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I've been working lately on installing an antenna for television and radio at our Decatur office. This involved putting an antenna on the roof of the 9 story OneMain Place building in Decatur and running a coax cable 9 stories down into the office.

Turns out, the pole I mounted the antenna to is only attached to the AC ducts and is not bolted to the roof. I had to lug a pair of cinderblocks up there to provide ballast.

Now I'm sitting on one of the chairs the owner has bolted to the roof taking in the view while my arms try to get over the trip.

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While Wal-Mart is probably not as big as iTunes, the recent news of Wal-Mart shutting down it’s DRM authorization servers is a perfect example of why DRM is inherantly a bad idea.  This applies for things besides music of course.  Truthfully, it applies moreso to things that are not music.

Music DRM is easily defeatable using the “Analog Hole”, which is more or less what Wal-Mart tells people to do.

“If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD.”

The unspoken part of this statement is “Then go and rerip them to high quality un DRMed MP3s.”  Now, let’s take a look ten years down the road and the recently release game Spore.  Try to install it, are the DRM authorization servers at Maxis still around?  Do the have the same IP and domain?  Can you play your copy of Spore anymore?  Possibly, but likely not.

I had a similar problem with an old TIVO unit I picked up second hand.  It needed to dial home to unlock itself but the phone number was no longer in service.  There isn’t an opton to change it.

The point is that copy protection that requires software (or hardware) to “dial home” is not a good idea.  Companies come and go all the time.  Truthfully, any new commer to the online music business pretty much has to offer non DRM music.  There is no guarantee they will be able to take on iTunes and everyone will be pissed if the business goes under in 6 months.  You just can’t trust any new comers to this market if there is no guarantee of their survival.  Not to mention that it requires more work on the distributor’s part since they have to maintain servers to activate this music.

Then there are people like me, who occasionally go through periods of reinstalling the operating system.  If each fresh install appears to be a “new PC” I’m screwed if there is a limited number of authorizations.

I’d like to wrap up with a final though as well on what real effect this has.  Ok, I suppose it does serve as a deterrent to casual distribution.  Basically we’ve killed the “mix tape of the future”.  For anyone who wants to pirate their music, there are many many easy ways to do it.   The only people this hurts is those who are trying to be honest.  For those people, I’ll point you towards Amazon.com, which sells DRM free music of great quality for a good price.  My only advice for Amazon is to backup your music somewhere since you can’t redownload purchased songs.

There is one coach at soccer almost everyone can't stand. Seriously, he sounds like a drill sergent when he's screaming at the kids. The problem is that he's yelling at a bunch of 10 year olds.

The problem is, he's head of the league.
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I’m pretty sure the 250gb per month limit does not apply to buisiness accounts but I’m concerned that it might give them ideas.

We currently have two connections feeding our building.  We have a T1 line that gets 1.5mbps up and down.  We use it for VPN tunneling to our two sattelite sales offices and for emergency backup.  If we send all of our traffic through this (as it was when I came over in the merger a year ago), the VPN goes down all the time due to not enough bandwidth.  This wasn’t a huge issue until we got our new Traffic and Maqrketing software that requires each computer be able to connect to the central servers.

The second is a Comcast based cable modem.  According to Speedtest.net, it gets 25mbps down and 1.5mbps up, though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen both numbers higher.  Basically, it’s got gobs of bandwidth.

Let’s forget about all fo the other internet traffic for a second and look at two streams of incomming data.  We use two Slingboxes, 24/7 to monitor two sources.  One is the off air signal of a transmitter that’s 200 miles away (roughly).  We run it at a lower quality image of about 300 kbps.  We mostly just want to know “it’s there”.

The second is a feed from a news station 50 miles away in Decatur.  They send us weather through this slingbox for air locally on the top of the hour.  This needs to be a higher quality feed since it’s used for on air broadcast.  We run is at about 800 kbps, but for the sake of simple calculations, we’ll call it 700 kbps (which is LESS).

This means at any given time, reguardless of any other traffic, we’re eating up 1mbps 24/7.  For each minute of the day we use 60 megs of data down.  Over an hour, that’s 3600 meg down or 3.6 gigabytes.  After a day we’ve eaten up 86.4 gigs of data.

Can you see where I’m heading with a 250 gig per month cap?  At this rate we’ll have eaten up a 250 gig/month cap in 2.89 days.  That’s if there is NO other traffic.  In fact, we’ll use about 2500 gigs of bandwidth in a month, or 2.5 terrabytes of bandwidth.

That’s 100 times the allotocated bandwidth.  If they charge say, a dollar per gig over 250 that makes for an internet bill of 2250 dollars per month.  Yowzers!

This is where my concern and fear over bandwitch caps is.  Bandwidth caps that are the claimed solution to a non existant problem.