Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
Just so we're 100% clear, we can't officially in any way condone illegal practices. They are spending massive amounts to sue anyone, even children (actually, perhaps especially children -- the massive suing is a PR propaganda campaign after all) so while your chances of getting caught aren't gigantic, those chances increase with every second you use any service they are aware of enough to start watching (spending huge amounts here too -- actually, they probably would get their platinum lining back if they'd cut down on costs by no longer suing children and hiring lawyers to threaten every P2P service they can find as well as people to watch and log as much info as they can about said services to try to track users down with -- btw, take a look at your ISP's privacy policy, you'll be surprised that a frightening number have a clause allowing them to immediately shut you down and put you under investigation if someone even ALLEGES you may have been using their service to get illegal content.)
Anyway, the "fine, I just won't buy it, I'll steal it instead" argument simply does not work very well. Firstly, a greater majority who just don't know better still will buy it, so they can still justify getting rid of the older formats that you could actually work with and secondly, if everyone tries to steal it, then people like the FBI will probably step in and start actually looking at things seriously and chances are it will get a lot more unpleasant to try to steal the content instead. Besides, if they implement a bad enough proprietary DRM, you probably can't steal it anymore. Someone has to first get it, and then they have to remove the DRM. This usually requires that they legally buy it complete with legal license and even then they have to figure out how to remove the protections, which won't be easy with a proprietary format. In other words, for you to get your illegal content, someone still hands over a wad of cash for this to work. If it starts to get too seriously like this, it may turn into a black market where you still have to pay, just less (Terry Pratchett's description of Ankh Morpork's thieve's guild perfectly describes the kind of system you'll see in a black market, which is to say that anyone attempting to operate outside of the rules of the guild will be met with the full force of injustice -- which is usually a stick with nails in it. In other words, the black market won't allow free stuff either, only they'll be a little more... forceful in their prevention of it.)
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
Since when? Since people like the RIAA managed to pay, trick or otherwise get the people in charge to pass moronic laws, such as those that make it illegal for us to attempt to crack protection systems put in place to take away fundamental rights such as making a backup of software you legally own.
Unfortunately, capitalism has it's ups and it's downs. The ups generally outweigh the downs, but, the downs definitely include greed, and the moment government steps in, capitalisms downs start growing larger. They've gotten the government on their side, so, now it's slowly moving towards where the customers have to beg. For an interesting read, go dig through some of the stuff that's happening with the new blue laser DVD formats, HDTV, and other similar new technologies. They are fighting over things like DRM and doing everything within their power to ensure we will get the priveledge of having to deal with a huge number of penalties ranging from inability to copy to actually getting decreased quality simply because they can't agree on interface standards and licenses. I've actually heard that we will be forced to switch to things like HDTV with no option to remain on plain old analog within ten years or so, and they are already promising to require DRMs and such even in that so you can't record and such. Here's an interesting article (a little old, but, still has the gist of it) you may wish to look at: http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/02/24/will-you-boycott- hd-with-mike/ The fact is, we can boycott all we want, but, people like my dad who just loves his HD football aren't going to give it up simply because it actually adds a protection to prevent copying or somesuch. Those people make up the majority, not us. I'm sorry, but, I'm afraid we're outnumbered here. The average joe doesn't understand about the ups and downs of DRM -- in fact, he doesn't know what DRM even stands for -- he just knows that best buy sold him an HDTV, he turned it on, and it worked, so he didn't take it back. The industry just needs enough of them and we can boycott all we like and they'll still eventually push things far enough that we have only two choices: don't buy anything at all and no longer watch TV/HD-DVDs, or, give up and let them have their way.
Actually, I would be terribly interested to know how it is they are managing to get some of these bills and such through. With people like the EFF trying to fight them, they shouldn't have gotten so much through. They've already killed off the very POINT of "fair use" for computer software, so I worry about just what the ultimate limits are. How much can they bribe or threaten through congress? Will we one day be just paying a Sony, MGM, and etc tax and get to watch something only once before the medium explodes and we have to buy a new one to watch again? Seems to be their idea of a utopia and they are fighting with all they have for it, but, the scary thing is, they are slowly gaining ground.
Why do people keep forgetting that for the PC you only get charged for official mods? Actually, ARE there any unofficial mods for the XBox360 at all? Why is this distinction important? Just take a look at the TES forums themselves in the rather bustling dev section for Oblivion. You can post a thread and by the end of the day it will likely be on another page. Actually, I've seen a few people posting mods before they actually even bought the game (mainly minor little scripting things or even just a few even more minor variable changes.)
Actually, PC users get a serious advantage here. We get to change whatever the heck we feel like for free on just a whim (no going through online verification services, no verification and usage of points, nothing, just load up the construction kit and play around.) The only catch is we have to use a third party (free) utility to extract the data files if we want to do things like make completely new objects in the CS (which means giving up another two gigs or so to Oblivion if you delete the original data files, or a good 5.2GB or so extra if you don't delete them.) I have personally played around with this and that and tossed in quite a number of minor mods, and I'm not even CLOSE to the official "end" of the game (by end I just mean the official end of the main story quest since the game never actually ends until you uninstall it.) I've tossed in some custom armor and a couple of nice weapons (nothing major, almost just reskins of some of the stuff my character already had access to, I'm not trying to cheat, just make it a little more enjoyable.)
XBox360 users are gipped out of the ability to just fire up the CS and play around unless I'm mistaken (don't have an XBox nor Oblivion for the XBox, but, I've seen no one even hint at this.) If you ask me, due to the loss of this, they should be given free access to official mods to compensate. And I'm really dissapointed to learn that Bethesda neglected to optomize the game more before shipping though. I can forgive them a LITTLE for rushing the PC version, but, the XBox360 version is a lot harder to change. You just don't DO frequent patching on consoles (if nothing else because of the hassle to users not used to it.) Actually, I'm still upset at how poorly it runs on PC and the fact that they still have yet to even attempt any sort of patching on this even. My X850XT-PE 256MB at roughly medium, MAYBE medium-high (overall) settings will occasionally jerk up to > 60 FPS in a few rare scenes (especially at night since I have bloom enabled) but, on some rare occasions especially in a forest I have actually seen my FPS drop down to 15. This is at 1024x768 with only light FSAA and AF. Unfortunately, it's usually just before a battle that this happens, and battles get VERY tough with everything jerking around like insane (and archers/spell casters may as well just go ahead and load a savegame at such a point, luckily I'm a jack-of-all-trades type character who uses a sword as well.) Before they start charging for stupid little addons like an armor for horses (and, btw, on the rare occasions an enemy attacks your horse, it takes very little to distract said enemy from trying to kill your horse -- not to mention that horses seem to have a LOT of hp apparently) maybe they need to correct what they've already charged for?
Anyway, back more on topic of the original post, it wasn't tiny mods that made Morrowind good. It was multitudes of fan created mods. In other words, the free ones. In Morrowind you only paid for BIG official mods (eg Bloodmoon and Tribunal which were big enough that they were rightly classified as expansions) which is, IMO, the correct way to do it. Charging for putting armor on your horse is just moronic when some user will surely make a free mod (at least on PC) if it's actually worth bothering with. Actually, I've had more fun with the user created mods such as the colorful Morrowind and the ones that increased the amount of greenery and many which added higher resolution textures t
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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You just admitted that you do... Just wait until you try some of the new formats, you're going to have loads of fun.
Anyway, I actually said we in the less literal sense, though it's hard to say what the future will hold. The sort of people who hang out on Slashdot actually are a minority compared to the sort who use services like iTunes (except there are surely quite a few even here who use such DRM filled services.) Those who avoid all DRM whatsoever are rare indeed, and, as you've already demonstrated, it's getting harder and harder to legally avoid DRM. The only way to avoid DRM with a DVD is to encode your own. Ok, DVDs are using one of the lightest DRM systems out there, but, future formats like HD-DVD are promising far worse for us to have to deal with (I'm personally likely to just skip the whole first generation since it sounds like first generation products won't work or will be severely penalized on any second generation products if things continue the way they are going now.) Anyway, simply put, this is more about the larger majority of people. If Average Joe Farmer gets a MP3 player, right now he's likely to get an iPod with it's DRM format, but, my hope is with things such as Sun's open DRM that trend can shift somewhat towards other players. This would mean the market would start to offer us a lot more choices (such as all those players promising us future formats such as OGG maybe actually OFFERING such formats for once -- you'd be surprised how few support it even though it's 100% open for anyone to use for free.) Right now Apple is making all the money and the others aren't exactly dedicating huge resources in the market since it's just not profitable enough to be worth it to them.
