DRM has another victim - and that's you

HD-DVD IS THE FORMAT of the future. But as of right now, it kind of blows. The effect of DRM infections on our few remaining freedoms aside, no one seems to be talking about the effects of DRM infections on usability. Well, that is until now.

How do minute+ boot times sound to you for a consumer appliance? A P4/2.5GHz with 1G of ram sound cheap? How about the power bill for this beast? All this in the name of DRM, if that isn't progress, I don't know what is.

Some of the horsepower can be put down to the image processing, but putting a general purpose CPU in a box meant for a dedicated task is, well, flat out asinine. Take a CPU that runs at closer to 100W than 0, add in the expense of it, and you have a piss-poor substitute for a $30 DSP that in all likelyhood takes 1/10 that power. The halls of TI must be empty now, with most employees needing to go home early after soiling their underpants from laughter after reading those specs.

But why would you need such a general purpose CPU? DRM. Yes, the same infection that brought you dramatically lower battery life in iPods and other fashion accessories works just as 'well' in consumer devices, but this time it brings you another 'plus', boot times. Yes, how much of that 'just push play' pause do you think is due to the overwhelming and stupid encryption? Has anyone hooked up a power meter to one of these things and noticed the spike when you hit that 'go' button? Whatever the case, I think it will be cracked in a few days, so who really cares.

In defense of the Toshiba and the HD-DVD camp, it looks like the Blu-Ray DRM infection is just as bad, or worse. The common theme of the next generation players used to be crushing, rights-removing and overwhelming DRM infections, but now that looks to be taking a back seat to speed, or lack thereof.

Congratulations content mafia, your lust for power and money finally has a consumer cost, and it makes piracy all that much more attractive to the average person. The technocrati now have an easy way to explain it to Joe Average, 'You know that inescapable minute you sit there fuming at your HD-DVD? Well.....'. What number own goal is this, I lost count. µ