The Roomba 560 Sucks Literally and Figuratively
I'm surprised that it took me so long to write this post since I retired my Roomba over 6 months ago when the $90 battery (that was about a year old) only provided the pile of crap with about 5 minutes of power. When I first got my Roomba 560 I was impressed with it. We quickly Roomba proofed the small place (at the time we lived in a place that was less than 1000 square feet) and set it up to run automatically about 3 times a week. After 3 months of normal use the Roomba needed to have it's side brush replaced. In fact this would happen 3 times over the year. It would eventually need everything except the main drive wheels, motor, and debris bin replaced even though it was being used normally. IRobot was very good about replacing these parts under warranty, but I would say that the Roomba was out of commission for about 2 months out of the year waiting for parts. Once the year was up one of the replacement parts that was replaced under warranty (and was less than 3 months old) the head unit in this case (holds the brushes) failed. IRobot assured me that the replacement parts carry the original warranty and not their own so this new head unit was not out of warranty since the Roomba was now out of warranty. That same month I confirmed that many Roomba owners had trouble with this blue head unit. Perhaps it was a defect, but IRobot still refused to replace it and I bought a green one since I was "out of warranty." So the original one was red, the replacement which lasted 3 months was blue and failed quickly for many people, and then I had to buy a green one for about $50 bucks. Two weeks after that the $90 dollar battery failed. Take my advice on this one. It is not durable enough to make the high price tag worth it and that goes for convenience as well. Use the money on a self-propelled, good vacuum, like a Dyson Animal instead. Sure you have to push it a little bit, and might have to move some furniture from time to time, but IRobot makes their money off of making very modular robots that are easy to repair, and then selling you high failure rate parts. At least that was my experience.
I should note that there are some companies refurbishing batteries for about $60 now and that there is a Ni-Cad battery available for between $70 and $80 but of course the Ni-Cads performance is not what the original $90 NiMh's performance is.
Also, when I spoke to customer service they accused me of abusing the Roomba. As I already mentioned we just used it normally and even prepped the house for it. There could not have been a better environment for it. We just used it like we should have been able to and it broke. Plus that's just poor customer service on their part.
Welcome to the Wasteland! Would you like to supersize that?
So there's an apocalypse where the Earth dies, and then we, the desolate survivors, live in the land of post apocalyptia. It is the permanent darkness of bleak hopeless despair, and nothing can change it. But lately the post-apocalypse is getting brighter and sunnier with the help from corporate sponsors. It's the Buy'N'Large post apocalyptia. Not only are our wastelands pocketed with civilization living rape-free, but the genre once reserved for paranoid alarmist has blossomed into pop corporate art. Movies like The Book of Eli that are as genuine as the Pepsi logo.
Like many bad corporate things, it started in the 1980s. Before then Orson Welles scared the shit out of Americans with the coming Martian horde destroying Earth. Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers were laughing about how it was all going to happen in Dr. Strangelove, and A Boy and His Dog let us know that no matter how dark it got, it was always funny. This was before Reaganites trickled down, and when the Rooskies were still terrifying.
The catalyst to it was Mad Max, and The Road Warrior; the quintessential post-apocalypse westerns. Both continue to influence post-apocalypse fiction, but more importantly: the films cost approx. 200,000 and 2mil to make, but earned 9mil and 24.6mil respectively in the United States. George Miller had created a franchise overflowing with success that could be easily replicated at a low budget.
This is 1981, one year after Reagan's election and the introduction of Reaganomics. Americans were feeling 10.8% unemployment and stagflation. The average American's spending power steadily decreased through the early and mid 1980s. The conditions were ideal for apocalypticism. Reagan's war rhetoric and increasing tensions with Russia had people so scared couples weren't having children out of fear of the future.
But the apocalypse was going to become something Kevin Costner or Kurt Russell saved on a biweekly basis. In previous decades where roughly 10 post-apocalypse films were made per decade, the 80s saw a tremendous boom. A total of 56 films, including the lowest budget trash feasible, all jumped on the nuclear holocaust bandwagon. Why? As reliable as any historical trend, movie going actually increases dramatically during fiscal crises.
With a guarantee that movie going will increase, regardless of the quality, studios only had to look to George Miller's success. They would, and it would produce an abomination of film-going: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. First American financed Mad Max film, with catchy songs provided by Tina Turner, sponsored by a New Coca Cola and rated PG-13 for teens everywhere. It was the nadir of the transformation to corporate art. A film specifically designed to reach the largest audience base by reducing to the lowest common denominator. This trend would continue until the early 90s, but largely taper off even before Kevin Costner's over-budgeted flop, "The Postman".
After all: the Cold War had ended, and the economy was booming throughout the 90s, it wasn't reasonable any longer to assume traditional apocalypse films would be the big seller they once were. But Bruce Campbell had yet to be cast in a Post-Apoc film, and he was unable to herald the end of the genre. It took until 1992 when he starred in MINDWARP for people to finally start getting the picture; except for Kevin Costner. Kevin Costner never catches on.
But history is like a river, and as time goes on it repeats itself. So with the second civil unrest and the economic depression, the market was again ripe for this noir genre. Movie studios need to keep making money, and formula flops like "I Love you Beth Cooper" and "National Lampoon's Titties Flopping About [UNRATED EDITION!]" weren't quite bringing in the crowd as they once did. It was the dying of the age of Dane Cookism.
Again a Republican President and Congress had frozen the minimum wage in a time warp, inflation was faster than the median growth, and a war with a global enemy had developed when the next attack was anyone's guess. Not surprisingly, movie-going went up 13% in 2008, and domestic box office profits hit an all time high. This doesn't mean that Movie Studios aren't gambling every time they make a movie. They need to find a guaranteed winner.
But before the corporate art swill could start coming down our throats faster than feeding troughs, the artist had to bring it back. Danny Boyle would with 28 Days Later and start a revolution. Zombie flicks had always been wildly popular outside of the U.S., but 28 Days' was both a plague and zombie apocalypse. Coincidentally right after Boyle's fiction, The Zombie Survival Guide came out to pop success. The new post-apocalypse genre had been given a golden chalice of rebirth in the living dead. While George Romero gave an original life to Zombism, Boyle created something else: blitzkrieg zombies the audience loved to fear, and The Survival Guide gave the answers on how to beat it.