Simply put, the point is just to appease the paranoid nuts with something we can actually work with instead of the only possibilities right now being less than ideal. Well, let me ask you this. If you never use DRM, then what's the problem with Sun implementing an open standard? Even if you never use it, wouldn't you rather those who do use an open system instead of a proprietary one? I really think you'd better not count on not being forced to use it at some point or other though. People like the RIAA are slow to accept reality, but, eventually even they will finally figure out that technology isn't going to go away no matter how much they sue little kids. Once they do, more and more things may move towards things like DRM to satisfy their money-grubbing paranoia. Like I said earlier, those who bypass all this are rare indeed despite the potential benefits. Yes, there are a few bands and such who release their work online with no DRM and all that, but, how many compared to all those people are really listening to? Sony and some recent laws have already shown us that in the future some may even try to make even plain audio CDs start using DRM. Sony's attempt failed, but, even if they won't try again, there are still others who may. All they need is to get enough of the people who don't know better and they have their foothold to being forcing those of us who do to deal with their crap.
Don't misunderstand me. I hate DRM at least as much as you do. Possibly more. Nothing ticks me off more than the concept of purchasing something and finding I can't play it on any cheap little player I might want to play it on or that my license has been lost/currupted and it will no longer play on anything at all. Even knowing that most likely a legally purchased thing will function correctly I hate it on principle of the fact that it COULD go wrong. In fact, I avoid DRM at all costs myself as much as I can, but, I want to be sure that if I'm ever forced to use it it will be as painless as possible.
PS. You use DRM more than you think if you play games btw. They have some stupid copy protection schemes tossed in there. If you really want to see an interesting one, do a little googling on the nature of the lovely StarForce scheme used in a few things such as X3 for the kind of paran
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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Well, like I explained already to some lesser extent. You need it to satisfy some of those paranoids out there who need that platinum since gold isn't good enough anymore. In particular, I'm talking about people like that RIAA. If you look at the article, you'll notice they mention how those with the have been left with less actual content than those who embrace it thanks to those paranoids.
Perhaps I should have worded that more carefully. We, as the end-users, must use DRM because we are required to. It is they who do not have to actually use it but will never feel satified until they do. If we will be forced to use it, I for one would prefer to use the least painful one possible. That's where my hopes are in favor of Sun. Then again, it could prove to be another WMA or worse now that Microsoft's DRM is getting less buggy and more supported. Obviously only future players will support future formats, but, one thing does occur to me. An opensource DRM method might just turn out to be one which, if you have the proper license and such, you can easily decrypt for playback on an older player. I know I've heard that there's an unofficial tool out there somewhere for doing this with WMA which works by calling part of WMP so does require you to have the license to actually remove the protection. Actually, the thing that scares me about that idea is if it is too easy to do this, the paranoids may strike again and resist any usage of that particular DRM anyway.
All we can do is wait and see anyway. Sun is going to do it whether we like it or not. People will use DRM whether we like it or not whether it's made by Sun or not. The only thing we can do is wait and hope for the best I'm afraid. If we could actually do anything about it, there'd be no DRM anymore and the big companies of the recording industry would be gone in favor of letting people distribute electronically at much lower costs.
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
I wholeheartedly agree. I hate DRM with a passion but, the fact remains that we must use it to some extent. The music industry is run primarily by paranoids are are scared to the point they must be getting stomach ulcers every other day that they'll loose 0.01% of their sales to the "evil pirates who are clearly set out to ruin them" (eg six year olds who want to hear a few songs but their parents can't afford to waste so much money on a bunch of CDs) and have to line their pockets with gold instead of platinum. Without DRM, these companies will never be satisfied and we will continue to only hear about one or two rare albums here and there released bypassing the worst of these companies. With DRM, the companies could be satisfied to allow people to actually get enough content to use their players.
For one of my classes I'm doing a report on the iPod and the iTunes service and how Apple got ahead based on an article in a Fortune magazine (linkage: http://mail.google.com/mail/?&ik=373e3b5929&view=c v&search=sent&th=10a2da71f4c15622&lvp=-1&cvp=4&qt= &zx=vw1482b90czm ) The gist of it is that Apple had a head start thanks in no small part to their early embracal of DRM with their proprietary format. Yes, I'm talking about those horrible files that can't be played on your average standardized MP3 player at Walmart, Bestbuy, or just about anywhere else except for those iPods. By accepting DRM so early, they got acceptance from the big companies in the recording industry. Alternatives without DRM have been severely limited in their offerings (I'm talking about the legal ones here, not the stuff you'll find via the evil P2P that has the record industry wetting their platinum pants.) The only other DRM in a standard format would be Windows Media Audio/Video, which have in the past had buggy support (transferring correctly to the device and keeping the license correctly in sync hasn't been easy for users in the past.) In other words, currently the main thing that gives Apple an advantage is that those in the best position to compete have to rely on less pleasant technologies. At this point, Apple has locked in a number of users (especially since it's easy to switch to an iPod, but, hard to switch away) and kept the iPod a "fashion trend" as well as just simply keeping it easy enough to work with, so they have a foothold. However, their competitors have a tougher time since users don't want to be forced to buy an untested and unproven proprietary player anymore now that the MP3 craze has long since moved on. By comparison, the iPod is proprietary, but, tested and proven with a lot of brand recognition.
On the other hand, Apple could be dislodged from their deep foothold should a format supported by all of the competition players gain the recognition among users and the support that iTunes enjoys among the recording industry. With a truly standard format, it wouldn't be much harder to get your audio working on a new device than it currently is with plain MP3s (which, today, basically is a simple matter of copying and pasting via explorer or dragging and dropping since modern MP3 players just act like a USB flash drive.) This would allow us to use a larger number of players with more content and give us more options (thus better quality and lower prices in the long run.) I hate DRM with a passion, but, since we are required to at least deal with it a little, I'd rather a standard DRM than being forced forever to remain with proprietary DRM systems like Apple's iTunes formats. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Sun follows through with this and suceeds.
The impression I've had is MS actually didn't shoot themselves in the foot at all. They did indeed intentionally force stores to stock less than possible and run out and intentionally chose to produce less than they could have, but, why do you think they did that? After all, it doesn't take much to figure out that had the produced enough to not sell out, they would have sold a lot. You know what I think they are doing with this? I think they want to create a sense of hype here. They want the XBox360 to look like this wonder product that's so great people have to stand in line for hours if they want to try to get one. You have to remember, the greater majority are less connected to information on such subjects, so are less likely to have read articles about things like how MS has forced some stores to let their shelves go empty sooner than they had to. Consoles sell AT LEAST as much to the average joe as to those of us who understand such things, and even among us not everyone knows. Actually, I'm not sure where the division between PC and console is, but, I suspect there are more average joes gravitating more towards PC and more geeky people gravitating more towards PC.
Anyway, as to comments about game base, I don't know what it is about XBox, but, somehow it seems to collect a pretty darned limited range of genres. My dad's collection consists of all FPS games except for one dusty copy of Baldur's Gate which he got because of all my ravings about the REAL Baldur's Gate (well, he didn't hate it, but, once he beat it he put it back on the shelf and never picked it up again.) That one isn't even an XBox specific thing. I don't know all of what he has for 360, but, the boxes I saw when I passed by recently looked like FPS games to me. Where is the Xenosaga or.Hack for XBox (ok, not the greatest games ever, but, I'm mainly demonstrating popularity here)? Oblivion is the only one I know of for XBox360, and I don't think one title in the right genre can prop a console up for people who want that genre versus the competition (especially in light of the fact that it's PC also and few people these days don't have a PC that should at least run it at minimal settings.) There's probably some little thing or two out there, maybe even a big thing or two, but, just not enough. The fact is, the overwhelming majority for XBox and XBox360 seem to have a strong tendency towards a few types rather than the huge list of every type you'll find on PS2. I'm sorry XBox/XBox360 fans, but, the games I've seen so far on those systems just aren't enough to convince me to buy one, but, I bought a PS2 last year or so when PS2 and XBox had both been out long enough to have built the basics and we could see how they were going. The PS2 was just the more attractive system to me.
