However, that's not a very strong arguement. Over the course of a 120 hour game (liek FF12), switching a disc once every 20 hours isn't exactly much to ask... I mean, FF7 and FF8 were utter marketplace DISASTERS because they had multipul discs, right?
That depends on how many disks you're talking about and the structure of the game being able to accommodate swapping disks. For example multiple disks would be a pain in the arse for open sandbox games where you can literally go anywhere. Since FF XIII doesn't exist outside of Square it's hard for me to say what the story / level structure would be like. But if their world is even moderately open that in itself could push up the disk count simply because if you can revisit certain areas then they're going to have to be duplicated on every disk unless the game is going make the player juggle disks while playing.
BTW I don't claim that multiple disks is necessarily a hindrance, but the point is that there are certain kinds of games that simple do not fit on a DVD-9. Some games might be able to overcome this, but some will not.
What doesn't always matter is run-time performance. Programmer performance is often just as, or more, important. A program that takes three hours to write and ten minutes to run is inferior to one that takes an hour to write and half an hour to run, if it's only going to be run once.
Well arguably Java is easier to write and maintain too as opposed to C++ so that's another legitimate reason to choose it. I find the iterative development style in most Java IDEs such as Eclipse to another reason to prefer it over C/C++ where compiling, linking and debugging gets more painful as the app grows.
He's talking about homebrew. Sony screws that up with each Firmware upgrade.
The PSP homebrew scene is probably 95% piracy and 5% genuine homebrewers. A quick glance at any torrent site can attest to the number of people constant seeding / leeching PSP games. It's no wonder that Sony choose to plug holes with firmware updates.
Yeah, because the Wii has -so- much more storage capacity than the 360.
The Wii has the luxury of being standard definition. Which means FMV is likely to consume 1/3 the space on disk that it would need for 720p on the 360. The same goes for textures, models etc. which invariably would have to be far more detailed on the 360 to suit its higher resolution and more capable graphics & CPU. The situation would be even worse if the 360 dared hope to support 1080. Assuming any FF title could be crammed onto a single disk for Wii then it's likely that it would require 3 or 4 disks to take advantage of the 360.
I have no idea if this was one of the reasons that FF is not going to the 360 but it's clear that that multiple disks are the ONLY way FF XIII or later could happen on the 360.
Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share. Releasing exclusively would be suicide, and though there is a large market in the US, I would expect there's enough PS3 owners and enough would-be PS3 owners on the fence that would pick up a PS3 because of FF that it wouldn't necessarily be worth the added effort to port to xbox.
Not just that, but FF probably wouldn't sit too well on the 360 due to the limited storage capacity. FF games are known for ridiculous amounts of FMV which is exacerbated by needing HD content on the 360. I expect if FF did appear that it would have to span multiple discs.
I think my perspective is rounded because I'm in regular contact with C++, Java and C# every day at work. I wouldn't dream of using Java for something performance related (or I'd at least use JNI to fix the performance bottleneck) and I wouldn't dream of using it for a lightweight GUI app that I expect launch quickly.
However I think Java is just fine in most regular roles assuming performance is no issue. I've never thought to myself that Azureus is any slower because its implemented in Java. I've even written a poker hand calculator that runs through hundreds of thousands of hands in a second. I think performance is an overrated concern for most apps.
Even so, I still find it easier to knock together a GUI app much easier using C++ than I would in Java. Swing layout editors just stink. I don't understand what the big hangup is with Swing and visual editing since DevStudio 2005 makes it look easy with.NET 2.0.
I have yet to see the firmware break anything unless you were hoping to play pirated games. In fact new firmware releases have introduced more and more functionality. For example the latest 3.5.0 firmware allows you to log into a paired PS3 from anywhere in the world and play movies & music off of it. Earlier firmware updates added AAC music, RSS, web browsing and other significant functionality.
If Fortify isn't working for you, you're not using it right.
Fortify has exactly one button to push when integrated into Developer Studio. Push the button and it supposedly analyses your code. When we installed Fortify to examine our product, we pushed the button and watched the machine CPU go to 100% and stay there until all system memory was exhausted and it crashed several hours later. What part wasn't I doing right?
To be fair Fortify 4.0 fixed the memory exhaustion crash but it still took Fortify an entire afteroon and night to analyse our product. It is intolerably slow and virtually impossible to use without dedicating a whole machine to get a single trace out of it. Our produce is large at a million lines but not uncommonly large.