Entire cultures developed around zombie contingency plans; how to collect rations, find hide-outs, and transform houses into war forts. The Apocalypse was back, baby, and movie studios green-lighting greats like: the remade Day of the Dead, Children of Men, The Road, and even Wall-E. This is how prevalent post-apocalypticism was in society: a children's movie was made for it, and kudos to it because Wall-E is absolutely brilliant, and is the first ever Garbage Apocalypse.
Sadly, every golden era must end and in cinema it ends quickly. The Happenings was written on the wall long before 2012, as The Day After Tomorrow wasn't looking too good for Cloverfield. The Statue of Liberty was going down more than Jenna Jameson. Studios began genetically designing movies from birth to bring in as many box office dollars as possible. Despite the decay we won't see the last of the Survivalist Zombie Post Apocalypse film for awhile, but at least the herald of the end of this insanity is here at last: AdultSwim Games' Radioactive Teddy Bear Zombies.
Yes, we've reached a veritable age of wisdom. We've overloaded the capacity of Zombie Stripper mild porno flicks and video game entertainment. Zombies will thrive as low-budget sex comedies, and apocalypse fiction will fade away again. National Lampoon already made their post-apoc flick, The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell, and it's only getting worse. To bring back the post apocalypse for much longer we're going to need to bring a new kind of life into them.
Now there's a few genres of apocalypse: you got your nuclear alien robot zombie monster virus apocalypse, and pretty much everyone's been going on from there. So I propose that the next great post-apocalypse film will be the radioactive super virus that destroys all life except for those that the robot aliens from the future resurrect into a new world order lead by zombie Ronald Reagan, who must free his new people from the shackles of their alien fathers.
I've been collecting backers while you've been reading all of this. It certainly can't be worse than Mad Max 4: Fury Road.
IT and Why You Need to Care — Chapter I
Chapter I -- Why You Have A Responsibility To Learn About Your Computer
So why am I writing this chapter? Well, it has to do with shovels...not directly, but it does. Just bear with me for a second and I'll explain. You see, very few people in the developed world would think of trying to dig a small hole with anything but a metal shovel. We all basically know how to use this tool, but most of us could not forge a new one if we had to. Still, that's okay because we understand it's basic operation. It is a tool, an important one, and it rarely comes with an instruction manual. The people that make shovles are allowed to assume that people understand how to use shovels. This is a totally fair and reasonable assumption.
Computers are the most versatile tools that we have created. They can help us waste time, by playing gory video games for example, to amazing things like plotting our course to Jupiter or helping us design our first moon colony. Their help in the field of medicine has allowed us to get closer to curing cancers and they will almost definitely help us actually get there. They are the single most important tool that we have created in the latter half of the last century. Used correctly, they can help us to create a utopia, or they can help us enslave each other. It is all up to how we use them, and that starts with everyone understanding their basic operation so they are no more apprehenive of using a computer than a shovel. It also means that we all have a responsibility to train ourselves to that level with few exceptions, or those that understand computers will be able to control us.
Many years ago I took my first computer class in middle school. I learned how to type on an old Tandy computer. Sure, better computers were available at the time, but it's not like all of our schools have money for that stuff, since we have to let our governments and state universities waste it on crap they don't need instead. Still, this lack of newer computers ended up being a good thing actually, not that I agree with schools being underfunded, but it limited what stupid, unnecessary crap we could be made to learn on a computer (for example, learning MS Office instead of programming). Instead we learned valuable skills like how to type and eventually even how to write a BASIC program, partially because we couldn't afford the software that our schools are unnecessarily buying and then cramming down kids' throats. A perfect example of this is how schools use Windows and MS Office predominantly, even though GNU/Linux and Open Office would meet their needs and run better on the old machines they usually get to use through donations, etc. Of course when I say school here, I mean public, primary education institutions. Colleges just charge kids an obscene amount to go there and make sure that their Presidents and Deans get crap that is just expensive and mostly useless like MacBook Airs and, oh yes, big screen televisions to unnecessarily use as monitors, but more on this later.
I was only in eigth grade, but learning this little bit of BASIC, and therefore programming, still puts me way above the knowledge level of most computer users. I wrote a program that created a picture of a brown hamster with a blinking nose on a white background, and it worked on monochrome monitors too, by the way. This taught me many things. First, the computers didn't even have hard drives, so we had to write out code, draw the images we intended to make on graph paper that represented the pixels we were going to color in, and bring that to class with us every week. To accomplish this I had to learn how a display worked beyond how to hook a cable up and press the power button, what resolution actually was, and how computers actually interpret code. I also found out how memory worked, and I found out that although computers may be self-aware some day, most of the stuff we have really can't do anything on its own, even if it wanted to. There is always some human hand behind even the most advanced AI's out there. Sure, this shattered my belief in the computer uprising I was hoping for, but as I got older, and watched more and more people give control of their lives over to technology without even trying to understand the basic way that it worked, I realized that I may yet live to battle deadly robot enemies with a chainsaw. In fact maybe they will team up with zombies and I can have the EMP in one hand for the robots and the katana blade in the other for the zombies, or maybe I'll get really lucky and somehow the robots will learn how to merge with the zombies and I'll be expected to run them over with an M1-Abrams tank. Although I'm not really into the machines of war, I think even pacifists have to admit that a tank that can survive a nuclear blast is pretty freaking sweet.
Sorry, back to the point. I continued with my studies of computers as a hobby, and took some more programming when I went to college. I reinforced the idea that computers only do what you tell them to do, but by now most of my college buddies had machines with Windows 98 or OS9 on them. The Apple guys especially had never seen the command line, and had no idea what it was for. They thought that if they had to do that stuff, the computer must just be bad. In theory, someone should just be able to build a computer that “just works” like, you know, Apple does, expect that it doesn't. Remember the Genius bar? You know the place that you go to get told to go to hell because Apple has a policy against really helping you out? Sadly this story is pretty true industry wide. Simple stuff you can be helped with... more complex stuff maybe, but probably not. This is partially because the people you are dealing with probably are not computer experts, at least from the theoretical standpoint, but are really just advanced users. Still, the larger point here is that all operating systems have a very powerful command line interface running in the background. When you click on an icon, for example, it runs a set of commands in the background. These commands can also be typed in at the command line. So you see, icons are a way of actually complicating a simple task like typing in a command at the command line. Sure they also act as place holders, help you organize where your programs are, and limit the amount of commands you have to know, if any, but this basic principal needs to be understood.
