Last week, David Pogue wrote an excellent article about the issue of DRM.

He does a great job of highlighting all the shades of gray in the DRM argument. I agree that taking intellectual property which you haven’t paid for isn’t morally right, but I am decidedly anti-DRM and against paying for the same item multiple times.

The MPAA and RIAA need to adjust their constituent’s business models. Forcing people to comply with their wishes by thrusting DRM on honest people will never work.

All existing and forthcoming DRM will be cracked anyhow. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Rather that post a big long redundant boring diatribe about Windows Vista, I’ll just refer you to Sam’s post. It’s pretty much everything that I would have written anyhow.

“Convergence” was a popular buzzword with the tech communiity and media about five years ago. Now that we have cheap bandwidth and adequate processing power (for encoding/decoding) to watch IP-delivered video, everyone seems to have forgotten about this word.

The other day, Scoble wrote about how “ABC TV’s new player rocks“. I tried it out, and it’s obvious that the picture is rendered in a higher resolution than Google Video or YouTube. But does it “rock”? I guess it depends on your ultimate goal and your criteria for such high praise.

I don’t want to watch TV shows on my computer monitor. How lame and incredibly nerdy is that? I want to watch high quality IP-delivered content on my TV (in full-screen), while seated comfortably on the couch, without first being required to navigate to someone’s stupid web page in order to do it! Has everyone forgotten that this was the real goal of convergence in the first place?

So, what did ever happen to convergence?

I’ve been putting off this post (and debating whether to even write it) for about a month now. Long-time readers know that I’ve tried out Firefox before. In fact almost annually, I also try out whatever the hot distribution of Linux is at the time and hop on a Mac just to make sure I’m not some ill-informed Windows/IE zealot.

Since at Connected Dot we need to make sure our web-based applications render correctly on the most popular browsers (which we consider to be IE, Firefox, and Safari) we have to install Firefox for testing. Besides just testing our own pages, I recently decided to give Firefox an extended test drive.

Before proceeding, I should provide a little background information: I’ve been using Internet Explorer since version 3.0 when I switched from using Netscape. I’m sure Joshua remembers when I switched. I’m sure he also remembers when I switched to Netscape Beta 0.9 from Mosaic. My philosophy is to use what’s best and leave my emotions (”but I’ve used this for so long”) and corporate politics (open source vs. the evil capitalists, etc) out of my decision.

Since the introduction of IE version 7, I’ve noticed that it runs pretty bloated. With a normal amount of tabs open (for me. I have 5 start pages) it regularly consumes 300-400 MB of RAM. While with 2 GB of RAM I’m in no danger of running out of physical RAM, it’s a drain on the system to manage it. Additionally, it isn’t that stable for me. I run Windows XP Professional at the office and Vista Ultimate on my laptop and in my home office and it actually seems less stable on Vista. Occasionally, I’d leave tabs open overnight intending to read the content in them the next morning only to wake up and find IE had crashed sometime overnight.

So, based on my “test drive” of Firefox for the past month, it’s now my default browser. It renders just about anything other than things on microsoft.com correctly (which is exclusionary and self-serving of Microsoft), consumes half the ram, seems (I don’t have any empirical evidence) faster, and using the amazing plug-in Greasemonkey, is incredibly powerful.

I’m always willing to listen to reason, so if there is something I’ve overlooked or some way of making IE7 more stable, or maybe I’m just visiting the “wrong” websites, let me know about it in comments.

Tip: If you’re going to run Firefox on Vista, you may need this information. I did.