Status-Q

I last bought a DVD player at about the time the Java programming language was invented. Finally it gave up the ghost so I’ve just got another – and this one runs Java. How times change.

When I got my first one, I paid quite a lot for the vendor to do some soldering to make it region-free, and that was so long ago that I’d almost forgotten the ridiculous DVD region system. But back then, when I started buying DVDs, they were more plentiful and noticeably cheaper in the States, so I have a few region 1 discs.

Fortunately, it turns out that there’s a relatively straightforward hack for the Sony BDP-S350 to disable the region checking. So, to help make sure the details remain widely available, here’s a copy of what worked for me.
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One thing that has shocked me in the last couple of months – since we registered as an exhibitor at a major trade show – has been the number of calls we’ve had from trade publications and websites. These are typically called something like ‘Enterprise Technology Management’, and their salespeople can talk for half an hour without taking a breath about the merits of their publications, how all of their writers are drawn from ‘the analyst community’, and how influential they are in whichever world they claim to serve.

As they wind down, they tell you that they have a special opportunity in this quarter’s issue for an editorial/whitepaper/article/review focusing on your company – they would love to ‘work with you’ on this and it will typically cost you somewhere from £3000-6000. Oh, and it would be very helpful if you could make the decision now because the editor is waiting by their desk.

Now, I wouldn’t mind if a publication that I had actually heard of had called up, said they had advertising space, told me their circulation numbers, and asked if I wanted to buy half a page. And I’ve always known that reviewers of products – for example in HiFi magazines – are offered luxury skiing holidays and suchlike by the vendors of those products. But in my naïvety I hadn’t realised just how blatantly editorial inches were offered for sale, especially in the trade press. This has happened to us several times now.

So, gentle reader, in the unlikely event that you should be as innocent as I was, please don’t trust anything in any magazine or trade publication that might drop through your door. At least, don’t take it at face value. If you are unlucky enough to have to read these things, don’t assume that because an article doesn’t say ‘advertisement feature’ in the corner, that somebody hasn’t paid for it to be there. It could have been me.