Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Wednesday, September 4, 2002
18:21 - *Oh, yeah, this* is gonna sell...** http://news.com.com/2100-1040-956285.html	(top)
Microsoft is prepping its "Windows XP Media Center" for a release over the holidays. ...Media Center. In other words, "Center for the Media Companies". Because there's not a single customer in the world who would have wanted something like this. Unless they happened to be stockholders in Columbia Records or Disney. Analysts and users see the built-in copy protection as a potential sales killer because it restricts the use of the built-in DVR, one of the most compelling features of the new PCs. DVRs, which are sold as companion products for TVs by TiVo and Sonicblue's ReplayTV, are expected to become standard equipment on PCs over the next few years, say analysts. Already Sony ships Vaio PCs with DVRs and most of the other features found on the HP Media Center PC. But Sony does not impose copy protection. So a consumer could use Sony's GigaPocket Personal Video Recorder software to record a TV show, convert the file to MPEG-2 video with another Sony application and burn the program to a DVD. This is like how whenever you see a country with a name like "The People's Democratic Republic of Freely Elected Democratic People", you know it's about as far from being any of those things as it's possible to be. Microsoft has once again created something that nobody needs or wants-- it has some useful functionality, but that functionality is already available, cheaply and without restrictions on the capabilities of the consumers, from other manufacturers. They're going to use the leverage of their size to sell something that differs from its competition only in being more restrictive. (Or more full of embedded ads. Why is it, by the way, that www.microsoft.com, including Windows Update, pops up an IWon.com ad banner every few pages you open? Huh? Is Microsoft having difficulty funding its website? Can't a company as successful as Microsoft grace us with the common human decency to not have pop-up ads right in the middle of its corporate website and critical upgrade mechanism?) Encrypted hard drives, pay-for-play DiVX discs, and DRM-protected music-file formats will not fly with consumers when there's a perfectly serviceable, non-restricted alternative on the market. People won't pay to have their rights reduced. So Microsoft has decided to forgo any pretense of acting in the consumer's interest, and has thrown in its lot wholly with the media companies so they can force people to buy into the new restricted scheme. It's the only way this would have worked, and only now that they can see they have carte blanche to use their monopoly power in any way they see fit without fear of reprisal from the DoJ, they're lifting the lid on the new Iron Age of Computing. Welcome to the future.