Tuesday, April 26, 2005

DRM considered harmful

Cory Doctorow talks to Microsoft about DRM:

"The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. There is no market demand for this 'feature.' None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures."
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He goes on to describe how the same thing happens with iTunes when you buy a new Mac every year. There's a pretty PDF version here

Monday, April 25, 2005

More h2g2

Book The First. The other four are there too, just use your favourite URL number-bumper.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - call it possible future reference material..

Friday, April 22, 2005

Unmistakeable

A record I've got - scroll down for the promotional giveaway metal cock which, alas, I didn't get in Woolworths.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Get Perpendicular

Why? Because Hitachi say so.. and I say watch the video and then decide. Plug your headphones in for this one.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Sunday, April 10, 2005