About three years ago, I signed up to download a demo of some product from a company called Pramati. I believe the product was Pramati Studio, but it doesn’t matter, as the product wasn’t for me at the time. Just today, I get an email with a subject line of: Welcome to the “Marketing” mailing list. Interesting since I don’t recall ever signing up for a “Marketing” mailing list with Pramati, but I read on. The email is a standard Mailman response when you sign up to mailing list running Mailman. It goes on to say that if I want to post to the mailing list, I can send an email to:

marketing@mail

NICE! The part that amused me the most was that Pramati was kind enough to provide me a password to manage my options on the mailing list using the following URL:

http://mail/mailman/listinfo/marketing

Even better! And as you can see, it works great! Since none of the information was correct, I sent a reply to the email, also including postmaster@pramati.com. As one would figure, I got invalid command response from the mailinglist. Even better though was the response from postmaster@pramati.com:

This is the Postfix program at host mail.pramati.com.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the message returned below.
The Postfix program
: permission denied. Command output: procmail: Insufficient privileges

Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.pramati.com
Arrival-Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2006 06:33:08 +0530 (IST) Final-Recipient: rfc822; root@pramati.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; permission denied. Command output: procmail:
Insufficient privileges

Outstanding! What the hell are these guys doing over there? And what kind of company involuntarily signs up people to a mailinglist? Pramati makes some nice stuff, I hope they don’t let they’re marketing team soil their reputation.

I was reading this article on Reuters over the weekend and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the DCC vs. MiniDisc show down in the early 90’s. Ten years after the first CD was produced, Sony and Phillips decided that it was time for a new format. Phillips introduced DCC, or Digital Compact Cassette, which was backward compatable with standard anolog cassettes. Ironically, it was not compatable with DAT. Around the same time, Sony announced the MiniDisc format, also referred to as MD.

Both MD and DCC were the first comsumer-oriented formats to allow consumers to record digitally, which was something Compact Disc lacked (DAT was priced out of reach of the average consumer). Both formats got some lables to put out some titles, but niether format caught on with the gernal public. In fact, the Compact Disc format grew in popularity due to the fact the CD-R writers and media became afforable. In recent years, we’ve seen software formats starting to over take Compact Disc.

Fast forward another 15 years or so and it seems history is repeating itself. Personally, I don’t feel the need to replace what few DVDs I have with a 50GB, Hi-Def version. Nor can I justify the higher price of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. I already don’t have the time to watch the extra 10 hours of “bonus” material for a 2 hour movie (God knows how much more crap they’ll be able to cram into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD). I usually buy a DVD because I wanted to see a freakin’ movie, not see how they made the movie too. Cable services like Comcast OnDemand and pending network services, like the rumored iTunes Movie store, will have far more potential than any new media format. For now, I’m saving my money.