mark’lectic

Greg Brown’s $1500 Shoes Would Fit Right In

February 15, 2008 – 12:41 pm

When Greg Brown was CEO of Micromuse, the stock was tanking, layoffs were a quarterly occurrence, and he once famously said that $1500 would barely cover the cost of his shoes. Even the other fat cats in the room thought that was excessive.

Now Greg Brown is running Motorola, and they’re coming out with $17,0000 bluetooth headsets. Some people never change. And I predict he’ll run Motorola with as much skill as he ran Micromuse…

More Proof that Motorola Is in the Doo-Doo [Goodbye Moto]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Posted in Tech | No Comments »

Get a Replacement Device and Lose all your DRMed Purchases

February 12, 2008 – 8:11 pm

From cosumerist.com

Microsoft Has No Answer For Their Broken XBOX Live DRM [Drm]

Reader Kevin’s XBOX 360 suffered the usual Red Ring of Death, so he sent it in to be repaired. He got back a different XBOX 360 with a different serial number. That would be no big deal, except Kevin has purchased a bunch of content through XBOX Live… content that is no longer fully functional due to Microsoft’s broken DRM.

This is typical of the problems with DRM and why law abiding consumers are the ones who suffer from DRM. If you purchase content that is tied to a particular bit of hardware, what happens if the hardware fails and you’re sent a replacement?

Now, obviously, it is absurd that Microsoft does not have a mechanism in place to deal with this. But, why should we even have to deal with it at all. Can you imagine if your replacement record player no longer played any of your records? Or you got a new VCR and it wouldn’t play any movies you’d purchased?

If nothing else, this demonstrates the customer relations expense (both financially and in good will) that DRM brings.

Posted in Tech | No Comments »

Post from Fedora 8

February 7, 2008 – 4:50 pm

Fedora 8 comes with this nifty little “Post Blog Entry” application.

Nice, but it assumes that all Wordpress blogs are in a subdirectory named “wordpress” on the server. There’s a way around it, but still.

Anyway, lets see how this goes…

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Time to Delete my Yahoo Account

February 1, 2008 – 4:34 pm

It’s a shame that Yahoo has just agreed to support OpenID only days before Microsoft announces they want to by them.

I’d love to use OpenID with my account, but I won’t go near anything from Microsoft…

Posted in Tech | No Comments »

If True, Apple’s Rental Model is Doomed

January 7, 2008 – 3:37 pm

According to reports, Apple is planning on offering movie rentals via iTunes. Apparently, these will be $3.99 for 24 hours.

What a crock.

Apple seems to forget that the 90s are over. Selling a rental for a specific time, downloaded or not, is competing with video tapes and Blockbuster. Who the hell want that model? The world has moved on. Between Netflix in the US and Lovefilm (and others) in the UK, I can’t imagine anyone with a brain going for this.

What Apple should do is offer a subscription service, just like Netflix. I.e, iTunes has three, four, or x number of “slots”. You pay a set fee per month, variable with the number of slots you want. I.e., $10 gets you three slots.

When you rent a movie, iTunes downloads it from the store and it fills one of your slots. You can sync it to your iPod/iPhone or your AppleTV or watch it right from your computer. Rent the next one and it fills your second slot. When you’ve filled all the slots, your rentals go into a queue.

When your done watching a film, click a “Return Movie” button next to a slot and iTunes deletes it from your computer, iPod, and/or AppleTV. Then it downloads the next film in your queue.

I’ve been a Lovefilm customer for a while. I can’t imagine going back to being forced to watch a movie in 24 hours.

Posted in Tech | No Comments »