True, but for how much longer? The reason you find Opterons in such massive servers is because HyperTransport scales up much better in 4P+ designs than Intel's ancient FSB. Now that they have QuickPath Interconnect for Nehalem/Core i7 and its derivatives, they aren't going to be held back by buses any longer. HT was AMD's one last trump card against the Core 2 generation, but they have no such card for use against the Core i7 generation.
the Steam version sells 1000 copies, and the PC version sells 100 copies. Later on I'm able to prove that 500 people pirated the PC Download. What is my piracy rate on the PC download? 83%.
Steam is not an "alternative content stream", it's a PC download. Valve will gladly tell the dev how many people bought it and quite often it's exactly the same game (as in it connects to the same score server). 2DBoy even accounted for it in their stats we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources. There is no significant systematic inflation for the PC version in their method that I can identify, outside of unsubmitted scores. 82% of PC players have stolen their game.
It's also worth noting that WiiWare games can be easily pirated too, and should be able to be counted in a similar fashion.
Consumer products using GPGPU tech will (and indeed are) happening, but it's sure as heck not going to be on ATI's GPUs. The performance is there, but the development tools are a joke. The main runtime (Brook+) is the technological equivalent of giving yourself a root canal every time you program in it, and the rest of the Stream SDK supporting toolset is more or less entirely AWOL. It's rather unfortunate, but compared to NVIDIA's CUDA the whole system is a joke; CUDA is an excellent toolkit that someone clearly put a lot of thought in to in order to meet the needs of developers, while the Stream SDK/Brook+ still feels like it's a research project that nobody optimized for commercial use.
The hardware is there, but no one in their right mind is going to program with AMD's software. Everyone is waiting for OpenCL. Even if it doesn't really take off, it still can't possibly be worse than the Stream SDK.
Bingo. The price is irrelevant as far as the consumer is concerned. The prices could be $100/$95 or $10/$9; it makes no sense - and in fact it's counter to their own best interests - for the consumer to buy a new copy of a game. The used copy is equally as good (a perfect substitute) and is cheaper, the consumer will buy it. Gamestop figured out that instead of pocketing a small share of 50%, they could pocket virtually the entire share of $45 by undercutting the producer of the game.
This is applicable to any other media too. If Walmart started selling used DVDs the way Gamestop sells games, they'd be able to pull off the exact same thing.
No one else gives a damn about headphones. The quality issues with on-board sound become quite apparent with a good set of headphones, and even most other consumer sound cards treat it as an afterthought, doing whatever they would do with a set of stereo speakers. The X-Fi (at least under Windows) has an absolutely excellent headphone spatialization algorithm for general listening, it completely resolves the fatigue issue that results from hearing only a single audio channel in each ear without naturally occurring crossfeed. As for gaming, Creative (or rather Aureal's) head related transfer function tech for 3D audio is second to none; it's better than 5.1 speakers and is the only thing on the market right now worth a damn for 3D audio on headphones.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how much of this would be usable under Linux. The spatialization issue in particular drives me nuts.
It would only serve to further hurt Ubuntu. There's something about the Linux graphics subsystem where it doesn't multitask very efficiently among multiple applications requesting 3D acceleration. Keeping Compiz on means that their 3D benchmarks are all that much slower, if not causing rendering errors too. It's not exactly "fair", but anyone here who's serious about Linux knows that it's a good idea to kill Compiz before gaming.
I don't claim to be well versed in microeconomics, but don't you need multiple large firms with equally large shares for an Oligopoly? I think the traditional example here is Coke & PepsiCo. The way the online advertising market is structured, Google has the lion's share of it. There are other large firms in it (e.g. Microsoft) but they don't even begin to have a share of the market similar to Google's.
There are two very interesting things about Google pulling out:
1) Google is now big enough to attract serious government anti-trust attention. It just immensely harder for them to do anything big that would benefit their core business (advertising) or anything external where they could throw their weight around. The message from the government seems to be that they're going to start treating Google as a de-facto monopoly in search/advertising, which means they're going to try to keep Google from using that monopoly in other markets.* I don't think they're the kind of market threat that the government makes them out to be, but left unchecked they may get there one day soon.
2) Yahoo is fucked. Yang should have sold it to Microsoft when he had the chance; they're probably not going to be able to stand on their own now, and whoever ends up being their suitor won't pay nearly as much as MS's best offer.
