Well, for my father in law, maybe. When he tries to play the game, he wants it to work, and not give him weird messages about not being authorized for some reason despite having a legitimate copy.
Its not a high-minded anti-DRM stance on his part. He wants it to work. DRM on PC games made it not work for him. So he took his money elsewhere.
I don't want a trusted computing module, but then I'm still here buying PC games (without DRM, because for me it isn't just a practical issue, although the practical side of it is that DRM makes PC games not work more often, which is bad).
The phone home stuff is old. The original idea of the DRM was it'd call EA's servers to reactivate every 10 days, and would shut itself off if it couldn't.
So if you put it on a laptop and went offline? Oops, no game for you. After a massive outcry on the Mass Effect forums (the first game that was supposed to have that), they backed off on the 10 day thing.
It still refuses to install after 3 activations though, you have to call EA to get another one and prove that you're actually a paying customer... as if any pirate would need to call, since their copies have cracks to remove SecuROM.
I recently had Mass Effect randomly decide I wasn't authorized and stop working... then a while later randomly start working again. Maybe you're okay with that, but if I'm paying for a game I expect the the game to actually run when I want it to and not randomly decide I'm no longer authorized.
I didn't notice any DRM on Mass Effect either, until the day it suddenly decided I wasn't authorized to play it.
SecuROM lives in the background. When it decides to bite you, you'd notice (if you were still playing the game of course). If you tried to reinstall it after formatting a few more times? It'd stop you.
My father in law was an avid PC gamer too. Then he had two games in a row fail to work on his machine due to weird DRM incompatabilities with his hardware. We could never figure out exactly what the problem was, since he wasn't doing anything all that strange and although it was a custom-built system, it was all pretty standard hardware.
He solved the problem by buying an Xbox 360.
He expects that if he buys a game and puts the disk into his machine, it should run. DRM caused that to not happen. To me, it doesn't seem like an unrealistic request (and the Xbox has no problem doing it).
And people wonder what is killing PC gaming? Its the companies that make PC games.
I own Mass Effect PC. No, really. As in went to the store and bought a copy. The game is great.
But the DRM? Not so much. A few days ago it just decided to stop working for a while, and instead of running would tell me that I wasn't authorized to run it. Seems odd, since not only was I running it just fine before that happened, the box is still sitting on my desk. Why am I not authorized to run a game that I paid for, while some guy who pirated it can run it just fine (and with shorter startup times due to the lack of SecuROM)? Nobody has ever really had a good answer for that other then "bend over and take it."
Since then it started working again as inexplicably as it stopped working in the first place, but the whole thing put a bad taste in my mouth.
Now, throw the three install limit on top of that, and I'm really not sure why I should ever give EA another dime. In fact I am sure, I'm not buying anything from EA again until they start acting like they care about paying customers more then pirates.
Spore is the first on the "would have bought, but won't due to DRM" list for me. It won't be the last. EA can try to blame it on piracy all they want, but the fact of the matter is that they're doing more damage to their own sales then any pirate ever did.
Ancestry.com is probably slow because its gotten more popular and doesn't have the server capacity to meet demand.
Or maybe the server-side code is ineffecient.
Or maybe they skimped on their bandwidth costs.
Or maybe they're using an ad network that is slow (this one happens ALL THE TIME), and its just causing Ancestry.com to have the perception of being slow when its really not.
With all the likely reasons for any given website to be slow, the likelihood of it being because I'm downloading a World of Warcraft patch are pretty remote. The reality is that just like "stuff" in a house, bandwidth usage will expand to fill all available space.
The problem is that idle.slashdot.org is now coming to us on the front page. The advice is just to never go there, but now we have to actively take steps to fight it off.
There's an "In Soviet Russia..." joke in this somewhere, I'm sure.
I don't get why Microsoft ever thought this was a good idea. Regardless of your opinion on SOAP (and I don't hate it nearly as much as some other folks here), having the SQL Server dishing it out directly was always kind of silly. Thats what a Web Server is for.
Removing silly code that just creates more places for security holes to hide is a good thing. Not doing it at all would have been better, but at least Microsoft is fixing that mistake now.
Could be, yes. Could be politically motivated. The article doesn't go into that level of detail.
At that point its a matter of semantics. If it was a politician who pushed for the no-bid to go to company X, I consider it a political screwup and not a government screwup.
Then again, I work for a government (not in the US though), so my perspective is probably different then the average taxpayer. I don't think most people differentiate between politicians and the rest of the government when money is mis-spent.
Well, some governments have rules about how the bid process works. Specifically, rules that you look at cost. You don't look at the prior history of the contractor, or if its realistic to actually deliver what was promised for the stated price.
In effect, in order to avoid corruption, the rules were designed to take decision making out of peoples hands as much as possible. The obvious problem there is that in order to pick a more expensive contractor that actually has decent engineers you have to be able to use a decision making process to say "this is worth the extra cost."
Too bad the media will just see it as cronyism, rather then someone trying to actually get value out of taxpayer dollars by paying for a quality system.
(I guess at this point its easy to tell that I work for a government, huh?)