BTW, one thing you may want to remember. PS3 has to compete with PS2. I'm serious. PS2 costs a mere $150 for a brand new slim model complete with built in network and modem, and you can probably find an older model new somewhere for less. You WILL find a used model somewhere for less if you are ok with used. PS2 has a huge game base with lots of fans, even some series that people like to follow. If I were a company making a new game that didn't need the greatest graphics since PS2 (which, when properly optimized, is quite capable after all,) let's say an RPG or something, I might think more about making it a PS2 game considering how many will have PS2s and may not want to upgrade until a few killer games come out for PS3. And if I were a new user looking at consoles, I might just consider the considerably cheaper PS2 over the PS3 if I just want PS2 games. Ok, PS3 is probably backwards compatible with PS2 games (better include PSX too, some people grabbed a PS2 in a hurry because it ran PSX stuff for their classics and may be unhappy if they sell off the PS2 to get a PS3 and the PS3 won't play some of their games.) Still, if I want a console mainly just for a few console exclusive things I can't get on PC, I'd be inclined
All I can say is I'll stick with just grabbing a standard IDE drive and an IDE->USB2 case for it. Good grief though, on newegg, you can grab a drive that does all this does at about $160+S&H for a 160GB. I may not speak for everyone here, but, I say I'd pay $10 and give up not having to have an extra power plug for the extra storage. ( Here's the particular product that caught my eye: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822154068 )
I don't like the idea of relying on an iPod or similar product for storage though. They aren't really designed for it. Really they are meant to toss in all your music files and I guess now video files, not to use for routine backups or large transfers across systems, or other similar things. Personally, I rather prefer the idea of those cheap little pocket-sized USB mini drives. I think they've reached as much as 6GB total these days, but, the reasonably priced ones are 2GB, which is still 1GB or so more that I would ordinarily need to move between systems where a network cable wouldn't do and I don't want to write a DVDR. Heck, flash drives are up to 4GB and maybe beyond, albiet a lot slower (then again, more reliable.)
Looks like a flop product to me. That price will surely kill them. Plus most people who'd actually use a thing like this will gravitate more towards either better portability smaller sizes or less portability with external plug and all holding a lot more space for the cost.
Well, I just wanted to clarify a bit on my earlier comment since I posted it as I was stepping out the door. Firstly, I'd like to point out that while manufacturers will say that so-and-so is required, this is not always so. I have heard of people running setups that claim to require 350W minimum on 300W and I think one rare case even 250W and somehow it was stable. Mind you, they had onboard video, the cpu, memory, and FSB were stock clocks, and so on (one thing to bear in mind is that Athlon 64/Opteron is built on mobile technology, so is quite power efficient.) As for how you get 1kW, you might be able to use two or three normal PSUs instead of one uber PSU. I have heard of setups doing this, albiet usually for a serious harddrive array (one example of which had so many HDs they had to create a seperate tower just for them.)
BTW, one thing you'll want to bear in mind is that a x wattage power supply does not use x watts. Firstly, none are 100% efficiency (which is why some use a PR rating saying the number of watts they REALLY do instead of lying and saying how many they can do in a vaccuum with carefully stored battery generated power instead of real life power sockets.) That's the first half of my point. The second half is that they don't use that much more than what they need at a given time. If the system is drawing 200 watts of power, that's what is being consumed. It's not consuming 1000 watts of power at all times irregardless of system usage. In other words, every single time those processors hit an idle cycle and decrease power usage, every time the memory enters a wait state, every time the harddrives stop running non-stop, power draw is going to go down. Supermicro covered their bases in a worst case scenario where you're running four copies of Prime95 each set to write their log files as quickly as they can to a raid array because you have to assume the worst scenario for a server. In real life, like someone said earlier, you're probably using 660W of power or so. Let's say 700. At 0.10 per kWh, that's ((0.7*24*365)*0.10) / 12 = 51.1.
Actually, one advantage here is that you can focus your cooling a bit more. A very well aired out case with four processors will actually run cooler than two cases with two processors each or especially four cases with one each. When combining a large numbers of these systems in a single room it may not run any cooler by itself mind you, but, it shouldn't run hotter either by itself. However, if you have only a few of them, it becomes possible to focus your AC or even buy refridgerated cases (yes, there is such a thing, or at least was, I remember seeing one primarily intended for servers a few years ago. The price was insane, but, then it would be more reliable than even watercooling for a server situation.) Anyway, run your components cooler, and they actually consume a little less power (which adds up in a hurry in a system that's on 24/7.) Of course, a poorly designed case would run even hotter, so it does rely on the use of a little sense.
Seems this company has been at it a while. My "HTPC" system is an ancient Supermicro board providing a dual Pentium 3 setup backwards compatible (via a jumper to switch the FSB) with Pentium 2 processors. This is back in a time where dual processor was almost server only, yet, this solution was affordable enough that we could get several of these for various people, one including myself, and useful enough that I haven't thrown away the thing yet today (I still use it as a server as well.) I'm not saying they are pioneers or anything, but, they know what they are doing and have practice at it.
Will we experience it again in ten years? I say yes. Some protection methods actually are going to age quite well (and, btw, I should warn you that your CDRs and DVDRs will NOT age so well and will almost without a doubt be all but unreadable in ten years, so I suggest you backup your backups every three years or so to be on the safe side -- at least, those important enough to still have in ten years. Originals should theoretically last as long as you take good care of them, but, I'm not 100% sure as sometimes the reflective layer seems to just somehow get worn, especially on CDs where it's at the top and more exposed to the elements.)
Some tricks, like the bad sector trick, still are actually holding out pretty well, though at least you can usualy reproduce the bad sectors via emulation, but, I don't think drives in any future date will allow writing of bad sectors, though I've never understood why they wont since if you tell them to write a sector like that, you probably did it for a good reason (and if you have consistantly bad data coming in unintentionally, something's wrong and you should be worried a lot more about the problem itself than the fact your backup will have to be thrown away and a new one made.) Some tricks, like the StarForce one are so bloody picky that, in ten years from now, when you are using Windows Etch-a-Sketch and it tries to load up an ancient driver and hijack your system, it will fail and probably crash and Microsoft calls you ten minutes later to ask why you tried to run an illegal copy of your game (because the software says it's illegal, so it doesn't matter that you legally bought it since MS can only watch what you do on Etch-a-Sketch, not what you do at Walmart.) Seriously though, jokes aside, the StarForce people aren't going to write you a patch to correct the fact that an ancient version of their software doesn't support SATA3.0 ultra-violet SD-ROMS or Windows Etch-a-Sketch, so you're just going to have to track down some ten year old software and hardware to get that game working again (and MS will NOT sell you a copy of XP or let you activate an old one, you'll just have to get an illegal patch if you want to use any other version of Windows besides Etch-a-Sketch if you haven't noticed their little forced upgrade schemes yet, I bet you will by then.) The fact is, as you've demonstrated in your little story, some protection methods are designed under the assumption that you live in a vaccuum and will only want to play the game a few times before throwing it away and buying a new copy. They honestly don't give a rip if you want to play the game you paid for and enjoyed so much ten years ago, that's your problem, you should instead buy their latest FPS templated game that features shinier textures on the guns and slightly different monster models than the last template rather than trying to play old games with, uh, what was that word again? Oh yeah "substance." No room for that in business.
I'm forced to agree. On more than one occasion I've played a demo and had a great impression of the game, then bought it and regretted every single penny spent on the flaming peice of crap that ended up in the bin of old stuff gathering dust never to be played again. But, more often for me it's the other way around. The game is better than it's peice of crap demo. Thing is, demos tend to have so little actually in them that you sometimes actually can't even see the real game at all, just the "technology" behind it. As a for instance, I tried the Daggerfall demo a number of years ago and found the game to be kind of boring and tedius. Much later, I got the real game via a download when people thought it was abandonware (ok, turns out it isn't after all, though it is still abandoned, just protected abandoned in that way that you're not supposed to have it at all since you can't buy or download, but, at the time we didn't know that.) Turned out the game had so many more dimensions to it that aren't even HINTED at in the demo that I regretted having wasted so much time not playing it. Heck, to this day I can still fire up (a now legal albiet highly used copy of) Daggerfall and enjoy a few hours of gameplay because it just has a certain depth you'll never know from the crappy demo (a depth which I was dissapointed to find somehow just not quite all the way in Morrowind and pray will be in Oblivion.)
