But my kid could frisbee the disks across the room and kill the game.
And yet, if the CD does not have any fancy DRM on it you will have made a backup of it, because you know your kid can frisbee it across the room.
Actually, if the CD does not have any fancy DRM on it you can keep in all nice and tidy, stored in a safe place, since you will only have to ever use it once: when you install the game on your PC.
With Steam there are no work arounds: Steam goes down = you're up shit creek without a paddle - there are no backups.
a class action lawsuit meant to determine once and for all if the games were just 'rented' or actually purchased
... said class action lawsuit resulting in a settlement where the lawyers get paid 1/2 million dollars in fees and each claimant receives a 20$ voucher to buy games from Valve.
(ask anybody that participated in a class action suit and they'll tell you who the real winners are).
It has been said, again and again that if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.
So where's the legal contract having a punitive clause with an outrageous number of $$$ to be paid as compensation if Valve fails to uphold their end of the contract?
When dealing with companies, their "word" is only that which is written down and signed by the appropriate company's representatives in a legally enforceable contract with adequately large amounts of $$$ for breach of contract. Rumors on the Internet ("it has been said"???), or any statement by anybody in the company, including it's CEO and major shareholders are not worth the paper they're written on.
f P2P is illegal - and frankly any internet traffic seems to be illegal according to the Orwellian UK government at the moment, what are we going to use 60Mbps for - checking Email?
Not only that but BT has joined the voluntary scheme with the record industry for making it easier for them to get your contact details AND judging by their past history of silent and prompt compliance will likely be one of the first to join the latest and greatest surveillance scheme from the Government whereby they have a centralized database with all the web addresses you access and all the e-mails you sent.
If you live in the UK and are concerned with the slow erosion of your privacy I suggest you both use your vote to kick the current crop of would-be-dictators out and vote with your money by moving away from those companies who bend over backwards to satisfy the government's (and the record industry's) wishes.
My experience in the Java world is there are very few people that can use multiple threads properly.
Java is a language where creating a new thread is stupendously simple, thread synchronization was a standard part of the language from day one (although it's quite basic) and many advanced uses of the language (web-applications, EJBs) are by default multi-threaded. It's quite surprising that most developer's either don't know how to manage concurrency altogether or default to a "lock everything" strategy.
Even more surprising is the fact that this remains true even for developers working on pure server applications (where a lot of value can be gained for applications that use multiple threads properly).
I've worked with recent graduates and almost universally they don't really know how to program efficient multi-threaded applications: maybe Universities aren't teaching the right things???
I just entered the link in my browser at work (a mid-sized investment bank which shall remain nameless) and the Websense filter they have installed here blocks the site as sex.
Elegance is the measure of truly great code - when you read a piece of code which does a complex functionality and yet it flows logically in an easy to follow way, you know.
Making clever code shows that you are brilliant enough to build a complex logic and flow structure in your mind and transform it into something that works (no mater what the language).
Making elegant code shows that you are brilliant enough to build a complex logic and flow structure in your mind and transform it into something that works (no mater what the language) and that you are brilliant enough to understand howy you, others and the software development process fit together and how the code you make and the externalities of how software is created and how it is used can be matched.
Clever code might show genius, but elegant code shows genius and wisdom.
On any non-trivial piece of software most of the man-hour spend on it are spent during maintenance, not coding it.
- Support - Bug-fixing - Enhancements - Third party component upgrades are the bits that eat up most time - the initial coding is trivial in comparison.
Another thing to take in account is that true performance in IT is not measured by amounts of code: it's measured by function points implemented (for example, requirement use cases finished and delivered matching the wishes/needs of the client). In other words, results not the artifacts of the method used to achieve said results.
Putting things together: - Somebody that can produce lots of code (but not necessarily results) in the coding stages of a project while sacrificing future performance on all other stages of a project is a liability, not an asset.
Having been one such person in the early stages of my career (and having worked with other such people), I can confirm that with experience and hindsight I can now see how being a bright, fast, hard-core lone wolf coder was actually not that great in terms of long term results (not to mention being very amateurish and not at all professional).
This kind of people are only "elevated" and "celebrated" in environments where Management is fully short-term oriented and incapable or unwilling to measure and evaluate longer term negative side-effects - usually because manager bonuses are calculated from short-term, visible and easy to measure actions which are deemed positive. (This kind of mis-aligned incentives is what caused all the problems with Credit Derivatives: traders were "elevated" and "celebrated" for using lent money to pile-up into CDs for short term results while accumulating huge long term risks).
