I Really Hate These ‘People’
Well, ‘people’ by a warped decision of the Supreme Court …
So, I had some time and decided to see how this new box plays DVDs. That was in my mind when I chose the hardware. I don’t go to movies or watch TV, but I do occasionally feel like watching a movie when it is raining and I can’t do what I had planned. Man does not exist by blog reading alone, after all.
So, I grabbed a Blu-Ray of the Wizard of Oz, which is something my Mother wouldn’t miss if it was destroyed in the testing and would test all of the capabilities of the system.
I stuck it in the drive and nothing happened. After all of the hype about Windows 7 being this multimedia miracle for the masses – bupkix, nada, zip.
I checked to see there actually was something on the DVD, and Windows Explorer assured me that there was, so I cranked up Windows Media Player which told me the disk was blank, but I should subscribe to an on-line media service that would be happy to rent me all kinds of things.
So then I went out and found VLC Media Player, a free open source package that everyone praises, and downloaded it. It at least told me what was going on with the disk – I didn’t have an encryption key that was required to play Blu-Ray disks. Apparently DVD players have to have these keys built-in to actually be used to play the newer DVDs which are all encrypted.
So, the media mogul six-pack not only get to over-charge you for the disks, and determine what disks you may have based on geography, but they get to determine what equipment you must use to see the content. They treat their customers like a pack of thieves and wonder why more people don’t buy their products.
17 comments
I have grown so exasperated with the tyrannical behavior of MPAA and RIAA that by personal policy I simply no longer buy media. Once in a while I’ll buy a gift CD or DVD, but even those I resist if I can find anything else suitable for the recipient. My equipment is old; BluRay is not an option… or a problem… for me. Most of my video collection is VHS tapes. Most of my music is on ordinary CDs, plus a couple hundred phono records I bought in my youth. I have enough entertainment to last a lifetime, and Stella checks out from the library any movies I end up watching (usually despite my better judgment). I cannot climb stairs in theaters, so I am at no risk of throwing money away to see a new movie. I am through with rewarding bad behavior by the media industries. Fuck ’em.
They want to control your life and these ‘people’ aren’t creative, they leech off the creativity of others. I really object to being treated like a thief by a bunch of MBAs who steal from those who create the product.
This attitude by the media moguls is a major reason I have no interest in e-books. I own my real books, but you only get to ‘rent’ e-books, and they can be taken away on a whim, as has happened in the not too distant past to Kindle owners.
If they would start treating people like customers and stop trying to soak them for obscene profits, they might make more sales. Their current attitude just pisses people off.
There’s two ways you can view a DVD on a computer: 1) Buy a program that’s MPAA-approved with the encryption keys built in to it, or 2) illegally, via libdvdcss.
BluRay is even worse. The encryption key for any specific Blue Ray disk is not located anywhere on said disk or in any program, encrypted or no. Rather, the BluRay player must obtain the key from an Internet server maintained by the MPAA immediately prior to playing the disk, and must be an authorized player (again) to do this. That is why all the BluRay players have a network port on them and require you to actually connect them to the Internet to actually play disks.
None of this stops actual pirates, because they simply crack the encryption (yes, the encryption has been cracked for both BluRay and DVDCSS), typically by compromising one of the official players to snoop the keystream (yes there are programs to do this). All it does is make life miserable for people who simply want to view a DVD or BluRay disk on their computer screen rather than in an official hardware player. Well, it also makes it impossible to create a portable BluRay player that will, e.g., work in a car driving across country, or in an airplane, probably one reason why DVD’s still outsell BluRay by a huge amount.
BTW, regarding ebooks, one reason I buy mine from Barnes & Noble is because they do the minimum encryption needed to satisfy the publishers. B&N ebooks are encrypted with the last n digits of the credit card number you used to buy them, and can be unencrypted using that number even if B&N goes under. Amazon uses a more intricate scheme and I don’t trust them at all, given their past history of doing exactly what you mention — withdraw books for whatever reason whenever they feel like it.
If I wanted to involve the ‘Net it would be cheaper to join a service like Netflix rather than buying the disks.
I’m not interested in hacking to use something I own, and I’m really pissed off that these clowns make it necessary. I would generally be watching a DVD because the ‘Net is down, which happens from time to time, normally when the weather outside really sucks. Maybe someone should tell them about the huge expanses of the US that don’t have cable or Internet access that would be a natural market for DVDs, but are being excluded by their stupidity.
