With fairness to Oblivion, I should say my memory of which game it was is a little hazy, although I'm sure I remember my son having DRM issues with Oblivion at time, but it was some time ago.
Laws vary from place to place in the world, but...
Here in Australia, there's quite a few consumer laws that cover it... "Merchantable Quality" is the main one and a game that has a time-bomb like this in it isn't of merchantable quality...
So yeah, this will be the third time I've done this.
To the local EB store's credit, they have always met their obligation to refund when I've demanded it. Saves me making a full complaint to the consumer watchdog.
What needs to happen is for everyone with a copy of this to take the disk back as faulty. Most consumer laws support this action.
My son's version of Oblivion (I think it was Oblivion) failed to install after he upgraded his PC five times and they refused to give him another code...
So we took it back to EB and demanded a refund (faulty product) which we were entitled to do. If you can't play a game, it's not of merchantable quality.
Looks like we'll be visiting them once more with a copy of GOW for a full refund:(
Perhaps if everyone did this, we'd see DRM take on a more practical appearance like a USB dongle - or even the entire game on a USB dongle - and without time limits or requiring web authentication.
That reminds me of what happened in Australia with the taxation department a few years ago.
The ATO put everyone's tax details online and used their Tax File Number ( everyone who pays tax has one ).
Some bright spark noticed his TFN in the URL the day they launched their new service and changed the number only to find that it gave him access to someone else's data.
There were accusations of hacking and all, but it conveniently left out the discussion that it was a pretty obvious and blatant flaw.
The minister responsible was never held accountable. That's why these security breaches keep on happening over here.
I'm pretty sure that there's a similar situation in the US.
The problem is that DRM is like broken glass just under the water of a running stream. Even after you rip yourself open on it, you're still not completely sure what caused the injury in the first place.
Anyway, it doesn't support mounting an ISO under any software that I tried and I'm guessing it was DRM related. Sometimes it went through the motion and then blocked it at the last moment. This was extremely frustrating as I ended up having to use an ISO reader and copying installation files to a directory.
That was frustrating, but some of my machines don't have DVD drives, so it will be impossible to use it on those.
This is exactly what Space Channel 5 does... Hit a combination of keys on the controller to activate it and the game plays itself. You can switch in and out of the game.
My kids were amazed at my beat-memory skills as I flawlessly played this game through to the end before I showed them the trick.
Now sometimes they load it up and activate it just for amusement although they also like playing it too.
I made it as far as Page 2 before I realised there was no real qualitative requirements for the review.
The reviewer is simply pushing their opinion of the keyboards based on how they personally liked them.
This completely ignored important concepts for gaming keyboards such as key response times, travel, Second key
response times and the all important "does it buffer and transmit every key you press when you mash the keyboard".
That's actually critical for a PC gaming keyboard because so many keyboards don't and you find when you have to crouch, change weapon, fire that often only two of those keys are registered because you basically hit all three keys at almost the same time.
Reading the review as presented was like watching a car reviewer review rally cars based on the color of the go-fast striping and the quantity of aluminium and carbon fiber in the cockput.
Way to go Extreme tech... Forget what's important and concentrate on marketting hype...
The medical industry is all about litigation. If you invent something that saves peoples lives, then of the 100 people it saves, there might be someone who dies anyway, because of device failure and you can be sure that some lawyer's already prefilled out the lawsuit against you and is just waiting for an opportunity.
A friend of mine invented a very simply device that measured skin resistance and could be placed over someone's torso (like a blanket) to look for internal bleeding. This isn't just some inventor guy, he works as an engineer in one of Australia's top universities.
As soon as the university lawyers found out it had a medical application, they killed the project.
There's no doubt it would have saved lives, but the sad truth is that the university involved would actually rather see those people die than risk the litigation of being sued if anyone tried to prove that someone actually died of the device if it was somehow misused by a paramedic at the scene of an accident.
And I don't think it's likely to change. There's too much money invested in keeping medicine esoteric and away from everyone else too allow too many companies in to dilute the spend of sick people.
Maybe it's a rant, but it's a sad truth that I beleive. Doctors are pretty much the only people who seem to get away with doing this kind of research but even then I've read of far too many doctors who are persecuted because they came up with some kind of new treatment/device.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
Please excuse my cynicism. It's just that I've observed this more than a few times.
