Archive for October, 2006
Sometimes I throw caution (and my bank balance) to the wind and buy a load of books in one hit, then work my way through them. They’re usually thematic; photography, technical etc. My last blow-out was on religious topics, specifically:
I did buy other books but I’ve not gotten round to reading them yet, the next on the list is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, whom I’m a huge admirer of.
Some may wonder, why a self-professed militant atheist would be reading books about the history of religion, but it’s history I’m currently fascinated by, and the fact that certainly people actually take these stories as being literally true means that a little education on the topic is very helpful to me.
Maddeningly, it’s obvious to anyone with any degree of objectivity that these stories are as historically accurate as tales of Thor, Odin, Zeus, Mythras or Harry Potter. At least Harry Potter is more entertaining to read, and in most cases, more believable.
October 7th, 2006
I do so enjoy PR-speak, in a recent release about the anti-piracy features of Windows Vista Cori Hartje came out with this corker:
Reduced functionality mode has been a part of the initial Windows XP product activation process for retail and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) installations since its launch, and, similarly, Windows Vista will have a reduced functionality mode but one that is enhanced.
(emphasis mine)
Enhanced reduced functionality? Double plus ungood!
It wouldn’t really be an issue if WGA in XP had been a rousing success, but I’ve seen at least three machines that were perfectly legit fail the WGA check, including my own, and one of those wouldn’t even get past the login screen and had to be re-installed (ironically using the same ‘invalid’ key). In the case of Vista, reduced functionality includes logging the user off after an hour, no matter what they’re doing at the time.
Naturally, this wouldn’t be a problem if Microsoft had a history of not utterly screwing up their anti-piracy schemes, alas this is not so. If Vista thinks that you’ve been tinkering with the anti-piracy measures, it’ll immediately have a hissy fit and demand reinstallation.
I’m probably not going to be first in line to install Vista in any case – my experience of the betas has been less than stellar – but I feel that MS have gone just a little too far in this case, because, naturally, the pirates will crack SPP within hours and it’ll be the legitimate customers, once again, being inconvenienced by this.
I, for one, don’t like being presumed guilty and constantly being forced to prove my innocence.
Technorati tags:
Vista,
WGA October 5th, 2006
How about this for a way to stop people downloading music illegally, give them value for money!
Frankly, most cds are over priced for what you get, a few decent tracks with some filler, which has done the job of annoying people to the point where they’ll just download the tracks they like and ignore the rest.
I don’t do this, however. I read a couple of music magazines, and if there’s a review that sounds like something I’d like then I download the whole album (illegally, natch) and listen to it. If I like it, I buy the album because I happen to like having physical media to hand instead of abstractions like mp3s. This solves two problems: firstly, I don’t end up with albums I hate and regret buying; and secondly I get to support the artists I truly enjoy.
Two examples:
Although it’s outside of my normal musical tastes, I really enjoyed the song “Hey Ya!” by OutKast, so I downloaded the album “Speakerboxxx / The Love Below” and checked it out. It turned out that “Hey Ya!” was the only decent song on there, the rest I positively hated. Had I bought the album I would have been very annoyed indeed.
On the other hand, I’m a big “Weird Al” fan, I’ve got all of his albums that have made it to my side of the pond, and learning that he had a new one coming out I sought out ‘pre release’ copy that was floating around the web, which I enjoyed. When I found out that the album was being released as a DualDisc with a whole bunch of extras, including the whole album remixed in 5.1 DVD-A, plus music videos and karaoke versions, I knew I had to have it.
Finding the dualdisc in the UK proved to be something of a bind, so I ordered it from Amazon US and it arrived a healthy 7 days later for the princely sum of $25 including shipping; at the current exchange rate that is actually lower than the retail price for normal UK cds, which of I course I never pay as I buy online, but still.
So, by adding lots of content that would be annoying to download, and showing that he cares about his fans I bought the album. Conversely, had I hated it based upon the mp3s I downloaded I wouldn’t have bought it, and I wouldn’t be annoyed as a result. So, everyone wins.
Music labels, give people compelling reasons to buy a CD instead of just downloading it for free, and you will get sales, it’s hardly rocket science is it?
Technorati tags:
Music,
Weird Al,
dualdisc October 4th, 2006
I’m going to publish one post a day for the next week, well, starting yesterday (Monday), just to see if I can actually come up with something to talk about without getting too boring.
You never know, I may come up with something profound. But don’t bet on it, especially if you live in the US where they’ve just banned internet gambling. Hmm, perhaps that’s an idea for a post!
