Dec 18 2007
A Tale of Two Potters
So here’s the story. If you’ve followed my tweets you probably noticed that I- A, am a Harry Potter fan, and B, recently bought the 5th DVD, Order of the Phoenix but didn’t get the “Special Edition” two disc version. It was a mistake on my part, not immediately finding it in Wal-Mart and foolishly assuming (hey, I was in a hurry) that the special features had be relegated to the HD version only in some bizarre marketing move. After all, stranger things have happened.
And as was kindly pointed out to me on my Facebook wall, I was wrong. As always, there was a 2-disc version somewhere floating around; I just missed it. So with my receipt in hand I went back to Wal-Mart knowing that technically I wanted to exchange one DVD product for another and that technically violated their return policy, however, I hoped that common sense would prevail and that a manager somewhere would recognize that the product I was returning (the plain-ol’ movie) was included in the new product I wanted to exchange it for - just the new one had more stuff (for only $3 more).
Thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly today, the common sense ruled and the manager recognized the situation and agreed to the exchange. Interestingly they said they had to open the DVD there, however. At first I thought “to check the discs to make sure they’re the same?” but then it dawned on me - they were ensuring that I couldn’t return the new DVD for cash by saying it was unopened. I’m guessing this is standard operating procedure, but it struck me as surprisingly - again - as a simple common sense approach.
Here, I was originally going to write about how I also discovered that Wal-Mart has finally updated their security on product returns, based on some advise I gave them 3 years ago. OK, so they probably didn’t do it because I told them, but they did adopt a policy to plug a considerable security hole that allowed customers to steal almost any item they wanted for practically nothing, and that I pointed out 3 years ago. More on this next time.
Now, I’m going to rant. And sue Warner Brothers. Ok, maybe not but oooh, am I ticked.
Finally, with Harry Potter 5 DVD #2 - the bonus features in hand, anxious to see the deleted scenes, the audio commentary, and whatever else is there that I paid my $3 for… I load the disc into my Macbook, and viola, it loads and starts playing that awesome score! Oh, sorry. That’s not what happened. I meant… and boom! it KERNEL PANICS my Macbook. Yes, kernel panic… that Mac equivalent of a blue screen of death… the “sorry, your computer is dead, you must restart” message that I haven’t seen since I first installed my Airport Extreme card into my Powerbook some 4 years ago and it was a little loose.
In other words: I have never had a Mac “blue screen” on me except for those times when it was caused by my incomplete installation of a wireless card. Once I fixed that, 4 years later, I’ve still never seen one. … Until today, when I insert the HP5 DVD, and DVD Player tries to fire up.
I highly suspect this to be related to the Windows only nature of the DRM surrounding the “bonus” digital version. I didn’t care anything about the digital only version, because it was for Windows only. And because I already had a copy of the movie from the internet. (Ok, now I really can’t sue Warner Brothers; but hey, I bought a copy regardless, right? Yeah. Learn from this studios: piracy doesn’t hurt your sales like you want to think it does. It’s more like FREE PUBLICITY… anyways, moving on…)
So I don’t know if any data was corrupted, and of course I’ve now set DVD player to not open/start playing a DVD on insert, but you can better believe I won’t be inserting this DVD into my Macbook again until I’ve taken some time to Google this and see if others experienced the same result.
OK WB? Do you get it? digital copy = good. DRM = bad… Bad guys can EASILY get around it (bit torrent? newsgroups?), good guys only hindered by it, my Macbook- probably kernel panicked by it.
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0xbfffd4a8
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelGMAX3100(5.1.8)@0×70a000->0×7c2fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(1.5)@0×6fc000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.4)@0×60d000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.5)@0×621000
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: DVD Player
Update: I’ve calmed down a bit and I confess, it could be completely unrelated to the DRM and more related to the fact it was the DVD players first launch on this computer, or perhaps something to do with the full screen playing. None the less, I stand by my original comments on DRM.