Once you really start to customize any system, or put any data on it that is yours, there is no way that the techs can know exactly what is important to you or not. Sure, you can tell them, and they can guess that your “My Documents” folder is probably important, for example, but if you understood even the most basic things about computers, you'd have your critical data backed up and would almost never have to demand that your organization spend thousands of dollars trying to recover your data from a bad hard drive, for example. This is important for many reasons, but one of them is common sense. Even if you are very organized and your critical data is in one place, if your drive is really toast you may end up with corrupt data. If your organization requires encryption and you simply forget your password, and things are not set up properly, you probably won't be able to get a lot of your data back. Also, this data should not be backed up to loose storage, like hard drives, if it is really critical and can simply be lifted. It always cracked me up how some of the Universities I worked for would provide very little storage space on their servers for users to back up to, and even then it was not usually done in an automated manner. They would give you a little share on some old server somewhere, just to say they gave you something, forcing many users to demand external hard drives or just to not worry about it at all and then cost the organization tons of money for recovery. In one instance a depatment was doing some very important historical recovery. The supporting IT department, a state department, of course, washed their hands of any responsibility to this mostly senior citizen run department other than giving them a computer. They then suggested a network backup drive that was very expensive but had some internal redundancy and washed their hands of any other responsibility. So here's the issue, there was so much data that they were almost exclusively using the network storage device to save to. Sure it had 3 discs in it that acted as one for redundancy (aka RAID 5), but it was still a single point of failure if anything went wrong with the network storage unit. Low and behold, it did and a tech was paid $15 an hour to use 60% of the universities network capacity to try and recover the data for over 24 hours. This could have all been avoided if one of their very expensive union employees had used one of the 15 thousand dollar servers they have in storage to backup the users data using an automated script, or just simply gave them an inexpensive tape drive. Compared to the cost of the computer and network storage array they gave them, a tape drive or external HDD as a secondary backup would have been peanuts and cost as much or less than the recovery, plus there would have been no issues with data corruption caused by trying to recover the data from failed drives, etc. So users are expected to know what they're doing by the people they pay to know. What I mean is that, policy wise, when shit hits the fan, you'll find out that your department has no real responsibility to your data anyway.
Hell, the CIO of the place I'm talking about actually cut off an employee midsentence when they were explaining the pros and cons of encryption because he was late for his 2 hour walk around campus. He, of course, asked the employee about encryption, but decided that the head of an IT department can't listen to any explanation that is more than 2 sentences long about it. He also only usually works a 6 hour day. The point is the guys at the top of these departments often know way less than their student techs. They say they're needed because they're “people” people, but do you really need someone who knows nothing about IT running an IT department? Isn't that a recipe for disaster? To pay them more and give them benefits above the lower level techs that have no rights seems to suggest that your retention of qualified people will be low as well, but that is the modern University IT model...not everywhere, but in the majority of places. All other issues aside, this should motivate you to want to know more and/or hire some new administrative staff even if it means taking on your corrupt state government and union, but more on this later.
The main issue here is control. You may say, “What do I care? At my University they let me be an administrator on my own machine.” (please see the post on brokenhivemind.com about some of the many reasons why you shouldn't be one.) This makes you think, among other things, that you have control of your work machine and if there is a problem, that is what you pay tech guys to fix, right? Well this is also where you shoot yourself in the foot. So let me make this point again. You see, most IT departments are run by people that have almost no clue as to how computers work, and I will be writing a whole chapter about this with supporting information. The point here is that since they are in control, they usually create policies that limit their responsibility to you and especially your data. Anything they do is basically a best attempt, putting the responsibility, when you're paddling up shit creek, solely on you. Still, this situation is avoidable if you understand just some basic things about computers.
So here's a list of things you should know.
- Being an administrator on your work computer really only makes you a threat to your fellow users and does not protect your privacy.
-- Your organization owns your computer and the network devices that go to it. They are allowed to monitor you and can do this just as effectively if you are an administrator or not. Also, in most cases if someone removes your hard drive, they can find a way to get your data off of it. Instead of demanding a new computer you don't need every 3 years, ask for one every four and a case that you can lock instead. Once someone has physical access or your computer is on 24/7 on a network, it's game over. If someone really wants your data, especially someone “legit”, like your boss, they can get it.
2. You don't need a computer every 3 to 4 years. It may seem like you do because your computer gets “slow” as you use it, but this is mostly due to spyware and other infections which you wouldn't be getting as many of if you weren't an administrator. Also, some operating systems are more prone to problems with this than others. Operating systems that are prone to infection, like Windows, have forced institutions to look to solutions like “clean access” which, like any service, is only as effective as the people providing it. Sure it helps, but if you know enough not to open that infected e-mail in the first place, your need for security software is greatly reduced. Plus in the end, a computer is a machine. If you have total access to it, and tell it to do something like infect itself, it will.
3. Problem research is often easy. Most solutions can be found by performing a google search. Sure, some of them require administrator rights, and since you're no longer an admin you'd have to contact your IT department for help if they do, but in general, almost all of the answers you need can be found by performing a quick search on your favorite search engine.
4. Don't go to sites you shouldn't go to at work. This reduces spyware infections, and since you're probably being monitored anyway, you should probably not be doing this unless you work in the adult industry. Whether I believe this is a violation of your rights or not, it's not like we are gaining rights as citizens or workers these days, so if you don't like this then fight against it through legal channels.
5. Academic freedom is often misinterpreted. You don't have a right to look at whatever you want. Sure, universities are in many ways the last monarchy system that we have left, and many corrupt bosses will look the other way when their IT techs service your machine when they find inappropriate material, but academic freedom does not give researchers, professors, etc. the right to research anything they want on their computers. Of course the head of at least one IT department I worked for did not understand this, or said that they didn't, but that doesn't mean that if the State checks out what you're doing at work they won't can you for it because you can protect yourself with academic freedom.