The fact is, they expect us to just know everything there is to know about the enjoyability of the game somehow before you buy it when demos often just can't really tell you about the real game, or, worse, sometimes they just simply expect you to know. Some of us have little issues with cash in that we can't exactly afford to blow everything we have on every single game that has a pretty box, so we resort to finding out which few are actualy worth spending the cash on instead of throwing money in the trash can like they want us to do. Yeah, sure, great for them if we dive for our wallets every time they release a new title, but, for those of us who prefer to have enough in there to maybe buy next week's groceries this attitude gets a little trying.
I do see people saying SCSI works because it bypasses checks. Then I see people saying it doesn't work because it bypasses checks a little TOO literally, as in it quits due to not having found what it was looking for simply because it never looked. As I understand it, this is the problem with Daemon-Tools for the people who are smart enough to change the bus and port names to avoid the blacklists (guess this is why version 4 is supposed to be adding a randomly chosen name during install.) It's a "SCSI" drive, so gets treated as if it were rather than an IDE (don't ask me why they had to make a virtual SCSI instead of virtual IDE because I don't actually know.) Anyway, most of us aren't blessed with the money needed for an external drive since they tend to cost in the upper $100, or even $200 range whereas a fast dual layer internal DVD burner can cost around $30 or so after shipping (typical Lite-On at Newegg.) I think the deal was that if you have any IDE drives, it ignores SCSI or any other method. Thus you have to not just disable the drive, but, I have read you have to actually unplug it to keep the OS from knowing you have a drive despite the BIOS setting or something.
As I understand it, StarForce uses some very brute force unpleasant methods to force all optical drives to hard reset. The way IDE is handled, the system doesn't really keep an eye on it, and usually if a drive suddenly dissapears, no big deal, it just had a power loss or something maybe. Kind of like floppy only a little less extreme. If you specify in the bios that you have a floppy drive and don't actually have one, the system says you do, windows says you do, as far as they are concerned, you've got a floppy drive no matter what anyone may say to the contrary, just, it's currently a little messed up because for some reason it won't respond, but, no big deal, just keep trying for a few moments before giving up.
Newer methods are getting more modernized since it actually occured someone that it might, just might, be theoretically possible to unplug certain things, such as an external drive. Thus, unlike the IDE where the system simply assumes it's there even if it doesn't see it because it detected it earlier, with the more modern methods, it will not assume this, and if it's not there, as far as the drivers are concerned, it has been removed so the user can use it elsewhere, so it unloads the drivers, clears up resources, etc -- I mean, hey, they aren't needed anymore, right? To it, you just unplugged the drive, so you don't need the stuff for it wasting resources. Then, a bit later, reset finishes, and the OS in it's typically long delays between checks finally noticed that the hardware has returned, so, clearly you just plugged it back in as far as it's concerned. It then proceeds to reload the drivers and reassign resources (which have to be negotiated, so you could end up with a different drive letter or something under rare conditions if something else should happen to grab it.) To the game, your drive just dissapeared in the middle of a validity check, which is definitely suspicious. It probably keeps retrying a few times to be sure, but, it will never find the same exact drive again because windows has removed it and will later add a new drive.
BTW, I have read that this brute force reset, besides the obvious problems associated with such a thing, also screws around with the OS priorities and can potentially cause crashes and such after a game like this. Those of you with legit copies that actually WORK might want to consider a reboot after playing the game (but, then again, many of you have to shut down and move things around back to normal anyway, so a reboot may be automatic to the process.) Actually, from what I've seen, I think this applies to illegit copies as well. I have also heard that it's using vender specific iffy codes to force this hard reset and those codes can indeed potentially damage a drive, though I would imagine this is very rare or they wouldn't dare release it (I imagine they'd ge
It's an old link, you can probably find a better one, but, I think that one's good enough for the gist of it. If you don't want to check the link, the basic synopsis of it is that the author named Anton Tomov of one tool for PocketPCs INTENTIONALLY placed malicious responses into the code for the program should it detect that it was an illegal copy. He claimed to not have done this, but, then later it seems as if people proved that he did if I recall (there's a post on the forum as I recall, and if I remember correctly, he basically just kept dodging the question without really answering beyond an initial claim.) All I can say is, though by now it's probably fixed if there was such a thing, I'm sure as heck not installing that software on my PPC, legit copy or no. I can't afford to loose the data I keep on it, and a hard reset is a real pain since I have to restore a backup (which obviously wouldn't be possible if the backup is wiped out and someone mentioned that it may possibly wipe flash card too.)
Actually, I would be interested to know what happened in the end with that case. I may have to look it up later when I have more time. Looks to me like he got away with it though, his website is up and going strong and the particular program that was in question is still selling. Back then I didn't even have a PocketPC, so didn't care much beyond the interest in the claim that someone had actually resorted to such things. The fact is, the EULAs of most software say, when translated from Lawyerese to English "We are not responsible if our software screws up your system and we won't replace any drives ruined by our copy protection methods. If you don't like that we have full immunity, too bad, you'll just have to not run the software you just bought. Also, by running the software, you agree to give up your legal rights to make duplicates (see DMCA) or anything else we don't like." Actually, from prior discussions on such matters with some people who know a bit more about the legalities of it all, I have the impression they can't TRULY make you give up your rights or get away with causing damage, but, by making the user agree that they are immune, the user will probably not even think of sueing them.
You know, I've always wondered just where figures like that estimated 50% actually come from. How do companies know who they loose sales to? It's like a joke I read in some book, probably by Terry Pratchett where they discussed crime prevention. Someone states that crime is prevented, and someone else points out that there's no way to know it's prevented because it never occured. Same here. Unless they know everyone who has an illegal copy, they don't know how many sales are lost. But, what I really want to know is if there's maybe some research out there somewhere where someone looks at how many sales were ACTUALLY lost. Because, as was stated earlier, the people who actually get pirated copies tend to be getting them because they can't afford the game or for some other such reason where they would not have chosen to buy the game even if there were no pirated copy out there. Thus, those pirated copies actually didn't affect sales at all (though as someone else stated much further back, it can actually increase sales because every now and then one of those people may like something enough to go back and actually purchase a legal copy to support the game's makers.) If we take that into account, I bet that 50% goes down a LOT. Not that there can be any accurate numbers anyway. I don't know how they get theirs, but, I suspect that normal means of collecting such information would get biased or otherwise skewed data because it would be focused too much in some particular area.
Here's a question for their number crunchers. Which is REALLY hurting them more. Ticked off customers who are fed up with crappy tech support and root-kit copy protection software or pirated copies by the rare few who would have actually bought the game had they not gotten the illegal copy? The numbers aren't as straight and simple as one might think. I have a suspicion that there's more and more harm due to the spending on crap like StarForce that, had the money been diverted to quality control, tech support, or, heck, even the marketing division, they might have made a heck of a lot more DESPITE those horrible horrible pirates who are set out to ruin them.
I've had runins with this sort of thing myself. Such as a game that used SafeDisc or some other hard to copy method where you need a 3.5 sheep burner or whatever to have even a chance of duplicating. My disc got scratched up, and I could no longer play the game I'd legally spent far far too much money on. The thing is, very very few stores will allow you to returned an open box of software, so the companies get away with this. It's only when users can return an item that the message gets back to the manufacturers that a particular method is unacceptable. The manufacturers are vaguely aware that people may be stealing their software, but, for the most part, they just pay the mafia -- excuse me, the ESA (aka ISDA, too many people were beginning to realize what they were, so they changed it again) -- and they handle all of it for the company, including protecting those games they made ten years ago and no longer produce in any way whatsoever or even still employ the people who made them or even actually still have the original copies of the data. In other words, your average company just is scared they'll loose money, so jump at the chance for something like StarForce if they can afford it. As far as they are concerned, what few sales are lost are just because the game wasn't as popular as they'd thought. Since you can't take the game back, most people just give up and go the illegal route, using patches and cracks and such to get the game they bought to actually work. They spent $40+ on the peice of junk, the least it can do is run, right? I think right now, more than anything else, the issue is lack of communication.