I got to say, I thought that the title was rather obvious too... I guess this is probably important information I need to know in case I ever climb Mount Everest though...
Perhaps they will top this with their next research assignment, "Top causes of death on Mount Kilimanjaro (presently believed to be heavy metal poisoning while driving back to the airport.)
QBASIC is an excellent choice. I think people tend to underestimate basic as a useful language, even if a little antiquated for modern uses.
It's perfect for absolute beginners because it forces you to get your syntax correct on each line if you use it correctly, which means you don't spend any time debugging syntax errors when you run it.
A lot of professional programmers forget what it's like for extremely young minds and this feature makes it easy to learn to get something working in less than a day - something that young minds need to keep up encouragement and that older people forget they struggled with over years while learning at school.
Then you can move up to Freebasic.
Freebasic (freebasic.org) is an Open Source basic compiler that crosses the bridge between Qbasic and C. It's also fully cross-platform (Windows/Linux/Mac) - the same code compiles on anything.
It also compiles native QBASIC code, and is fast enough to make basic games or even complex programs.
You can also make all of your "C" function calls directly from it and learn to use those routines, making a convenient pathway to move to C as you become more experienced - all that will be needed is to learn a slightly different syntax.
Actually, it was highly effective in stopping Bush.
Abu Ghraib was exposed by Email. Atrocities in Iraq were exposed through Blogs. The steady flow of information through non-propaganda channels slowly turned the public opinion against him.
It took six years to stop him completely, but it helped stop a lot of what was wrong long before that. It exposed faux-rescues and provided a channel for information other than the state-influenced public media channels.
There are a lot of reasons the military wanting to ban soldiers from accessing the internet.
The internet isn't a force by itself but it does fan the winds of change.
Perhaps if the Internet didn't exist then sixty years from now we'd be talking about Bush like we now talk about Hitler.
Things got a little dangerous when another text message came in from his wife mid operation.
U WANT LEG OR SHOLDER CUT FOR DINR?
Heh, but still some great work. It's tragic though that there's still a dearth of medical facilities in some countries and life-saving make-do operations like this are common. Kudos to Medicines Sans Frontiers for doing what our own governments should be doing.
It was pretty clear that whoever won, Australia's voters would lose. But to paraphrase Paul Keating (former PM before John Howard) it's the painful government we had to have.
The only hope for many of us was that whoever eventually replaced the government we were about to vote in would be a better choice in the long term. Sometimes that's the best you can hope for.
In three more years, I'll know if I made the right choice.
It's just unfortunate that the government we needed to move through to get to that point turned out to be a "Christian" version of the Taliban. Perhaps I should start referring to them as the Chaliban.
Yes, strokes can happen spontaneously overnight. There are lots of people out there who just develop blood clots without any known medical or physiological reason and it often comes on suddenly.
Clots can lead to strokes and PE's
And you can still be in good health (medically speaking) and get a thrombosis.
Actually he did that. You can't say that "You can't do that", because he did that. The Bush Administration is asking for retrospective immunity - that's a lot worse than asking for permission to do it.
The rest of the world is watching this one closely as well - it's not just the US that's interested in the outcome of this incident.
GrpA
It's a little harder but you can find a job.
on
IT Job Without a Degree?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There are typically two reasons someone will employ you without a degree.
1). They want to get the best skills without paying for them.
2). You have sufficient experience that no-one reads your resume far enough to notice you've never been to college and wouldn't care either way, or you present extremely well at interviews.
I'd say work on (2) because companies that focus on (1) tend to be bad employers, although not always. Sometimes it's just employers who realise the value of the skills you have, not the paper you paid for that claims it.
I think you've rather eloquently made my example - You didn't kill people out-of-hand, but only when offered no other choice.
The choices you make throughout the games ( eg, do you release the nanites to clean the air or allow them to be withheld making it poisonous for people to live outside ) - there are often no clear right and wrong choices - each choice makes you acutely aware of the consequences of the decision and you must talk to many NPCs and gain insights from each perspective into the problem to make a choice.
Being anti-violence to the point of denying it entirely is a form of violence itself, because it takes the option (choice) away from you, which is fundamentally evil in an of itself.