So again the issue is control. Perceived control and actual control. You want to be able to tell the difference here. Many of us complain about how when we call a call center we don't get the answers we want, the people know less than you even do, or they are just plain rude. I'm going to skip the complaints about speaking to India since you should be impressed that most Indians speak English much better than Americans speak other foreign languages if they speak one at all. Basically it's not possible to know everything. Plus, call center personnel are usually entry level and underpaid, usually being the key word here. In the Connecticut State University union mafia employment system, many of the techs are overpaid and get amazing benefits, and still do not keep up on their skills, they actually think they're underpaid, etc., but more on that later.
When you call in, they go through a basic checklist. This is why they ask you if it's plugged in for example. Many calls are solved this way. If the problem persists, and the tech is not lazy or they don't have someone else to bump it to and they're not lazy, they see if they know the solution off of the top of their head. If they don't they give you a “canned response.” If that isn't appropriate, and this determination is really up to them, then they might do a search for solutions if they don't just have another department to bounce you to or an excuse to use. So you see, calling a call center is usually just a waste of time. In fact if we could get people to just use search engines a bit we would hardly need call centers at all. Call centers resolve over 90% of calls on average (this varies based on the call center) because most of the solutions to your problems are simple.
The other side of this is that the more you know, the better overall experience you'll have. Sure, many of you say that you don't want to know anything about computers, and then quickly demand to be administrators on your work machines even though this level of access should be kept for people that at least mostly know what they're doing since, in effect, it gives the user access to the whole system. If you are more than one year from retirement, this issue is not something you can ignore. Computers will simply become more complex, but the basic way they work will stay the same. The basic skills needed to troubleshoot systems will stay the same. Also, you will not have the time to wait for your overworked, or possibly incompetent, IT center to respond every time you have a problem. Also, if you're at a university, and you're not a tenured professor or better, they will not respond if the king (aka president or dean) is having an issue. They probably should if your problem is effecting students, for example, but universities are politically loaded places and at the most corrupt ones, the asses of the presidents, deans, etc. are kissed well before more important work is done. The deans and presidents probably wouldn't approve of this, but they are simply unaware since ass kissing takes up so much of their time.
Bosses will expect you to know more as time goes on too. Learning more will make your experience less frustrating, will help you get and keep a job, and will eliminate many jobs for people that, for example, spend your tax money on watching You Tube all day. Really, this will come up again in a later chapter but at one place I worked, right before the State announced that it was 8 billion dollars in debt, the organization I worked for spent thousands of dollars on a flat screen TV to display a white background with the total number of calls that were open. This place liked to throw parties and play X-Box on it too. The call center, which had a similar TV they claimed they needed for training, watched popular sporting events on theirs. They spent their down time and your tax money goofing off, and if they were found to be incompetent, they demanded training, because they obviously didn't have the time to educate themselves and their union kept them from really being truly reviewed or fired... I want people to have jobs, but is this the kind of thing we want to pay for and support especially when the alternative is less frustrating and better overall? The alternative being that we get rid of these unnecessary, paid hand-holding jobs and all become more competent? We are encouraging this level of job and support by not addressing simple problems ourselves and that is, amongst other things, expensive and wasteful. Pen and Teller would probably say that it's Bullshit.
IT and Why You Need to Care — Introduction
Introduction
First let me say that I am not a complete computer expert. My career in computers started both out of interest and necessity, but I do not have a degree in computer science. Still, I am amazed at how much I was able to learn and how many of my better paid (and treated) colleagues I was able to surpass in skill simply by working hard, knowing how to do simple research, paying attention, and giving a shit.
I am writing this book in the hopes that my expereinces will help users realize that regardless of what the proprietary companies and others have told you, computers are not as complex as you have been conditioned to believe. You can easily learn how they work at more than the GUI (graphical user interface) level, and most of the time you will not really break anything beyond repair if you simply do some basic research, BACK UP, and apply some common sense when working on problems.
I feel that the current culture of computing, mostly in the computer support arena and especially at the University level, is riddled with misunderstanding and sadly, unnecessary incompetence. Let me say at this point that incompetance is not a bad word in my book. It simply means that there is an area that a person can improve on. We are all incompetent in certain areas. The areas we choose to become competent in often depend on our situations. If a person is an IT “pro” and incompetent but willing to become competant, there is no problem there; If they simply become worse as the years go on and even create a culture where not knowing and not trying to find out is okay, then that is an unacceptable problem. I also hope that by writing this book I can shed some light on a dark area of our culture that not only does not need to be dark, but can lead us to wonderful things if cultivated correctly. I am writing in the hopes of a brighter future when it comes to technology and our implementation of it.
As an aside, this entire book will be written using Open Office. If there is something simple in writing style, formatting, etc. that should have been done and is not, I assure you it is because of a mistake I made and not because of any lack of functionality inherent in this amazing free product.
Atari 7800 (Step 2 in my trip down retro-gaming lane)
So I finally ordered the parts to make my 7800 work again. I have to admit that I just ordered an adapter and used an old RCA cable instead of trying to dig up, or build a manual RF switch although the schematics are freely available. I will say that the site www.atariage.com was very helpful in my endeavors. Wikipedia also had some very interesting articles about the 7800 highlighting topics that I never knew. One was that independent developers have released games as late as 2009 for the system. The other was that the system, while trying to compete with the NES, saw the age of Nintendo's exclusive contracts, and rushed games to market to try and compete. Although the 7800 could address a little more than 4 Megabits of memory, while Atari made the system no game over 144 Kbits was ever released. It got me back on my soap box about how we move through hardware too quickly for stupid reasons, and how we move to new pieces of hardware well before tapping the real potential of the old hardware. This makes sense for some companies economically, but is still lame in the long run. It creates tons of waste, and for what, to chew through some more garbage code with slightly faster hardware(rant, rant, rant). Anyway, I've realized that most of the Atari games I have actually are 2600 games, and the only true 7800 game I have is Pole Position II. I played through many old games in their lame 2 player head to head modes and remembered how much could be done with very little memory for about 45 minutes, and then fired up my PS3 to play Lego Batman. Still when I look at Atari I can only wonder what might have been if they had made better decisions as a company, and if Nintendo didn't come up with the lame concept of exclusive releases. Anyway, long live my 7800.
DRM is like a vampire: It’s hard to kill and it sucks.