By the way, you're not missing out on anything special by not programming in Java or C#. Both of those languages are slow, and introduce their own language complexities. -bms20
Speed isn't everything. If your server application is network or database bound then stability and API richness is considerably more important than speed of execution. After all, does it matter that your app completes 2ms faster if it has to wait 500ms for the database to return? Or that it crashes more frequently? Or that you can't port it to new hardware because half the libs you use don't compile? Since Java offers dozens of cross-platform APIs (network communication, web services, XML parsing, crypto, database, RMI etc. ) and runs (without recompiling) on dozens of platforms AND is generally harder to bring down than C++ I would favour where speed and UI are not factors.
Even where a UI is present, Java has it's uses. Eclipse demonstrates that Java can produce excellent cross-platform desktop applications. I think Java's weakness is definitely its UI though. While Swing is a very rich API, it's also hard to write native look and feel apps. The file picker dialog is one place where Java apps always suck. Poor look & feel is probably why Eclipse chose to use SWT instead.
C# (.NET) obviously doesn't benefit from robust cross-platform support but it does inherit most of the same advantages of Java. It also has excellent UI support (and better layout tools) on Windows meaning that you can accomplish quite a lot in C# without dropping to C++.
I've played with Boundschecker, Purify (& Quantify) and Fortify. My experience of these tools is that they either take a painfully long time to run, throw up too many spurious warnings or crash outright after eating all available memory / disk space.
They might be useful for small apps but if you have a massive app they are almost more trouble than they are worth.
It's hard to say what you can do except foster safe coding practice and highlight the common pitfalls such as memory leaks, buffer overflows etc. Many compilers can help detect heap / memory overruns because the debug libs put guard bytes on the stack & heap that trigger exceptions when something bad happens. There are also 3rd party libs such as Boehm which help with memory leeak / garbage collection issues and dump stats. I'd say using STL & Boost is also a very good way of minimizing errors too simply because doing so avoids having to write your own implementations of arrays, strings etc. which are bound to be less stable.
For an analogy, this would be comparable to someone working around the technical limitations in the personal version of TestDriven.NET to unlock features in the professional or enterprise versions for free. What complicates this even further is that this isn't a developer doing this for his or her personal use or experimenting with our product, this is a business trying to sell a product. We tried for close to two years to get Jamie to stop releasing the Express version of TestDriven.NET without success.
It's certainly sneaky the way he as gained access to APIs that are already exposed, but unless the EULA that accompanies VS2005 Express says you can't do it, what is his crime? I'm speculating here but I imagine he discovered that his control is initialised with some kind of "site" object representing DevStudio that he can use to navigate to other objects representing menu & toolbar managers and invoke methods to add his own things to them.
Why the OpenOffice people are hostile to this project is something I've stopped wondering about... today's announcement of the "first" port of OOO to Mac not using X11 just shows how badly a project hurts itself when it refuses to work with others
They're "hostile" because NeoOffice uses an incompatible licence (GPL only, not LGPL) meaning none of the Neo work can be incorporated back into OpenOffice. So if you want to blame someone, blame the NeoOffice folks. They've shut themselves out, not the other way around.
I think NeoOffice is a decent port, but I've never thought it felt native. Sure some of the widgets look native but the whole thing feels off in some way. Sluggish. If the reason for that is a Java layer then I'd gladly take something that uses native widgets.
OpenOffice itself is no speed demon but NeoOffice seems even slower.
I've been a regular visitor to the church of Emacs and paying my weekly tribute to RMS on Sundays.
I used to use Emacs all the time but I got tired of the slow loading and superfluous functionality. So I switched to "micro" versions (jed, memacs, joe etc.). I still use jed quite a bit for editing text files, but GUI editors and IDEs provide virtually everything I could want from an editor these days for other purposes. One particularly excellent GUI editor on Windows is Notepad++. I also use Eclipse which is also pretty slow loading but once running offers superb editing facilities.
I wouldn't touch vi or emacs unless I absolutely have to. Typically that means when I'm stuck in a console window or similar. Other times, give me a decent and user friendly graphic editor any time.