"Miller also alleged that some of the $500 million spent on Railhead already had been improperly used to renovate a facility owned by contractor Boeing."
Its easy to waste a lot of money when a department that has a virtually unlimited budget outsources with little to no oversight.
We had similar problems in Canada with the Long Gun Registry, which was a dumb idea to begin with. Then they outsourced it. All told it cost more then $1 billion to set up, and didn't work properly at first. (It does work now, though its still a dumb idea.)
It was outsourced. Near the bottom of TFA it says that some of the money was used to renovate a building owned by Boeing.
Its amazing just how many "government screwups" are actually caused by politicians outsourcing to their buddies in private industry (with little to no penalties for failing to deliver what was promised), and have nothing to do with the abilities of actual government employees.
There's actually quite a few smart IT folks in government, but they're not the ones who make decisions on who to outsource this stuff to. In fact, most of them would probably rather build a team and do it In-House, since that way you build up the knowledge internally and can more easily support it later.
So please don't blame government employees for something that Boeing screwed up.
No, you don't "finish" games now. You release them enough to get money, then announce the expansion.
I bet they're running scared over at Funcom. Half the people who bought the game have already quit, and Warhammer draws on the same type of player that AoC does. I'd bet they'll be hurting a lot more from Warhammer's release then Blizzard will be (since they can afford to lose a lot more customers, and there is a huge audience of WoW players who have no interest in leaving anyway).
Sometimes stuff changes. Shattrah City changed over the course of Burning Crusade, with NPCs moving, others changing factions as new ones formed, etc. Some stuff is also changing for the new expansion, like Dalaran and Naxxramus both leaving old world and going to Northrend.
In general you're right, stuff doesn't change a lot. They do that because they still have new people coming to the game, and how would a new person run Gnomeregan for the first time if it was taken back over by the Gnomes?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for my father in law, maybe. When he tries to play the game, he wants it to work, and not give him weird messages about not being authorized for some reason despite having a legitimate copy.
Its not a high-minded anti-DRM stance on his part. He wants it to work. DRM on PC games made it not work for him. So he took his money elsewhere.
I don't want a trusted computing module, but then I'm still here buying PC games (without DRM, because for me it isn't just a practical issue, although the practical side of it is that DRM makes PC games not work more often, which is bad).
The phone home stuff is old. The original idea of the DRM was it'd call EA's servers to reactivate every 10 days, and would shut itself off if it couldn't.
So if you put it on a laptop and went offline? Oops, no game for you. After a massive outcry on the Mass Effect forums (the first game that was supposed to have that), they backed off on the 10 day thing.
It still refuses to install after 3 activations though, you have to call EA to get another one and prove that you're actually a paying customer... as if any pirate would need to call, since their copies have cracks to remove SecuROM.
I recently had Mass Effect randomly decide I wasn't authorized and stop working... then a while later randomly start working again. Maybe you're okay with that, but if I'm paying for a game I expect the the game to actually run when I want it to and not randomly decide I'm no longer authorized.
I didn't notice any DRM on Mass Effect either, until the day it suddenly decided I wasn't authorized to play it.
SecuROM lives in the background. When it decides to bite you, you'd notice (if you were still playing the game of course). If you tried to reinstall it after formatting a few more times? It'd stop you.
My father in law was an avid PC gamer too. Then he had two games in a row fail to work on his machine due to weird DRM incompatabilities with his hardware. We could never figure out exactly what the problem was, since he wasn't doing anything all that strange and although it was a custom-built system, it was all pretty standard hardware.
He solved the problem by buying an Xbox 360.
He expects that if he buys a game and puts the disk into his machine, it should run. DRM caused that to not happen. To me, it doesn't seem like an unrealistic request (and the Xbox has no problem doing it).
And people wonder what is killing PC gaming? Its the companies that make PC games.
I own Mass Effect PC. No, really. As in went to the store and bought a copy. The game is great.
But the DRM? Not so much. A few days ago it just decided to stop working for a while, and instead of running would tell me that I wasn't authorized to run it. Seems odd, since not only was I running it just fine before that happened, the box is still sitting on my desk. Why am I not authorized to run a game that I paid for, while some guy who pirated it can run it just fine (and with shorter startup times due to the lack of SecuROM)? Nobody has ever really had a good answer for that other then "bend over and take it."
Since then it started working again as inexplicably as it stopped working in the first place, but the whole thing put a bad taste in my mouth.
Now, throw the three install limit on top of that, and I'm really not sure why I should ever give EA another dime. In fact I am sure, I'm not buying anything from EA again until they start acting like they care about paying customers more then pirates.
Spore is the first on the "would have bought, but won't due to DRM" list for me. It won't be the last. EA can try to blame it on piracy all they want, but the fact of the matter is that they're doing more damage to their own sales then any pirate ever did.
Ancestry.com is probably slow because its gotten more popular and doesn't have the server capacity to meet demand.
Or maybe the server-side code is ineffecient.
Or maybe they skimped on their bandwidth costs.