Dear Home Entertainment Industry,
Any company that tells you their DRM will keep pirates from copying your material is either stupid, or lying to you because they think you are stupid. Buying or developing new DRM and copy protection stuff all the time is probably costing you a lot of money. This drives the price up for consumers, widening the gap between expensive legitimate media and cheap pirated media even further. Worse, it creates compatibility problems meaning they can't even view your content after they buy it!
Your mistakes are making pirating media even more attractive, completely defeating the purpose of the copy protection. You may dismiss that comic as silly, but remember: The guy that drew it has a degree in physics, and was a contractor for NASA at the Langley Research Center. He seems like a pretty smart guy, and it would probably be a good idea to listen to him. He drew a comic about music DRM being dead, but you skipped the funeral, and are now trying to pull off a Weekend at Bernie's. His comic gets millions of visitors, and his simple art has made him enough money to make the comic his day job. Clearly, he understands a good bit about marketing, and quite a bit about technology. Google seems to think he's a pretty important guy. It's looking more and more like he has the right idea.
Lets get down to the core of the issue: You don't want people to steal your hard work, or the hard work of the artists you work with. The fact is, you can't keep pirates from pirating your material unless you stop making material. If you cut the crap and just sell the media unprotected at lower cost, most of the people who buy pirated copies will just buy your material instead. They'll love it, use it, and maybe share it with other people who will then buy even more of your stuff! Media pirates win over DRM every time. They can defeat your expensive copy protection on one device, rip the media to an unprotected format, make a gazillion copies, and then sell them for a far lower price than you can manage. The cost of your DRM may be more than their costs from start to finish. They will continue to win as long as you keep spending money on your crappy technical bandages. Instead, think like a pirate. Emulate them. Hell, use them as a distribution platform! Research how to easily distribute your content to more people for less cost, and then do it. Media piracy will all but dry up because nobody will need to pirate anything, and you will make even more money!
It's amazing to me that this DRM stuff is still around. For me, believing DRM will prevent piracy is a bit like believing the world is flat. We've seen that it's not true. We've circumnavigated the global market, and we've seen the flaws in this concept. Media pirates still pirate the media, and consumers are finding it more and more difficult just to PLAY the legitimate media. Yes, I know I could just buy a receiver that decodes HDMI's audio stream before passing it to the TV, or buy an HDCP stripper, but I shouldn't be FORCED to spend more money just so it's slightly harder to copy your products. I don't need to copy your stuff, and if I did, you couldn't stop me anyhow. Devices with HDCP compatibility and other DRM products must cost more to make, and this cost is passed on to the consumer. These devices don't mean I get any better audio or video quality, they just mean I have to deal with more headache and confusion. I've finally got my HDCP compliant setup working, so I can ignore your DRM crap, just like the pirates do. I'm getting really close to where I'd rather do without your products than buy them from you.
Do us all a favor and get rid of all this DRM crap so we can all get back to watching movies, listening to music, reading e-books, and playing video games.
Sincerely,
Mark Smith
P.S: Below is just one of many reasons why I hate DRM.
I own a PS3, an XBox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and have a Comcast HD DVR, and I wanted all of them to show up on my nice big Samsung 50" Plasma TV. I had a receiver with two HDMI inputs and a half-dozen Component inputs, along with two Toslink optical ins and one Coaxial digital audio in, plus a half dozen stereo audio (Red and White RCA) inputs. Initially, I wanted all of the inputs to go to my receiver, and then have one HDMI cable going to my TV, just to carry the video. I then realized my receiver was only and HDMI pass-through, which meant that the audio signal was not decoded from HDMI by the receiver, and required Toslink Optical or Digital Coax input to get sound to the speakers. This was especially true of surround sound. Bummer.
I hatched a new plan. The TV had a Toslink optical output on the back. Whatever source was selected on the TV would dump it's audio to this output. Since all the devices had combination audio/video cables, I could just connect all my devices to the TV and then connect the Toslink from the output of the TV to the input receiver, and thus do all switching between game consoles and DVR with the TV remote. This would also mean I would only need my three existing HDMI cables, my one Wii Component cable, and one Toslink cable to connect all my systems to the TV. Six devices, five cables! Perfect!
I set all this up, plugged in all the cables, fired up the receiver, and started up an HD movie channel. I noticed that my Receiver was only showing two speakers active, indicating standard stereo. I thought I had perhaps picked a channel without surround sound, so I tried switching to my PS3, making sure that the audio out was set to 5.1 surround. I still only got stereo. I tried connecting the optical cable directly to my PS3 instead of through the TV. BAM! 5.1 channel surround. Back to the TV. Two speakers. I was getting fairly confused at this point. Surely the TV wouldn't degrade the output to the optical out, right? There's no way they would actually try to make it HARDER to hook up a home theater system to a TV, right? RIGHT?
WRONG. Enter HDCP, or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. The devil-child of the otherwise friendly Intel Corporation, HDCP is designed to prevent the copying of digital content (video and audio) over a variety of digital signal ports (source: Wikipedia). Since a digital copy would theoretically be a perfect copy of the original material, it was deemed necessary to prevent Joe/Jane Consumer from simply copying this media and throwing it on the internet. In order to view most HD material at full quality, you need HDCP enabled devices. You need an HDCP compliant player, an HDCP compliant TV, and if you want to decode HDMI signals, HDCP compliant audio equipment. From the minimal research I did, it seems that the device has to disable outputs that would allow you to thwart the copy protection in order to be HDCP compliant. This means that when HDMI is the input source on my TV, it is required to downgrade it to regular stereo audio out on the Toslink optical port. The practical upshot of this? I can't use the Toslink optical output port on my TV to send surround sound audio back to my receiver if the original source comes from HDCP protected HDMI. What?! Lame.
So what could I do instead? My Video game consoles support surround sound. My DVR/Cable TV box support surround sound. They all seem to have Toslink out, and in the case of the cable box, Digital Coax out. Below is the monstrosity that I came up with. It works, but not nearly as nicely as the original idea.