* Not that the DoJ is particularly effective here. See: Microsoft
Why would there be 18K DSi units in a harbor in a country in which it's not going on sale for months? I could see someone stealing them in Japan, but 18K units in Sweden doesn't make much sense.
But, those are issues that can be addressed, and with more attention like this it will get more help from "joe the programmer"
Can it though? Certainly part of the issue is definitely the encoder, but you're still constrained by the inherent limitations of the codec (and more to the point, the decoder). Theora can't be overhauled without breaking the decoder, and even if it was overhauled as Theora 2.0, it couldn't implement any of a multitude of patented video compression technologies already used in MPEG or other standards. And unless someone wants to hire a team of engineers for Xiph, the odds of someone inventing a revolutionary, non-patent-infrining video codec on their own is pretty slim.
From what I've seen with the work on 1.1, improving the encoder just isn't enough to nullify the deficiencies in the codec itself. It's like trying to improve Mac OS Classic when really you need to make a clean break and invent Mac OS X.
I really want to like Theora, but it's really, really hard to get around the quality issues. VP3, which Theora is based on, just isn't competitive these days. It was subpar back in 2001 when it was donated to Xiph, and the contrast has only gotten worse over time. H.264, VC-1/WMV9, MPEG-4 ASP, even Adobe Flash 8 (which added VP6) are clearly capable of outperforming it.
If nothing else, free is good (both in terms of speech and beer) and a royalty free standard for video would be great, but it's too hard to ignore just how inferior this standard is. I'm a pragmatic person, I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use this over a better codec; free isn't all that enticing if the video quality sucks.
Is the fact that something is beating IE7 really news? IE7 is not known for its stellar Javascript performance, it's basically a generation-old browser that pre-dates the modern push for high-performance Javascript execution. I would certainly hope that the PS3's browser is faster than IE7, or Firefox 2, or any other browser that old. It's like touting the PS3 is faster than the PS2 - good for you Sony, but it's supposed to be faster in the first place.
Now if they could beat the Firefox/Safari nightlies, or what the final version of IE8 can do, then that would be noteworthy, as they'd be very near the top.
This is in contrast, for example, with Apple's iPhone which does not have this application sandboxing feature and allows access to all features available to the user when compromised
When that exploit was published, it was the infamous TIFF exploit in the iPhoneOS 1.0-1.1.1. At the time the iPhone ran everything as root, so compromising Safari immediately granted root access. Since 1.1.3 however Apple has gone to granular permissions, most applications run as the limited "Mobile" user, for example. With that in mind, I'm not sure if the author's statement is true any longer. Safari certainly runs as a limited user, I just don't know how limited it is.
I don't know anyone who went to the old E3 and could say it was about the industry. You had Gamestop stockboys from a 5 state radius there trying out games for their own personal amusement, while companies set up booths with automobile-sized speakers and threw a party because that's what the aforementioned stockboys expected. And if you really were in the industry, sure, whatever you say, you still wait in line.
The ultimate example of this I believe to be the line for the Wii in 2006 immediately after it was announced. It was hours and hours and hours long, a quite unprecedented line even by E3 standards. And it was filled with gawkers: the stockboys, their girlfriends, their best friend, and other people who had no business at an industry event. Lord help you if you had a legitimate reason to be there, you'd still need to send someone to stand in line all day just to get a shot at using the Wii to cover it for your publication, decide if you want to allocate shelf space for it, etc.
The new E3, on the other hand, was definitely an industry event. In fact I'd call 2008 a very good year; everything was well organized, getting to meetings was easy, and getting face time with a game and a developer was a piece of cake. Everyone was there to do business, there were no gawkers and vendors weren't forced to throw the equivalent of spring-break indoors.
I don't know why the E3 organizers would want to go back to the horrible old format, I guess it's better for them if it's a public show like PAX rather than an industry event? In any case, make no mistake, going back to the old format means it's a gamer show, and by extension it's gunning for PAX.
I should add that PAX is a cool show too, but like the old E3 it is not a good place to do business, and with the increasing crowds it only gets worse
A dead man's switch won't do you much good. If you've been picked up your computer has too, and has been safely copied and stowed away as evidence.
