Jay's Random Rants & Raves

Excel and PowerPoint - Part 2

2010-03-07T12:40:00.003-05:00

To continue where I left off from the previous post. How do you animate a graph in PowerPoint when the graph is just window into Excel and not an actual PowerPoint graph?

Answer: You mask it with a bunch of white boxes and you set the exit animation. This method makes it look as if the chart is appearing, when in actuality it is the mask white box disappearing.

Obviously this isn't a perfect solution because things like axis lines are broken up and stuff, so it isn't really elegant, but it does the job.

If anyone has questions about anything Microstoft Office related, don't hesitate to ask it here.

Excel and PowerPoint

2010-03-06T08:58:00.003-05:00

For the past year and a half, I have been working in a department that creates lots of powerpoint presentations. When I first got there, they had good presentations, but the data in them was not linked to all the data that was in their multitude of spreadsheets. So, how do you link all the data from the spreadsheets to the data in PowerPoint so you don't have to copy and paste data every time something changes?

NO ONE KNOWS! Seriously... Of all the great things that Microsoft Office provides, they don't let users link a cell or group of cells from Excel directly to a PowerPoint chart. This really stinks and Microsoft should fix it.

However, there is a solution that I use that does almost the same thing. The problem with my solution is that you can't get get chart animation quite as easily.

Get all the data from whatever source you have and put it into Excel
Remove the grid lines by choosing Tools --> Options --> General
Create the chart in Excel with all links to the data in Excel - I usually create the chart on a separate page.
Select the cell range around the chart (not the data). You are basically creating a "window into excel" and you are going to paste that window into PowerPoint. It's important to remember that your window is referencing a specific range in Excel. If you insert lines or columns, PowerPoint won't know that the chart might be in a different place now, so you may have to re-link it. This is why I usually put my chart on a separate worksheet from the data.
Go into your PowerPoint slide. Edit --> Paste Special... Links... Linked to Excel Workbook.

Voila! You have a spreadsheet chart in your PowerPoint presentation. Anytime the data changes, just right click on the link in PowerPoint and click "refresh".

Some people choose to embed the spreadsheet into PowerPoint. This works sometimes, but if you have a huge spreadsheet with 50 charts and graphs, that's a very large file. If you embed it 50 times into PowerPoint, that makes for an enourmous PowerPoint presentation. In addition, if your data comes from an external source (something that Excel linked to) it can cause refresh problems.

Now, how do you animate the chart if you don't want to show the whole thing all at once?

Come back soon for the continuation.

Download em all

2009-04-27T21:29:00.002-04:00

I've been a big user of Firefox for several years now. I know, there's been big news lately that it's got the most security holes of any browser. Well, that is really because the Firefox people actually post every threat and security hole that they have. Think of it this way, if you were to buy a safe, would you buy the one that is constantly updating their "safe technology" every time they find something that someone could curcomvent? Now, I'm not saying that other browsers don't plug security holes, but they also don't publish every single one that they find.

But that's the long way of getting to this topic. I found my self in the past few weeks wanting to learn some more about programming and I found an awesome website "learncpp.com." It's basically the C++ learning books (and then some) that cost 49.95 online for free. I love it but didn't want to log onto the internet everytime I wanted to read something from it. Plus, we never know how long these sites are going to last for anyway.

Along comes the "Download em all" add in for firefox. The thing is great. I can download everyting from the site with just a click of a couple buttons. The site was set up in main chapters and sub-sections. Each time you wanted to view another subsection, you would click on "next" and it brings you to the next page.

Well, download em all is able to download all those "next" pages into saved html pages on your computer. Really cool.

If you ever find yourself needing to download a bunch of stuff from the same site, you should check it out.

Notepad++

2009-03-29T09:07:00.002-04:00

I was looking the other day for a good free program that I could use for program code editing and I found a real gem. Notepad ++ is a really great program if you like doing any type of programming from HTML to C++. I've used many programs in the past. I love Microsoft Visual Studio, but am not willing to shell out the $1,200 (or some rediculous amount of money) for the program. That's what brought me to see if there was a program out there that at least highlighted stuff for me. It doesn't have "predictive text," but with the huge number of add-ons that someone has probably done that.

