Speaking of columns, the Custom PC website has just been updated with the content from the May issue (#32), including my column on Intel’s big living room PC idea, Viiv.

“By using existing software, Intel has waded into the mess that currently masquerades as ‘the digital home’. Very little of the digital home is based around the user experience. The software is nice, but aside from rare services such as the brilliant Emusic, generally, when you buy digital media, it has restrictive DRM that’s only compatible with one program. So you can’t play any music that you’ve downloaded on iTunes through Media Center, and you can’t play Google video downloads on it either. It’s like having an oven that will only cook Bird’s Eye food. As Cory Doctorow wrote on Boing Boing when reviewing Google’s Video Store, ‘For the first time in its history, it has released a product that is designed to fill the needs of someone other than Google’s users.’ Consumers don’t want DRM hassles; they’re introduced at the behest of the entertainment industry.”

The full article is here.