Then maybe that is something the Firefox team should have thought about. As part of their, you know, open-source tradition of focusing on usability and user-experience consistency?
I can definitely see how it would be annoying to the end user, but I can't agree with blaming Microsoft for following a well-documented API.
The right way to manage a large problem is to periodically examine your processes, figure out the flaws and bottlenecks, and fix them. This is as old as time itself. Agile and Scrum just slap new buzzwords on old ideas, and their proponents act as if they have invented a cure for cancer.
If your business was failing under its old methodology, changing to "agile methods" is not going to help, except maybe as a catalyst to get your dinosaurs to quit in frustration over the meaningless jingo. The problem is that your business was unable to self-identify its flaws and correct them.
Nobody fails because they haven't heard of agile methods. Nobody fails because they honestly believe that a single "waterfall" cycle is the correct way to run a large project.
People and projects fail because they get locked into a specific process without any effort to identify and correct flaws in that process. Scrum is just one more process that you can be blindly locked into.
Everyone wishing that the money were spent on development instead of marketing is, unfortunately, living in an ideal fantasy world.
People are dumb. They follow trends, soak up advertisements, and generally do what marketers tell them to do. You personally might be immune, but remember that just by reading Slashdot (and therefore being somewhat tech-savvy) you have already self-selected against most of the population.
In modern culture, quality does not correlate with success. (Arguably, in entertainment, it never has... consider ticket sales for generic romantic comedies with famous actors vs thought-provoking art-house films.) Quantity is much stronger than quality. Exposure is all that matters.
Nobody bothers to do independent research anymore; Consumer Reports has been dropped in favor of Google search, and whoever has the most hits wins.
The lack of splitscreen is, sadly, a design tradeoff for having a huge open world where you can drive anywhere.
In most level-based games, like past Burnouts, the whole level is loaded ahead of time. Splitscreen just means having more players in the same amount of space. Every new player in splitscreen comes with a small, fixed overhead cost. The whole level has already been put into memory so there is nothing extra to be loaded.
But in an open-world game like Burnout Paradise, the players could be anywhere. The world is too big to fit into memory, so the game loads as much as possible and then intelligently loads "ahead" of where the player is, so that the world appears to be seemless.
But splitscreen players could be in totally different places on the map, driving at full speed in opposite directions. So the game would have to load twice as much data in the same amount of time. The second player doubles the cost of everything - twice as much memory, twice as much disk bandwidth to load ahead of each player, etc.
There are hardware limitations about how fast textures can be loaded from disk, how much memory is available, etc. Splitscreen is very hard for open-world games. It can be done, but it would take significant resources - making it work would probably tie up their best programmers for months.
Game development is all about allocating your resources as best you can. Ultimately someone decided that it was acceptable to drop split-screen in favor of making sure that the single-player and online experiences were as good as possible, and getting the game out the door on time.
The removal of split-screen still stings, of course:( But maybe you can understand why it's missing.
The interview (as opposed to the article) is at least a little more interesting.
There is nothing fancy here but he is trying to explain about the distinction between between running five tasks at once (a classic "threading" model), and splitting one task into five work units.
Many common threading models in video-game engines do not reduce latency; eg, "render thread", "audio thread", etc. You get a big win from doing two or three threads, but after that your physics takes an entire frame, or your rendering takes an entire frame, and you bottleneck. No matter how many more CPU cores you throw at it, those fixed number of threads are not getting any faster.
Nine women can't deliver a baby in one month, etc etc.
Hardly groundbreaking, but still a nice achievement given the state of most video game engines out there today. Burnout Paradise runs at 60hz with very low latency between input and screen. That's worth some kudos.
What, you mean like ActiveX and code signing? Anything goes, as long as the user knows it's dangerous?
The era of "trust the user to make intelligent decisions" is long gone. I would argue that it never really existed in the first place. Computers are for people who don't want to know how the computer works. They don't want to see Big Scary Dialog Boxes where they have to make the Right Choice or else their system could be compromised.
