The Richter Scale^®

As an active (some might say hyper-active) consumer of digital media I find DRM (Digital Rights Management) to be annoying at the very least, and downright malodorous at worst. DRM is what prevents you from playing downloaded music from _________ (insert one of: iTunes, Napster (new one), Yahoo Music, Real/Rhapsody, etc.) on any device or platform you want, any time you want, for example.

And DRM is not limited to only music - it applies to eBooks (like those for my Sony Reader or the occasional standards documents I need to purchase from IHS/ANSI); videos (iTunes TV shows, for example), and movies (e.g. Xbox Live movie downloads which can only be stored for a few days, and played only a few times; Microsoft’s Vista operating system will require LCD (or other) displays to have HDCP - High Definition Copy Protection - in order to play back HD video content from Blu-ray and HD-DVD; Apple’s new iTV with iTunes; and the reason I cannot watch TV shows at ABC’s web site while back home on Bonaire because I am outside the U.S.).

The truly scary thing about DRMed content, at least to me, is that the company I bought it through could decide at some point that my right to view or listen to the content should be terminated, and there’s not much I could do about it (other than keep computers in Internet isolation, perhaps). Or that some technological mishap prevents me from playing purchased media forever.

And then there are changing standards and allegiances, as witnessed by Microsoft’s desertion of all of its Plays For Sure partners when the company decided to release the Zune player.

The big media publishers are driven by fear - fear of loss of control, fear of lost revenue, fear of alienating their artists - and that fear has more or less paralyzed them. Their knee jerk response has been to vastly restrict how digital content can be purchased and used, combined with an effort to scare those who don’t respect (or are ignorant of) intellectual property rights into submission. The result is an alienation of their customers. Like me.

With the rare exception of a TV show I may order and download from iTunes for my video iPod, knowing I will only view it once, my form of protest to DRM has taken the form of either viewing/listening to the material for free or simply purchasing physical media that I can play anywhere, anytime, and rip to my computer hard disk if I so wish. And apparently I’m not the only one doing this as is evident from the growing indications that the music industry is looking at options for selling non-DRMed MP3 music files to boost their electronic sales and also reduce their dependence on the monster they created - Apple’s iTunes.

A December 7, 2006 article in USA Today offered one of the first hints of this as Yahoo Music became one place where an MP3 (which is by definition not DRMed) file for a Norah Jones song as well as one from Relient K became available for sale.

Then, a couple of days ago, Billboard magazine (as republished by Yahoo News) released further hints that DRM is being reconsidered by at least some music publishers, especially under pressure from some large on-line sites, such as Amazon.com and MySpace.

I, for one, would be right there with my money in hand to buy non-DRMed MP3 music files at a reasonable price - like $0.50 each - and I suspect that folks who now knowingly steal music for their collections but have the means to pay for their music would do so to to be legal and support the artists they like.

Lower priced, unrestricted music files, combined with a marketing campaign to make the artists seem a bit more human and approachable would do wonders for the music industry, and perhaps create a revival for digital music at large.

A couple of weeks ago in New York City I was lucky enough to score two Nintendo Wii consoles with merely a 2 hour wait in line at the Times Square Toys R Us. I received a ticket to purchase a console when I joined the line, and I roped in my nine year old son to get a ticket too. See pictures below of us in line, along with some new friends, with our tickets; Wii boxes stacked up at the Toys R Us; and my son Bas and I with one of our Wiis.

One of the Wii consoles has been sent on home to Bonaire via slow boat, but we managed to install the other one last week at the in-laws while visiting for Christmas, and it was great fun. We now have the same Wii set up in our living room on our big screen and it’s still fun.

Nintendo has, in my estimation, never been stupid - foolish and foolhardy yes, but not stupid. And the Wii is no exception. While the Wii has been derided by game mavens as having mediocre graphics, the fact is that the Wii is designed to be used with just about all existing televisions. Okay, so it doesn’t look as crisp and awe inspiring as an Xbox 360 or PS3 running in high definition with an appropriately designed game title and all the right cables, but most real folks don’t have HD TVs yet.

So, in contrast to the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360, for which an HD TV is pretty much required, the Wii is effectively plug and play with current display technology (but get a component video cable if you want to get a bit better resolution out of it on a newer TV). And from personal experience, you don’t notice jagged pixels or fuzziness when you’re madly shaking your hands and arms to make your character on the screen run, jump, or whatever - you’re too busy playing the game using the Wii’s innovative input devices.

The three titles I have found so far that make the best use of the Wii remote (and Wii nunchuk in some cases) are the free Wii Sports game disc which comes with the Wii (features Baseball, Tennis, Bowling, and Golf), Excite Truck, and Super Monkey Ball. And the latest Zelda (Twilight Princess) is good too, but it takes quite a bit of game time to get to where you are using the wireless motion controls in a broad range of ways.

Super Monkey Ball in particular features 50 mini-games ranging from darts, running hurdles, races, space shooters, tightrope walking, and much much more. But even Super Monkey Ball probably only scratches the surface on original ways game developers will likely put the wireless controls to use in the future.

I have read and heard a fair bit of commentary from naysayers that the Wii is just a fad, and recreational gamers will soon tire of it, but I’m not so sure. There’s something very satisfying about being able to physically interact with a video game, whether it be swinging a control like a golf club in a golf game, playing tennis with the control as a racket, throwing darts, or even pointing the remote at the screen as an aiming mechanism for some weapon in a first person shooter. Certainly it’s a lot more natural to point your “gun” at a target than it is to use a joystick to rotate your view so that your cross hairs then line up on your target.

And while reports of television destruction and bodily injury from flailing arms, snapping Wii Remote restraint cords, and sweat-induced slipperiness abound, the experience in my family is that the greatest pain resulting from use of the Wii controllers is the day after vigorous play - muscle aches being the most common malady.

I am firmly convinced the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by mid-2008, if for no other reason than it will work very well with pretty much any TV already in use today, as well as new ones being purchased, combined with the fact that it’s much more attractively priced than the higher end alternatives, meaning it’s more accessible to a larger number of people. It also doesn’t hurt that the game titles available for the Wii are much more family friendly than those for the PS3 (and to some extent, the Xbox 360), at least as things stand now.

I give the Nintendo Wii a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading the freaking manual of any new device and gadget I get (and I have a lot of those in my queue right now). In geek lingo, that’s know as RTFM (and the “F” means something rather more crude than “Freaking” in case you hadn’t guessed.

This all stems from the fact that when we bought the house we are living in now, we remodeled and added ceiling fans to every room in the house. But, Bonaire has flaky power, and for the last two and a half years we have been attributing the fact that the remote controlled lights in the ceiling fans are sometimes dim and sometimes bright (changing over a period of months from one to the other, or at least so it seems) to that power instability.

So imagine our surprise when a couple of days ago we discovered that if we hold the “light” button on our ceiling fan remotes, the corresponding ceiling fan’s light actually dims or brightens gradually over a 10-15 second period from one extreme to the other. We have had dimmer functionality in the lights all along and never known it. Why? Because we didn’t RTFM. So, from now on, I will RTFM, even when the device is seemingly trivial, as everything is definitely not always as simple as it seems.