This won't stop "Tivoization"
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's kind of insane to think that this will stop anything. The PS3 runs Linux (a generic PPC Linux no less) with no problems at all. It sure as hell does not mean you can access the proprietary portions of the PS3 that Sony don't want you to see. Why? Because Linux is running over a virtualized set of hardware. I'm sure if push came to shove that Tivo would do exactly the same thing, ensuring whatever code or functionality they wished to hide stayed hidden.
I use both git and Subversion, with branched development in both. I don't see how either is any better than the other at the task you describe.
The problem is not many projects create branches to fix bugs or implement every feature. Nobody does that in the real world since a developer might have to fix 20-50 bugs during QA and it would be sheer insanity to create a branch for each. No one would do it. Normally the trunk would receive a lot of unrelated checkins for bug fixes and may ultimately need to be backed out. Sure you might use branches for major work, but even there there the branch might go through its own QA cycle where it can suffer exactly the same problem.
I fully appreciate the changeset feature in git for what it can offer. I just don't see the tool being as convenient as Subversion especially if you have cross-platform work or expect decent integration with the desktop or major IDEs.
Imagine you have multipld different changes. Now imagine you have to backout one particular change without affecting any others. That's where changesets come in. Each set of changes is a discrete changeset that some source control systems would allow you to easily revert if need be. Subversion allows you to do atomic commits, but backing out changes is still a major pain especially if the file is touched by more than one checkin. You can't just pull a complete set of changes as you could with git. That's not to say I think git is very convenient in other ways, but changesets are one of its strengths.
And we should trust your unsupported assertion more than the educated opinion of the originator and head of one of the most successful large software projects in history because...?
Never trust an argument from authority unless it has the proper reasoning to back it up. Besides, Linus is managing a highly distributed, Linux-only (by definition) project. Git might suck badly if you have cross-platform requirements, or a centralized repository, a different development model, or simply want UI tools & IDE integration.
I don't think there is anything especially wrong with Subversion. Sure it doesn't support changesets which is an very handy feature if you're juggling lots of checkins, or your role is release engineer but it is possible to work without them, e.g. using patches and atomic fileset commits. I used CMVC with changesets and it is useful for release managed projects but its bit of a pain for casual or self-managed code.
Other features such as replication would also be useful if svn were a slug but it isn't. Some source control systems such as Clearcase are so badly designed that replication is essential because of the bursty traffic but svn seems to run superbly even across the internet. Subversion is also cross-platform and runs anywhere which in itself is a massive bonus.
I would like to see git be used more but it needs to be properly cross-platform with a front-end akin to TortoiseSVN and plugnis for all major development environments before that is likely to get the attention it deserves.
So don't branch, and DON'T allow concurrent checkout of any code - FORCE the DEVELOPERS who need to work on the same code to COORDINATE their work EARLY in the development cycle. Of course they'll bitch.
Sorry but this is ridiculous. I'm on a project where there are 5 or 6 independent and major features each with business and back-end dependencies which may or may not be ready in time for a particular point release. All need to be QA tested and therefore need to be checked in for release engineering builds. Branches and merging are the only sane way to manage it. I'm sure some projects have hundreds of features and subsystems in concurrent development. It would be impossible to feature work on the same branch without severely disrupting development and QA testing. Saying otherwise is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I didn't say they hadn't heard of it. I say they aren't interested in it. Which is true. I'd like to see the race if I went to Indianapolis but it doesn't mean I have the slightest interest when I am not there.
Coverage of the sport and NASCAR is close to zero outside of the North America and that reflects the amount of interest in it. If there is any coverage it might amount to a 20 second news item. The racing sport you are likely to see on mainstream channels outside of the US is Formula One.
Just because you believe in the project so adamantly does not mean that so many other people would believe in it just because it got posted on slashdot. It got plenty of publicity, anyone who visits any kind of linux forum can tell you that. But as I said before, the status quo seems to think that it is absolutely absurd, and the idea that they even raised $1000, let alone $12000 is even more absurd.
Quite. Talk such as "all it took was $1 from each person in just 1% of the community," etc. is nonsense since few people outside of the US would have the slightest interest in Indianapolis 500. Even within the US, I bet the community can think of better things to do with their money (including keep it) than pay to have a penguin sticker on some nondescript racing car.
I don't think it would be a bad idea for there to be fund raisers but this idea is just lame and I think the funds raised so far reflect that.