The thing that probably ticks me off the most of all though is the fact that you may not legally backup your game. Oh sure, the law says you can make a backup, but, they managed to get a law passed adding a loophole that ensures you may no longer make a backup. You are not allowed to circumvent any copy protection (however minor) to make a backup as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong, it really worries me that they can actually get away with this, but, as nearly as I can tell, they somehow did with the DMCA.) If there's a game out there without even the cheapest most basic copy protection in it, it's because it's an illegally released internal beta or an opensource/otherwise free game. (Ok, I exagerate, I'm sure there's some exception somewhere, I just haven't seen it in a long time.) So, we may no longer make backups even though the law says we're supposed to have a right to, and my discs have a habit of getting scratched somehow even though I keep them in the cases and take good care of them, holding by the edges, not leaving them lying around, etc (I swear there's some kind of mini gremlin that gets in there and runs it's claws across my CDs or something.) It just bugs me so much knowing that I've bought the right to play the game for as long as I darned well please, but, they lied to me because most of us mere humans can't make a disc last as long as some games are actually worth keeping for, so they actually just sell us the right to use them for a while while falsely advertising that we can use them as long as we like. If the disc breaks well, off to the store with you to increase their revenues a bit further if you want to keep playing. BTW, has anyone else noticed that lately discs seem to be a little cheaper and softer, or is it just my imagination?
Anyway, I once tried a friend's copy of X3. Or I tried to try it. We couldn't get it working with his legitimate IDE drive (and if you're a SCSI user, well, the game no longer costs $50, it actually costs $70 because you are required to buy an IDE drive to legally play X3 from what I've read since StarForce is poorly designed enough to assume there's no such thing as a SCSI cd-rom.) After what I swear felt like an hour of it trying to verify, it failed. Needless to say, he wasn't particularly happy considering that he bought it soon af
Thanks. Ironically enough, it loaded almost instantly once I got home and saw your post. Don't know if the slashdot bomb finally settled or if maybe it was that connection where I was having troubles reaching that server for some reason.
Anyway, I'm glad to see that they seem at least mostly supportive. None in there exploded at the thought of someone modifying their content or anything. It all felt a little rehearsed to me though. I wonder how the greater majority of devs feel though. They just interviewed some people involved in some of the most recent most modded games, but, I still wish I knew better how some of them feel about those that were clearly not meat to be modded. Still, the more PR in favor of modding, the more future games will fully support it I would hope.
I have to disagree with LG about modding getting harder I must say. I played around a bit here and there over the years with various moddable games and I have to say that the skill level required for modding has actually not changed very much overall. From games like ZZT & MegaZeux which utilized ASCII art and OOP programming to todays games like Doom 3, the aforementioned Morrowind, and so on, I'd say the main thing that has changed is the amount of individual skill levels. For example, it's best these days to get someone who works with CAD a lot than to try to make your own graphics with no experience, but, back in the day of MegaZeux with it's loadable font ASCII art it still required amazing time and effort to make things have a clean good look. I've noticed a lot the sheer ease of doing things despite the complexity of game engines the last time I played around with Morrowind's toolset and tossed together my own little underground hiding hole (complete with persistant storage, training areas, and so on of course.) Morrowind had it's downfalls, but, it was no simple engine (one of, if not the first commercial game to make use of programmable pixel shaders in fact.) A little more recently I dabbled a bit in NWN's toolkit and it was simplicity itself to build the actual maps. Adding new graphics, writing up the code for scripted events or such, and adding other such content has definitely not gotten any harder. I'd say with more and more designing with mods in mind these days, modding has probably gotten easier.
Wow, I try to get to that and can't. It's already slashdotted and yet only three people have commented on it. It strikes me that Slashdot needs to have it's own internal caching system.
Anyway, I have to admit I'm particularly interested in what the designers think about it. Some games, such as Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights to name a couple I've played a lot recently, show that the devs honestly want to see their product become something bigger that what it started as. Morrowind, NWN, and many other such games that should be considered old still have active communities developing mods today (though, admitedly, a lot of people have slowed down on NWN due to the impending release of NWN2.) I doubt the devs originally planned for those games to still be selling in the stores today when they first released them, but, by allowing users to make what they wanted out of the games they took on a life of their own and those companies still get the occasional profit from it.
On the other hand, I see some games that show more of an unfriendliness towards modding. Some that make it nearly impossible to do so seemingly intentionally, and I believe I recall seeing one sometime in the past where they actually threatened a group that was writing a mod until they dropped the project (mind you, this was mainly because the game was so unmoddable that the only way to mod it was to hack it.) Ok, it's clear that some devs feel differently than others, but, I'm kind of curious how the majority overall feel about it. Do more hate the idea of something they've worked so hard on being changed by unsolicited people with too much time on their hands (not to mention that each game will have it's own set of bad mods and inevitably a nude mod or three, which is obviously inappropriate) or are more devs proud to see that their product is made so well that it can take on a life of it's own and, essentially evolve through the help of free fanwork so that it lives on long after the devs have given up on squashing whatever bugs may remain and shut the doors on the old dusty project for a new one?
Legal contracts can't impinge on basic rights. Let's just say, as a for example, that you sign a contract that says "I _____, hereby give ______ the right to shoot me directly in the head with the intentions of killing me." If the person then shoots you, they will go to jail for murder, despite the fact that you signed the contract saying it was alright. Fundamental rights are just that, fundamental, and cannot be given up. Now don't get me wrong, there's a point where you go beyond fundamental rights, such as if he truly did name a specific name or otherwise directly attempt to harm the school's business like telling people to absolutely not go there because the school intentionally hires bad teachers or something stupid like that, but, simply stating an insult and his opinion about one unnamed teacher is clearly not intended in this manner.
Personally, I agree most with the earlier example of the children. He stuck his tongue out and now they're punishing him for it. They got mad and immediately threw the worst they could think of at him in anger, then, when the anger cooled a bit, they realized they went too far and retracted part of it (you can still come to the party, but, I'm keeping the toys I loaned you.)
One thing I did have to admit to though, the school isn't 100% unfounded in getting angry. Mind you, they definitely went way too far, and he wasn't trying to harm them in any way so really shouldn't be punished, but, one thing to bear in mind is that the medical field is a rough place. Reputation is important, and the word "malpractice" is spoken in a quiet whisper when at all (even a malpractice suit that fails can sometimes ruin some people in the medical field.) So they can be excused in getting so upset. They can't be excused for attempting to punish someone simply for speaking an opinion out of anger though. Actually, personally, if my college tried to kick me out then told me I'd have to do 100 hours of community service just because I insulted one of my teachers to a few students, I'd be talking to a lawyer that very day.
Oh yeah, I forgot to say, but, a lot of new drives automatically limit their speeds to 1x when they detect a video disc, whether ripping or playing, so if MS is saving us from ourselves, they need to make drives with that hardware "issue" stop working too while they're at it. Well, it's no worse than forcing people with old drives that were working just fine to have to buy a new one just because MS says so.
That's just it. To me the problem isn't that they kill off support for some ancient dropped standard, but, that they kill off support for something that still is supposed to be within the current standard but is just a little old. Anyway, it's still annoying on the principle that MS is doing yet another little thing to further their love of digital media protections. Next thing you know we'll be hearing that Vista won't play any video files without MS certified DRMs.
Honestly, I think this is just another means for microsoft to get their tracking methods and more control over certain things that they had been loosing more and more of with the fall of popularity of their internet explorer "product." While Firefox and it's predecessors had actually been quite popular among those who know what they are doing for a while, the average joe farmer type didn't know anything about browsers, he just wanted to click on a link and it do everything for him. MS can't get much on the more knowledgable person's computer, but, average joe farmer has only just recently started to put Firefox on his system recently (on a relative scale.) With this solution, average joe farmer is going to back on their database where he belongs (according to them anyway.) Plus they need to exert a little control over Firefox and right now haven't a base to stand on to do it, so they have to start slow.
Call me cynical if you like, it's just that they've done similar enough things in the past.
I'm sorry, I know it's wrong, but, I'm just enjoying every minute of SONY's pain in this. Right now about the only thing I'd enjoy more is if it were Microsoft whom everyone had just discovered had placed rootkits on everyone's PCs with their latest Internet Explorer. ^_^
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see SONY die or anything, I just want them taken down a peg to where they have to compete properly again.
Unless they are lying and plan to change that to selling royalty-full licenses later, I'm very glad to see this. This is very nice of them and will ensure that companies such as MS who just love to snatch up every little thing won't be able to slow down the linux developers from many potential innovations. Always a nice thing to hear. Let's just hope it's completely true and that they don't decide to start selling them instead a year or two in.
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Just so we're 100% clear, we can't officially in any way condone illegal practices. They are spending massive amounts to sue anyone, even children (actually, perhaps especially children -- the massive suing is a PR propaganda campaign after all) so while your chances of getting caught aren't gigantic, those chances increase with every second you use any service they are aware of enough to start watching (spending huge amounts here too -- actually, they probably would get their platinum lining back if they'd cut down on costs by no longer suing children and hiring lawyers to threaten every P2P service they can find as well as people to watch and log as much info as they can about said services to try to track users down with -- btw, take a look at your ISP's privacy policy, you'll be surprised that a frightening number have a clause allowing them to immediately shut you down and put you under investigation if someone even ALLEGES you may have been using their service to get illegal content.)