Re:Not in upcoming Debian
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To be fair, if it was Windows or a Mac, adding support for a webcam would be as easy as installing a binary driver blob. I like Linux, but compiling drivers in to the kernel (and hence needing to compile it yourself, at times) has always been one of it's biggest annoyances.
Every time a Firefox or SSLTLS article comes up, we go over this again and again. SSLTLS is both an encryption and authentication scheme; it sucks but that's what the spec says it is. Firefox can't go off and do its own thing, least someone starts exploiting the fact that their implementation of SSLTLS is no longer an authentication scheme and starts taking advantage of people who expect otherwise. The W3C needs to separate authentication and encryption in the standards themselves, that's the only proper and safe way to change things.
Objective-C, used almost nowhere outside Apple, is required for iPhone UI development, while app-level Android programming is done in Java
Developers weren't happy when Apple told them to go write their programs as Javascript webapps instead of native code with the first iPhoneOS, why would they be any happier being told to write applications in Java? Thankfully it's not as limited as Javascript, but it's still not native code. I think this will be the Achilles Heel for Android, just like it was for iPhoneOS 1.x.
And what's with the complaining about Objective-C? If you can write in C++, you can write in Objective-C. It's slightly different from everything else in some fairly trivial ways, some better and some worse but none of them a significant change. It's not as if Apple is forcing everyone to write in Fortran.
The thing about Greenhouse that worries me is that they have "well meaning but not meant to succeed start-up" written all over them. There is no nicer system out there right now when it comes to DRM, but I'm not even close to being convinced that they have any staying power. I'm afraid it will end up another Triton; one day they go tit-up and it turns out that they can't just turn the DRM off, because they were too small to correctly establish a plan for winding down.
He's spot-on. This agreement only covers services such as Imeem, Last.fm, and Napster, which are based on streaming individual songs. It does not cover services such as Pandora, AOL Radio, or Digitally Imported, which stream pre-programed/tailored stations like a meatspace radio station does. Those guys are still fighting to avoid having to pay the massive $0.0019/user/song that the Copyright Royalty Board passed down last year. Generally when people are talking about internet radio they are talking about these services, so internet radio is not saved.
Actually yes, that's the idea. The concern is that the ever so fragile titles may be greatly damaged ala Columbia, in which case someone needs to come pick up the astronauts stranded in Atlantis, because it can't be flown back in to the Earth's atmosphere and it can't be flown to the ISS. Since the Columbia incident all missions have been to the ISS or to a point in space where you can reach the ISS. This is not possible with the Hubble mission, it's too far away for the shuttle's limited fuel supply.
This is definitely true, but it's worth nothing who is being targeted here. It's not the consumer EA is going for, it's the retailer that EA is after. Gamestop and their ilk, who up until fairly recently have largely been traditional retailers, have heavily gone in to the used game business. It's very profitable for them, they buy a game for pennies and then resell it for MSRP-$5, pocketing a nice profit in the process.
The Entertainment Software Association and its members have taken great offense to this, not on the grounds that a used game market hurts their profits (it does, but then again it has existed for years) but rather the amazing conflict of interest it has created with retailers. Gamestop doesn't want to sell you a new game, there's no profit in it for them, they want to sell you that used game that they got for next to nothing. And it's expanding, Best Buy and Walmart want to get in to the game too. In short, the guys that are selling games in meatspace are doing everything they can to drive customers away from new copies of the game and towards used copies.
It's this that has EA and the other publishers in flames. Their sales of single player games are getting murdered, and in some cases the meatspace retailers are making more money than the publisher did, because the same game is being circulated 2-4 times giving the retailer the chance to make a profit nearly equal to the retail price of the game, 2-4 times over. The problem is a simultaneous loss of revenue on the publisher's side, along with watching someone else co-opt your product and make far more money (virtually all profit) by driving away your customers.
So this is why we're going to see things like SecuROM and other DRM schemes that prevent second-hand copies from being playable, along with platforms like Steam and Impulse, and games with a MP component that requires account activation. All of these make reselling a game impossible. Until digital distribution can completely usurp meatspace sales, they're going to want to shut down Gamestop's activities as much as possible through other means. And while the consumers aren't the target, they'll be the ones to suffer the most.
What's going to be most interesting is how the next-generation consoles are going to deal with this. These changes are coming to the PC first because it's an open platform that allows such a change immediately, while there's no way to close the hole with consoles. Publishers are going to want to put an end to retailers engaging in second-hand sales with their console games too, so I'm left wondering how they'll go about it since the physical media has always been considered a valid token of game ownership.