Anyway, last week, I was troubleshooting a report at work. The report was based in SQL language and had over 22,000 lines of code. Last year the report worked great, this year it kept crashing and actually bringing down the entire server sometimes. I was told that "nothing had changed" on the database side between last year and this year and it must be a probelm with the report. Well, the report hadn't changed either so I went to the SQL to investigate. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to manually check 22,000 lines of SQL. So along comes Notepad ++ with it's compare add-in. It is awesome. The compare add in compares two files together, so I saved down the last years report SQL and this years report SQL to text files and compared them.

The add-in analyzes each line of the text file and shows the files side by side. Any line that is completely different on one side or the other gets highlighted and a line gets inserted in the other file to allow you to keep the matching lines side by side. Any lines that look almost the same get highlighted in a different color with the differences highlighted in a darker shade. All lines that match 100% don't get highlighted. With 22,000 lines of code, after running this add-in it took me about 2 minutes to find the problem. Turns out that "nothing has changed" was not quite 100% accurate. There is a setting called "Full Outer Join" that isn't a good setting to set as a default for the entire database, that somehow changed from last year to this year.

If you are looking for Windows notepad on super steroids, give notepad++ a try.

New sayings

2009-01-10T18:13:00.003-05:00

Each day as I interact with Kristen, Alanna, and Annabelle, I keep thinking that I should turn this blog into a "saying of the day" blog. I'll tag them all with "dialog" and you can choose dialog in my cool new "tag cloud" (see to the right)...

I'll do it as much as I can think of it from now on.

Saying of today.

Me to Alanna (as she's in the tub) - do you want 5 or 10 more minutes?

Alanna (in the tub): Dad, I'd like more than 10 minutes.

Me: Well, you can have 10.

Alanna: Dad, would you like to do something on the computer for 10 minutes while I spend my 10 minutes in the tub?

So, I am. But am watching the clock very closely cause we both know that 10 minutes can turn into more than 10 minutes when I'm on the computer :)

Another cool program

2008-12-05T23:04:00.000-05:00

Add Evernote (www.evernote.com) to the list of productive free software. I really like this program.

Interesting websites that I've come across

2008-12-01T22:17:00.002-05:00

Since I haven't posted in quite a while, i thought it might be useful to list the websites and applications that I've found or started using recently that have some sort of interesting quality.

www.gyminee.com - a website that helps you track weight loss, calorie intake, and come up with exercise programs.

www.google.com/reader - an RSS feed reader that allows you to read many news feeds from tons of websites, quickly and easily

mail.google.com - gmail keeps getting better and better with free POP and IMAP so that I can read it on my Windows Mail program as well as new and helpful features being added monthly it seems.

www.facebook.com - it's just fun

www.anyvite.com - you can invite freinds to a gathering and set up a mini-blog for the event. Friends can accept your invitation without having to register on the website to say yes / no / maybe. Plus, after the event you can add pictures and video.

www.igoogle.com - a personalized web page of google with tons of gadgets to choose from. A good homepage for some

www.go2web20.net - a list of "web 2.0" sites.

www.todoist.com - a nice small to-do website (I still like Outlook better though)

del.icio.us - bookmarks stored online and syncronized with my firefox

APPLICATIONS

Launchy - press alt-space to bring up the launcher, which indexes your desktop and computer and can launch pretty much anything with a little tweaking. I have set up (for instance) a launcher called "gtf" and "gte" which brings up google translate and translates the phrase that I give it. For example if I want to know what "ca va" means in english, I type alt+space gtf [TAB] ca va and press enter and it immediatly brings me to the google translate website with the translation of ca va. It's very useful for those long french e-mails that I get every so often.

OpenOffice 3.0 - looks much better than it's 2.0 counterpart and is a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.

Playon by MediaMall - lets you stream Hulu, CBS, Netflix, ESPN through your computer to your PS3 and watch it on your TV

Yeah, that's it for now. I'll write more if I think of others.

Ubiquity

2008-08-28T22:51:00.003-04:00

My previous post was sent from a Firefox add-on called ubiquity.

One of the reasons we use Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer because they seem to plug security holes a little quicker than Microsoft does.

Another reason is that there are tons of add-ons to firefox that you can get. We currently have the Delicious add-on, the get directions from google maps add-on, the weather add-on, and the download status bar add-on. Add-ons are basically small programs that add a little more functionality to the program you are using. Our weather add-on for instance, does nothing more than display the weather forecast underneath the little X button in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The ubiquity add-on is quite a bit more robust than the weather one and it's basically an attempt to add some easy spoken language commands within firefox. I can access commands by pressing CTRL+SPACE and typing what I want.