Anyway, the "fine, I just won't buy it, I'll steal it instead" argument simply does not work very well. Firstly, a greater majority who just don't know better still will buy it, so they can still justify getting rid of the older formats that you could actually work with and secondly, if everyone tries to steal it, then people like the FBI will probably step in and start actually looking at things seriously and chances are it will get a lot more unpleasant to try to steal the content instead. Besides, if they implement a bad enough proprietary DRM, you probably can't steal it anymore. Someone has to first get it, and then they have to remove the DRM. This usually requires that they legally buy it complete with legal license and even then they have to figure out how to remove the protections, which won't be easy with a proprietary format. In other words, for you to get your illegal content, someone still hands over a wad of cash for this to work. If it starts to get too seriously like this, it may turn into a black market where you still have to pay, just less (Terry Pratchett's description of Ankh Morpork's thieve's guild perfectly describes the kind of system you'll see in a black market, which is to say that anyone attempting to operate outside of the rules of the guild will be met with the full force of injustice -- which is usually a stick with nails in it. In other words, the black market won't allow free stuff either, only they'll be a little more... forceful in their prevention of it.)
Since when? Since people like the RIAA managed to pay, trick or otherwise get the people in charge to pass moronic laws, such as those that make it illegal for us to attempt to crack protection systems put in place to take away fundamental rights such as making a backup of software you legally own.
- hd-with-mike/ The fact is, we can boycott all we want, but, people like my dad who just loves his HD football aren't going to give it up simply because it actually adds a protection to prevent copying or somesuch. Those people make up the majority, not us. I'm sorry, but, I'm afraid we're outnumbered here. The average joe doesn't understand about the ups and downs of DRM -- in fact, he doesn't know what DRM even stands for -- he just knows that best buy sold him an HDTV, he turned it on, and it worked, so he didn't take it back. The industry just needs enough of them and we can boycott all we like and they'll still eventually push things far enough that we have only two choices: don't buy anything at all and no longer watch TV/HD-DVDs, or, give up and let them have their way.
Unfortunately, capitalism has it's ups and it's downs. The ups generally outweigh the downs, but, the downs definitely include greed, and the moment government steps in, capitalisms downs start growing larger. They've gotten the government on their side, so, now it's slowly moving towards where the customers have to beg. For an interesting read, go dig through some of the stuff that's happening with the new blue laser DVD formats, HDTV, and other similar new technologies. They are fighting over things like DRM and doing everything within their power to ensure we will get the priveledge of having to deal with a huge number of penalties ranging from inability to copy to actually getting decreased quality simply because they can't agree on interface standards and licenses. I've actually heard that we will be forced to switch to things like HDTV with no option to remain on plain old analog within ten years or so, and they are already promising to require DRMs and such even in that so you can't record and such. Here's an interesting article (a little old, but, still has the gist of it) you may wish to look at: http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/02/24/will-you-boycott
Actually, I would be terribly interested to know how it is they are managing to get some of these bills and such through. With people like the EFF trying to fight them, they shouldn't have gotten so much through. They've already killed off the very POINT of "fair use" for computer software, so I worry about just what the ultimate limits are. How much can they bribe or threaten through congress? Will we one day be just paying a Sony, MGM, and etc tax and get to watch something only once before the medium explodes and we have to buy a new one to watch again? Seems to be their idea of a utopia and they are fighting with all they have for it, but, the scary thing is, they are slowly gaining ground.
Why do people keep forgetting that for the PC you only get charged for official mods? Actually, ARE there any unofficial mods for the XBox360 at all? Why is this distinction important? Just take a look at the TES forums themselves in the rather bustling dev section for Oblivion. You can post a thread and by the end of the day it will likely be on another page. Actually, I've seen a few people posting mods before they actually even bought the game (mainly minor little scripting things or even just a few even more minor variable changes.)
Actually, PC users get a serious advantage here. We get to change whatever the heck we feel like for free on just a whim (no going through online verification services, no verification and usage of points, nothing, just load up the construction kit and play around.) The only catch is we have to use a third party (free) utility to extract the data files if we want to do things like make completely new objects in the CS (which means giving up another two gigs or so to Oblivion if you delete the original data files, or a good 5.2GB or so extra if you don't delete them.) I have personally played around with this and that and tossed in quite a number of minor mods, and I'm not even CLOSE to the official "end" of the game (by end I just mean the official end of the main story quest since the game never actually ends until you uninstall it.) I've tossed in some custom armor and a couple of nice weapons (nothing major, almost just reskins of some of the stuff my character already had access to, I'm not trying to cheat, just make it a little more enjoyable.)
XBox360 users are gipped out of the ability to just fire up the CS and play around unless I'm mistaken (don't have an XBox nor Oblivion for the XBox, but, I've seen no one even hint at this.) If you ask me, due to the loss of this, they should be given free access to official mods to compensate. And I'm really dissapointed to learn that Bethesda neglected to optomize the game more before shipping though. I can forgive them a LITTLE for rushing the PC version, but, the XBox360 version is a lot harder to change. You just don't DO frequent patching on consoles (if nothing else because of the hassle to users not used to it.) Actually, I'm still upset at how poorly it runs on PC and the fact that they still have yet to even attempt any sort of patching on this even. My X850XT-PE 256MB at roughly medium, MAYBE medium-high (overall) settings will occasionally jerk up to > 60 FPS in a few rare scenes (especially at night since I have bloom enabled) but, on some rare occasions especially in a forest I have actually seen my FPS drop down to 15. This is at 1024x768 with only light FSAA and AF. Unfortunately, it's usually just before a battle that this happens, and battles get VERY tough with everything jerking around like insane (and archers/spell casters may as well just go ahead and load a savegame at such a point, luckily I'm a jack-of-all-trades type character who uses a sword as well.) Before they start charging for stupid little addons like an armor for horses (and, btw, on the rare occasions an enemy attacks your horse, it takes very little to distract said enemy from trying to kill your horse -- not to mention that horses seem to have a LOT of hp apparently) maybe they need to correct what they've already charged for?
Anyway, back more on topic of the original post, it wasn't tiny mods that made Morrowind good. It was multitudes of fan created mods. In other words, the free ones. In Morrowind you only paid for BIG official mods (eg Bloodmoon and Tribunal which were big enough that they were rightly classified as expansions) which is, IMO, the correct way to do it. Charging for putting armor on your horse is just moronic when some user will surely make a free mod (at least on PC) if it's actually worth bothering with. Actually, I've had more fun with the user created mods such as the colorful Morrowind and the ones that increased the amount of greenery and many which added higher resolution textures t
You just admitted that you do... Just wait until you try some of the new formats, you're going to have loads of fun.
Anyway, I actually said we in the less literal sense, though it's hard to say what the future will hold. The sort of people who hang out on Slashdot actually are a minority compared to the sort who use services like iTunes (except there are surely quite a few even here who use such DRM filled services.) Those who avoid all DRM whatsoever are rare indeed, and, as you've already demonstrated, it's getting harder and harder to legally avoid DRM. The only way to avoid DRM with a DVD is to encode your own. Ok, DVDs are using one of the lightest DRM systems out there, but, future formats like HD-DVD are promising far worse for us to have to deal with (I'm personally likely to just skip the whole first generation since it sounds like first generation products won't work or will be severely penalized on any second generation products if things continue the way they are going now.) Anyway, simply put, this is more about the larger majority of people. If Average Joe Farmer gets a MP3 player, right now he's likely to get an iPod with it's DRM format, but, my hope is with things such as Sun's open DRM that trend can shift somewhat towards other players. This would mean the market would start to offer us a lot more choices (such as all those players promising us future formats such as OGG maybe actually OFFERING such formats for once -- you'd be surprised how few support it even though it's 100% open for anyone to use for free.) Right now Apple is making all the money and the others aren't exactly dedicating huge resources in the market since it's just not profitable enough to be worth it to them.
