As I was traveling to Arizona for New Year holidays, I discovered a great trick-in at Pointe Hilton in Phoenix. It’s easy – build a hotel in such a way that cell-phone reception is hardly present, charge $10.00/day for limited internet access and $24.95/day for true high-speed broadband and voila – you get even more money then if you tried to trick guests with those $2/minute phone charges.
While anxiously anticipating Windows Vista to arrive on shelves accessible by consumers, I keep doing my homework researching how it will handle my collection of DVDs, CDs and mp3s. In other words – I’m thinking of using Vista not only as a productivity center, but as media one as well. However, the DRM craze seem to be putting away this idea for good.
While following links from Slashdot to originating site, I discovered the Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. This is, obviously, not an accounting cost-analysis, but a well-weighted walk through all the issues that arise while implementing a protection for premium content. While I do think author exaggerates a little, however, the hammer is about to fall.
Microsoft, by implementing this customer-unfriendly scheme, is preventing regular users from watching premium content on Vista PCs/laptops thus tossing away a share of market for Media Center PCs. After all – why bother with $1000 Vista PC while there are a lot of much cheaper options, like set-top players?
The whole story actually (in my view) is giving Vista a very bad rap. Personally, I don’t want it anywhere near my movies. Nor anywhere near my laptop. At least not anytime soon.
Just called Lenovo for the status of my old laptop repair. So far they only got the replacement fan yesterday and fixed the whole unit today and shipped it today as well. In the meantime, they moved to new software so now reps look up orders in two versions of support software, giving wrong trouble-ticket numbers and messing up other stuff.
Good news – I’m putting Vista and Office 2007 Beta2 on my old laptop tomorrow.
Bad news – need to sell the old laptop ASAP.