There are trade games, but the aim is to get rich. Puzzle games, but the aim is to beat it. The only games that really teach you about consequences are the ones that place you in a difficult position and make you decide on the course of actions.
In Deus Ex, if you kill someone, you can't discuss things with them and maybe learn something that will help you. If you start killing people, your brother attempts to teach you why you are wrong, his attitude towards you getting stronger and stronger the more violent you are. If you open your eyes and look for other ways, you win his praise and people are more likely to help you.
The inclusion of non-lethal weapons is novel as well. It makes it harder to play, but you gain more respect for your action.
And you must learn insight in the way you ask questions. Which responses convince the person to help you?
Deus Ex was a good game for this reason. It excelled.
Even the original Ultima Underworld was a good game. People needed your help and you performed quests for them, many spanning the entire game. The result was that you received your eight "Virtues" and could use these to defeat the evil at the bottom of the pit. You also gained other items of value from people you helped, such as goggles that let you see traps.
But sometimes the simplest reward in a game is praise. After all, that one rewards is what we all grew up learning to look for,
Even Bioshock proved that point. It wasn't any more difficult to defeat the end-game boss if you harvested the little sisters (I couldn't) but I really liked the ending I got and I enjoyed anticipating the next teddy bear waiting for me.
Slashdot Mirror
It might have been Two Worlds...
With fairness to Oblivion, I should say my memory of which game it was is a little hazy, although I'm sure I remember my son having DRM issues with Oblivion at time, but it was some time ago.
GrpA
When it comes with the game/software install files on it :)
GrpA
Laws vary from place to place in the world, but...
Here in Australia, there's quite a few consumer laws that cover it... "Merchantable Quality" is the main one and a game that has a time-bomb like this in it isn't of merchantable quality...
So yeah, this will be the third time I've done this.
To the local EB store's credit, they have always met their obligation to refund when I've demanded it. Saves me making a full complaint to the consumer watchdog.
GrpA
What needs to happen is for everyone with a copy of this to take the disk back as faulty. Most consumer laws support this action.
My son's version of Oblivion (I think it was Oblivion) failed to install after he upgraded his PC five times and they refused to give him another code...
So we took it back to EB and demanded a refund (faulty product) which we were entitled to do. If you can't play a game, it's not of merchantable quality.
Looks like we'll be visiting them once more with a copy of GOW for a full refund :(
Perhaps if everyone did this, we'd see DRM take on a more practical appearance like a USB dongle - or even the entire game on a USB dongle - and without time limits or requiring web authentication.
GrpA
And a dwarvish white angel points excitedly to the sky and calls out for the last time...
RIP and Amen.
That reminds me of what happened in Australia with the taxation department a few years ago.
The ATO put everyone's tax details online and used their Tax File Number ( everyone who pays tax has one ).
Some bright spark noticed his TFN in the URL the day they launched their new service and changed the number only to find that it gave him access to someone else's data.
There were accusations of hacking and all, but it conveniently left out the discussion that it was a pretty obvious and blatant flaw.
The minister responsible was never held accountable. That's why these security breaches keep on happening over here.
I'm pretty sure that there's a similar situation in the US.
GrpA
As long as you don't try to install two programs at the same time... Unless you happen to like the snazzy loading screen.
GrpA
The problem is that DRM is like broken glass just under the water of a running stream. Even after you rip yourself open on it, you're still not completely sure what caused the injury in the first place.
Anyway, it doesn't support mounting an ISO under any software that I tried and I'm guessing it was DRM related. Sometimes it went through the motion and then blocked it at the last moment. This was extremely frustrating as I ended up having to use an ISO reader and copying installation files to a directory.
That was frustrating, but some of my machines don't have DVD drives, so it will be impossible to use it on those.
GrpA
This is exactly what Space Channel 5 does... Hit a combination of keys on the controller to activate it and the game plays itself. You can switch in and out of the game.
My kids were amazed at my beat-memory skills as I flawlessly played this game through to the end before I showed them the trick.
Now sometimes they load it up and activate it just for amusement although they also like playing it too.
GrpA
I thought Whack-A-Mole was a game developed and played by organised crime long before electronic games were developed.
It had a proprietary interface that looked more like it was from time crisis though.
GrpA
I made it as far as Page 2 before I realised there was no real qualitative requirements for the review.
The reviewer is simply pushing their opinion of the keyboards based on how they personally liked them.