For instance, if I'm reading a site and I run across the word "Bornholmsk". I can simply highlight the word, press ctrl-space and type wikipedia to get a definition. Or I can read ２１世紀に、国際化をよく考えなければなりません。

highlight that, press ctrl-space and type translate.

Or I can press ctrl-space and type weather Las Vegas, NV and get the weather

here's where it gets cool if you have google mail or google calendar.

I can press ctrl-space and type "email Hello how are you to jason Smith" and it will automatically bring up my g-mail and input "hello how are you" in the message and Jason Smith (my google contact) as the send to address.

Also, if I want to add an appointment to my google calendar I can simply press ctrl-space and type "add-to-calendar Meet Jason at the mall from 6pm to 7pm tomorrow" and it automatically adds a new appointment to my google calendar for tomorrow from 6 to 7pm.

There are many more commands and options and it's still in the "prototype" phase, but all-in-all it's probably one of the best little add-ons I've seen in a long time.

If you use firefox, it's worth a look.

My test of Ubiquity

2008-08-27T09:29:00.001-04:00

I am testing Ubiquity... more to follow in my next post

Big days ahead

2008-08-14T14:01:00.001-04:00

Well, one week from now, we will be going to closing on our first home. We are really looking forward to it.

Brett Favre

2008-08-08T12:10:00.001-04:00

Yesterday it was announced that Brett Favre will now be playing for the Jets. What do you think? Good or Bad? I think it will be fun to see how he adjusts to a different team and coaching style after playing on the same team for 15 years.

Fantasy Football season again

2008-08-08T12:00:00.002-04:00

Well, it's that time of year again. Time for me to prove how little I know about football and give Fantasy Football another go. I've been playing this game with friends from Denver since 2001 and I have a blast doing it (even though I lose a lot). So wish me luck.

Historically accurate music

2008-08-07T09:46:00.000-04:00

Here’s an interesting thing I was reminded of on the radio this morning. Sometimes I listen to the classical music station for Boston. I really like classical music and like to laugh at the fact that their advertising is geared more towards people with over $1 million in the bank as well.

This week is their compare / contrast week and this morning as I was listening, they were talking about the differences between classical music as it is played now compared to how it would have been played originally. I’ve heard this before but was just reminded of it again this morning.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, music such as was composed by Vivaldi was performed in small chambers for high class royalty. The composition was originally intended to have a much different sound than what we hear in today’s modern orchestras. The instruments are much different. The violin, for example, now has metal wound strings and a different bow. This is not entirely for improved durability. It was done to make the instrument louder and be able to “hit” notes faster and harder at the onset of the note. Original violins had fiber strings and very “round” notes, meaning that you couldn’t really easily produce a short heavy hit note. Most notes sounded more like “WOW” notes…. You know wwwWWWAAAAaaaawwww… they had a much rounder sound. Thus the music we hear now is much different.

There are several groups out there, but the one I heard this morning is called Tafelmusik. Their intent is to produce historically accurate music that sounds more like what the composer intended. I’m gonna check them out.

The roll up TV (OLED)

2008-08-05T15:19:00.002-04:00

I know, I only have a few people reading this blog. I know who you are and I know most of you don’t know about all the new techie stuff out there. I thought you might like to hear about the newest TV / Display technology out there called OLEDs. It stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes.

So what are the benefits to OLEDs versus LCD screens? Well, organic LEDs emit their own light (think digital alarm clock), whereas regular LCD screens have to have a backlight (think IronMan wrist watch in the dark). The main complaint of LCD screens is that none of them have “true black” color when you are watching TV. There is always some light coming through from the back of the screen. OLEDs can completely turn themselves off and on so we can have true black color in a screen that is thinner than an LCD screen. This translates into something called contrast ratio. Contrast ratio was important to me when I went shopping for a new TV and we got a great one at 25,000:1, a really good contrast ratio for an LCD screen. OLED contrast ratios are around 1,000,000:1 (a slight 4,000% improvement over the LCD). OLEDs also don’t have to “cool down” and can reproduce fast action much better than LCDs can. It’s last benefit? They are rather skinny. I mean 3mm thin! For the metric challenged of us, including myself, a US Quarter is approximately 1 ¾ mm thick. So this TV is a little skinnier than 2 quarters stacked together. It doesn’t appear to be bendable, but that was the original idea of OLEDs. The 11” XEL-1 Sony OLED digital television can be yours for only $2,500 at the Sony Style store. That’s right folks, you too can own one for less than the price of a tank of gas (1 year from now).