October 3rd, 2006
I was an early adopter of DVD, I’ve had a DVD player for over eight years, many hundreds of DVDs from several different regions, and enjoy the format immensely.
I won’t be getting either a Blue Ray or HD-DVD player for the foreseeable future.
Why? I don’t want to be buying into another Betamax, and at the moment there isn’t a clear winner in the format war and I’m not going to be on the losing side. Plus there are some fairly onerous DRM restrictions built into both platforms that, frankly, give me the willies. Case in point, I recently blogged that I love my Media Centre pc, well one of the things I occasionally do is copy a DVD onto the hard drive so I can have it available more conveniently. This, naturally, won’t be possible with the next-gen disk formats as they’re all about control, and the control is given to the content producers, not the consumers. This is also why I don’t use services like iTunes or Napster, if I can’t do what I like wit the media I purchase, then I’m not interested.
Case in point, I’m a huge Mike Oldfield fan, and a few years ago he released a re-recording of Tubular Bells, and the cd was copy-protected (or as we say in these here parts, broken). I couldn’t play it on my PC and copying it to play in my in-car cd changer was similarly difficult (I never use original cds in the car). So, facing this dilemma I decided to do what all true geeks would, I googled and I found out how to break through these silly copy protection systems and rip a copy of the cd. It took some time and effort, with some tracks requiring multiple passes to get a decent copy, but I eventually managed it.
The net result – I had a copy of the cd for my car, an mp3 for my pc, and a slew of new knowledge on how to bypass copy protection schemes.
I’ve had similar problems with copy protection schemes with games, when I couldn’t play No-one Lives Forever because the brain-damaged DRM system wouldn’t work with my DVD drive, I had to resort to finding a no-cd crack to actually play the game I had purchased. None of the pirates had this problem, naturally; I was being penalised for being a paying customer.
DRM should be renamed to Consumer Rights Limitation, because that is exactly what they aim to do, prevent us, as the consumers, from using our purchased products as we wish. Imagine a washing machine that only allowed certain type of detergent, not because it couldn’t use more types, but because the manufacturers wouldn’t allow it. Or as in the case of iTunes / Napster et al, once you had washed your clothes in it they were not able to be washed in any other washing machine, even if you had to change it because it had broken!
Technorati tags:
DRM,
Blu Ray,
HDDVD October 3rd, 2006
I’ve been using Windows XP Media Centre (sorry, center) edition for a month now, and I have to say it’s the single most impressive bit of software I’ve used from Microsoft in a long time.
Instead of buying a pre-configured media PC I saved a bunch of money by building it myself, allowing me to get some decent kit on a budget.
The hardware consists of:
- Shuttle XPC
- NVidia 7600 passively cooled, linked to Panasonic LCD tv via a DVI – HDMI cable
- Liteon DVD burner
- MCE remote and keyboard
- 250Gb SATA hard drive
- SPDIF connected to my home cinema amp
I chose not to buy a capture card, as I really don’t need to record TV as I already have that facility, however I do like to download episodes of shows like House and Family Guy (I know, I’m a very bad man) as they’re shown in the US way before they’re available in the UK, and the media PC is ideal for viewing those.
Unfortunately, the DVD drive and MCE are both configured to be Region 2 out of the box, which is useless for me as I’m a DVD early adopter, and have lots (and I do mean lots) of region 1 dvds so this had to be solved.
I didn’t select the liteon drive just because they’re cheap, I also chose it because there are a plethora of de-regioning options available for it. A quick download of LtnRPC and the drive was ready. Windows was even easier to re-region, I just installed DVD Region Killer and away I went.
As this wasn’t a pre-built system, there was no built-in DVD display software, so I bought NVidia Purevideo Decoder Bronze edition, I don’t need the higher versions of the software as I’m passing the audio to my AV Amp, which can handle Dolby and DTS streams, so the base version suffices. I do have to say this, with the 7600 upscaling the dvd output to the native resolution of my LCD TV (720p) the images it produces are nothing short of stunning. It’s far better than my ‘normal’ dvd player, a mid-range Panasonic RA61 (not a cheap £30 player by any stretch of the imagination), fed with a high-quality disk like The Incredibles I’d swear it was an HD source, not a normal DVD.
Additional software I’ve added are the G-Force audio visualisation software, the MCE Power Toys, and Album Art Fixer.
All in all, I heartily recommend MCE, there are a few issues with it, like it’s lack of support for satellite and cable systems (it only officially supports DVB-T in the UK) but those, from my perspective, are minor niggles.
October 2nd, 2006
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