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True, but for how much longer? The reason you find Opterons in such massive servers is because HyperTransport scales up much better in 4P+ designs than Intel's ancient FSB. Now that they have QuickPath Interconnect for Nehalem/Core i7 and its derivatives, they aren't going to be held back by buses any longer. HT was AMD's one last trump card against the Core 2 generation, but they have no such card for use against the Core i7 generation.
Steam is not an "alternative content stream", it's a PC download. Valve will gladly tell the dev how many people bought it and quite often it's exactly the same game (as in it connects to the same score server). 2DBoy even accounted for it in their stats we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources . There is no significant systematic inflation for the PC version in their method that I can identify, outside of unsubmitted scores. 82% of PC players have stolen their game.
It's also worth noting that WiiWare games can be easily pirated too, and should be able to be counted in a similar fashion.
Consumer products using GPGPU tech will (and indeed are) happening, but it's sure as heck not going to be on ATI's GPUs. The performance is there, but the development tools are a joke. The main runtime (Brook+) is the technological equivalent of giving yourself a root canal every time you program in it, and the rest of the Stream SDK supporting toolset is more or less entirely AWOL. It's rather unfortunate, but compared to NVIDIA's CUDA the whole system is a joke; CUDA is an excellent toolkit that someone clearly put a lot of thought in to in order to meet the needs of developers, while the Stream SDK/Brook+ still feels like it's a research project that nobody optimized for commercial use.
The hardware is there, but no one in their right mind is going to program with AMD's software. Everyone is waiting for OpenCL. Even if it doesn't really take off, it still can't possibly be worse than the Stream SDK.
Bingo. The price is irrelevant as far as the consumer is concerned. The prices could be $100/$95 or $10/$9; it makes no sense - and in fact it's counter to their own best interests - for the consumer to buy a new copy of a game. The used copy is equally as good (a perfect substitute) and is cheaper, the consumer will buy it. Gamestop figured out that instead of pocketing a small share of 50%, they could pocket virtually the entire share of $45 by undercutting the producer of the game.
This is applicable to any other media too. If Walmart started selling used DVDs the way Gamestop sells games, they'd be able to pull off the exact same thing.
Headphones.
No one else gives a damn about headphones. The quality issues with on-board sound become quite apparent with a good set of headphones, and even most other consumer sound cards treat it as an afterthought, doing whatever they would do with a set of stereo speakers. The X-Fi (at least under Windows) has an absolutely excellent headphone spatialization algorithm for general listening, it completely resolves the fatigue issue that results from hearing only a single audio channel in each ear without naturally occurring crossfeed. As for gaming, Creative (or rather Aureal's) head related transfer function tech for 3D audio is second to none; it's better than 5.1 speakers and is the only thing on the market right now worth a damn for 3D audio on headphones.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how much of this would be usable under Linux. The spatialization issue in particular drives me nuts.
It would only serve to further hurt Ubuntu. There's something about the Linux graphics subsystem where it doesn't multitask very efficiently among multiple applications requesting 3D acceleration. Keeping Compiz on means that their 3D benchmarks are all that much slower, if not causing rendering errors too. It's not exactly "fair", but anyone here who's serious about Linux knows that it's a good idea to kill Compiz before gaming.
I don't claim to be well versed in microeconomics, but don't you need multiple large firms with equally large shares for an Oligopoly? I think the traditional example here is Coke & PepsiCo. The way the online advertising market is structured, Google has the lion's share of it. There are other large firms in it (e.g. Microsoft) but they don't even begin to have a share of the market similar to Google's.
There are two very interesting things about Google pulling out:
1) Google is now big enough to attract serious government anti-trust attention. It just immensely harder for them to do anything big that would benefit their core business (advertising) or anything external where they could throw their weight around. The message from the government seems to be that they're going to start treating Google as a de-facto monopoly in search/advertising, which means they're going to try to keep Google from using that monopoly in other markets.* I don't think they're the kind of market threat that the government makes them out to be, but left unchecked they may get there one day soon.
2) Yahoo is fucked. Yang should have sold it to Microsoft when he had the chance; they're probably not going to be able to stand on their own now, and whoever ends up being their suitor won't pay nearly as much as MS's best offer.
