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IT And Why You Need To Care — Chapter 2

Posted by 007 on 19 April 2010, 6:42 pm

Chapter 2 – A Classical Example of University “IT”

So before I write this obscene account of mafia-like management systems and government waste, I should say that inspite of all of this, about half of the people I and the characters in my story worked with here were really good, hard working people. The problem is with the other half. No organization can simply piss away 50% (or more!) of their money and expect not to have to make any changes, but that is what the State of Connecticut does. Sure, this example comes from a small University, but you will see how more than likely this is going on to some extent with many collegiate organizations nationwide, perhaps not to the same disgusting level, but certainly in a way that is helping to make college unaffordable to most. I highlight IT because when tuition goes up for no good reason, technology is almost always on the list of things that are blamed as a rising cost. On to the story which takes place at Central Connecticut State University in its User Support department. This incident took place a little over a year ago.

List of Characters – As Transformers to mask identity.
Continue reading ‘IT And Why You Need To Care — Chapter 2’ »

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Food Revolution Petition

Posted by 007 on 16 April 2010, 10:12 pm

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 misuse of technology… but yeah this kind of doesn’t fit on this blog. Still whatever, you should probably go to abc.com and sign this if you don’t want to drag your diabetic kids around in teenage sized carriages until they die early.

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Dell Forcing People To Buy Windows With New PCs (with few exceptions)

Posted by 007 on 31 March 2010, 2:05 pm

Remember how only a little over a year ago Dell sold several desktops and notebooks with the options of No OS, Ubuntu, or some copy of Windows on them as a choice when you bought a system? Remember how awesome that was? If you were a SUSE user, for example, you could order a Dell with no OS on it and put the OS you actually liked on it when it came. Well I guess Dell must not be as into Open Source as they once were, or they chose to forget about the famous “Windows Protest Day” highlighted in Revolution OS in the late 90′s. Recently I confirmed two things with some Dell online chat techs. One, they tell me that they now offer no desktops with an Ubuntu option and only 2 Intel Atom processor based notebooks with one, and two they will not sell me a computer without an OS on it period. When I brought up the fact that they can’t charge me for Windows if I don’t want to buy it, the tech dodge the bullet by saying “there is simply no option available to sell you a desktop computer without Windows on it.” Pretty frakking lame. I was actually excited that Dell jumped on the Ubuntu wagon for a while, but the No OS option was the coolest thing that they did and now it is gone. Your computer company shouldn’t assume that you want Windows, and you should have an option to choose not to get it if you don’t want it. Those who want to pay for it can always do so. Also, they bundled the Zino desktop I was looking at with Vista and not even Windows 7. It’s too bad because the Zino is perfect little computer to use with your HDTV, etc. and they would have sold one more today if they just weren’t such asses about the whole Windows thing. Hell, I was even going to pay for the spring green casing. It’s not like the Mac Mini option is much better in comparison, but at least it has a UNIX based OS on it. Still it costs about twice as much…. I wish hardware manufacturers would stop kissing Microsoft’s ass and just worry about what all of their users want, and provide it when possible. Asking for them to not put an OS on a computer seems pretty simple to me. They can always have you sign a waiver that you refused their “tailored” OS for the machine. Dell, you broke my heart today. I guess you’re just a bunch of hypocrites in the end. I think we call that being a big corporation in general.

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Samsung TVs and Manual Network Setup (using a cable) with Comcast

Posted by 007 on 28 March 2010, 9:39 pm

Samsung Series 6 TV and Comcast Network Setup

So if you’re like me and testing a cable connection with your Samsung TV and your automatic
network setup just won’t grab the gateway and DNS information here’s how to setup your connection manually with a router. In this case a Linksys WRT54G.

Type in 192.168.1.1 in a web browser on your computer and log into your router. For most of you that don’t believe that you need to secure things like this settings page, your information will be default or blank. (I don’t believe in not having simple security set up so if you need to look up the default info to log into your router I’ll let you do that before you continue by using direction from some other site). Otherwise enter the password you setup for accessing your router’s settings.

Under the Setup tab and Network Setup look at the range of DHCP addresses that you have. Choose one above this range. For example if your range is 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.110 then enter 192.168.1.111 later in the Samsung setup. This will be your IP address that you’ll use with the TV.

Check out your Subnet Mask settings here too. For most of you this will be 255.255.255.0 Record this so you can enter it in your Samsung TV’s menu later.

Since you’re connecting to a Linksys router your Gateway will probably be 192.168.1.1, if not a Linksys then use the address that you use to access your router’s setup menu in a web browser.

Now here is the tricky part. You need to get your DNS server information. On a UNIX (Linux) machine, this means a Macintosh computer as well for those of you who still don’t know that OSX is built on UNIX, you need to open a terminal (scary to those who think OSX is only graphical) and type in the following command. cat /etc/resolv.conf
(This will work for most of you, but resolv.conf stores DNS Server information that you’ve used so most of you will get 2 addresses when you type this in since Comcast will give you two DNS server addresses that will be stored in resolv.conf. One of them should work.)

Now that you’ve gathered your information press the Menu button, scroll to Plug & Play, then Network Setup, press Enter then Internet Protocol Setup, press Enter and choose Manual Setup.
Scroll down and Enter the IP Address (192.168.1.xxx (aka the one you chose outside of your normal range)), Subnet Mask (probably 255.255.255.0) Gateway (probably 192.168.1.1 if you have a Linksys Router) and one of the DNS server entries you got from using cat on the resolv.conf file. Then navigate back up to the network test option and run the test, if it fails on the DNS entry then try the other DNS address assuming there is one.
– 013 if you want to provide the DNS stuff for Windows please do. I know how to do it, but am pissed off with how much it sucks lately and do not want to provide support for it for free for at least another week.

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The Roomba 560 Sucks Literally and Figuratively

Posted by 007 on 10 March 2010, 2:21 pm

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.

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Welcome to the Wasteland! Would you like to supersize that?

Posted by deathjr on 27 February 2010, 4:16 pm

McCain * Palin 08So 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.

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IT and Why You Need to Care — Chapter I

Posted by 007 on 18 February 2010, 12:03 pm

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.
Continue reading ‘IT and Why You Need to Care — Chapter I’ »

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IT and Why You Need to Care — Introduction

Posted by 007 on 16 February 2010, 1:22 pm

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.



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Atari 7800 (Step 2 in my trip down retro-gaming lane)

Posted by 007 on 29 January 2010, 4:37 am

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.

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DRM is like a vampire: It’s hard to kill and it sucks.

Posted by 013 on 13 January 2010, 11:52 pm

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!

Simple, 5 wire setup.

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.

Awful wiring. Just. Awful.

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.

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