The onus is on application developers to minimize the frequency of scary choices, and to mitigate the impact of a wrong choice as much as possible.
There will always be malware that wants to install itself, websites that spread misinformed "security" tips, scammers who trick people into making wrong choices. And of course there will always be buggy or exploitable code.
Increased testing is useful. Increased architectural safety is MORE useful.
No, because the submission is unreasonable inflammatory rhetoric made by someone who thinks that he is much smarter than he really is. The explanation for all the "problems" this user is having is PEBKAC, not DRM.
You need to give your customers what they want, but not necessarily what they ask for. There is often a very gulf between the two, and unless your customers are professional designers they are very likely to mistake one for the other.
The job of a designer is to incorporate feedback and continually improve the design. That does not mean implementing every request, but rather addressing the root problem that leads to the requests.
In other words, don't give people a free hint button if playtesting shows that it reduces overall accomplishment. Figure out why people are finding certain puzzles so frustrating, and do something about that instead. Or else incorporate the hint mechanic in a way that rewards players for using it sparingly.
The submitter is trolling, and all the arguments about DRM are pointless. This has absolutely nothing to do with DRM.
Gears of War is, like all "good" Windows programs (according to Microsoft), a signed executable. It is also a game with online multiplayer, so it has an integrity check that tries to make sure you're not playing with modified game files (eg where all walls are rendered transparently or the player models have 50-foot-high red arrows above them).
The integrity check has a simple bug. It expects the signing certificate to be valid based on today's date, instead of on the date of signing. That's it.
It has nothing to do with rights or intentional expiration. Many other applications with expired signing certs work perfectly well.
Surely everyone who plays video games has had at least one "Tetris effect" moment in his or her life, where you see something in the real world and think about how to solve it according to the rules of the last game you were playing.
Maybe you played a stunt-based car-racing game and later thought about how sweet a jump would be if you drove your car up a ramp. Or maybe you played an adventure/puzzle game and then looked around a room and wondered if certain items were "important".
It's impossible to claim that that video games are perfectly compartmentalized in the human brain and do not transfer any weight into real-world decision making.
That's still a long way from saying that video games desensitize people, or that violent games promote real-world violence. But the brain definitely connects things that it learns inside a video game to other situations in the real world. That should not be a shock to anyone.
Thanks for reading them through for someone whose brain shuts off after the first page break of a scanned document:) It sounds like the complaint is based on prior versions of SecuROM, so I'd be interested as to what comes out of the discovery phase. I guess I'll keep a news alert out on it in case something interesting crops up.
The problem is that the information in all the other posts is of the "I found this on the internet and haven't tested it" type.
I would happily accept that if it weren't for the fact that I have a copy of Spore Creature Creator installed and my Daemon Tools work fine, my Process Explorer works fine, and none of the files that these instructions tell me to remove even exist.
The problem is that I don't believe the article, because it's written by someone totally clueless as to how his own computer works.
Interfering with the firewall? It made an internet request, and the firewall popped up an accept/reject box. That's exactly what it's supposed to do (internet authentication), and the firewall is working exactly as it should.
It hides a folder in Application Data? Try this on for size: the Application Data folder is hidden by default. Furthermore, the files in the Application Data \ SecuROM folder have a README.txt explaining exactly what they are and what they are used for.
It disables Process Explorer? No it doesn't. It doesn't let you run the game until you reboot if you have run an old version of Process Explorer, and that was fixed a long time ago (by Microsoft) as of Process Explorer v11.
The only thing that site has under Player Stories is a bunch of people saying things like "My XXX software doesn't work or is buggy! I blame SecuROM!". The claims (it disabled my antivirus! my hard drives crashed and my dvd phyiscally broke!) border on hysteria and don't offer any more solid proof.
All I want is someone to actually look at the SecuROM protection that comes with Spore or Mass Effect and then tell me why it is bad, without falling back on "I heard that SecuROM does terrible things!"
