December 2006 Archives

(The following comments, as usual, do not necessarily represent the opinions of C&P)

This morning, a graphic designer friend of mine sent me this link.

Now I don't want to get into a tiff over DRM here, but I generally oppose it. A few thoughts after reading this article:

1. The author, Michael Arrington, appears to be a Mac guy and opposes DRM (if the problem there isn't immediately apparent, wait until the 2nd observation). He takes pleasure at Gates walking into a room full of Macs and even includes a link to the AirPort Express, noting that someone had set up an AirPort network. For some reason, he didn't include a product link for the Zune, which he was given at the event.

2. Apple's hands are so far from clean on this issue that it's hardly worth debating. What do I mean? Read this and if you're a frequent iTunes downloader, brace yourself. I do enjoy using Apple products, but I'm painfully aware of how unfair iTunes is for artists, particularly those on major labels (don't worry, I still sleep well at night knowing that Bono will always have a roof over his head).

3. Gates didn't say much, but what he did say was encouraging. I've mentioned my concern with phoning-home in Vista before and I'll reiterate: I can only see it making life rougher for users, rather than easier. But it's good to hear Gates admit that he's no fan of the current situation and that DRM “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers.”

It's too bad that there's no clear direction for this, but hopefully some creative ideas will be brought to the arena soon, so we can avoid fiascos like Coldplay's X&Y from early this year.

We're crossing our fingers, but it appears that this may have been the culprit:

The vendor was aware of some issue with a "y-connector" but when the technician tweaked the yellow cable (in the bottom right area of the picture), the whole system went down. This was a breakthrough since it was the first time we were able to reproduce the issue. Since the y-connector was on backorder from Nortel, an entire power supply was overnighted to fix the issue. Overnighted, so I thought from the previous Wednesday, but the following Monday, this finally showed up:

Another problem-filled day passed before the technician came back to install it. Since the new power supply went in, we've been ok, so hopefully our phone woes are now a thing of the past. If it turns out this was the sole problem with the hardware end (not the only problem, we know, since AT&T had to replace some cabling out in the street), then that's a disappointing piece of troubleshooting. After the months spent in high-level testing, for it to be a cable, is just... sad.