A narcissist society might very well be the product of modern marketing. From the point of view of a company that tries to sell something, the ideal consumer is one that commonly evaluates a purchase by thinking both: - I deserve this - I'm going to enjoy it and why should I not get something that I enjoy
This would also neatly help explain the increase in the number of overweight people around (food is a kind of product in which excessive self-indulgence has very visible effects).
TV and Movies always cut out the boring parts of life:
Observe how people dial a phone and immediately somebody picks up on the other side.
Or how in movies intercontinental plane trips at most consist of entering a plane and then magically coming out of the airport on the other side (conveniently skipping the 11h sitting between a fat lady and a spoiled brat).
Or how movies characters cross large cities from one side to the other in the blink of an eye (unless they are engage in a high-speed car pursuit).
Even "real-life" type of movies or series always do that - nobody wants to spend 1/2 looking at the TV seeing the main character travel from Paddington to Liverpool Street Station on the tube (subway)...
I really don't understand this phenomenon of the "Defender of the Strong" - there always seem to be a bunch of fanboys trawling through any forum that immediately jump to the defense of "Big Company with loads of $$$" by accusing others of being against success.
Look: - They have loads of $$$ so they can afford to defend themselves - Companies are not people so they can't "feel" insulted and it's impossible to "hurt their feelings" - Whatever anyone says in a forum rarely has any meaningful impact to the bottom line of a company unless the company has done something really bad and they're letting it be know (in which case the company deserves any loss they take)
Are you a shareholder of Google (and somehow your puny participation makes you feel like an owner) or has modern marketing and image promotion brain-washed you into being a mindless serf for a brand?
The problem is when a vocal some within the minorities start to demand extra respect and extra rights because of their race/religion/sex and as "compensation" for past harm done by some ancestors of the minority to some ancestors of the majority.
These people are a selfish minority that try to use the system for personal gain.
Not being racist is treating everybody equally independently of their race/religion/sex. Expecting better treatment because you're a member of a racial-group/religious-group/gender, be it the majority one or a minority one is racism/discrimination.
Problems like poverty or low education with disproportionally affect members of a racial-group/religious-group/gender are better solver by targeting the actual problem (poverty, low education) and not the externalities.
Here's a nice one that should hammer down the point on how exactly all of us break copyright laws all the time and how our lives would be affected if copyright laws were fully enforced:
- Do you ever tell jokes? - Are they all made up on the spot by you? I bet they're not. - Do you repeat jokes you heard from others? According to the law, you're breaking the joke's "inventor" copyright: unlicensed distribution - have you paid for it? - Do you make up jokes based on other jokes you heard? According to the law, you're breaking the original joke's "inventor" copyright: unlicensed distribution of a derivative work - have you paid for it?
Consider for a moment that if copyright was fully enforced (as is being tried on the Internet at the moment) people would be forced to pay somebody (or at least seek authorization) if they wanted to repeat a joke...
The citizenry of the UK are mostly mindless uneducated sheep held in thrall by celeb news.
The News around here for the last 2 weeks have been all about a reality TV "celebrity" which is sick with cancer - very little has been said about this proposed law.
If it wasn't for the 5% or such of people that actually use their brains to think this place would be a dictatorship already: as it is, we're already half-way to a Police State.
Fortunately, Labor is on is way out - they're pretty much incompetent at everything but image management, and the old saying that "you can fool some people all the time or everybody some of the time but you can't fool everybody all of the time" is finally coming back to bit them. On the other hand, they're likely to be replaced by the other side of the same coin - the Tories - whose modus operandi is pretty much the same.
That said, the overall management culture in the UK seems to be all about ah-hoc short term results and firefighting instead of vision, method, preparation and prevention - so I'm hardly surprised that people go for the flashy, populist and reactive politicians instead of the proactive, methodical and effective ones.
Empire: Total War uses online activation (through Steam), so if you buy this and you don't have an Internet connection all the time in your gaming PC, or you upgrade components on it or you upgrade your OS or any other arbitrary condition (which can change at any time at the whim of one of the suits at Creative Assembly) then you've just threw away a nice chunk of your fun money.