* Not that the DoJ is particularly effective here. See: Microsoft
Why would there be 18K DSi units in a harbor in a country in which it's not going on sale for months? I could see someone stealing them in Japan, but 18K units in Sweden doesn't make much sense.
Matroska isn't an MPEG standard. It's patent and royalty free, and the standard itself is open for FOSS to implement (as many have).
Can it though? Certainly part of the issue is definitely the encoder, but you're still constrained by the inherent limitations of the codec (and more to the point, the decoder). Theora can't be overhauled without breaking the decoder, and even if it was overhauled as Theora 2.0, it couldn't implement any of a multitude of patented video compression technologies already used in MPEG or other standards. And unless someone wants to hire a team of engineers for Xiph, the odds of someone inventing a revolutionary, non-patent-infrining video codec on their own is pretty slim.
From what I've seen with the work on 1.1, improving the encoder just isn't enough to nullify the deficiencies in the codec itself. It's like trying to improve Mac OS Classic when really you need to make a clean break and invent Mac OS X.
I really want to like Theora, but it's really, really hard to get around the quality issues. VP3, which Theora is based on, just isn't competitive these days. It was subpar back in 2001 when it was donated to Xiph, and the contrast has only gotten worse over time. H.264, VC-1/WMV9, MPEG-4 ASP, even Adobe Flash 8 (which added VP6) are clearly capable of outperforming it.
If nothing else, free is good (both in terms of speech and beer) and a royalty free standard for video would be great, but it's too hard to ignore just how inferior this standard is. I'm a pragmatic person, I can't think of any reason why I'd want to use this over a better codec; free isn't all that enticing if the video quality sucks.
GPRS is a single large dot.
Is the fact that something is beating IE7 really news? IE7 is not known for its stellar Javascript performance, it's basically a generation-old browser that pre-dates the modern push for high-performance Javascript execution. I would certainly hope that the PS3's browser is faster than IE7, or Firefox 2, or any other browser that old. It's like touting the PS3 is faster than the PS2 - good for you Sony, but it's supposed to be faster in the first place.
Now if they could beat the Firefox/Safari nightlies, or what the final version of IE8 can do, then that would be noteworthy, as they'd be very near the top.
When that exploit was published, it was the infamous TIFF exploit in the iPhoneOS 1.0-1.1.1. At the time the iPhone ran everything as root, so compromising Safari immediately granted root access. Since 1.1.3 however Apple has gone to granular permissions, most applications run as the limited "Mobile" user, for example. With that in mind, I'm not sure if the author's statement is true any longer. Safari certainly runs as a limited user, I just don't know how limited it is.
As far as anyone can tell when reading the EULA, it is free. But that doesn't mean Interplay can't sell it as part of their back catalog.
I don't know anyone who went to the old E3 and could say it was about the industry. You had Gamestop stockboys from a 5 state radius there trying out games for their own personal amusement, while companies set up booths with automobile-sized speakers and threw a party because that's what the aforementioned stockboys expected. And if you really were in the industry, sure, whatever you say, you still wait in line.
The ultimate example of this I believe to be the line for the Wii in 2006 immediately after it was announced. It was hours and hours and hours long, a quite unprecedented line even by E3 standards. And it was filled with gawkers: the stockboys, their girlfriends, their best friend, and other people who had no business at an industry event. Lord help you if you had a legitimate reason to be there, you'd still need to send someone to stand in line all day just to get a shot at using the Wii to cover it for your publication, decide if you want to allocate shelf space for it, etc.
The new E3, on the other hand, was definitely an industry event. In fact I'd call 2008 a very good year; everything was well organized, getting to meetings was easy, and getting face time with a game and a developer was a piece of cake. Everyone was there to do business, there were no gawkers and vendors weren't forced to throw the equivalent of spring-break indoors.
I don't know why the E3 organizers would want to go back to the horrible old format, I guess it's better for them if it's a public show like PAX rather than an industry event? In any case, make no mistake, going back to the old format means it's a gamer show, and by extension it's gunning for PAX.
I should add that PAX is a cool show too, but like the old E3 it is not a good place to do business, and with the increasing crowds it only gets worse
A dead man's switch won't do you much good. If you've been picked up your computer has too, and has been safely copied and stowed away as evidence.