This completely ignored important concepts for gaming keyboards such as key response times, travel, Second key
response times and the all important "does it buffer and transmit every key you press when you mash the keyboard".
That's actually critical for a PC gaming keyboard because so many keyboards don't and you find when you have to crouch, change weapon, fire that often only two of those keys are registered because you basically hit all three keys at almost the same time.
Reading the review as presented was like watching a car reviewer review rally cars based on the color of the go-fast striping and the quantity of aluminium and carbon fiber in the cockput.
Way to go Extreme tech... Forget what's important and concentrate on marketting hype...
GrpA
I can't see it happening.
The medical industry is all about litigation. If you invent something that saves peoples lives, then of the 100 people it saves, there might be someone who dies anyway, because of device failure and you can be sure that some lawyer's already prefilled out the lawsuit against you and is just waiting for an opportunity.
A friend of mine invented a very simply device that measured skin resistance and could be placed over someone's torso (like a blanket) to look for internal bleeding. This isn't just some inventor guy, he works as an engineer in one of Australia's top universities.
As soon as the university lawyers found out it had a medical application, they killed the project.
There's no doubt it would have saved lives, but the sad truth is that the university involved would actually rather see those people die than risk the litigation of being sued if anyone tried to prove that someone actually died of the device if it was somehow misused by a paramedic at the scene of an accident.
And I don't think it's likely to change. There's too much money invested in keeping medicine esoteric and away from everyone else too allow too many companies in to dilute the spend of sick people.
Maybe it's a rant, but it's a sad truth that I beleive. Doctors are pretty much the only people who seem to get away with doing this kind of research but even then I've read of far too many doctors who are persecuted because they came up with some kind of new treatment/device.
I'm guessing that car-parts-incubators is just radical enough to get anyone who tries to market it into trouble. Even if it saved a million livess, it would bring a thousand lawsuits and while I'm sure if some parents saw an infant die because of a lack of incubators, they would say these are needed, but if an infant dies while it's in an incubator, they'll look for someone to blame. Not that commercial units are any more reliable. But what judge is going to beleive that a $1000 unit was just as good as a $40,000 unit?
Please excuse my cynicism. It's just that I've observed this more than a few times.
GrpA.
I wonder if that means I can get a heap of this and create a stack now...
GrpA
I got to say, I thought that the title was rather obvious too... I guess this is probably important information I need to know in case I ever climb Mount Everest though...
Perhaps they will top this with their next research assignment, "Top causes of death on Mount Kilimanjaro (presently believed to be heavy metal poisoning while driving back to the airport.)
GrpA
QBASIC is an excellent choice. I think people tend to underestimate basic as a useful language, even if a little antiquated for modern uses.
It's perfect for absolute beginners because it forces you to get your syntax correct on each line if you use it correctly, which means you don't spend any time debugging syntax errors when you run it.
A lot of professional programmers forget what it's like for extremely young minds and this feature makes it easy to learn to get something working in less than a day - something that young minds need to keep up encouragement and that older people forget they struggled with over years while learning at school.
Then you can move up to Freebasic.
Freebasic (freebasic.org) is an Open Source basic compiler that crosses the bridge between Qbasic and C. It's also fully cross-platform (Windows/Linux/Mac) - the same code compiles on anything.
It also compiles native QBASIC code, and is fast enough to make basic games or even complex programs.
You can also make all of your "C" function calls directly from it and learn to use those routines, making a convenient pathway to move to C as you become more experienced - all that will be needed is to learn a slightly different syntax.
GrpA
Actually, it was highly effective in stopping Bush.
Abu Ghraib was exposed by Email. Atrocities in Iraq were exposed through Blogs. The steady flow of information through non-propaganda channels slowly turned the public opinion against him.
It took six years to stop him completely, but it helped stop a lot of what was wrong long before that. It exposed faux-rescues and provided a channel for information other than the state-influenced public media channels.
There are a lot of reasons the military wanting to ban soldiers from accessing the internet.
The internet isn't a force by itself but it does fan the winds of change.
Perhaps if the Internet didn't exist then sixty years from now we'd be talking about Bush like we now talk about Hitler.
GrpA.