Also forget about re-selling them game or giving it to a friend once you've became bored with it (or if you find out that you don't like that kind of games)
Funny part is, if this just had a key check or CD check instead of the "can be remotely disabled at any time" style of DRM, this would be one of the few games that I would buy this year.
Here in the UK, if you buy a game in a Bricks and Mortars shop, if it won't run in your system you can go back to the store, return the game and get your money back (the magic words are "Not fit for purpose").
With digital distribution you're stuck with a bunch of bits and byets which you can't return: Even if the UK law is on your side, you likely have to, via e-mail, try to get a refund from a company which is probably based outside the UK.
I'm surprised you choose not give people little bottles of sugary water: As I see it, there is not point in wasting the healing benefits of the placebo effect when that's all you have.
Pretty much only in the US and then only in some states.
In Europe EULAs are considered an attempt at changing the terms of the implicit sales contract after the sale and are thus not valid. Any attempt at trying to enforce an EULA around here would result in the plaintiff being laughed out of the court and having to pay the defendant's legal costs.
Sure, daily newspapers are already suffering, not only from the Internet but also from free newspapers and TV.
Then again, nowadays their specialty is repackaged news from the likes of Reuters and AFP, sports news and celebrity gossip: all of which can be found on the Net where it is much more really time and even has more in-depth commenting (in the form of user comments, most of which are bad but some are good).
Worse, dailies have been cutting up in personnel and costs so they're much less likely to have hard-core investigative journalism articles and you rarely come across articles which have insightful views on the news of the moment.
At the moment, the only competitive advantage dailies have over TV and the Internet is that good old paper printed articles can be read anywhere anytime and even that is under attack by eBooks.
Now weeklies, on the other hand are a whole different breed: they can't compete with dailies in "real-time reporting" of news so they go for investigative journalism, in-depth coverage and in-depth analysis of news. Real journalism like that (as opposed to just reporting) is medium independent and not something that can be replaced by user-produced content (a million clueless amateurs can never replace a journalist with years of experience in a specific domain).
As long as they do it under Judicial oversight (e.g. with a court warrant) I don't see what's the problem - just because it goes "over the tubes" and might use computers in one or both sides doesn't mean it's "special", more than just a phone call and entitled to extra protection from the police.
I'm a lot more concerned with large scale wiretapping without court orders than I am about court authorized wiretapping of calls that go over "the tubes".
In this day an age, anybody with enough technology experience will have dropped out of the radar since they have learned that anything you put on the Internet under your own name will be there forever and might come back to bit you later one. (Hands up for anybody that never posted something stupid to a forum/Usenet in the heat of a flamewar and later regretted it)
The really experienced people will post under aliases and at most will have basic profiles in places like LinkedIn and Facebook with well vetted bits of info.
You can be pretty damn sure that the last of the posts you can find with my name on the Net is in comp.lang.* from 12 years ago while if you search for my nick you'll figure out a lot more about present me (including political leanings) without actually knowing who I am.
So the people you will find with lots of posts on the Internet under their names are not the most experienced, they're actually the ones which are a bit experienced but not enough.
With LinkedIn you can get away with pretty much just providing the same information that's on your CV - that is enough to have a decent profile. If you've submitted your CV to any of the major job search sites out there (such as monster), then all that information on your CV is already out there and available to the public.
As for connections, most of them tend to be "person I worked with" and could be determined by cross-referencing CVs - something you can easily do if you have a database of employment info (again, like the large job search sites or some of the larger employment agencies).
Also, LinkedIn is very much a professional oriented site - in there you're only expected to let people know what's your expertise and job history and maybe keep in contact with people with whom you have a professional relationship: nobody is expecting you to share stories about your puppy, your latest drug and alcohol fueled wild party or how you found true love.
The other sites are a lot more "personal" and you're expected to be sharing information you might think is private. Tread carefully with those.
Most celebrities work in Media (TV, Movies, Music)
Politicians like to be seen/endorsed with/by celebrities
Most voters are dumb enough to let themselves be influenced by the glam that surrounds celebrities
With the notable exception of Bill Gates (because he's filthy rich and does good charity work) and Steve Jobs (because Apple is as much a fashion company as a technology one) there is nobody in the technology sphere that has anywhere the celebrity power of most media stars.
As a side note, in the UK the magic words for getting a store to accept a return are "Not fit for purpose".