I’m waiting for news of my rollup laptop any day now.

TV Product Placementpalooza

2008-08-04T15:46:00.002-04:00

As television grows more user specific, we head away from the “free TV” paid by advertisement format into a new age of pay per view television. What do you think is the best option for entertainment companies? It seems everyone lately is trying to get in on the band-wagon. Should we pay for our TV and how? Currently I pay for my TV in many different ways.

1) I pay by having to watch those annoying ads (sometimes with loud sounds) that pop up and cover ½ of the viewing screen during a show that I’m watching. These ads are by far the most annoying to me, and if anything, make me avoid whatever is being advertised.

2) I pay for my satellite service. This payment goes directly to DishNetwork, then indirectly to the networks that charge them and secretly to the directors and actors, and ultimately to the government who taxes the life out of everything with less than 20 legs.

3) I pay for the convenience of fast forwarding through my commercials, which I’m sure somehow makes it to the networks, and back to the government again.

4) I pay by watching ads. Yes, if the timing is right between my clicks of the 30 second skip button, if a smart advertiser puts an interesting image up, I might just stop and watch a commercial.

5) I pay when I watch TV online by watching a long commercial at the beginning.

6) I pay by seeing product placements in TV shows

7) I now have the option of paying per episode on my Playstation 3 for some stuff.

Now I ask, since we want our TV to be somewhat subsidized by advertisements, what do you think the best way to do so is?

My opinion, I don’t think we should pay-per episode, that’s just dumb.

I think that splashing an unwanted ad during the middle of a show (which sometimes obstructs from an important plot device) is one of the worst and most annoying ideas.

So what do I like?.............Shameless product placement. That’s right folks, I want the people I watch on TV to be like normal people and have opinions about what type of soda and candy they like and what kind of shoes they like to wear. I want Rocky Balboa to look at the camera and say, “look at these beautiful pearly whites that I get when I use Crest.” But even more than that, I’d like to see companies like Coke pay to have someone spit out some Pepsi and say “Yuck, this stuff tastes disgusting.”

That’s it! I’m going to become a TV executive now. See you all on TV.

New Google Maps

2008-08-04T11:11:00.001-04:00

Looks like Google Maps (www.maps.google.com) just got a facelift. There there's a layer option now.

But printing the maps is where it looks like the best changes were made. At each turn before you kick off your printer, you can now choose to print just the text OR the text with map OR the text with StreetView (Really a good option when you live in Massachusetts where they don't like to label streets or building numbers.

Great improvement Google!

Delicious.com

2008-08-01T09:24:00.003-04:00

Back in 2003, a new website del.icio.us opened up for storing bookmarks. I discovered it a few years ago. It’s basically a site to store all your bookmarks / favorite sites / etc… and share them with others (or not). Many people use it for “social bookmarking” and that’s really how they want you to think of it. “Find sites and share them with others.”

I use it because it gives me a central location to store all my favorite websites. I can access my favorite sites from anywhere and any computer. If you use Firefox instead of internet explorer, you can get an add-in for it that will access your bookmarks and synchronize them. Here are the many uses that I love about it.

1) My home and work computers both have the add-in and all the same favorites. When I add a site at home, it gets added on my work computer. When I add a site at work, it gets added to the home computer. I guess technically it doesn’t get added to either because it’s all stored online, but you know what I mean.

2) TAGS instead of FOLDERS. This is the best thing about it. I can tag a website (say Netflix) with many tags and access them with whatever tag I want. For example, I just found a mortgage interest rate website a few days ago that helped me keep track of rates and know when I should lock in my mortgage rate. I could tag it with house, mortgage, interest, and MBS (mortgage backed securities). When I want to go back and find that site, I can search for any one of those tags and it will show up in the list. I love tags, they allow me to be “messy” with my bookmarks and still easily find whatever it is that I need. Kristen and I have over 270 bookmarks and can find everything we need very quickly.

3) You can look at your bookmarks in a cloud view (which I've just added to my blog on the right), meaning if you have 50 bookmarks with the tag “Candy” and only 1 bookmark with the tag “toothpaste”, the cloud will have large 28pt font for Candy, but small 6pt font for toothpaste. The example above would also indicate that you might want to visit a dentist.

4) The social bookmarking aspect of it is pretty cool. For instance, right now, I can see that someone has just bookmarked “50 ways to boost your energy without caffeine.” That looks interesting. However, you can choose to be more private (like myself) and only share sites that you want to share. You don’t need to share everything.