Does anyone have a solid description of specifically what this form SecuROM "installs", what it does, how it is harmful, and why it can't be removed?
Every time this topic comes up it becomes a "How dare they!" bitchfest so I've never been able to figure out the answers to the above.
I'm not saying that this is definitely just a pile of FUD combined with general anti-corporate hate against EA. But I'm leaning that way without real evidence.
Read it again? It specifically says that game and forum are moderated separately. You will not be banned from playing C&C online for making a shitstorm in their forums.
Posting in EA Forums is enabled by an EA Nucleus account -- but access to the forums and access to the games are separate. Players who have been banned from EA Forums are not automatically banned from online access to their other EA games. Players can be banned if they breach the Terms of Service or Code of Conduct in a forum, game or service. Each forum, game and service is managed independently by customer support representatives responsible for that specific forum, game or service.
Steve Wozniak is a smart guy but he is, to put it mildly, an extreme "power user". He left Apple to develop a programmable IR remote control (http://www.ktronicslc.com/core.html) with 256 functions split over 16 code pages.
It had programmable macros, scheduled timers, and absolutely no way to label what a button *does*. If the batteries ever ran down it had to be re-flashed via a serial link. It's technically sweet, it filled a niche that Woz perceived in his daily life, and it remains completely unusable for 99.9% of the world's population. (I'm sure it generated some fantastic patents, though!)
I would trust Steve Wozniak to design firmware for a battery powered car, or to build a lifesaving medical device, or to write a graphical Tetris clone that fit entirely in the unused bytes of a LILO boot sector. But I don't think his opinions on the marketability of consumer electronics are worth a damn.
I seem to recall another DRM solution with fairly broad manufacturer support, that promised to work "for sure".
How many times will the industry bring out new, better, "consumer-friendly" DRM? At what point do they realize that you can't dress up restrictions and pass them off as features?
People might not always be educated on topics like DRM or copyright but that doesn't mean that people are suckers. Attention music industry: don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining.
Wikipedia is all well and good, but I don't see any citation for the shell extension information, and can't find any information on it other than "it's in Wikipedia". And I've installed both Mass Effect and Spore Creature Creator, which use SecuROM protection, and I do not have any such services or extensions installed on my PC.
Perhaps there are specific versions of SecuROM that can do these things, but a blanket statement that SecuROM is bad for your computer is not borne out by my own experience. I've never had any trouble with playing the games I've bought, and I don't see anything running on my computer that shouldn't be there.
(Aside: as a developer, I'm fairly certain that the reason SecuROM would install a service is so that non-administrators can have direct hardware access to the CD/DVD drive to perform the precise data-access timing checks that SecuROM is based on. Since Mass Effect and Spore don't require a disc to play, this could be why they didn't install any services.)
DRM software is not malware just because you don't like what it does. AFAIK, SecuROM is just a wrapper that goes around a game EXE. When the game isn't running, SecuROM isn't running.
If it is integrated into the game EXE, and it doesn't hide executable content on your hard drive, I don't see how you can claim that it's "installed".
I don't get it. Are you boycotting because of the anti-piracy DRM, or are you just assuming that you will have problems with it?
It seems like if you think a game is worth paying for, you should buy it, and then download a cracked copy IF you had problems. And report the problems to customer support, loudly, so that the company learns in a *TRACEABLE* way that DRM is bad.
A boycott is much less effective than escalated customer service traffic. A company like EA can't measure or even notice copies that aren't sold, especially with an anticipated title like Spore. But they will definitely notice if people who have legit copies of the game are reporting problems at an elevated rate compared to other past titles.
Slashdot Mirror
Then maybe that is something the Firefox team should have thought about. As part of their, you know, open-source tradition of focusing on usability and user-experience consistency?
I can definitely see how it would be annoying to the end user, but I can't agree with blaming Microsoft for following a well-documented API.
New ideas? Please.