Games stores try to convince people that they cannot accept returns if the game box is open - that's all bullshit. If a game does not work on your machine for whatever reason then it is "not fit for purpose" and by law they have to accept a return and refund you in full. If they still try and squirm away from it, the next set of magic words is "Trading Standards" (the official body that deals with consumer protection).
If you live in the UK i strongly recommend that you check the Trading Standards site - know your rights as a consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet he has a really muscular right arm from all the exercise
And yet, if the CD does not have any fancy DRM on it you will have made a backup of it, because you know your kid can frisbee it across the room.
Actually, if the CD does not have any fancy DRM on it you can keep in all nice and tidy, stored in a safe place, since you will only have to ever use it once: when you install the game on your PC.
With Steam there are no work arounds: Steam goes down = you're up shit creek without a paddle - there are no backups.
(ask anybody that participated in a class action suit and they'll tell you who the real winners are).
So where's the legal contract having a punitive clause with an outrageous number of $$$ to be paid as compensation if Valve fails to uphold their end of the contract?
When dealing with companies, their "word" is only that which is written down and signed by the appropriate company's representatives in a legally enforceable contract with adequately large amounts of $$$ for breach of contract. Rumors on the Internet ("it has been said"???), or any statement by anybody in the company, including it's CEO and major shareholders are not worth the paper they're written on.
Not only that but BT has joined the voluntary scheme with the record industry for making it easier for them to get your contact details AND judging by their past history of silent and prompt compliance will likely be one of the first to join the latest and greatest surveillance scheme from the Government whereby they have a centralized database with all the web addresses you access and all the e-mails you sent.
If you live in the UK and are concerned with the slow erosion of your privacy I suggest you both use your vote to kick the current crop of would-be-dictators out and vote with your money by moving away from those companies who bend over backwards to satisfy the government's (and the record industry's) wishes.
My experience in the Java world is there are very few people that can use multiple threads properly.
Java is a language where creating a new thread is stupendously simple, thread synchronization was a standard part of the language from day one (although it's quite basic) and many advanced uses of the language (web-applications, EJBs) are by default multi-threaded. It's quite surprising that most developer's either don't know how to manage concurrency altogether or default to a "lock everything" strategy.
Even more surprising is the fact that this remains true even for developers working on pure server applications (where a lot of value can be gained for applications that use multiple threads properly).
I've worked with recent graduates and almost universally they don't really know how to program efficient multi-threaded applications: maybe Universities aren't teaching the right things???
I just entered the link in my browser at work (a mid-sized investment bank which shall remain nameless) and the Websense filter they have installed here blocks the site as sex.
Elegance is the measure of truly great code - when you read a piece of code which does a complex functionality and yet it flows logically in an easy to follow way, you know.
Making clever code shows that you are brilliant enough to build a complex logic and flow structure in your mind and transform it into something that works (no mater what the language).
Making elegant code shows that you are brilliant enough to build a complex logic and flow structure in your mind and transform it into something that works (no mater what the language) and that you are brilliant enough to understand howy you, others and the software development process fit together and how the code you make and the externalities of how software is created and how it is used can be matched.
Clever code might show genius, but elegant code shows genius and wisdom.
On any non-trivial piece of software most of the man-hour spend on it are spent during maintenance, not coding it.
- Support
- Bug-fixing
- Enhancements
- Third party component upgrades
are the bits that eat up most time - the initial coding is trivial in comparison.
Another thing to take in account is that true performance in IT is not measured by amounts of code: it's measured by function points implemented (for example, requirement use cases finished and delivered matching the wishes/needs of the client). In other words, results not the artifacts of the method used to achieve said results.
Putting things together:
- Somebody that can produce lots of code (but not necessarily results) in the coding stages of a project while sacrificing future performance on all other stages of a project is a liability, not an asset.
Having been one such person in the early stages of my career (and having worked with other such people), I can confirm that with experience and hindsight I can now see how being a bright, fast, hard-core lone wolf coder was actually not that great in terms of long term results (not to mention being very amateurish and not at all professional).
This kind of people are only "elevated" and "celebrated" in environments where Management is fully short-term oriented and incapable or unwilling to measure and evaluate longer term negative side-effects - usually because manager bonuses are calculated from short-term, visible and easy to measure actions which are deemed positive.
(This kind of mis-aligned incentives is what caused all the problems with Credit Derivatives: traders were "elevated" and "celebrated" for using lent money to pile-up into CDs for short term results while accumulating huge long term risks).