Or maybe they're using an ad network that is slow (this one happens ALL THE TIME), and its just causing Ancestry.com to have the perception of being slow when its really not.
With all the likely reasons for any given website to be slow, the likelihood of it being because I'm downloading a World of Warcraft patch are pretty remote. The reality is that just like "stuff" in a house, bandwidth usage will expand to fill all available space.
"now with the 360 they have taken on the reputation of having created the worst console in the history of gaming."
Can't say I agree with that. In terms of defect rate, absolutely. But if you have a working 360, it does a lot of things well.
/agree
Its a lot easier to dispute a bill when you haven't paid it. Once they have the money, its pretty hard to get it back.
This sounds like what Xbox fanboys were saying when word of the 360 being defective reached a fever pitch.
"Well, MINE works fine, you all must be using it wrong!"
Course a week later Microsoft admitted to it and shelled out $1 billion.
And AC's argument was... what, exactly? "A bug got caught by the testers, therefore you don't use unit tests and are not a real developer!"
If someone is going to start with a completely inane statement, they're going to draw inane replies.
Of course, because software that uses unit tests has never, ever, had a bug in it.
The problem is that idle.slashdot.org is now coming to us on the front page. The advice is just to never go there, but now we have to actively take steps to fight it off.
There's an "In Soviet Russia..." joke in this somewhere, I'm sure.
At the risk of sounding really stupid... if you're using SOAP over HTTP, why can't you use HTTP authentication and HTTP cookies?
(Meant as a serious question.)
I don't get why Microsoft ever thought this was a good idea. Regardless of your opinion on SOAP (and I don't hate it nearly as much as some other folks here), having the SQL Server dishing it out directly was always kind of silly. Thats what a Web Server is for.
Removing silly code that just creates more places for security holes to hide is a good thing. Not doing it at all would have been better, but at least Microsoft is fixing that mistake now.
Wow, someone who actually believes AV software stops viruses effectively?
Could be, yes. Could be politically motivated. The article doesn't go into that level of detail.
At that point its a matter of semantics. If it was a politician who pushed for the no-bid to go to company X, I consider it a political screwup and not a government screwup.
Then again, I work for a government (not in the US though), so my perspective is probably different then the average taxpayer. I don't think most people differentiate between politicians and the rest of the government when money is mis-spent.
Well, some governments have rules about how the bid process works. Specifically, rules that you look at cost. You don't look at the prior history of the contractor, or if its realistic to actually deliver what was promised for the stated price.
In effect, in order to avoid corruption, the rules were designed to take decision making out of peoples hands as much as possible. The obvious problem there is that in order to pick a more expensive contractor that actually has decent engineers you have to be able to use a decision making process to say "this is worth the extra cost."
Too bad the media will just see it as cronyism, rather then someone trying to actually get value out of taxpayer dollars by paying for a quality system.
(I guess at this point its easy to tell that I work for a government, huh?)
"Miller also alleged that some of the $500 million spent on Railhead already had been improperly used to renovate a facility owned by contractor Boeing."
Its easy to waste a lot of money when a department that has a virtually unlimited budget outsources with little to no oversight.
We had similar problems in Canada with the Long Gun Registry, which was a dumb idea to begin with. Then they outsourced it. All told it cost more then $1 billion to set up, and didn't work properly at first. (It does work now, though its still a dumb idea.)
It was outsourced. Near the bottom of TFA it says that some of the money was used to renovate a building owned by Boeing.
Its amazing just how many "government screwups" are actually caused by politicians outsourcing to their buddies in private industry (with little to no penalties for failing to deliver what was promised), and have nothing to do with the abilities of actual government employees.
There's actually quite a few smart IT folks in government, but they're not the ones who make decisions on who to outsource this stuff to. In fact, most of them would probably rather build a team and do it In-House, since that way you build up the knowledge internally and can more easily support it later.
So please don't blame government employees for something that Boeing screwed up.
SC: Ghost was also being developed by another studio, and SC 2 is in house.
Is that why there was no april fools stuff this year?
Thats just sad. Stuff like omgponies is what gave Slashdot some of its charm.
No, you don't "finish" games now. You release them enough to get money, then announce the expansion.
I bet they're running scared over at Funcom. Half the people who bought the game have already quit, and Warhammer draws on the same type of player that AoC does. I'd bet they'll be hurting a lot more from Warhammer's release then Blizzard will be (since they can afford to lose a lot more customers, and there is a huge audience of WoW players who have no interest in leaving anyway).
Far as I know this is going to be the opening of the game, IE its the one you see on first run after you install it.
So yeah, its not trying to sell the game to new people. Its for the people who are buying it.
Sometimes stuff changes. Shattrah City changed over the course of Burning Crusade, with NPCs moving, others changing factions as new ones formed, etc. Some stuff is also changing for the new expansion, like Dalaran and Naxxramus both leaving old world and going to Northrend.
In general you're right, stuff doesn't change a lot. They do that because they still have new people coming to the game, and how would a new person run Gnomeregan for the first time if it was taken back over by the Gnomes?
Judging is always like that. Thats why so many people want the judged sports gone entirely.