All it would have taken from you is to accept one measley little story about the Tux500 project a few weeks ago and *bam*, it would have had the proper amount of publicity to energize the Linux community and raise enough money to fully sponsor the car. All it took was $1 from each person in just 1% of the community, so it would have worked even with 80% of the community doing their own thing. But since the project didn't get the good publicity it deserved, it only raised half the amount needed just to put a logo on the car. Fortunately the good will of the tux500 team seems to be allowing the logo to still be on the car. I guess they are better people than you.
Energize the community? To me it sounds like an unbelievably pointless waste of money. The failure to raise 250k probably reflects the community thinking much the same thing. Even assuming 250k were raised, I can think of dozens far more worthwhile open source projects that it could go towards.
A way to stay relatively safe is to use a dedicated card. Here in Poland banks with online presence will supply you with what some call an "e-card". It looks like a Visa and is recognized as a Visa when you buy stuff online, but:
Ireland has something similar called 3V which is supposed to be an online-only Visa card that you top up. So in theory you can use it without fear that someone will run up huge bills or cause you hassle trying to get a card reissued. The only problem (and this is a massive problem) is that it's ONLY online. I find the concept enormously handy but I want a physical card that I can use anywhere and hold onto for an emergency situation (e.g. my regular card is lost).
I think the US has proper Visa Gift / Debit cards but they're very difficult to find and some charge "maintenance" or topup fees. I think the idea would be enormously popular, especially with teenagers if they do away with fees and just take their skim from the 1-2.5% they slap on all transactions anyway.
I bought The Lord of the Rings Online. A good game, but has the same extremely irritating automatic subscription behaviour. The very first thing that happens after you activate your game is that it asks you for your credit card and what plan (monthly, three monthly etc.) you wish to subscribe to. At no point did I see an option such as "No thanks, I just want to use the 30 days I got with my purchase", at no point did I see a checkbox that says "I will manually renew each month". Once you activate you're set up with automatic renewals whether you like it or not.
I normally cancel my sub as soon as I've gone through all the bother of signing up for it. But it's still extremely annoying and insulting that any company does this. Codemasters are not alone here. All it does is make me less inclined to renew than if they just let me choose myself.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on how many disks you're talking about and the structure of the game being able to accommodate swapping disks. For example multiple disks would be a pain in the arse for open sandbox games where you can literally go anywhere. Since FF XIII doesn't exist outside of Square it's hard for me to say what the story / level structure would be like. But if their world is even moderately open that in itself could push up the disk count simply because if you can revisit certain areas then they're going to have to be duplicated on every disk unless the game is going make the player juggle disks while playing.
BTW I don't claim that multiple disks is necessarily a hindrance, but the point is that there are certain kinds of games that simple do not fit on a DVD-9. Some games might be able to overcome this, but some will not.
Well arguably Java is easier to write and maintain too as opposed to C++ so that's another legitimate reason to choose it. I find the iterative development style in most Java IDEs such as Eclipse to another reason to prefer it over C/C++ where compiling, linking and debugging gets more painful as the app grows.
The PSP homebrew scene is probably 95% piracy and 5% genuine homebrewers. A quick glance at any torrent site can attest to the number of people constant seeding / leeching PSP games. It's no wonder that Sony choose to plug holes with firmware updates.
The Wii has the luxury of being standard definition. Which means FMV is likely to consume 1/3 the space on disk that it would need for 720p on the 360. The same goes for textures, models etc. which invariably would have to be far more detailed on the 360 to suit its higher resolution and more capable graphics & CPU. The situation would be even worse if the 360 dared hope to support 1080. Assuming any FF title could be crammed onto a single disk for Wii then it's likely that it would require 3 or 4 disks to take advantage of the 360.
I have no idea if this was one of the reasons that FF is not going to the 360 but it's clear that that multiple disks are the ONLY way FF XIII or later could happen on the 360.
Not just that, but FF probably wouldn't sit too well on the 360 due to the limited storage capacity. FF games are known for ridiculous amounts of FMV which is exacerbated by needing HD content on the 360. I expect if FF did appear that it would have to span multiple discs.
However I think Java is just fine in most regular roles assuming performance is no issue. I've never thought to myself that Azureus is any slower because its implemented in Java. I've even written a poker hand calculator that runs through hundreds of thousands of hands in a second. I think performance is an overrated concern for most apps.