Actually, Verizon (Once, MCI, WorldCom, UUNET, and a long long time ago OzEmail) is one of the few International ISPs
Optus is an Australian ISP - Don't confuse them with Singtel. Singtel *own* Optus, but Optus is a standalone company.
There are other Aus/NZ ISPs - eg Maquarie, AAPT (Telecom NZ).
Just off the top of my head.
GrpA
Taken from the text logs:
MK UR FST CT ALNG CLR BON WTH STRLZD RZR K?
Things got a little dangerous when another text message came in from his wife mid operation.
U WANT LEG OR SHOLDER CUT FOR DINR?
Heh, but still some great work. It's tragic though that there's still a dearth of medical facilities in some countries and life-saving make-do operations like this are common. Kudos to Medicines Sans Frontiers for doing what our own governments should be doing.
GrpA
Some of us knew what we were getting into...
It was pretty clear that whoever won, Australia's voters would lose. But to paraphrase Paul Keating (former PM before John Howard) it's the painful government we had to have.
The only hope for many of us was that whoever eventually replaced the government we were about to vote in would be a better choice in the long term. Sometimes that's the best you can hope for.
In three more years, I'll know if I made the right choice.
It's just unfortunate that the government we needed to move through to get to that point turned out to be a "Christian" version of the Taliban. Perhaps I should start referring to them as the Chaliban.
GrpA.
Yes, strokes can happen spontaneously overnight. There are lots of people out there who just develop blood clots without any known medical or physiological reason and it often comes on suddenly.
Clots can lead to strokes and PE's
And you can still be in good health (medically speaking) and get a thrombosis.
GrpA
Actually he did that. You can't say that "You can't do that", because he did that. The Bush Administration is asking for retrospective immunity - that's a lot worse than asking for permission to do it.
The rest of the world is watching this one closely as well - it's not just the US that's interested in the outcome of this incident.
GrpA
There are typically two reasons someone will employ you without a degree.
1). They want to get the best skills without paying for them.
2). You have sufficient experience that no-one reads your resume far enough to notice you've never been to college and wouldn't care either way, or you present extremely well at interviews.
I'd say work on (2) because companies that focus on (1) tend to be bad employers, although not always. Sometimes it's just employers who realise the value of the skills you have, not the paper you paid for that claims it.
GrpA
I think there's prior art on the Statue of Liberty...
Oh yes, It's the Colossus of Rhodes.
Sometimes, I think that the people who make mistakes under such circumstances should be held responsible for several *Generations*.
I bet *that* would make openness more attractive.
GrpA
I think you've rather eloquently made my example - You didn't kill people out-of-hand, but only when offered no other choice.
The choices you make throughout the games ( eg, do you release the nanites to clean the air or allow them to be withheld making it poisonous for people to live outside ) - there are often no clear right and wrong choices - each choice makes you acutely aware of the consequences of the decision and you must talk to many NPCs and gain insights from each perspective into the problem to make a choice.
Being anti-violence to the point of denying it entirely is a form of violence itself, because it takes the option (choice) away from you, which is fundamentally evil in an of itself.
There are trade games, but the aim is to get rich. Puzzle games, but the aim is to beat it. The only games that really teach you about consequences are the ones that place you in a difficult position and make you decide on the course of actions.
In Deus Ex, if you kill someone, you can't discuss things with them and maybe learn something that will help you. If you start killing people, your brother attempts to teach you why you are wrong, his attitude towards you getting stronger and stronger the more violent you are. If you open your eyes and look for other ways, you win his praise and people are more likely to help you.
The inclusion of non-lethal weapons is novel as well. It makes it harder to play, but you gain more respect for your action.
And you must learn insight in the way you ask questions. Which responses convince the person to help you?
Deus Ex was a good game for this reason. It excelled.
Even the original Ultima Underworld was a good game. People needed your help and you performed quests for them, many spanning the entire game. The result was that you received your eight "Virtues" and could use these to defeat the evil at the bottom of the pit. You also gained other items of value from people you helped, such as goggles that let you see traps.
But sometimes the simplest reward in a game is praise. After all, that one rewards is what we all grew up learning to look for,
Even Bioshock proved that point. It wasn't any more difficult to defeat the end-game boss if you harvested the little sisters (I couldn't) but I really liked the ending I got and I enjoyed anticipating the next teddy bear waiting for me.
GrpA