this is just to say that add to cart should not end in tears

The longer I'm online, the more irritable I get with DRM and with pretty much everyone who deals with selling digital content, and my irritability grows larger the more I use actualfax money for it and don't pirate, which is weird, because when I was unemployed and welfare-esque, I didn't care, as the internet is for pirating.

It's like a weird inverse Streisand Effect; the stupider DRM restrictions get, the less interested I am in buying it. The longer it takes to get to the actual movie on my bluray, the more firmware upgrades I have to deal with, the fact it's to the point where I've become semi-tech support to do simple shit like play a bluray for family and family friends, the fact iTunes has a goddamn five computer restriction on some of my music, and did I mention the unskippable nightmare of playing a bluray movie when your remote control is being a bitch? Or having to suddenly firmware update that takes for-fucking-ever....and we won't even go into the fuck-upedness of region restrictions and grey market buying because then I wonder if every single person in the entertainment industry is just stupid or stuck in the fifties or five years old with a three year old's understanding of how the universe works.

Open letter to Every Person Who Makes Buying Movies, Music, and Any Digital Content a Losing Proposition;

Let me tell you what is not fun: learning the slow and horrifying way to compile binaries by command line in goddamn linux--LINUX OF THE MY GOD THEY CALL THESE USER GUIDES?--with minimal inline comments and some not in English and hard code hex codes so I could watch my own legally bought blurays. Because the firmware was being a bitch and I hit my limit on staring hatefully at my bluray player while it refused to play anything. We won't talk about having to grab the experimental version of Handbrake that required new and exciting educational opportunities in how to make Linux not crash when the nightly build breaks something important in the OS; we will talk about being really excited when I could configure it using an actual interface. With my mouse.

(Command line: whoo boy does that improve your spelling in sheer terror of what you might accidentally tell your computer to do.)

Let me tell you what was fun: watching my movie afterward with a sense of bitter satisfaction uninterrupted and in 1080i. It made my goddamn week.

Let me tell you what's expensive: hard drives that can hold bluray movies at 40G a pop. Baby, I am running out of SATA ports to add more TB hard drives. And possibly out of sanity when I start wondering if it would really be like, incredibly crazy to build a second server for load balancing (and um, because okay, that's so much fun: I want to have a server building party and invite everyone to bring their parts and have chips and salsa and cupcakes and bandaids and silver nitrate for the totally not going to happen electrical burns).

Let me tell you what sucks: could have torrented that shit for free instead of paying for the privilege of being so frustrated I crashed my server twice (Handbrake's nightly builds redefine unstable) and get my content from people who do this much better than I do and are magic with compression codes. As they probably know what the hell they're doing.

Let me tell you about me: I am your demographic. I spend ridiculous amounts of money on movies and music and I own a fourteen year old who isn't any cheaper. I am lazy and given a choice I like clicking "Add to Cart" rather than spend a month I will never get back with Dev C++ learning to compile and install binary libraries and parsing XML (Parsing. XML. Just. God.) to watch something I bought.

Let me tell you one last thing: what you are doing is really improving my programming. From the current status of torrenting, I'd say a generation could also thank you for that.

I'm lazy. Please stop making me educate myself.

Seperis

*****

...it's only overreacting when you've tried to update the firmware less than five times. What I'm saying is, Samsung, you are so close to getting a firmly-written letter.