Even so, I still find it easier to knock together a GUI app much easier using C++ than I would in Java. Swing layout editors just stink. I don't understand what the big hangup is with Swing and visual editing since DevStudio 2005 makes it look easy with .NET 2.0.
I have yet to see the firmware break anything unless you were hoping to play pirated games. In fact new firmware releases have introduced more and more functionality. For example the latest 3.5.0 firmware allows you to log into a paired PS3 from anywhere in the world and play movies & music off of it. Earlier firmware updates added AAC music, RSS, web browsing and other significant functionality.
The PSP has plenty of killer games. And with more to come such as upcoming Final Fantasy & God of War titles.
Fortify has exactly one button to push when integrated into Developer Studio. Push the button and it supposedly analyses your code. When we installed Fortify to examine our product, we pushed the button and watched the machine CPU go to 100% and stay there until all system memory was exhausted and it crashed several hours later. What part wasn't I doing right?
To be fair Fortify 4.0 fixed the memory exhaustion crash but it still took Fortify an entire afteroon and night to analyse our product. It is intolerably slow and virtually impossible to use without dedicating a whole machine to get a single trace out of it. Our produce is large at a million lines but not uncommonly large.
Speed isn't everything. If your server application is network or database bound then stability and API richness is considerably more important than speed of execution. After all, does it matter that your app completes 2ms faster if it has to wait 500ms for the database to return? Or that it crashes more frequently? Or that you can't port it to new hardware because half the libs you use don't compile? Since Java offers dozens of cross-platform APIs (network communication, web services, XML parsing, crypto, database, RMI etc. ) and runs (without recompiling) on dozens of platforms AND is generally harder to bring down than C++ I would favour where speed and UI are not factors.
Even where a UI is present, Java has it's uses. Eclipse demonstrates that Java can produce excellent cross-platform desktop applications. I think Java's weakness is definitely its UI though. While Swing is a very rich API, it's also hard to write native look and feel apps. The file picker dialog is one place where Java apps always suck. Poor look & feel is probably why Eclipse chose to use SWT instead.
C# (.NET) obviously doesn't benefit from robust cross-platform support but it does inherit most of the same advantages of Java. It also has excellent UI support (and better layout tools) on Windows meaning that you can accomplish quite a lot in C# without dropping to C++.
They might be useful for small apps but if you have a massive app they are almost more trouble than they are worth.
It's hard to say what you can do except foster safe coding practice and highlight the common pitfalls such as memory leaks, buffer overflows etc. Many compilers can help detect heap / memory overruns because the debug libs put guard bytes on the stack & heap that trigger exceptions when something bad happens. There are also 3rd party libs such as Boehm which help with memory leeak / garbage collection issues and dump stats. I'd say using STL & Boost is also a very good way of minimizing errors too simply because doing so avoids having to write your own implementations of arrays, strings etc. which are bound to be less stable.
It's certainly sneaky the way he as gained access to APIs that are already exposed, but unless the EULA that accompanies VS2005 Express says you can't do it, what is his crime? I'm speculating here but I imagine he discovered that his control is initialised with some kind of "site" object representing DevStudio that he can use to navigate to other objects representing menu & toolbar managers and invoke methods to add his own things to them.
They're "hostile" because NeoOffice uses an incompatible licence (GPL only, not LGPL) meaning none of the Neo work can be incorporated back into OpenOffice. So if you want to blame someone, blame the NeoOffice folks. They've shut themselves out, not the other way around.
I think NeoOffice is a decent port, but I've never thought it felt native. Sure some of the widgets look native but the whole thing feels off in some way. Sluggish. If the reason for that is a Java layer then I'd gladly take something that uses native widgets.
OpenOffice itself is no speed demon but NeoOffice seems even slower.
I used to use Emacs all the time but I got tired of the slow loading and superfluous functionality. So I switched to "micro" versions (jed, memacs, joe etc.). I still use jed quite a bit for editing text files, but GUI editors and IDEs provide virtually everything I could want from an editor these days for other purposes. One particularly excellent GUI editor on Windows is Notepad++. I also use Eclipse which is also pretty slow loading but once running offers superb editing facilities.
I wouldn't touch vi or emacs unless I absolutely have to. Typically that means when I'm stuck in a console window or similar. Other times, give me a decent and user friendly graphic editor any time.
