Buzz Out Loud Show Notes: Wii get a workout

Report from Digital Hollywood:
Fritz Attaway: MPAA EVP and general counsel really does think we're all criminals. Reed Stager, Chairman, Digital Watermarking Alliance, thinks watermarks and serial numbers will work!

Dr. Ruth from Normal, Illinois
I cracked the Morse code! It says, "Hey Buzz Crew." Rock on! Thanks to everyone who decoded the Morse code! It just said, "Hey buzz crew."

ANON
Two cell phones, one number? They can do it. It's not a technical limitation. I had a phone, I dropped it in the water, and then when I went to Verizon, they programmed me another phone. And when the phone that I dropped in water came back to life, they both rang. When I called Verizon, they told me not to use the second one, but I'm telling you, they were both working.

Eric
To answer yesterday's question: You can absolutely have multiple SIMs on the same phone number or account, there are no technical hurdles; it's just that American carriers don't let you do it. In the rest of the world, many carriers will let you have two SIM cards linked to the same number. So instead of switching cards, you just turn your other phone on and send a special code to your carrier to tell them to send all your calls to that phone instead of the other. It doesn't work like a telephone with multiple extensions where the calls go to all phones that say they have that number. If the carriers allowed that, then people would be able to clone your SIM card and make calls using your account.

Hank in publishing, responding to Matt in advertising
But as publishers, all we do, all day long, is try to shoehorn as many ads in possible into everything. But don't feel bad, we get up in the morning, put on our $300 jeans, and drive off in our gold-plated Ferraris like everyone else.

Luke from Pittsburgh
If Netflix is smart, this is how they will succeed at online movies where everyone else is failing:
Remove the notion of streaming or on-demand viewing from the equation. Instead, give users a Netflix in-box on their PC, TiVo, and iTV. They manage their queue just like they would over the traditional Netflix service, but instead of waiting three days for delivery, it shows up much faster through their online Netflix service. But here's the catch: they can see when it was "sent," and they will be notified when it is "delivered," but other than that, they will not monitor the video's progress. When they are finished viewing the downloaded movie, they use their Netflix Inbox client to "return" the video (in this case, deleting from the user's device and alerting Netflix to send the next video in their queue).
By changing the expectation from an on-demand context to a traditional through-the-mail context that people understand (even though it is in a new environment), they will eliminate the disappointment of slow downloads and stuttery video that today's online video providers are dealing with. If Apple, TiVo, and the MPAA are smart, they will jump in. The only setback I see is that they will likely not be allowed to roll out a PC client due to concerns over cracking the DRM the Netflix in-box would ship with.
In case they aren't doing anything like this, I'm calling my patent lawyer.

Tedson
Tom, I recently (like 6 months ago) discovered that the GPUs in the MacBook and MacBook Pros had been underclocked. This is preposterous! Why should I pay for a $2,500 MacBook Pro and only get second-rate parts. I considered buying one and reclocking it in Windows but decided not to. My question is, are the new MacBook Pro's GPUs underclocked? Love the show!!

Ross
This week's story regarding the congratulatory cake that the IE team delivered to the Firefox development team is just another in a series of funny feuds between Microsoft's IE and their competition. In 1997, when Microsoft released IE 4, they put a giant IE "e" logo on Netscape's lawn. Netscape quickly retaliated by putting a 7-foot-tall Mozilla statue on top of the toppled-over IE "e" logo.