Daily Archives: 8/11/2005

Animation, News

Time to update Flash

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If you’ve not already updated your version of Flash player then now’s a good time to do it. After years of getting away with being a very secure system, Flash Player 7 has had a vulnerability revealed ‘that could allow the execution of arbitrary code’, in other words it could allow a website to install nasty stuff on your machine.

It works by creating a specifically broken form of a .swf file that permits code to be run that wouldn’t normally be permitted by the Flash Player. Flash Player 7 has been around for a few years now, so it’s a good sign for its security that it’s taken this long to come to light, but now is a good time to upgrade to Flash Player 8.

It’s free and easy to do, just follow the instructions here.

You can find out more about the vulnerability here.

Upgrading also means that you can play the latest Flash content, which has some very cool graphical effects, and other cool stuff that animators love.

Buy this!

UK ‘Lost’ box set – don’t buy it!

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I’m a big fan of the series Lost. It might be hokum, but it’s very enjoyable hokum, and it’s got Dominic Monaghan pretending that he’s not a hobbit, aww bless.

Anyway, in the UK they’ve released a box set of the first twelve episodes in time for Christmas, here it is. We’re being charged, on average, around £25 for half the series. Fair enough, they want to make money at Christmas and the whole season hasn’t been shown over here yet so they don’t want to release it all.

Now, let’s compare that to the US price: US link. There you go: $36.98, which works out at £21.27 at today’s exchange rate. Four pounds cheaper… but what’s this? The US box set has the entire first series in it! Four pounds cheaper and with twice as much content. Call me crazy if you like, but it looks like the Brits are getting a bad deal here.

I’ve put this under the ‘buy this!’ category of my blog, but in this case I’m telling you not to buy something. Don’t buy the UK Lost box set. It’s a plain and simple rip off. I love the series, but I find the fact that we’re being charged twice as much money as people in the US for the same thing damn annoying so I’d encourage you to vote with your wallets.

Games related things

Possible region-free PS3

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It seems Sony is considering not putting region encoding on games for the PS3. Story here.

They decided not to do this for the PSP, which makes sense for a handheld device: what’s the point in it being portable if you can’t play the games that you buy when you’re travelling? Their rationale is that high-definition television (HDTV) is making playback of signals a unified system around the world, unlike the current state of affairs with PAL and NTSC. Of course, if you’ve got the money to buy an HDTV then you could probably afford several different PS3s from all the different regions around the world, but that’s beside the point (apparently).

The good news for all of us Brits is that this means we’ll finally be able to buy and play games from the US on our UK Sony hardware without illegal and potentially damaging modifications. This means we will at last be free of the six-or-more month wait that it usually takes before US games are translated over into all the numerous languages of the European market. Yep, despite the fact that we British are very good at understanding American, we currently have to wait for the games to be translated into French, German, Spanish, Icelandic, Welsh, Cornish, Swedish, and Ogham before we get the chance to play on them.

Let’s not forget that another thing that happens during that six month wait is that the price of the game always seems to double. It’s curious really, you’d think that the company would have recouped a lot of their money so wouldn’t need to charge us Brits twice as much as the Americans, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. So, we might be getting releases faster and cheaper. That’s such good news that, for today, I’ve decided for the moment to stop calling them $ony.