First off, notice that I need five cables just to go to the receiver! I needed five cables total in my original plan! Also note that the Wii now plays through the TV Speakers, rather than the sound system. This is because the Wii has a combined Component/Stereo Audio cable. In order to get the sound from the TV back to the receiver, I would need to run another stereo audio (red and white RCA ended) cable from my TV to my receiver. This setup requires three extra cables, and a far more convoluted setup. If I want to play Wii or XBox 360, I change the input on my TV. If I want to play PS3 or watch TV, I have to switch the input on my receiver, and if I was playing Wii or XBox 360 before, I have to change the input on my TV too. Since the HDMI on the Receiver is pass-through, I have to mute the TV speakers for the PS3 and the DVR, but I have to turn them back up to play Wii. SUPER LAME!
All this is worth it to the media companies though. It prevents people from pirating their content after all! How does this prevent pirates from copying the material? Well, frankly, it doesn't.There are devices that are sold to circumvent HDCP since some older hardware didn't have it. I'm sure those consumers were THRILLED about having to buy extra hardware that added no value to their viewing experience. Even better, HDCP may have been cryptographically broken since 2001, before it was even in commercial products! This didn't stop it from being required by the EU to get their official "HD Ready" label. The media pirates are ginning out "Protected" material at full tilt, and probably have been since HDCP first went commercial. Some HDCP compliant devices even have a point where the unencrypted digital stream is available, like in this article at Hackaday.com. Basically, HDCP is worthless when it comes to stopping high-volume pirates.
What are the side effects? HDCP makes setting up home theater systems even harder than before. Even if you get the cables connected "Correctly" (i.e., the setup would work if HDCP didn't exist), software and hardware restrictions may prevent your setup from working as expected (like it did in my case). Worse still, sometimes even with all your 100% HDCP compliant devices correctly connected to one another, you still have problems! Because HDCP is complex, it has some issues. Some devices handshake incorrectly, resulting in the blinking screen issue. There is no excuse for this. HDCP is a lame duck, and should be a dead duck.
What Is The iSight Good For? Frustrating Trips Down Messaging and Webcam Lane
Ok so before I get going here I have not updated to 10.6 yet, after all of the problems I experienced with critical applications after the 10.4 to 10.5 switch (not on my own machine but on others, I had enough sense to make a separate partition to test 10.5 with first. Many of the Apple users demand an upgrade to the newest OS no matter what it will do to their stuff btw, the logic on that eludes me.) I decided to wait a bit. Sure 10.6 is actually a reasonable price for once, but that's probably because it's just what 10.5 should have been in the first place if Crapple didn't panic and release 10.5 before it was really ready because of Vista, or whatever. Anyway, OSX used to be alot more into proudly claiming their open source roots than they are now. One of the things that many webcam manufacturers have gotten behind is the UVC standard for cams which Apple claims to support which they do but only sort of. This allows the most systems to support the most cameras. Let me stop and say congrats to Logitech for supporting this as much as possible. The manufacturers have provided a simple standard that allows their USB webcams to work on almost all machines. It works on my Ubuntu machine, it works on my Windows machine, and it works, oh wait it doesn't work on my Apple even though Apple supposedly supports the UVC standard. That's why there is no driver for it. It is just supposed to work, but oh yeah it doesn't, but I have an iSight built in so it won't be an issue right? Well now we get into the frustrating part and provide some more technical specifics. My family wants to communicate with me via webcam. Since most of them just surf the web I am not going to recommend a Crapple to most of them unless they just love Crapple, have used it before, are just dangerous around a computer, etc. because it is just too expensive for what they want to do. Sure Apple's do some things better than other computers but most users don't need to do those things and that is another post in itself. Anyway, I tested my Quickcam Communicate MP in Ubuntu with Pidgin, no dice, with Kopete, worked fine with MSN protocol. Of course I tried many protocols including Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and Jabber. I did not try Google talk. I guess I should but since I'm paying for an iSight just to have open source save my ass in the end I got kind of annoyed. This is pretty typical though. Sure if I was an incompetent CIO I would have just spent 60 grand on some system to manage all of this, then demand that everyone else use that, or some shit but I'm smart enough not to do things like that. The problem was simple. This is an area where the companies are battling it out over protocols, and ultimately control of what we will use with the systems we own. Anyway, I downloaded MSN Messenger for OSX since iChat doesn't support this as one of its built in protocols, guess what, MSN on Mac doesn't support the built in iSight camera and since the Communicate MP doesn't work I tried an old Firewire camera I had. MSN Messenger basically said sorry, but we expect to have full camera support in our next version. Ok on to Windows, no problems here after I installed the Quickcam drivers, but I still couldn't really communicate using a cam with the Crapple. Skype seems to work with everything, but it really doesn't provide optimal performance. The point I'm getting to here is that there are some 3rd party companies that release broader webcam support for the Apple, perhaps 10.6 has better UVC support, etc. but the real problem was iChat, the built in iSight, and companies deciding what they will try to make you use. What the hell is the built-in iSight good for other than communicating with other Apple users that have built-in iSights and iChat (the old firewire iSights are pretty awesome btw, but that's not what I'm taking about here). Then it dawned on me. That's all that it is for. From Apple's point of view why is anyone trying to use anything other than iChat anyway? Microsoft wonders why they try to use anything but Windows (pick a version) messenger, but at least MS has taken steps to provide a Messenger for Mac with better camera support, sure it isn't out yet because this wasn't a foreseeable problem j/k but at least they're starting to wake up. Lower end UVC cameras are not supported well at least up through 10.5 on the Apple because they don't seem to be too worried about them, and then not in many applications and now we can start to pass the blame around to the companies that provide messengers with fewer features on one OS than another. The list of supported cameras that work on the Apple are usually very expensive when compared to the Communicate MP and similar models. The point I'm getting to here is if we're going to include the iSight as such a proprietary device and lock it down to a few programs let's not lie to people and sell them Macs with the claim that they have a built in iSight. Yeah technically they do, but it's not worth much if you work in a real environment with many different computers. Perhaps they can give you a credit towards purchasing a real webcam to use with your Mac. I don't know. All I know is that by the time I was done I could do everything I wanted to from Linux to Linux and Linux to Windows with affordable hardware using UVC on Linux with good performance, but not using Apple's UVC implementation. Again Skype worked on all after some fiddling. I tried Yahoo messenger, MSN Messenger, iChat and some open source variants on the Apple. I could almost always get text chat, but not camera support even with the firewire cam on the Apple. Again, I did find a way around it in the end, I'm just using the cam with my Laptop (Ubuntu/Windows) or I can get some of the users to go to iChat, but I guess that I'm annoyed that this issue is so complex for something that should be so simple. Instead I feel like users are being hearded into using one protocol or another with one hardware set or another so that companies can try to corner us into their products. Sure iChat is pretty impressive when Macs are all talking to each other, but when is Apple going to learn that fully implementing open source standards that they use is good for them, and that they don't have a large enough percentage of the market to be jerks? Fighting that only makes people not want to buy Apple's again, and when they buy their $120, instead of $30, webcam that's OSX approved so they can use it with more than iChat they feel ripped off and lied to because they have been. Sure techs can find some ways around these problems, but the average user doesn't buy an Apple to deal with these problems. The overall point is that problems like this leads some idiots that run IT departments to demand all Windows, or all OSX environments, but the truth is that if I had all Ubuntu machines with Ubuntu approved webcams I would have had no problems either. Sticking to one kind of machine plays right into the companies hands and rewards them for making simple problems complex. If I have a camera built into my computer I should be able to use it with any major chat program to connect to anyone else using a similar client with full video and audio support. The camera manufacturers have done their best to make this possible so if Apple and MS are fighting them than what else are they fighting, and should we really be spending money with them? Anyway, that last point is a whole other post. Still MS and Ubuntu came out way ahead of Apple on this one.