DVD’s will play with the Internet down (assuming you purchased a computer program that has the decryption keys, or are using a portable DVD player that has the decryption keys built in, or etc.). Blu-Rays will not. Now you know why BluRay hasn’t taken off.
Agree on the “hacking to use something I own” bit. That said, I can’t get unencrypted e-books from most sources (Baen is about the only publisher that’ll sell unencrypted ebooks of their titles). Given that I already have bookshelves piled high with books and the only place I have to put more physical books would be on every other surface in my place, which would qualify me for an episode of “Hoarders”, the only way I can buy more books is either a) buy e-books, which take no physical space, or b) get rid of sufficient paper books to make space for the new books. Which happens because there are books that simply cannot be purchased as ebooks — for example, one of the inventors of iSCSI wrote a book about it and I need to buy that book (if for no reason other than that he’s one of my co-workers) but it is not available as an ebook — but if it wasn’t for ebooks, I probably would never be able to buy new fiction because the non-fiction reference books are slowly squeezing the fiction off my bookshelves. At least I don’t need to hack the B&N ebooks, they work just fine with no Internet access as long as you connect the reader to your B&N account before leaving Internet range.
I tried a standard DVD and it played without a hitch, but I was looking to the future and have an HD monitor connected via HDMI and a Blu-ray player/burner. These people are actually promoting piracy with their attitude.
Yeah, I have boxes of books that are in storage because I don’t have room for them in the house, but when we have out little storms ‘Net access and all things electrical are not readily available, so it’s nice to have a book to read under the lantern light while you are waiting for the MRE to heat or the Clorox purify the water.
Physical books to read if the power is out are not a problem in my house, believe me :). I also carry physical books with me on camping trips — usually guide books and history books about whatever area that I’m exploring, none of which are available as ebooks for a variety of reasons (for one thing, many of them are the work of individuals self-publishing via a vanity press and selling it through tourist centers in those small communities).
That said, if it’s available as an ebook, that’s what I’m buying it in, because that’s one less physical book to get rid of to make space for a new physical book. And yes, I have the wall of boxes of books in storage too… but I’m not adding more books to that collection, I’m giving books away to anybody I can find to take them as I buy new physical books rather than stash more books away where I can’t read them anyhow.
this last move, with 11 semi- and mostly-wild cats to trap and relocate, i decided to get rid of most of the physical books rather than try to trap and relocate 2000+/- books. 🙂
if i ever win the lottery, i am going to buy 3000 more to replace those, because i miss having them [even if i hate moving them].
books, not cats.
i may be a crazy cat lady, but i definitely don’t need 3000 cats.
Oh, yes, no doubt about it – if you ever move, moving books is definitely a reason to call the professionals if you can afford it. Even culling out-of-date technical books doesn’t really reduce the load, so I understand about the lure of eBooks.
Some day when I need ‘big type’ books I’ll succumb, but not yet.
A small box of books weighs 60 pounds. You can stack four of them on a hand truck, though dragging that much weight up the ramp into the U-Haul is a bit of a chore so you probably want to stop at three. My last move, I moved somewhere around 40 boxes of books. That’s literally over a ton of books. It took me around a week just to box them up and haul them down the stairs to the garage where my professional moving help could do the actual hard work of dragging them up the ramp into the truck on moving day.
Meanwhile, hauling all my e-books to the new place consisted of, um, closing my laptop, slipping it into its case, and slinging the strap over my shoulder :).
I’m thinking of moving again, but it depends on whether I find the right place. I really want someplace where I can set up a real workshop, a 1 car garage is fine and dandy but a) it’s not big enough to work on my Jeep in it when the weather is bad outside, and b) I really can’t wire up the wiring for a welding machine and air compressor in a rental…
I just moved across the street the last time, but I spent two weeks moving books a few boxes at a time. I will pay if I have to move again, because I’m too old for that crap.
Yeah, the one big drawback in renting is not being able to make major changes. I hate to think what it will cost you for a two car garage in California, even with the current depressed market, but I understand the aggravation of being ready to do something and then being stopped by bad weather – I have been trying to trim around my house for over a week, but the thunderstorms keep rolling in off the Gulf.