It's kind of insane to think that this will stop anything. The PS3 runs Linux (a generic PPC Linux no less) with no problems at all. It sure as hell does not mean you can access the proprietary portions of the PS3 that Sony don't want you to see. Why? Because Linux is running over a virtualized set of hardware. I'm sure if push came to shove that Tivo would do exactly the same thing, ensuring whatever code or functionality they wished to hide stayed hidden.
The problem is not many projects create branches to fix bugs or implement every feature. Nobody does that in the real world since a developer might have to fix 20-50 bugs during QA and it would be sheer insanity to create a branch for each. No one would do it. Normally the trunk would receive a lot of unrelated checkins for bug fixes and may ultimately need to be backed out. Sure you might use branches for major work, but even there there the branch might go through its own QA cycle where it can suffer exactly the same problem.
I fully appreciate the changeset feature in git for what it can offer. I just don't see the tool being as convenient as Subversion especially if you have cross-platform work or expect decent integration with the desktop or major IDEs.
Imagine you have multipld different changes. Now imagine you have to backout one particular change without affecting any others. That's where changesets come in. Each set of changes is a discrete changeset that some source control systems would allow you to easily revert if need be. Subversion allows you to do atomic commits, but backing out changes is still a major pain especially if the file is touched by more than one checkin. You can't just pull a complete set of changes as you could with git. That's not to say I think git is very convenient in other ways, but changesets are one of its strengths.
Never trust an argument from authority unless it has the proper reasoning to back it up. Besides, Linus is managing a highly distributed, Linux-only (by definition) project. Git might suck badly if you have cross-platform requirements, or a centralized repository, a different development model, or simply want UI tools & IDE integration.
Other features such as replication would also be useful if svn were a slug but it isn't. Some source control systems such as Clearcase are so badly designed that replication is essential because of the bursty traffic but svn seems to run superbly even across the internet. Subversion is also cross-platform and runs anywhere which in itself is a massive bonus.
I would like to see git be used more but it needs to be properly cross-platform with a front-end akin to TortoiseSVN and plugnis for all major development environments before that is likely to get the attention it deserves.
Sorry but this is ridiculous. I'm on a project where there are 5 or 6 independent and major features each with business and back-end dependencies which may or may not be ready in time for a particular point release. All need to be QA tested and therefore need to be checked in for release engineering builds. Branches and merging are the only sane way to manage it. I'm sure some projects have hundreds of features and subsystems in concurrent development. It would be impossible to feature work on the same branch without severely disrupting development and QA testing. Saying otherwise is living in cloud cuckoo land.
Coverage of the sport and NASCAR is close to zero outside of the North America and that reflects the amount of interest in it. If there is any coverage it might amount to a 20 second news item. The racing sport you are likely to see on mainstream channels outside of the US is Formula One.
Quite. Talk such as "all it took was $1 from each person in just 1% of the community," etc. is nonsense since few people outside of the US would have the slightest interest in Indianapolis 500. Even within the US, I bet the community can think of better things to do with their money (including keep it) than pay to have a penguin sticker on some nondescript racing car.
I don't think it would be a bad idea for there to be fund raisers but this idea is just lame and I think the funds raised so far reflect that.
Energize the community? To me it sounds like an unbelievably pointless waste of money. The failure to raise 250k probably reflects the community thinking much the same thing. Even assuming 250k were raised, I can think of dozens far more worthwhile open source projects that it could go towards.
Ireland has something similar called 3V which is supposed to be an online-only Visa card that you top up. So in theory you can use it without fear that someone will run up huge bills or cause you hassle trying to get a card reissued. The only problem (and this is a massive problem) is that it's ONLY online. I find the concept enormously handy but I want a physical card that I can use anywhere and hold onto for an emergency situation (e.g. my regular card is lost).
I think the US has proper Visa Gift / Debit cards but they're very difficult to find and some charge "maintenance" or topup fees. I think the idea would be enormously popular, especially with teenagers if they do away with fees and just take their skim from the 1-2.5% they slap on all transactions anyway.
I normally cancel my sub as soon as I've gone through all the bother of signing up for it. But it's still extremely annoying and insulting that any company does this. Codemasters are not alone here. All it does is make me less inclined to renew than if they just let me choose myself.