Sega Genesis 3 (step 1 on my trip down retro-gaming lane)
So as many of you know, and many more are soon to find out, Sega released a Sega Genesis 3 in North America around the time they released the 32x and the Sega Saturn. This was a smaller version of the Sega Genesis that did not accept the 32x, officially anyway, and did not have an expansion slot for accepting the Sega CD. Still, after our Genesis finally burnt out, a few months after we burnt out the Flicky cart from playing it too much, we were hard pressed to find a brand new Sega Genesis that could accommodate the add-ons. So with the loss of the main unit we also lost the use of the Sega CD and 32X. Sure I could have looked harder, etc. but I moved on to newer game systems, well actually I think I just played a ton of Super Nintendo which was way better than the Genesis and since the 32x kind of had crappy games I think I got lost in Final Fantasy 3. Still the Genesis will always live in my heart as my first "16-bit" home system. Notice the double quotes. Anyway, somewhere along the way we ended up with the Sega Genesis 3 and I fired it up tonight. I played some of my old favorites including Altered Beast, X-Men and Shadow Dancer, but my lust for power did not stop there. I dug out, and am cleaning up my Atari 7800. The schematics for the 7800 are public domain now, which is good because my RF switch is shot, so I can either build one from the schematics, repair mine, or cop out and buy another one for about $10. Still, it might be more fun to build one, especially if I get one of those $2 circuit boards from Radio Shack and put it together without a casing so the electronics just dangle there on the side of the TV... The when technophobes came into my house I could be all like, "that's what a circuit board looks like, that's where the magic takes places. Inside of the little black things on the boards wizards and other mythical creatures cast the spells that cause you to see images on the screen." Still, in this town some of them may be seeing images from some stuff left in their systems from the 60's and I don't mean their retro-gaming systems when I say systems here. Oh man, I'm so excited. Still I have vowed not to dive into another old system until I finally beat level 6 on X-Men without using cheats. Wish me luck. Yes I could get emulators, but emulators are not nearly as cool as having the old hardware. It is amazing that the developers were able to make them so please don't misunderstand me here. I am very happy that emulators exist, but God I love old game systems. Oh yeah, and there is a store in my town that sells old arcade machines. They have skee-ball machines for $45 bucks, the problem is you have to rent a huge truck to get it home, still I'm tempted.
I’m in love with an Android.
I watched enviously as my Mom handled the new Moto Droid. It was fast, powerful, and awesome in ways I never thought possible. Taking a break from switching from the phone Mom was returning, the Verizon sales dude picked up the phone and demonstrated something that I thought was firmly stuck in the realm of iPhones: He tapped a button on the screen and spoke to the phone. Suddenly, even in the noisy store, Google sprang to life and found "Furniture Stores", with little link entitled "Local Results for furniture stores" with a blue dot next to the name of the town we were in. I couldn't help but let out a "Holy Sh--" in the middle of the crowded store. I got a few looks, but the din of the store kept them local. The Verizon dude chuckled and quietly admitted "Yeah, that's what I said too."
I had just bought an HTC Touch Pro six months prior for my new business, and wasn't even remotely eligible for an upgrade. Mom was a die-hard blackberry user, her last phone being an 8830 world edition, but she hated the tiny buttons. She also hated dialing using the same tiny keyboard, which has the numbers placed awkwardly one column in from the edge of the phone. I have convinced her to give the phone I had a shot, an HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1. I loved the keyboard, and it was an excellent email and text messaging device, and had a nice touch screen. After a few minutes playing with the phone, she decided to get it with her upgrade. We had to ask at the store for one: they weren't even on display. That should have been a sign. Two weeks later, we were returning her Touch Pro, and I was drooling over Droid.
I had turned a blind eye to the problems on the Touch Pro. It is not a bad piece of hardware. The keyboard is truly fantastic, with nice large keys, solid construction. The phone has excellent sound quality. The problem was Windows Mobile. Using the phone felt like dragging a grouchy kid to buy new clothes. The phone was always lagging behind, getting distracted, and refusing to try on the sweatshirt. I had largely ignored these problems. I rarely used the phone for phone calls. Most of my time was spent in the email application, and occasionally the web browser. My mom, on the other hand, used her phone constantly. Email was checked and sent all the time. She switched rapidly between sending e-mail and calling. Windows Mobile couldn't keep up. To top it off, I started noticing the same problem with my phone. Every complaint from her rang true, and I started to hate my own phone. She could return hers, I was stuck with mine. We drove back to the same Verizon store we had been at the week before, got our sales guy, and gave him the bad news. Mom could not contain herself any longer: "I hate this phone. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. I need to exchange it."
We wandered the store, and the Moto Droid caught my eye once again. I had heard bad things about it: The keyboard felt cheap, It wasn't that great, and it certainly was no iPhone. The last one was a bonus, in my opinion, and I figured it was worth a shot. We wandered over to try it out. Mom fell in love almost instantly. The phone had a keyboard she could use, on screen dialing, and she could read her contacts without her glasses. It worked with outlook web access so she could have her exchange email. It was perfect. I had to have one. Then, I laid eyes on Eris.
