Now that all the hullabaloo from this year’s Macworld Expo had died down a bit, I decided to check out one of this year’s headlines: DRM-Free iTunes Music and Videos. Regardless of all the ill-tempered rants against DRM, I still bought “encumbered” music from iTunes in the past two years. So it was great news that Apple has finally succeeded in getting most of its songs in DRM-free format. The fact that you can “upgrade” your previous purchases to the DRM-free format is good news as well. But as with everything good in this world, there has to be some sort of catch. The catch is that if you want to “upgrade” your previously purchased you have to pay an additional $0.30.

Right, so I already paid $0.99 to download the DRM-protected, 128Kbps format. If I want to “upgrade” to the DRM-free, 256Kbps format, they want me to pay them another $0.30. WTF?!? So they doubled the bit rate and removed the DRM. That’s just great. 99% of their customers (myself included) will not be able to tell the difference between 128Kbps and 256Kbps bit rates, but that must make that 1% really happy.

See, now this is why people “pirate” all your shit. You want us to pay for one copy in one format and you want us to pay for another copy of the same thing in another format. But ooohhh! It’s 256Kbps and look at the slick GUI! I’m probably going to pay to get my albums “upgraded” anyway so why the hell am I whining? See you all on “the bay”.

Our local cable TV company got a new channel a while back. AXN Beyond, or as I like to call it: “TV Series Graveyard”. Nothing on it but old TV series reruns. What is it with TV networks? They give you a good TV series every now and then. It hooks you in and just when you are starting to enjoy it, they ruin it by either dragging the series so long or kill it outright. Either way sucks. Dragging on a good story for too long before ending it eventually makes it boring. Ending a good story just when it was starting to pick up makes for a very disappointing finish.

I think I now understand the wisdom in Disney’s 64 episode limit. Most Disney series will end within 64 episodes or less. A few will get dragged on for 100 or more episodes but it’s rare to see a Disney show drag on for more than 3 seasons.

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