among award voters.

     

    "There are over 5,000 Bafta members," Ms Keene explained. "With the best will in the world, they don't all come to the preview screenings. Unless you send them DVDs it is really hard to get a film nominated."

     

    This point was brought home last year when the distributor Entertainment took the decision not to provide Bafta voters with screeners of Million Dollar Baby. Clint Eastwood's boxing drama failed to gain a single nomination at the 2005 awards. One month later it scooped the major honours at the Academy Awards.

  2. FIVE MINUTES

    This is half an hour. It is equivalent to the five minutes that your football game is going to last before you take out the trash, so it's an even trade.

     

    OH REALLY

    The response you get if you are dumb enough to tell her that her "five minutes" is equivalent to your "five minutes". This will be shortly followed by:

     

    GO ON (With Raised Eyebrows)

    Never let a conversation get to this point. It doesn't matter whether you now persist in trying to sell your statement or backdown and acknowledge defeat. You are now on a one way track to one of those arguments that end in "fine".

  3. 15. Go into a fitting room and shut the door and wait a while; and, then, yell, very loudly, "There is no toilet paper in here!"

    You know, Security Officers have no sense of humour. :'(

     

    It's alright though, I got to see what's behind that staff only door and they eventually let me leave the store - they were even kind enough to walk me to the door in case I got lost along the way ;)

  4. I gather chewy is pointing out how ImgBurn is so lean & clean, compared to a number of other bloated programs.

     

    As to LUK! not commenting, I can understand that he may possibly get tired of posting the same response everytime someone posts to query / suggest this. :sleeping: A search would show that LUK! has previously indicated it will likely happen eventually :thumbup: (don't bother asking when).

     

    Personally, I appreciate the time LUK! spends posting in the forum answering all those questions most of the rest of us would have no idea about, rather than repeating himself. It would also taken time away from that spent on development etc. (!)

  5. And i don't want that someone will collect all my gf pics, and use it someday for unknown purpose.

     

    Ok, you trying to convince us all of those girls were your girlfriends at some time :ermm: I must have counted at least 200 different girls, and how do you get them to agree to do all those things ? :blush:

     

    Don't worry, I won't use them for any unknown purpose though - I'll give you a link to the website and free password so you'll know exactly the purpose I'm using them for :thumbup:

     

    PS.. You might want to start using a password on your system. :ph34r:

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Only joshing =))

    Wouldn't know how to hack into a wet paperbag :innocent:

  6. You may want to check out this thread: http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=569 - ironically only posted in the last day or so.

     

    I NEVER, EVER accept any hardware drivers suggested by Windows Update anymore. The couple of times I did, resulted in numerous problems. I ended up having to remove soundcard and network card, manually delete every trace of drivers for both from my registry and hard drive, then re-install them. I now only ever get the drivers from the manufacturers site.

  7. Coming back on topic for a minute. Ran my usual Spybot scan (it's resident module is normally running all the time) and came up with a few cookies. Then ran ewido which discovered a inf registry entry for Comet Cursor (but no actual files etc) and more cookies.

     

    While it does appear to dig a little deeper than Spybot, I tend to think it's risk ratings are overdoing it a bit however.

     

    It flagged the Comet Cursor inf entry as High Risk - however on it's own it's far from that.

     

    The cookies it rated as Medium Risk - come on ewido, it's a tracking cookie, a text file, just like the one ewido placed on my computer when I visited their website. If cookies get a Medium Risk I wonder if anything actually receives a Low Risk rating by the program :unsure:

     

    Will see how it goes over next couple of weeks.

  8. :o Is kev also nailing JT then ?? So thats jack, kirk and now kev, no wonder she has gone on hols - probably needs the rest !! =))

     

    In my defence both kirk and kev start with K :/ OK - piss poor defence

     

    Seems as it's now obvious who JT is - I will need to be very nice for a while :mellow:

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