The Eris is HTC's Android phone. It ran a different version of Android, but is getting an update to 2.1 in early 2010. I picked up the phone, and thought about my options. I did want a new line for my business. I sure as hell wanted an android phone. I was still uncertain. The phone had no hardware keyboard, and only had three physical buttons, one of which was under a trackball. I am a big fan of tactile response. I started messing with the keyboard. Every key press brought a little buzz from the phone, shaking it just enough to tell me I'd hit a key. Perfect. Of course, it was still $100 I didn't want to spend. I was about to walk back when the Verizon dude saw me. "Hey, if she's getting the Droid, if you need an upgrade or a new line, the Eris is free."
So now I have a new personal number, separate from the number on my business cards, and I have my own piece of Android love. This phone is FANTASTIC. The one feature I would say that is missing is support for the turn-by-turn directions on Android 1.6 or higher. The Eris runs 1.5. The Moto Droid runs 2.0, so it already has this feature, and I am still a bit jealous of my mom's phone. Verizon PR reps have been telling some high-end customers that there will be an update to 2.x sometime early next year, so that feature is pending. It also doesn't support tethering through Verizon yet, but I found an application that gets the job done. I'm not going to bore you with the specs of the Eris or the Droid, suffice to say they are both powerful, fast, and awesome to use. Make sure you download the Barcode Scanner application by ZXing Team, and give this a scan:
QR Code URL
(iPhone users can also get NeoReader from the
app store for free to scan this kind of barcode.)
Goodbye MS Office! Hello Open Source!
When I got a netbook, I wanted to copy my e-mail settings from my 64-bit Windows 7 desktop running Office 2007 to my 32-bit Windows 7 netbook, also running Office 2007. Boy was I surprised when the Windows Easy Transfer Wizard told me that I couldn't transfer my settings from 64-bit to 32-bit. I have half a dozen e-mail accounts, and I was going to have to enter the information for each one in by hand on the new computer, and then re-download months, or in some cases years of messages.
This got me hunting for another way to get my e-mail. What I found was amazing. Even the newest piece of my puzzle - DavMail - had been around for two years, and I hadn't noticed it. Now that I have put everything together, I am ecstatic. I will never have to go through all that garbage just to move my e-mail again. Furthermore, I will never have to type in a license key for my home office and email suite again. I don't need to stick with a single operating system to get my work done. I can use a single collection of programs across three different operating systems, and I can move my data easily between those systems, regardless of whether it's running Windows, Linux, or OS X This doesn't require a magic wizard utility or expensive third party software, I just copy and paste the folders containing the data. All of this is thanks to DavMail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, and OpenOffice.
DavMail is a gateway between your computer and your company's Exchange client. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. It translates requests from Thunderbird and Sunbird for data into something that your Exchange sever and Domain Controller can understand, and then translates the responses from those servers into something Thunderbird and Sunbird can understand. Even if you don't like Thunderbird and Sunbird, Exchange e-mail access is still possible. DavMail works with any client that can get POP3 or IMAP e-mail. Calendar access through DavMail will work with any client that can use calDav. Corporate address books will work through DavMail with any client that can get contacts from LDAP. You can even use it as a server for e-mail. This means that you can use your home computer running DavMail to from an Exchange server, even if you can't install DavMail on that device! Most important of all, DavMail is Free (as in free beer) and open source.
Mozilla Sunbird is a standalone calendar client that runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Thunderbird has plugins to perform all of Sunbird's work, but I really like the fact that I can look at my calendar and my e-mail at the same time. The interface is simple, and all of the settings are stored in a profile folder specific to Sunbird. It has the same ultra-low system requirements and easy migration as Thunderbird (noted below), and is clear, simple, and easy to use. At this time, Tasks are not synchronized (at least, not that I've seen), but I expect this will change with later versions of the client.
Mozilla Thunderbird is an e-mail client from the Mozilla Foundation that runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. If The Mozilla Foundation sounds familiar, it's probably because you're running Firefox, another of their excellent free products. It supports plugins, just like Firefox, including the Lightning Calender plugin. It also supports LDAP contacts, so via DavMail you can search for contacts through an Exchange Server or Directory server. It also supports POP3 and IMAP accounts, meaning that you can use it to get e-mail from most ISPs, gmail, etc. It is stable, well developed, well supported, and easy to use. One of the features I like the most is how it stores e-mail data. The program simply creates a profile directory in your home folder, and stores everything there. This means that when you get a new computer, want to change operating systems, or want to back up your e-mail settings (and all locally stored mail), all you need to do is copy and paste this directory somewhere else! This is an enormous perk. Not only does it mean that you can move your e-mail settings from computer to computer with nothing more than a flash drive and a few clicks, but it also means that new computer can be running any operating system that Thunderbird runs on! Just get a Mac? Install Thunderbird, and copy your profile. New Linux netbook? Thunderbird! New Windows 7 Desktop? Thunderbird! Even if your computer is from halfway through the Clinton administration, sporting a 233MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM running Windows NT4, Thunderbird will dutifully collect your e-mail. (Author's note: Windows NT4 was released in 1996. That's some serious - and perhaps slightly insane - legacy support! )
OpenOffice is a free and open-source Productivity Suite designed by Sun Microsystems to compete directly with Microsoft Office for most computer users. While not strictly required for my e-mail setup, I felt it important to include this as a viable option for users to completely eliminate Microsoft Office. People who use Word, Excel and PowerPoint can easily switch to OpenOffice without worrying about problems with documents opening or paying expensive license fees when a new version comes out. It has applications to match Access, Visio, and Microsoft Equation Editor as well. Because of its open source nature, OpenOffice has been ported to Windows, OS X, Linux, OS/2, and of course, Sun's own Solaris. It can save documents in a variety of file types, including Microsoft's formats and OpenOffice specific formats. OpenOffice Writer even has an "Export directly as PDF" button next to the print button.
Phew! That's a lot of software and functionality! Don't forget, your grand total for the software above is ZERO currency. You will not spend a dollar, dinar, peso or euro on those packages. Furthermore, if you are a programmer, you can write your own plugins, addons and extensions using nothing but more free software! Wow!
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