To be fair, if it was Windows or a Mac, adding support for a webcam would be as easy as installing a binary driver blob. I like Linux, but compiling drivers in to the kernel (and hence needing to compile it yourself, at times) has always been one of it's biggest annoyances.
Every time a Firefox or SSLTLS article comes up, we go over this again and again. SSLTLS is both an encryption and authentication scheme; it sucks but that's what the spec says it is. Firefox can't go off and do its own thing, least someone starts exploiting the fact that their implementation of SSLTLS is no longer an authentication scheme and starts taking advantage of people who expect otherwise. The W3C needs to separate authentication and encryption in the standards themselves, that's the only proper and safe way to change things.
Developers weren't happy when Apple told them to go write their programs as Javascript webapps instead of native code with the first iPhoneOS, why would they be any happier being told to write applications in Java? Thankfully it's not as limited as Javascript, but it's still not native code. I think this will be the Achilles Heel for Android, just like it was for iPhoneOS 1.x.
And what's with the complaining about Objective-C? If you can write in C++, you can write in Objective-C. It's slightly different from everything else in some fairly trivial ways, some better and some worse but none of them a significant change. It's not as if Apple is forcing everyone to write in Fortran.
The thing about Greenhouse that worries me is that they have "well meaning but not meant to succeed start-up" written all over them. There is no nicer system out there right now when it comes to DRM, but I'm not even close to being convinced that they have any staying power. I'm afraid it will end up another Triton; one day they go tit-up and it turns out that they can't just turn the DRM off, because they were too small to correctly establish a plan for winding down.
He's spot-on. This agreement only covers services such as Imeem, Last.fm, and Napster, which are based on streaming individual songs. It does not cover services such as Pandora, AOL Radio, or Digitally Imported, which stream pre-programed/tailored stations like a meatspace radio station does. Those guys are still fighting to avoid having to pay the massive $0.0019/user/song that the Copyright Royalty Board passed down last year. Generally when people are talking about internet radio they are talking about these services, so internet radio is not saved.
Actually yes, that's the idea. The concern is that the ever so fragile titles may be greatly damaged ala Columbia, in which case someone needs to come pick up the astronauts stranded in Atlantis, because it can't be flown back in to the Earth's atmosphere and it can't be flown to the ISS. Since the Columbia incident all missions have been to the ISS or to a point in space where you can reach the ISS. This is not possible with the Hubble mission, it's too far away for the shuttle's limited fuel supply.
This is definitely true, but it's worth nothing who is being targeted here. It's not the consumer EA is going for, it's the retailer that EA is after. Gamestop and their ilk, who up until fairly recently have largely been traditional retailers, have heavily gone in to the used game business. It's very profitable for them, they buy a game for pennies and then resell it for MSRP-$5, pocketing a nice profit in the process.
The Entertainment Software Association and its members have taken great offense to this, not on the grounds that a used game market hurts their profits (it does, but then again it has existed for years) but rather the amazing conflict of interest it has created with retailers. Gamestop doesn't want to sell you a new game, there's no profit in it for them, they want to sell you that used game that they got for next to nothing. And it's expanding, Best Buy and Walmart want to get in to the game too. In short, the guys that are selling games in meatspace are doing everything they can to drive customers away from new copies of the game and towards used copies.
It's this that has EA and the other publishers in flames. Their sales of single player games are getting murdered, and in some cases the meatspace retailers are making more money than the publisher did, because the same game is being circulated 2-4 times giving the retailer the chance to make a profit nearly equal to the retail price of the game, 2-4 times over. The problem is a simultaneous loss of revenue on the publisher's side, along with watching someone else co-opt your product and make far more money (virtually all profit) by driving away your customers.
So this is why we're going to see things like SecuROM and other DRM schemes that prevent second-hand copies from being playable, along with platforms like Steam and Impulse, and games with a MP component that requires account activation. All of these make reselling a game impossible. Until digital distribution can completely usurp meatspace sales, they're going to want to shut down Gamestop's activities as much as possible through other means. And while the consumers aren't the target, they'll be the ones to suffer the most.
What's going to be most interesting is how the next-generation consoles are going to deal with this. These changes are coming to the PC first because it's an open platform that allows such a change immediately, while there's no way to close the hole with consoles. Publishers are going to want to put an end to retailers engaging in second-hand sales with their console games too, so I'm left wondering how they'll go about it since the physical media has always been considered a valid token of game ownership.