A narcissist society might very well be the product of modern marketing. From the point of view of a company that tries to sell something, the ideal consumer is one that commonly evaluates a purchase by thinking both:
- I deserve this
- I'm going to enjoy it and why should I not get something that I enjoy
This would also neatly help explain the increase in the number of overweight people around (food is a kind of product in which excessive self-indulgence has very visible effects).
TV and Movies always cut out the boring parts of life:
Observe how people dial a phone and immediately somebody picks up on the other side.
Or how in movies intercontinental plane trips at most consist of entering a plane and then magically coming out of the airport on the other side (conveniently skipping the 11h sitting between a fat lady and a spoiled brat).
Or how movies characters cross large cities from one side to the other in the blink of an eye (unless they are engage in a high-speed car pursuit).
Even "real-life" type of movies or series always do that - nobody wants to spend 1/2 looking at the TV seeing the main character travel from Paddington to Liverpool Street Station on the tube (subway) ...
I really don't understand this phenomenon of the "Defender of the Strong" - there always seem to be a bunch of fanboys trawling through any forum that immediately jump to the defense of "Big Company with loads of $$$" by accusing others of being against success.
Look:
- They have loads of $$$ so they can afford to defend themselves
- Companies are not people so they can't "feel" insulted and it's impossible to "hurt their feelings"
- Whatever anyone says in a forum rarely has any meaningful impact to the bottom line of a company unless the company has done something really bad and they're letting it be know (in which case the company deserves any loss they take)
Are you a shareholder of Google (and somehow your puny participation makes you feel like an owner) or has modern marketing and image promotion brain-washed you into being a mindless serf for a brand?
The problem is when a vocal some within the minorities start to demand extra respect and extra rights because of their race/religion/sex and as "compensation" for past harm done by some ancestors of the minority to some ancestors of the majority.
These people are a selfish minority that try to use the system for personal gain.
Not being racist is treating everybody equally independently of their race/religion/sex. Expecting better treatment because you're a member of a racial-group/religious-group/gender, be it the majority one or a minority one is racism/discrimination.
Problems like poverty or low education with disproportionally affect members of a racial-group/religious-group/gender are better solver by targeting the actual problem (poverty, low education) and not the externalities.
Here's a nice one that should hammer down the point on how exactly all of us break copyright laws all the time and how our lives would be affected if copyright laws were fully enforced:
- Do you ever tell jokes?
- Are they all made up on the spot by you? I bet they're not.
- Do you repeat jokes you heard from others? According to the law, you're breaking the joke's "inventor" copyright: unlicensed distribution - have you paid for it?
- Do you make up jokes based on other jokes you heard? According to the law, you're breaking the original joke's "inventor" copyright: unlicensed distribution of a derivative work - have you paid for it?
Consider for a moment that if copyright was fully enforced (as is being tried on the Internet at the moment) people would be forced to pay somebody (or at least seek authorization) if they wanted to repeat a joke ...
The citizenry of the UK are mostly mindless uneducated sheep held in thrall by celeb news.
The News around here for the last 2 weeks have been all about a reality TV "celebrity" which is sick with cancer - very little has been said about this proposed law.
If it wasn't for the 5% or such of people that actually use their brains to think this place would be a dictatorship already: as it is, we're already half-way to a Police State.
Fortunately, Labor is on is way out - they're pretty much incompetent at everything but image management, and the old saying that "you can fool some people all the time or everybody some of the time but you can't fool everybody all of the time" is finally coming back to bit them. On the other hand, they're likely to be replaced by the other side of the same coin - the Tories - whose modus operandi is pretty much the same.
That said, the overall management culture in the UK seems to be all about ah-hoc short term results and firefighting instead of vision, method, preparation and prevention - so I'm hardly surprised that people go for the flashy, populist and reactive politicians instead of the proactive, methodical and effective ones.
As a side note
Empire: Total War uses online activation (through Steam), so if you buy this and you don't have an Internet connection all the time in your gaming PC, or you upgrade components on it or you upgrade your OS or any other arbitrary condition (which can change at any time at the whim of one of the suits at Creative Assembly) then you've just threw away a nice chunk of your fun money.
Also forget about re-selling them game or giving it to a friend once you've became bored with it (or if you find out that you don't like that kind of games)
Funny part is, if this just had a key check or CD check instead of the "can be remotely disabled at any time" style of DRM, this would be one of the few games that I would buy this year.
