I just want to say that I checked out 2 news sources for the recent tragic shooting in Manchester, CT. CNN made me watch an upbeat “Gillette Fusion ProGlide” razor commercial before hand and WTNH went even a step further and had a KIA salesman follow me around the screen. I know three things for [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Uncategorized category.
Fuck You Greenpeace
So I better start by listing all of the green things I do before I talk about how I was annoyed by a bunch of douche bags from Greenpeace while I was trying to enjoy a day at the farmer’s market today. So let’s start with that. 1. I buy as much local food as [...]
Steve Jobs Likes The 1984 Style On Stage
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/03/authorities-begin-evidence-examination-in-gizmodo-iphone-case/ So Steve, I just want to say that sitting with a big picture of yourself behind yourself while your company is going after some guy from Gizmodo about your stupid new iPhone is kind of very Orwellian. Seriously Steve, retire…. you’re creepy. Plus the Android phones are better anyway.
Food Revolution Petition
So yeah, I signed it. I’m not the biggest corporate supporter out there so going to abc.com wasn’t high on my list of priorities, but I think that this idea is pretty awesome. Probably as awesome as GNU/Linux. What does it have to do with technology, well processed food is an excellent example of the [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 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 LOTS 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.
Lets get down to business. 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 results. 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 and playing video games.
Sincerely,
Mark Smith
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 [...]
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 [...]
Goodbye MS Office! Hello Open Source!
You don’t need Microsoft Office to write documents or presentations, nor to get email, contacts, or calendars from Exchange servers. You can use free, open source tools instead!