I’m reminded of a line from the original Star Wars movie “The more you tighten your grip the more systems will slip through your fingers.”

DRM is the grip holding the ‘premium commercial content’ (is there ‘premium content’ that isn’t commercial?) hostage in your PC releasing only when you and your PC are deemed worthy to watch it/listen to it. Vista brings this grip to an entirely new tightness, grabbing your PC by the silicon and squeezing.

Regardless of how much MS uses the term ‘enabling’ to describe the new DRM ‘features’ in Vista doesn’t change the fact that they are adding complexity and resource requirements that do nothing but benefit content creators.  Why should I pay extra (in the form of compliant hardware and resource utilization) for something I’m very likely to never use?

This behavior only emboldens those that these protections are meant to thwart; content pirates.  They are trying to battle basic human nature; the more you try to control a ‘vice’ the more people will try to outwit/ignore/topple that control.  This will only stop the dumb pirates, the smart ones will hire a Chinese professor or two to break the system and keep on churning out pirate discs at a fraction of what the studios/labels charge.

The end result is that the consumers pay to make to the pirates smarter.  Ouch.

Windows Vista Team Blog : Windows Vista Content Protection – Twenty Questions (and Answers)

I’m not really a fan of Outlook.  I find it to be overly complex for most users, hell, even for seasoned technology professionals, but it is the defacto standard email/contact/calendar tool for corporate America.

This free plug in from Microsoft (free?  Microsoft?  Wow, Bill musta been distracted that day.) alegedly allows sending SMS messages via an attached GSM phone (such as my much loved Audiovox 5600).

I’ve not yet tested it and considering the source I take it’s operation far from granted.  I don’t send many SMS messages but I can see the utility in such a function.

Download details: Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in (MOSA)

I’m not usually one for adding all sorts of ‘gadgets’ to my pages, I leave that to the MySpace crowd, but the Snap Preview Anywhere tool is different. 

By adding a small bit of javascript code to your page it enables a pop-up preview of pages that you link to from your site.  When you hover over a link it generates a small balloon window with a thumbnail image of the page to which the link leads.

I’ve just installed it here on my blog and it worked well out of the box for external links.  The internal links however generate no pop-up balloon by default.  A quick visit to the FAQ provided an answer in the form of an additional parameter to enable previews of internal links.  Sweet.

Snap

According to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 daylight savings time is extended by 4 weeks beginning this year.  I’ve already patched my Windows XP and server machines to recognize this change but I forgot about my beloved Audiovox 5600. 

Ok, so I’ve gotten so lazy that I put stuff in my blog just so that I remember to do it later. 😉

Is that Windows Mobile in your pocket? : 2007 Daylight Savings Issues for Windows Mobile 2003 and 5.0