So that’s the overview.

The Del.icio.us site has always been pretty clunky and slow (with over 5 million users) from my point of view. It’s just been redesigned though, and it’s quicker, a little easier to use, and now has the actual site name delicious.com rather than del.icio.us (which I thought was kind of cool).

If you haven’t given delicious.com a try, go for it, you’ll probably like it.

Water found on Mars

2008-07-31T15:11:00.001-04:00

NASA just released in a press conference that water has been scooped up and is being analyzed by the Mars lander “Pheonix”. While scientists point to this as another step to proving macro-evolution, I say… hey cool! there’s water (ice) on Mars. To see more, go to www.nasa.gov and search for Pheonix mars lander.

This is a test of posting to my blog by e-mail

2008-07-31T14:28:00.001-04:00

I’ve never tried posting to my blog by e-mail, so I’m testing it J

What I've been working on

2008-07-31T14:24:00.000-04:00

Today is the day… the day my department “flipped the switch” on my new streamlined spreadsheet. I’m having a blast today fielding questions and seeing the last couple months of work actually being used by the department. I can sometimes have trouble getting others to buy into changing the way they do things. It’s been said “Change is much easier when it’s done by you than when it is done to you.” I wholeheartedly agree. It’s also been said that when it comes to change, people fall in a statistical bell curve with 3% saboteurs of change and 3% change drivers, 17% resistant to change and 17% liking change, 30% don’t like change but can be convinced, and 30% like change but need to see the benefit in it. I’m on the 3% change driver section. Since I work in finance with a bunch of analyst type people, they all need to take time to digest and analyze the change before they buy in (they’re all on the 30% don’t like change side). This can be frustrating at times.

So today is a good day. They’ve flipped the switch and I’m thriving off answering questions and fixing little issues that are getting found by all the analyzer types.

The big plus is that I think I may have shaved off 2-4 hours of the entire department’s financial close time.

Google Sketchup

2008-07-29T13:09:00.002-04:00

I've been searching for a while to find some free software that will allow me to model our new house (inside and out), and use it to figure out how to position furniture in our room and landscaping, so on and so forth.

I realize I could spend less that $100 on some landscaping & home planning software, but I majored in finance and feel that I should be able to find something for free in exchange for being bombarded by advertisements on every website I visit.

About a week ago, while looking at Google's "even more>>" section, I stumbled upon the program that they use to model all the 3d buildings in Google Earth. If you don't know what google earth is, you haven't been spending enough time with me....

The program is called Sketchup. Using it made me recall some old childhood memories. Some of my first experiences with computing were in elementary school. We started a computer class in the 5^th grade. It was fairly simple and I don’t really remember much about it other than learning some BASIC programming. You know, simple programming for 5^th graders… Anyway I learned how to write music with the beeps of the computer. One of the best things I remember is a little CAD (computer aided design) program that was the first experience I had to 3 axis stuff. I had lots of fun drawing all the lines and making a 3d house or whatever else I could think of.

Sketchup is by far the simplest modeling software I’ve ever seen, yet it’s robust enough for real designers to use. Google did it right on this one. Somehow they managed to make software that’s so easy, my four year old can use it, yet powerful enough that designers use it too.

It’s a little tough to explain in print, so I’ve added a link to a youtube video that shows you just how easy it is.

If you haven’t tried it and are the least bit interested in designing your own stuff (carpentry, room design, etc…) you should give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.

High end computers - followup from 8/2006

2007-11-12T09:38:00.001-05:00

I thought you might be interested. In followup to my post from August of 2006. The computer I could have bought in August 2006 for $2,275 would now cost $1,558. Not bad.... you can save $700 by waiting a year.

Ubuntu

2007-04-30T20:57:00.000-04:00

I thought the title might intrigue some of you. Ubuntu is the name of a "flavor" of the Linux operating system. I'm actually blogging from it right now. Other notable operating systems are Mac OS X and .... man, I forget the name.... oh yeah... I remember....Microsoft Windows.

The most notable difference between the three operating systems are these:

Mac OS X - cost = buy a Mac $1200, the Mac OS X only works on Apple computers. It's a really pretty and fun system to work in. Hardly any support for computer games.

Windows Vista - cost $300, works on most computers, has bugs and security flaws, plays tons of games, and "just works".

