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Leave Prague for Authentic Czech Pubs {Gadling}
Feb 16th 2008 7:36AM You don't even need to leave Prague to find authentic Czech pubs - just get out of the very center of town. Ride the subway a few stops from Mustek, and you'll find plenty of pubs that are just as they always were, and with not a tourist in sight.
When is HD not HD? {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Jan 30th 2008 2:22PM The maximum bit rate for all streams on a DVD is 9.8Mbps. There are a number of reasons that the video content on DVD is encoded at about 4-5.5 Mbps.
1) Audio and subtitles. Unless you want video without audio, you'll have to account for the audio streams in your 9.8Mbps. Outside the U.S., it's not uncommon for a DVD to have 5-8 separate audio streams for different languages. Even in U.S., you often have English, French, Spanish, and a commentary track, which can eat up at least 2Mbps.
2) Supporting older DVD players. I still have one of the very first DVD players released (early 1997), and it still works with recent DVDs, but it would experience serious problems if you tried to feed it MPEG2 at the maximum bitrate that the DVD standard allows. I considered it a miracle of technology back in 1997 that a DVD player that cost *only* $1,500 could decode MPEG2 at 5Mbps. My PC of that era could barely play postage-stamp-sized video at decent frame rates.
Geo-tagging photographs with a GPS unit {Gadling}
Jan 2nd 2008 8:39AM I bought one of these Sony units about six months ago, and although it's a great idea, it doesn't work as well as I'd hoped.
The way it works is very simple - it records your position every 15 seconds, along with the exact time, and then the software matches up the time stamps in the GPS device with the time stamps on your photos to determine the location in which a photo was taken.
The first issue is that you have to make sure the time settings on your camera are *very* accurate, meaning less than 30 seconds of error when setting the time from a very reliable source like http://www.time.gov/
Secondly, the GPS hardware in the Sony device is not very good. The accuracy is often no better than a few hundred feet from your actual location, and the device itself must be pointed *directly* at the sky at all times (I actually duct taped it to the top of my baseball cap at one point). Half the time, it didn't record my position at all.
My recommendation would be to spend a few more bucks and buy a better GPS unit, and then use its track logs to geolocate your photos using software like Greg mentioned above. I ended up buying a Garmin 60Csx, which is very accurate (if a little expensive), and only needs the antenna peeking out of my backpack to reliably record GPS data.
Beer Today, Gone Tomorrow {Gadling}
Dec 27th 2007 1:17PM I remember repeating this statistic (Czechs drink about 160 liters per capita) to investors when I worked as an analyst in Prague in the early 1990's.
Investors seemed to find this impressive, and a good reason to invest in Czech breweries. I tried to explain that the opposite was probably true - does it really make sense to invest in beer in a country that can't possibly drink more (i.e. the market can't grow)?
Czech Christmas, Part III: The carp must die {Gadling}
Dec 20th 2007 11:20AM My kids like to see the carp swimming in their little pools in front of the supermarket, but don't like to eat them. The wife has carp on Christmas Eve, but I have chicken breasts and potato salad with the kids.
Here are some pics where you can see the carp being sold on the street, and my son looking at them:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=91601526%40N00&q=carp&m=tags
iPhone now software unlocked in 32 countries and 69 carriers {Engadget}
Sep 13th 2007 4:58PM Czech Republic - O2 (formerly Eurotel).
iTunes 7.0.2 thinks I've moved to France (and they have no TV Shows there!) {The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)}
Nov 3rd 2006 7:29AM I'm in the Czech Republic, but buy through the U.S. store. When I saw that my country had been changed to Denmark, I feared that Apple was now going to stop me from buying TV shows from the U.S. store. However, I was able to switch back to the U.S. store with no problems.
The Movie Business Challenge {Blog Maverick}
Jul 24th 2006 9:18AM Comments 59. and 63. are on the right track (try to use a market mechanism to determine the correct pricing for a ticket), but haven't gone into enough detail to come up with a workable solution. If we are looking at the movie theater business as a revenue-maximizing problem (and assume more-or-less fixed marketing costs), one obvious potential solution is to use a multi-unit auction format that attempts to maximize the revenue from each screening of a movie, rather than maximizing the revenue per ticket. Movie seats are perishable items, so (within limits) it makes sense to try and fill the theater for every screening. Of course, filling the theater also increases the number of people that have seen the movie and can generate buzz around it. The fairest multi-unit auction (and the one with the best chance of filling the theater) would work as follows: assume a screening with n seats. Customers bid by indicating how much they'd be willing to pay for a ticket to that screening. Then you take the nth highest bid, and everyone who bid *above* that number gets a ticket, at the price of the nth bid. Assume a theater with three seats. Ten people enter bids for tickets, at $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, and $10. We take the third bid from the top ($8), and the top three bidders pay $8 each for tickets (and no one pays more than he/she bid). We now have revenue of $24, more than the revenue ($18) of pricing tickets at $9 (we have only two people willing to pay that price, so we won't sell all the seats). Lowering the price to $7 makes no sense, as we can already fill the theater at $8 a ticket. If we have five seats to sell, the price per ticket is $6, which although lower than our original $8 ticket, still yields more revenue ($30 for five tickets) than the $8 price ($24 because we sell only three of our five seats). A multi-unit auction format also solves the problem of what to charge for matinee tickets, what to charge for tickets after a movie has been in the theaters for a while, how to maximize revenue for the opening week-end, etc. Obviously there are issues with this plan, among them the simple fact that it might be hard to explain how the auction works to the average consumer. But if used for select screenings (especially for geek-friendly movies), I think it'd be worth a try (and just the buzz from the first auction could help promote the film).
