Year Zero

I have been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails CD, which was released today. I find it interesting that I had no problem getting the CD on the day it was released, yet the extremely expensive software that I pre-ordered the day it was announced and has been out for two days already has not even been shipped yet. This has got me more angry than it probably should have, but why is it that so many companies in the computer industry seem to take customers for granted. If I was offering pre-orders for a product, I would go out of my way to make sure that my customers who were loyal enough to go to the effort of ordering a copy of the product before it was released got the product they ordered the day it was released (or at least a copy of it shipped to them on the release day).

One of the nice things that Nine Inch Nails did was to release the album online so that their fans could listen to it weeks before it came out. I actually did listen to it online, and while it would have been easy to steal the digital stream, I never because like the majority of people out there, I am honest. After listening to it once, and restraining myself from listening to it multiple times in an attempt to not spoil the higher quality CD version. It is just too bad that there wasn't a DRM free high quality version available on online music stores as I would have preferred to download it as I don't like having to running to a store to get stuff.

What the lack of a shipping copy of CS3 means is that the next episode of One of those Weeks will be created using Flash 8 instead of Flash CS3 like I want. It is probably not that big of a deal, but there are differences between ActionScript2 and ActionScript3, so it would be nice to finally only have to use ActionScript3. I just hope that Adobe gets their act together because the one thing I dread is having to switch to Silverlight even if it is suppose to be a cross-platform cross-browser Flash killer. Microsoft just doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to cross-platform compatibility. Though I must say that the name is much better than WPF/E.