Well, the problem is that the housing market here is becoming a bit less depressed, even the ghetto is starting to move. You’re still taking a minimum of $350K for someplace livable with a two-car garage, and it’s hard to justify that cost (around $2500/month) given that a 2-bedroom duplex is renting for $1700/month. You can buy a lot of herring for $800/month! (Though the tax deductions make it more like $400-$500 month difference, but still).
I paid professional moving help to load the truck and then unload it (and haul the books to the middle of the living room) at the other end. But simply boxing up that many books and putting the boxes in a place the professional moving help could get at easily was a PITA. And while there are a few of my books that are obsolete, some of them will never be obsolete. My compiler design textbooks, for example, are as relevant now as they were thirty years ago when I used them in college, every time I need to parse something they’re right there on my bookshelf. And of course Stevens and Knuth have their own shelf…
Basic theory is still the foundation, which is something that I have found lacking is many of the newer grads. You should be learning how to write 4GLs at the college level, not how to use them. I don’t expect them to write in machine language, like I did, but they should certainly be capable of assembler language coding so they know what is going on, and what the architecture can do.
Oh, don’t forget the property taxes, insurance, and repairs that come with home ownership that get piled on top of the mortgage, and I wouldn’t count on the tax break after the next ‘Grand Bargain’, as mortgage interest is not a problem for the 1%, it will probably be sacrificed in ‘closing loopholes’.
The university I attended was big on basic theory, and expected you to simply pick up any computer languages needed to complete the assignments without needing specific instruction in how to write programs in any particular computer language. I was working on a Java program today at work. Java didn’t exist when I was at university. But (shrug). I had to figure out why it wasn’t working the way it was expected (it turns out that some of the Java AWT behavior changed between Java 1.4 and Java 1.6 and the order in which onTop windows got drawn changed meaning that my login window was hidden beneath the splash window, gosh, such gratuitous incompatibilities *never* happen, right?), so I figured it out and I fixed it. That’s the sort of thing that was expected back when I graduated from college, that you’d figure out things without needing anybody holding your hand and the job of the college was to teach you the theory to make sense of what you were looking at, rather than teach you any specific language that was going to be obsolete in a few years anyhow. (Ada, anyone?).
Property taxes are going at about 1.3% of selling price locally. Insurance is actually somewhat cheaper than you’d expect for a $350K home because it’s the land that’s expensive, not the houses on the land, which can be rebuilt for far less than the price of house + land. PMI is running at 0.73% for 5% down. Interest rates are at 3.6% for a 30 year loan. I can plug all that in and figure out the max that I’m willing to pay. Regarding the mortgage tax deduction, if I can’t swing the finances without said deduction, I’m not pulling the trigger. The other cost to consider is the cost of down payment plus fees. 5% down payment plus roughly 3% in various fees, transfer taxes, and so forth, you have to amortize that over the expected amount of time that you’re going to live in the home if you are trying to make sense of the finances, because there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get it back at the end of the period, especially given that you have to pay roughly the same amount in fees to sell the house. I have a spreadsheet for all this stuff and know what my costs were for the last home I owned (err, rented from the bank, I should say), and know exactly what the bottom line is…
The DoD still specifies Ada for embedded systems, so it is in use locally. Lots of nice features, but no standardized I/O, so it is not in general use. There are ‘Ada systems’ flying over my house most days on their way to the range.
Yes, teaching people to think, rather than telling them what to think. The number of students who asked me what was the best language to learn and getting annoyed when I told them the one that does what you want do with the computer. You can’t convince people that if they can learn one language, they have the skills to learn any language they need.
A lot of the problem is with HR departments demanding paperwork because they don’t understand technical jobs. I have refused to pursue jobs after talking to HR and getting someone who has no idea what their questions mean, or what the answers mean. In one case I only applied as a favor to a project manager that I had known for years and he needed to do something that I had already done. It was a short-term contract but HR got involved and hired someone who didn’t have any idea what the project was about. He bought dinner and I gave him some of the design stuff from my project which pointed him in the right direction without reinventing the wheel.
Thanks for the Java note as it explains something that has been annoying me. I knew there was some change but haven’t had time to look into it as it isn’t something that is important, only occasionally useful.
I built a similar spreadsheet for a totally different purpose – my parents held the mortgage when they sold their place in New York, and I did it to provide the buyers with the annual interest/principal report, as well as showing them what it would really cost to buy the house. I’ve used it every time my Mother talks about buying a house again, so she sees the real cost.