Simply put, the point is just to appease the paranoid nuts with something we can actually work with instead of the only possibilities right now being less than ideal. Well, let me ask you this. If you never use DRM, then what's the problem with Sun implementing an open standard? Even if you never use it, wouldn't you rather those who do use an open system instead of a proprietary one? I really think you'd better not count on not being forced to use it at some point or other though. People like the RIAA are slow to accept reality, but, eventually even they will finally figure out that technology isn't going to go away no matter how much they sue little kids. Once they do, more and more things may move towards things like DRM to satisfy their money-grubbing paranoia. Like I said earlier, those who bypass all this are rare indeed despite the potential benefits. Yes, there are a few bands and such who release their work online with no DRM and all that, but, how many compared to all those people are really listening to? Sony and some recent laws have already shown us that in the future some may even try to make even plain audio CDs start using DRM. Sony's attempt failed, but, even if they won't try again, there are still others who may. All they need is to get enough of the people who don't know better and they have their foothold to being forcing those of us who do to deal with their crap.
Don't misunderstand me. I hate DRM at least as much as you do. Possibly more. Nothing ticks me off more than the concept of purchasing something and finding I can't play it on any cheap little player I might want to play it on or that my license has been lost/currupted and it will no longer play on anything at all. Even knowing that most likely a legally purchased thing will function correctly I hate it on principle of the fact that it COULD go wrong. In fact, I avoid DRM at all costs myself as much as I can, but, I want to be sure that if I'm ever forced to use it it will be as painless as possible.
PS. You use DRM more than you think if you play games btw. They have some stupid copy protection schemes tossed in there. If you really want to see an interesting one, do a little googling on the nature of the lovely StarForce scheme used in a few things such as X3 for the kind of paran
Well, like I explained already to some lesser extent. You need it to satisfy some of those paranoids out there who need that platinum since gold isn't good enough anymore. In particular, I'm talking about people like that RIAA. If you look at the article, you'll notice they mention how those with the have been left with less actual content than those who embrace it thanks to those paranoids.
Perhaps I should have worded that more carefully. We, as the end-users, must use DRM because we are required to. It is they who do not have to actually use it but will never feel satified until they do. If we will be forced to use it, I for one would prefer to use the least painful one possible. That's where my hopes are in favor of Sun. Then again, it could prove to be another WMA or worse now that Microsoft's DRM is getting less buggy and more supported. Obviously only future players will support future formats, but, one thing does occur to me. An opensource DRM method might just turn out to be one which, if you have the proper license and such, you can easily decrypt for playback on an older player. I know I've heard that there's an unofficial tool out there somewhere for doing this with WMA which works by calling part of WMP so does require you to have the license to actually remove the protection. Actually, the thing that scares me about that idea is if it is too easy to do this, the paranoids may strike again and resist any usage of that particular DRM anyway.
All we can do is wait and see anyway. Sun is going to do it whether we like it or not. People will use DRM whether we like it or not whether it's made by Sun or not. The only thing we can do is wait and hope for the best I'm afraid. If we could actually do anything about it, there'd be no DRM anymore and the big companies of the recording industry would be gone in favor of letting people distribute electronically at much lower costs.
Oops, sorry about the link... I posted it from an e-mail reminder I sent myself, and apparently Google uses some sort of weird redirection. Here is the correct link: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_arc hive/2006/03/20/8371750/index.htm
I wholeheartedly agree. I hate DRM with a passion but, the fact remains that we must use it to some extent. The music industry is run primarily by paranoids are are scared to the point they must be getting stomach ulcers every other day that they'll loose 0.01% of their sales to the "evil pirates who are clearly set out to ruin them" (eg six year olds who want to hear a few songs but their parents can't afford to waste so much money on a bunch of CDs) and have to line their pockets with gold instead of platinum. Without DRM, these companies will never be satisfied and we will continue to only hear about one or two rare albums here and there released bypassing the worst of these companies. With DRM, the companies could be satisfied to allow people to actually get enough content to use their players.
c v&search=sent&th=10a2da71f4c15622&lvp=-1&cvp=4&qt= &zx=vw1482b90czm ) The gist of it is that Apple had a head start thanks in no small part to their early embracal of DRM with their proprietary format. Yes, I'm talking about those horrible files that can't be played on your average standardized MP3 player at Walmart, Bestbuy, or just about anywhere else except for those iPods. By accepting DRM so early, they got acceptance from the big companies in the recording industry. Alternatives without DRM have been severely limited in their offerings (I'm talking about the legal ones here, not the stuff you'll find via the evil P2P that has the record industry wetting their platinum pants.) The only other DRM in a standard format would be Windows Media Audio/Video, which have in the past had buggy support (transferring correctly to the device and keeping the license correctly in sync hasn't been easy for users in the past.) In other words, currently the main thing that gives Apple an advantage is that those in the best position to compete have to rely on less pleasant technologies. At this point, Apple has locked in a number of users (especially since it's easy to switch to an iPod, but, hard to switch away) and kept the iPod a "fashion trend" as well as just simply keeping it easy enough to work with, so they have a foothold. However, their competitors have a tougher time since users don't want to be forced to buy an untested and unproven proprietary player anymore now that the MP3 craze has long since moved on. By comparison, the iPod is proprietary, but, tested and proven with a lot of brand recognition.
For one of my classes I'm doing a report on the iPod and the iTunes service and how Apple got ahead based on an article in a Fortune magazine (linkage: http://mail.google.com/mail/?&ik=373e3b5929&view=
On the other hand, Apple could be dislodged from their deep foothold should a format supported by all of the competition players gain the recognition among users and the support that iTunes enjoys among the recording industry. With a truly standard format, it wouldn't be much harder to get your audio working on a new device than it currently is with plain MP3s (which, today, basically is a simple matter of copying and pasting via explorer or dragging and dropping since modern MP3 players just act like a USB flash drive.) This would allow us to use a larger number of players with more content and give us more options (thus better quality and lower prices in the long run.) I hate DRM with a passion, but, since we are required to at least deal with it a little, I'd rather a standard DRM than being forced forever to remain with proprietary DRM systems like Apple's iTunes formats. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Sun follows through with this and suceeds.
The impression I've had is MS actually didn't shoot themselves in the foot at all. They did indeed intentionally force stores to stock less than possible and run out and intentionally chose to produce less than they could have, but, why do you think they did that? After all, it doesn't take much to figure out that had the produced enough to not sell out, they would have sold a lot. You know what I think they are doing with this? I think they want to create a sense of hype here. They want the XBox360 to look like this wonder product that's so great people have to stand in line for hours if they want to try to get one. You have to remember, the greater majority are less connected to information on such subjects, so are less likely to have read articles about things like how MS has forced some stores to let their shelves go empty sooner than they had to. Consoles sell AT LEAST as much to the average joe as to those of us who understand such things, and even among us not everyone knows. Actually, I'm not sure where the division between PC and console is, but, I suspect there are more average joes gravitating more towards PC and more geeky people gravitating more towards PC.
.Hack for XBox (ok, not the greatest games ever, but, I'm mainly demonstrating popularity here)? Oblivion is the only one I know of for XBox360, and I don't think one title in the right genre can prop a console up for people who want that genre versus the competition (especially in light of the fact that it's PC also and few people these days don't have a PC that should at least run it at minimal settings.) There's probably some little thing or two out there, maybe even a big thing or two, but, just not enough. The fact is, the overwhelming majority for XBox and XBox360 seem to have a strong tendency towards a few types rather than the huge list of every type you'll find on PS2. I'm sorry XBox/XBox360 fans, but, the games I've seen so far on those systems just aren't enough to convince me to buy one, but, I bought a PS2 last year or so when PS2 and XBox had both been out long enough to have built the basics and we could see how they were going. The PS2 was just the more attractive system to me.
