I don't watch copied DVD's. I like to own the original media and box. Also because most DVD's are so cheap these days why wouldn't I just buy the original? Lately, one thing that's really been seriously pissing me off big time is the way that film companies take control of my DVD player and decide how I watch the DVD. i.e. forcing me to watch their 'COPYING IS STEALING' crap and a boat load of trailers for films I've no interest in.

Let's face it, if I was watching a hooky DVD or rip, none of this crap would be present and therefore completely missing the target audience...people who are watching hooky DVDs and rips. And, if I was so inclined to duplicate, say the rental copy, then I'd rip and burn the DVD minus all this crap anyway. The other thing that uniquely grips my shit are trailers I can't easily skip past. LionsGate DVD's are particularly guilty of this trick. I can fast forward (better than nothing, but as you fast forward past each trailer, the next one needs to be manually fast forwarded and so on; still a pain in the arse) but I'm not allowed just to go straight to the main feature menu.

So the movie I'm about to watch tonight made me sit through two mandatory 'YOU ARE A THIEF' messages and then made me fast forward through 4 trailers and 2 chocolate adverts and some other crap. Some are even worse, last week one DVD (I forget which one) did this to me -

1. Twenty seconds warning me not to dare copy the DVD, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
2. Twenty seconds warning me not to even think about watching it in a public place, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
3. Fifteen seconds of animated logos advertising the main production company, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
4. Another fifteen seconds of shiny logos advertising how clever they were for using Dolby Digital, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
5. Fifteen seconds advertising another film company involved in making the movie, with fast forward/skip/menu prohibited.
6. About four minutes of trailers and other spam with no option to skip to menu other than fast forward EACH trailer, skipping/menu prohibited.
7. Approximately 15-20 seconds of animation just to show the menu before I could select 'Play'

Talk about making enemies with the customers who actually paid for your product.

So...Dear Film Companies...stop assuming I'm a thief and stop taking control of MY DVD player which I paid for with MY MONEY and let me decide, or not, whether I watch your crappy legal messages and second rate movie trailers/spam. I don't have to put up with this nonsense every time I open a book or play my CD's (though wouldn't the music biz love that eh?). I'm not stupid and I know the book is protected by copyright, but I don't have to remind myself every time by re-reading the copyright page each time I pick it up, so why inflict this crap on me when watching a DVD. Yeah ok I could get the player chipped and made region free, blah, blah, blah, but why should I resort to invalidating my warranty just to be able to have the freedom to decide that today I want to watch the film now, and not after ten minutes of threats and unwanted DVD spam.

Yay! Re-sharper 4 just shipped (in the last hour by the looks of it, their blog entry says 10th of June and it's still the 9th) after the shortest Beta/RC period I think I've seen ever. Finally, support for all the clever new C#3.0 bits.

For the past week or so in my spare time I've been trying to get my head around DI and IoC. Last night the light flickered on and stayed on thanks to this series of articles by Simone Busoli on dotnetslackers:

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart1.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart2.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart3.aspx
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/InversionOfControlAndDependencyInjectionWithCastleWindsorContainerPart4.aspx

Although the articles focus on the Castle Windsor container, the principles apply to containers such as Microsoft's own Unity container.

So I succumbed to peer pressure (or something like that) and got me a Twitter account. I'm still not sure I get the whole 'micro-blogging' thing but I'll give it a go. So if you fancy tuning in and finding out when I've gone to the bathroom, scratched my arse or wiped my nose then get it hot off the press from here: http://twitter.com/cosmicklev.

Look what we have to put up with in Perth. This is my residential line (Nildram, but shows as Tiscali now):

This is the business line:

This is on a good day. Neither results them are particularly inspiring and BT refuse to do anything about fixing the residential line to match the business line, other than having replaced the master socket when a fault manifested itself last year. Both copper circuits follow the same path back to the exchange (or so a BT engineer assured me) so I'm guessing the residential line has some pretty crappy jointing along the way. To make matters worse, changes in humidity, temperature and the phases of the moon can reduce the speed by as much as 30%. There's even some folk in the estate who've been turned down by BT Broadband, yet the adjacent business estate which houses HBoS, The Scottish Executive and Scottish and Southern Energy had new fibre especially pulled up to this end of town for them.

There's also Virgin Cable duct roughly a 100 yards round the corner from the estate but sadly they never made it down our street when the houses were built. So much for de-regulation, competition and choice.