The right way to manage a large problem is to periodically examine your processes, figure out the flaws and bottlenecks, and fix them. This is as old as time itself. Agile and Scrum just slap new buzzwords on old ideas, and their proponents act as if they have invented a cure for cancer.
If your business was failing under its old methodology, changing to "agile methods" is not going to help, except maybe as a catalyst to get your dinosaurs to quit in frustration over the meaningless jingo. The problem is that your business was unable to self-identify its flaws and correct them.
Nobody fails because they haven't heard of agile methods. Nobody fails because they honestly believe that a single "waterfall" cycle is the correct way to run a large project.
People and projects fail because they get locked into a specific process without any effort to identify and correct flaws in that process. Scrum is just one more process that you can be blindly locked into.
Everyone wishing that the money were spent on development instead of marketing is, unfortunately, living in an ideal fantasy world.
People are dumb. They follow trends, soak up advertisements, and generally do what marketers tell them to do. You personally might be immune, but remember that just by reading Slashdot (and therefore being somewhat tech-savvy) you have already self-selected against most of the population.
In modern culture, quality does not correlate with success. (Arguably, in entertainment, it never has... consider ticket sales for generic romantic comedies with famous actors vs thought-provoking art-house films.) Quantity is much stronger than quality. Exposure is all that matters.
Nobody bothers to do independent research anymore; Consumer Reports has been dropped in favor of Google search, and whoever has the most hits wins.
Welcome to the present day.
The lack of splitscreen is, sadly, a design tradeoff for having a huge open world where you can drive anywhere.
In most level-based games, like past Burnouts, the whole level is loaded ahead of time. Splitscreen just means having more players in the same amount of space. Every new player in splitscreen comes with a small, fixed overhead cost. The whole level has already been put into memory so there is nothing extra to be loaded.
But in an open-world game like Burnout Paradise, the players could be anywhere. The world is too big to fit into memory, so the game loads as much as possible and then intelligently loads "ahead" of where the player is, so that the world appears to be seemless.
But splitscreen players could be in totally different places on the map, driving at full speed in opposite directions. So the game would have to load twice as much data in the same amount of time. The second player doubles the cost of everything - twice as much memory, twice as much disk bandwidth to load ahead of each player, etc.
There are hardware limitations about how fast textures can be loaded from disk, how much memory is available, etc. Splitscreen is very hard for open-world games. It can be done, but it would take significant resources - making it work would probably tie up their best programmers for months.
Game development is all about allocating your resources as best you can. Ultimately someone decided that it was acceptable to drop split-screen in favor of making sure that the single-player and online experiences were as good as possible, and getting the game out the door on time.
The removal of split-screen still stings, of course :( But maybe you can understand why it's missing.
The interview (as opposed to the article) is at least a little more interesting.
There is nothing fancy here but he is trying to explain about the distinction between between running five tasks at once (a classic "threading" model), and splitting one task into five work units.
Many common threading models in video-game engines do not reduce latency; eg, "render thread", "audio thread", etc. You get a big win from doing two or three threads, but after that your physics takes an entire frame, or your rendering takes an entire frame, and you bottleneck. No matter how many more CPU cores you throw at it, those fixed number of threads are not getting any faster.
Nine women can't deliver a baby in one month, etc etc.
Hardly groundbreaking, but still a nice achievement given the state of most video game engines out there today. Burnout Paradise runs at 60hz with very low latency between input and screen. That's worth some kudos.
What, you mean like ActiveX and code signing? Anything goes, as long as the user knows it's dangerous?
The era of "trust the user to make intelligent decisions" is long gone. I would argue that it never really existed in the first place. Computers are for people who don't want to know how the computer works. They don't want to see Big Scary Dialog Boxes where they have to make the Right Choice or else their system could be compromised.
The onus is on application developers to minimize the frequency of scary choices, and to mitigate the impact of a wrong choice as much as possible.
There will always be malware that wants to install itself, websites that spread misinformed "security" tips, scammers who trick people into making wrong choices. And of course there will always be buggy or exploitable code.
