Posted by Ken Moiarty on 04/28/06 06:50

"Gene E. Bloch" <spamfree@nobody.invalid> wrote in message
news:mn.da6c7d64424ea6de.1980@nobody.invalid...
> On 4/27/2006, Ken posted this:
>> Sorry, I'll elaborate: I didn't mean that DVD "finalizing" is
>> technically a part of DRM. I meant to infer that the apparent
>> "convenient neglect" of the designers (and/or manual writers) of my DVD
>> recorder to make it reasonably plain to the uninitiated consumer, the
>> need to manually finalize a recording, looks to me to be a
>> DRM-motivated.
>>
>> Ken
>
> Sorry for the misunderstanding.
>
> OTOH, after a lifetime of dealing with many, many badly designed user
> interfaces and badly written manuals, I do not agree with you at all.

Well thank you for sharing observation. ;-)

>
> Was it H. L. Mencken who said "Do not ascribe to malice what can be
> adequately explained by stupidity"?

Nobody's ascribing anything to malice here. (At least not I.)

>
> It was someone, anyway, and in conjunction with Occam's razor, it is all I
> need to explain the problem with the location and documentation of
> finalizing commands.
>

Fine, you have _an_ explanation. It's not necessarily an optimum
explanation. But it's an explanation and it's one which makes you content
that there's nothing more in this vein that you can possibly learn or change
your mind about. That's typical and it's only human.

> But then, I normally reject conspiracy theories, regardless of any
> evidence to the contrary :-)

Problem is you see, DRM is not about a "conspiracy theory". DRM is an
aggressive response by the content provider industry to protect their
copyrighted digital material (as well as analog material; something which
they lament as being, "the analog hole"), which includes bringing their
immense combined corporate muscle and pressure to bear on hardware
manufacturers to comply, so as to more than adequately protect their
intellecutal property from piracy and rampant consumer file sharing. They
are in their rights. So much so that hardware manufacturers follow every
means at their disposal to avoid provoking them, whilst also trying to do so
in subtle, barely nuanced, ways that should be least likely to alienate the
average customer in the process.
>

> Besides that, I just can't see how the quality of the UI and the
> documentation can be ascribed to DRM. It is there, it is documented, and
> it not the world's biggest secret, it's just clumsy.

This is a case of someone with enough intelligence, but for whatever reason
unable/unwilling to see the forest for the trees.

>
> Moreover, in the devices I've used, it is neither obscure in the UI nor
> obscure in the manual.
>

Okay this sounds like your almost contradicting yourself where you wrote
above: "after a lifetime of dealing with many, many badly designed user
interfaces and badly written manuals, I do not agree with you at all."...

But I get the gist of your message. It clearly implies that you doubt that
this finalization thing is even obscure as I claim it to be [for the
uninitiated] in my DVD recorder's interface/manual at all! Well you feel
free to look up, both, the manual and the interface on the web to see for
yourself if you care to.

Ken

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