Here in the UK, if you buy a game in a Bricks and Mortars shop, if it won't run in your system you can go back to the store, return the game and get your money back (the magic words are "Not fit for purpose").
With digital distribution you're stuck with a bunch of bits and byets which you can't return: Even if the UK law is on your side, you likely have to, via e-mail, try to get a refund from a company which is probably based outside the UK.
I'm surprised you choose not give people little bottles of sugary water: As I see it, there is not point in wasting the healing benefits of the placebo effect when that's all you have.
Pretty much only in the US and then only in some states.
In Europe EULAs are considered an attempt at changing the terms of the implicit sales contract after the sale and are thus not valid. Any attempt at trying to enforce an EULA around here would result in the plaintiff being laughed out of the court and having to pay the defendant's legal costs.
Sure, daily newspapers are already suffering, not only from the Internet but also from free newspapers and TV.
Then again, nowadays their specialty is repackaged news from the likes of Reuters and AFP, sports news and celebrity gossip: all of which can be found on the Net where it is much more really time and even has more in-depth commenting (in the form of user comments, most of which are bad but some are good).
Worse, dailies have been cutting up in personnel and costs so they're much less likely to have hard-core investigative journalism articles and you rarely come across articles which have insightful views on the news of the moment.
At the moment, the only competitive advantage dailies have over TV and the Internet is that good old paper printed articles can be read anywhere anytime and even that is under attack by eBooks.
Now weeklies, on the other hand are a whole different breed: they can't compete with dailies in "real-time reporting" of news so they go for investigative journalism, in-depth coverage and in-depth analysis of news. Real journalism like that (as opposed to just reporting) is medium independent and not something that can be replaced by user-produced content (a million clueless amateurs can never replace a journalist with years of experience in a specific domain).
Weeklies are not likely to go down anytime soon.
As long as they do it under Judicial oversight (e.g. with a court warrant) I don't see what's the problem - just because it goes "over the tubes" and might use computers in one or both sides doesn't mean it's "special", more than just a phone call and entitled to extra protection from the police.
I'm a lot more concerned with large scale wiretapping without court orders than I am about court authorized wiretapping of calls that go over "the tubes".
In this day an age, anybody with enough technology experience will have dropped out of the radar since they have learned that anything you put on the Internet under your own name will be there forever and might come back to bit you later one. (Hands up for anybody that never posted something stupid to a forum/Usenet in the heat of a flamewar and later regretted it)
The really experienced people will post under aliases and at most will have basic profiles in places like LinkedIn and Facebook with well vetted bits of info.
You can be pretty damn sure that the last of the posts you can find with my name on the Net is in comp.lang.* from 12 years ago while if you search for my nick you'll figure out a lot more about present me (including political leanings) without actually knowing who I am.
So the people you will find with lots of posts on the Internet under their names are not the most experienced, they're actually the ones which are a bit experienced but not enough.
With LinkedIn you can get away with pretty much just providing the same information that's on your CV - that is enough to have a decent profile. If you've submitted your CV to any of the major job search sites out there (such as monster), then all that information on your CV is already out there and available to the public.
As for connections, most of them tend to be "person I worked with" and could be determined by cross-referencing CVs - something you can easily do if you have a database of employment info (again, like the large job search sites or some of the larger employment agencies).
Also, LinkedIn is very much a professional oriented site - in there you're only expected to let people know what's your expertise and job history and maybe keep in contact with people with whom you have a professional relationship: nobody is expecting you to share stories about your puppy, your latest drug and alcohol fueled wild party or how you found true love.
The other sites are a lot more "personal" and you're expected to be sharing information you might think is private. Tread carefully with those.
With the notable exception of Bill Gates (because he's filthy rich and does good charity work) and Steve Jobs (because Apple is as much a fashion company as a technology one) there is nobody in the technology sphere that has anywhere the celebrity power of most media stars.
As a side note, in the UK the magic words for getting a store to accept a return are "Not fit for purpose".
Games stores try to convince people that they cannot accept returns if the game box is open - that's all bullshit. If a game does not work on your machine for whatever reason then it is "not fit for purpose" and by law they have to accept a return and refund you in full. If they still try and squirm away from it, the next set of magic words is "Trading Standards" (the official body that deals with consumer protection).
If you live in the UK i strongly recommend that you check the Trading Standards site - know your rights as a consumer.