Increased testing is useful. Increased architectural safety is MORE useful.
No, because the submission is unreasonable inflammatory rhetoric made by someone who thinks that he is much smarter than he really is. The explanation for all the "problems" this user is having is PEBKAC, not DRM.
You need to give your customers what they want, but not necessarily what they ask for. There is often a very gulf between the two, and unless your customers are professional designers they are very likely to mistake one for the other.
The job of a designer is to incorporate feedback and continually improve the design. That does not mean implementing every request, but rather addressing the root problem that leads to the requests.
In other words, don't give people a free hint button if playtesting shows that it reduces overall accomplishment. Figure out why people are finding certain puzzles so frustrating, and do something about that instead. Or else incorporate the hint mechanic in a way that rewards players for using it sparingly.
The submitter is trolling, and all the arguments about DRM are pointless. This has absolutely nothing to do with DRM.
Gears of War is, like all "good" Windows programs (according to Microsoft), a signed executable. It is also a game with online multiplayer, so it has an integrity check that tries to make sure you're not playing with modified game files (eg where all walls are rendered transparently or the player models have 50-foot-high red arrows above them).
The integrity check has a simple bug. It expects the signing certificate to be valid based on today's date, instead of on the date of signing. That's it.
It has nothing to do with rights or intentional expiration. Many other applications with expired signing certs work perfectly well.
It's just a bug. Please shut up about DRM.
Surely everyone who plays video games has had at least one "Tetris effect" moment in his or her life, where you see something in the real world and think about how to solve it according to the rules of the last game you were playing.
Maybe you played a stunt-based car-racing game and later thought about how sweet a jump would be if you drove your car up a ramp. Or maybe you played an adventure/puzzle game and then looked around a room and wondered if certain items were "important".
It's impossible to claim that that video games are perfectly compartmentalized in the human brain and do not transfer any weight into real-world decision making.
That's still a long way from saying that video games desensitize people, or that violent games promote real-world violence. But the brain definitely connects things that it learns inside a video game to other situations in the real world. That should not be a shock to anyone.
Well, it might work if you keep telling your neighbors that.
Uhh, TBC came out in Jan 2007. It is now Nov 2008.
They announced that they would LIKE to do yearly expansions. So far there is nothing yearly about them.
"these people are powergamers. they do it with an attitude more serious than any job they work in"
Actually, in the case of this guild, it is their job. TwentyFifthNovember is a sponsored "pro-gamer" team.
Thanks for reading them through for someone whose brain shuts off after the first page break of a scanned document :) It sounds like the complaint is based on prior versions of SecuROM, so I'd be interested as to what comes out of the discovery phase. I guess I'll keep a news alert out on it in case something interesting crops up.
The problem is that the information in all the other posts is of the "I found this on the internet and haven't tested it" type.
I would happily accept that if it weren't for the fact that I have a copy of Spore Creature Creator installed and my Daemon Tools work fine, my Process Explorer works fine, and none of the files that these instructions tell me to remove even exist.
The problem is that I don't believe the article, because it's written by someone totally clueless as to how his own computer works.
Interfering with the firewall? It made an internet request, and the firewall popped up an accept/reject box. That's exactly what it's supposed to do (internet authentication), and the firewall is working exactly as it should.
It hides a folder in Application Data? Try this on for size: the Application Data folder is hidden by default. Furthermore, the files in the Application Data \ SecuROM folder have a README.txt explaining exactly what they are and what they are used for.
It disables Process Explorer? No it doesn't. It doesn't let you run the game until you reboot if you have run an old version of Process Explorer, and that was fixed a long time ago (by Microsoft) as of Process Explorer v11.
The only thing that site has under Player Stories is a bunch of people saying things like "My XXX software doesn't work or is buggy! I blame SecuROM!". The claims (it disabled my antivirus! my hard drives crashed and my dvd phyiscally broke!) border on hysteria and don't offer any more solid proof.