Ubuntu Linux - cost $0, works on most computers, can run windows software and "just works" (usually)

That said, I've been messing around on Ubuntu Linux (version Feisty Fawn) and I think it's a great. It's not quite as easy to install programs as Windows and it can be tricky to set up, but I think most people could do pretty well using this version of Linux. At this point, Linux can now be used by 2 our of 3 types of people (as opposed to the 1 type about 2 years ago). The two types are 1) People who never download new programs or try to install anything new and 2) People who are pretty knowledgeable with computer software / programming.

I don't recommend it to people who don't have high speed internet access or anyone who doesn't have a computer expert nearby to help with problems.

It's got some really great, free programs though. GIMP is an image editor that is really robust and comparable to Adobe Photoshop (a very expensive program). OpenOffice.org is the equivalent to MS Office (another very expensive program). It comes with Firefox as an internet browser and Evolution for e-mail and calendar stuff. It has GAIM for instant messaging that allows you to talk with people in all other messenger applications (MS Messenger / Yahoo IM/ AOL instant messenger).
K3B will burn CDs and DVDs. Rythmbox will play all your audio files.

Best of all, it's all free.

Now for the fun part. I installed Beryl (an awesome desktop application that lets me do this.

Four Desktops (Windows only has one) / Rotate a cube to see and use them

Windows don't just close when you click the little red X to close the window, they go up in flames now :)

Thumbnail views of your minimized windows before you maximize them

A window manager called "slam"...bump your mouse cursor up against the top right corner of the screen and Beryl will display all your windows in an easy page (below) so you can select the one you want to use

A nifty little feature called peek allows you to peer underneath a window you are currently working in. Also notice when you do that, it makes the window slightly transparent.

Last but not least, the Jello effect when you drag windows around the screen they stretch, then snap into place.

You can turn all these features off or install many more, it's all up to you.

If you want to give Ubuntu a try, just let me know :)

It wouldn't be fair if I didn't write this today

2007-04-18T08:56:00.000-04:00

According to videobusiness.com

"Sony fixes problem DVDs
Copy-protection glitch reported on Casino Royale, Pursuit of Happyness others
By Jennifer Netherby 4/17/2007
APRIL 17 | Sony Corp. of America says it has fixed a glitch on recent DVD releases including Casino Royale, The Pursuit of Happyness and Stranger Than Fiction that prevented the movies from playing on some DVD players."

I'm still glad they're not in the paperback business... :)

Sony's way of increasing electronic sales

2007-04-17T16:10:00.000-04:00

There has been a small buzz the past couple weeks about Sony's new DVD protection and I was affected by it last night (and a couple nights ago).

A few nights ago, Kristen and I sat down to watch Casino Royale (the new James Bond movie). I grabbed the DVD that we rented from Netflix and stuck it into our Mitsubishi DVD player (which has been working great for almost 5 years). Nothing came up on the screen. So I took it out and looked at it to see if I could see any scratches. It looked pretty good except for a the funny reflection. So I proceeded to put the DVD into our computer and it seemed to work fine.

Hmm.... says I .... this be a strange predicament, says I.

So, I reported it as a broken DVD to Netflix and got them to send us a new one. This one worked for about 15 minutes of the movie, then bombed out on us. Could have been scratched, but it didn't look it.

It turns out that Sony has implemented a new copy protection (The Holiday / Stranger than Fiction / Casino Royale). A copy protection that's sOOOOO good that (on some DVD players) you can't even "copy" the video from your DVD player to your TV screen.

Sony says they have no plans of changing their copy protection. Another interesting fact is that their new disks won't even play on some of their own manufactured DVD players. I'm guessing that they probably spend more to "protect" their software and information than would ever be lost by people copying stuff.

We consumers better hope and pray that Sony never gets into the paperback book business. I can see it now...

NEWS
Sony implements new copy protection for their division of paperback books. Upon opening the new print run of Harry Potter, readers were surprised by a blinding light emanating from the inner binder of the book. Unfortunately, no one can read the new book because of the light. This was Sony's newest release in a long line of paperback book copy protection. When senior executives were asked about the matter, they commented "we have no intentions of changing our copy protection... at least no one will be copying them. We suggest you purchase our copy protection sunglasses for 299.99 from your nearest best buy."

I know it seems ludicrous when you talk about paper books, but for some reason digital "paper" is different. Really....they've done the same thing... they've blinded my DVD player so that it can't read the DVD. What's the difference? A book is a book, why can't a DVD be a DVD.