corporate greed

I recently described the pleasure available to anyone attempting to watch DVDs on a computer. Then I went out and purchased Star Trek. The media industry has been very reluctant to face facts, and it really seems they're completely out of touch or just belligerent.

Let me explain:   read more >>

Kids love to watch movies, but they are not kind to equipment. Some of the older media, such as VHS tapes, might be technically inferior to DVDs but they certainly were more durable. We have tried to get our kids to carefully handle DVDs, but it just doesn't happen. A few were destroyed before I learned my lesson.

It turns out that most geeks with kids have realized the same thing: you just can't give kids DVDs. All the films and videos they love can be stored on your hard drive with much better results: no more messing with scratched discs, no more fumbling for the right video case, instant access to whichever video they want to watch, and you won't have to replace broken DVDs over and over (something which will make our corporate overlords very unhappy).

This had been working well for us until I tried to save the new Pixar film Up. A quick bit of googling revealed that movie studios have attempted a new form of disc copy protection: ship broken discs.   read more >>