All I want is someone to actually look at the SecuROM protection that comes with Spore or Mass Effect and then tell me why it is bad, without falling back on "I heard that SecuROM does terrible things!"
Well, I've installed Mass Effect PC and Spore Creature Creator, and I don't have any of those files or registry entries.
Does anyone have a solid description of specifically what this form SecuROM "installs", what it does, how it is harmful, and why it can't be removed?
Every time this topic comes up it becomes a "How dare they!" bitchfest so I've never been able to figure out the answers to the above.
I'm not saying that this is definitely just a pile of FUD combined with general anti-corporate hate against EA. But I'm leaning that way without real evidence.
Read it again? It specifically says that game and forum are moderated separately. You will not be banned from playing C&C online for making a shitstorm in their forums.
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55656
Posting in EA Forums is enabled by an EA Nucleus account -- but access to the forums and access to the games are separate. Players who have been banned from EA Forums are not automatically banned from online access to their other EA games. Players can be banned if they breach the Terms of Service or Code of Conduct in a forum, game or service. Each forum, game and service is managed independently by customer support representatives responsible for that specific forum, game or service.
Steve Wozniak is a smart guy but he is, to put it mildly, an extreme "power user". He left Apple to develop a programmable IR remote control (http://www.ktronicslc.com/core.html) with 256 functions split over 16 code pages.
It had programmable macros, scheduled timers, and absolutely no way to label what a button *does*. If the batteries ever ran down it had to be re-flashed via a serial link. It's technically sweet, it filled a niche that Woz perceived in his daily life, and it remains completely unusable for 99.9% of the world's population. (I'm sure it generated some fantastic patents, though!)
I would trust Steve Wozniak to design firmware for a battery powered car, or to build a lifesaving medical device, or to write a graphical Tetris clone that fit entirely in the unused bytes of a LILO boot sector. But I don't think his opinions on the marketability of consumer electronics are worth a damn.
I seem to recall another DRM solution with fairly broad manufacturer support, that promised to work "for sure".
How many times will the industry bring out new, better, "consumer-friendly" DRM? At what point do they realize that you can't dress up restrictions and pass them off as features?
People might not always be educated on topics like DRM or copyright but that doesn't mean that people are suckers. Attention music industry: don't piss on our heads and tell us it's raining.
Wikipedia is all well and good, but I don't see any citation for the shell extension information, and can't find any information on it other than "it's in Wikipedia". And I've installed both Mass Effect and Spore Creature Creator, which use SecuROM protection, and I do not have any such services or extensions installed on my PC.
Perhaps there are specific versions of SecuROM that can do these things, but a blanket statement that SecuROM is bad for your computer is not borne out by my own experience. I've never had any trouble with playing the games I've bought, and I don't see anything running on my computer that shouldn't be there.
(Aside: as a developer, I'm fairly certain that the reason SecuROM would install a service is so that non-administrators can have direct hardware access to the CD/DVD drive to perform the precise data-access timing checks that SecuROM is based on. Since Mass Effect and Spore don't require a disc to play, this could be why they didn't install any services.)
Question - what about SecuROM is "installed"?
DRM software is not malware just because you don't like what it does. AFAIK, SecuROM is just a wrapper that goes around a game EXE. When the game isn't running, SecuROM isn't running.
If it is integrated into the game EXE, and it doesn't hide executable content on your hard drive, I don't see how you can claim that it's "installed".
I don't get it. Are you boycotting because of the anti-piracy DRM, or are you just assuming that you will have problems with it?
It seems like if you think a game is worth paying for, you should buy it, and then download a cracked copy IF you had problems. And report the problems to customer support, loudly, so that the company learns in a *TRACEABLE* way that DRM is bad.
A boycott is much less effective than escalated customer service traffic. A company like EA can't measure or even notice copies that aren't sold, especially with an anticipated title like Spore. But they will definitely notice if people who have legit copies of the game are reporting problems at an elevated rate compared to other past titles.