Anyway, as to comments about game base, I don't know what it is about XBox, but, somehow it seems to collect a pretty darned limited range of genres. My dad's collection consists of all FPS games except for one dusty copy of Baldur's Gate which he got because of all my ravings about the REAL Baldur's Gate (well, he didn't hate it, but, once he beat it he put it back on the shelf and never picked it up again.) That one isn't even an XBox specific thing. I don't know all of what he has for 360, but, the boxes I saw when I passed by recently looked like FPS games to me. Where is the Xenosaga or
BTW, one thing you may want to remember. PS3 has to compete with PS2. I'm serious. PS2 costs a mere $150 for a brand new slim model complete with built in network and modem, and you can probably find an older model new somewhere for less. You WILL find a used model somewhere for less if you are ok with used. PS2 has a huge game base with lots of fans, even some series that people like to follow. If I were a company making a new game that didn't need the greatest graphics since PS2 (which, when properly optimized, is quite capable after all,) let's say an RPG or something, I might think more about making it a PS2 game considering how many will have PS2s and may not want to upgrade until a few killer games come out for PS3. And if I were a new user looking at consoles, I might just consider the considerably cheaper PS2 over the PS3 if I just want PS2 games. Ok, PS3 is probably backwards compatible with PS2 games (better include PSX too, some people grabbed a PS2 in a hurry because it ran PSX stuff for their classics and may be unhappy if they sell off the PS2 to get a PS3 and the PS3 won't play some of their games.) Still, if I want a console mainly just for a few console exclusive things I can't get on PC, I'd be inclined
All I can say is I'll stick with just grabbing a standard IDE drive and an IDE->USB2 case for it. Good grief though, on newegg, you can grab a drive that does all this does at about $160+S&H for a 160GB. I may not speak for everyone here, but, I say I'd pay $10 and give up not having to have an extra power plug for the extra storage. ( Here's the particular product that caught my eye: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822154068 )
I don't like the idea of relying on an iPod or similar product for storage though. They aren't really designed for it. Really they are meant to toss in all your music files and I guess now video files, not to use for routine backups or large transfers across systems, or other similar things. Personally, I rather prefer the idea of those cheap little pocket-sized USB mini drives. I think they've reached as much as 6GB total these days, but, the reasonably priced ones are 2GB, which is still 1GB or so more that I would ordinarily need to move between systems where a network cable wouldn't do and I don't want to write a DVDR. Heck, flash drives are up to 4GB and maybe beyond, albiet a lot slower (then again, more reliable.)
Looks like a flop product to me. That price will surely kill them. Plus most people who'd actually use a thing like this will gravitate more towards either better portability smaller sizes or less portability with external plug and all holding a lot more space for the cost.
Well, I just wanted to clarify a bit on my earlier comment since I posted it as I was stepping out the door. Firstly, I'd like to point out that while manufacturers will say that so-and-so is required, this is not always so. I have heard of people running setups that claim to require 350W minimum on 300W and I think one rare case even 250W and somehow it was stable. Mind you, they had onboard video, the cpu, memory, and FSB were stock clocks, and so on (one thing to bear in mind is that Athlon 64/Opteron is built on mobile technology, so is quite power efficient.) As for how you get 1kW, you might be able to use two or three normal PSUs instead of one uber PSU. I have heard of setups doing this, albiet usually for a serious harddrive array (one example of which had so many HDs they had to create a seperate tower just for them.)
BTW, one thing you'll want to bear in mind is that a x wattage power supply does not use x watts. Firstly, none are 100% efficiency (which is why some use a PR rating saying the number of watts they REALLY do instead of lying and saying how many they can do in a vaccuum with carefully stored battery generated power instead of real life power sockets.) That's the first half of my point. The second half is that they don't use that much more than what they need at a given time. If the system is drawing 200 watts of power, that's what is being consumed. It's not consuming 1000 watts of power at all times irregardless of system usage. In other words, every single time those processors hit an idle cycle and decrease power usage, every time the memory enters a wait state, every time the harddrives stop running non-stop, power draw is going to go down. Supermicro covered their bases in a worst case scenario where you're running four copies of Prime95 each set to write their log files as quickly as they can to a raid array because you have to assume the worst scenario for a server. In real life, like someone said earlier, you're probably using 660W of power or so. Let's say 700. At 0.10 per kWh, that's ((0.7*24*365)*0.10) / 12 = 51.1.
Actually, one advantage here is that you can focus your cooling a bit more. A very well aired out case with four processors will actually run cooler than two cases with two processors each or especially four cases with one each. When combining a large numbers of these systems in a single room it may not run any cooler by itself mind you, but, it shouldn't run hotter either by itself. However, if you have only a few of them, it becomes possible to focus your AC or even buy refridgerated cases (yes, there is such a thing, or at least was, I remember seeing one primarily intended for servers a few years ago. The price was insane, but, then it would be more reliable than even watercooling for a server situation.) Anyway, run your components cooler, and they actually consume a little less power (which adds up in a hurry in a system that's on 24/7.) Of course, a poorly designed case would run even hotter, so it does rely on the use of a little sense.
Seems this company has been at it a while. My "HTPC" system is an ancient Supermicro board providing a dual Pentium 3 setup backwards compatible (via a jumper to switch the FSB) with Pentium 2 processors. This is back in a time where dual processor was almost server only, yet, this solution was affordable enough that we could get several of these for various people, one including myself, and useful enough that I haven't thrown away the thing yet today (I still use it as a server as well.) I'm not saying they are pioneers or anything, but, they know what they are doing and have practice at it.
Will we experience it again in ten years? I say yes. Some protection methods actually are going to age quite well (and, btw, I should warn you that your CDRs and DVDRs will NOT age so well and will almost without a doubt be all but unreadable in ten years, so I suggest you backup your backups every three years or so to be on the safe side -- at least, those important enough to still have in ten years. Originals should theoretically last as long as you take good care of them, but, I'm not 100% sure as sometimes the reflective layer seems to just somehow get worn, especially on CDs where it's at the top and more exposed to the elements.)
Some tricks, like the bad sector trick, still are actually holding out pretty well, though at least you can usualy reproduce the bad sectors via emulation, but, I don't think drives in any future date will allow writing of bad sectors, though I've never understood why they wont since if you tell them to write a sector like that, you probably did it for a good reason (and if you have consistantly bad data coming in unintentionally, something's wrong and you should be worried a lot more about the problem itself than the fact your backup will have to be thrown away and a new one made.) Some tricks, like the StarForce one are so bloody picky that, in ten years from now, when you are using Windows Etch-a-Sketch and it tries to load up an ancient driver and hijack your system, it will fail and probably crash and Microsoft calls you ten minutes later to ask why you tried to run an illegal copy of your game (because the software says it's illegal, so it doesn't matter that you legally bought it since MS can only watch what you do on Etch-a-Sketch, not what you do at Walmart.) Seriously though, jokes aside, the StarForce people aren't going to write you a patch to correct the fact that an ancient version of their software doesn't support SATA3.0 ultra-violet SD-ROMS or Windows Etch-a-Sketch, so you're just going to have to track down some ten year old software and hardware to get that game working again (and MS will NOT sell you a copy of XP or let you activate an old one, you'll just have to get an illegal patch if you want to use any other version of Windows besides Etch-a-Sketch if you haven't noticed their little forced upgrade schemes yet, I bet you will by then.) The fact is, as you've demonstrated in your little story, some protection methods are designed under the assumption that you live in a vaccuum and will only want to play the game a few times before throwing it away and buying a new copy. They honestly don't give a rip if you want to play the game you paid for and enjoyed so much ten years ago, that's your problem, you should instead buy their latest FPS templated game that features shinier textures on the guns and slightly different monster models than the last template rather than trying to play old games with, uh, what was that word again? Oh yeah "substance." No room for that in business.
I'm forced to agree. On more than one occasion I've played a demo and had a great impression of the game, then bought it and regretted every single penny spent on the flaming peice of crap that ended up in the bin of old stuff gathering dust never to be played again. But, more often for me it's the other way around. The game is better than it's peice of crap demo. Thing is, demos tend to have so little actually in them that you sometimes actually can't even see the real game at all, just the "technology" behind it. As a for instance, I tried the Daggerfall demo a number of years ago and found the game to be kind of boring and tedius. Much later, I got the real game via a download when people thought it was abandonware (ok, turns out it isn't after all, though it is still abandoned, just protected abandoned in that way that you're not supposed to have it at all since you can't buy or download, but, at the time we didn't know that.) Turned out the game had so many more dimensions to it that aren't even HINTED at in the demo that I regretted having wasted so much time not playing it. Heck, to this day I can still fire up (a now legal albiet highly used copy of) Daggerfall and enjoy a few hours of gameplay because it just has a certain depth you'll never know from the crappy demo (a depth which I was dissapointed to find somehow just not quite all the way in Morrowind and pray will be in Oblivion.)
The fact is, they expect us to just know everything there is to know about the enjoyability of the game somehow before you buy it when demos often just can't really tell you about the real game, or, worse, sometimes they just simply expect you to know. Some of us have little issues with cash in that we can't exactly afford to blow everything we have on every single game that has a pretty box, so we resort to finding out which few are actualy worth spending the cash on instead of throwing money in the trash can like they want us to do. Yeah, sure, great for them if we dive for our wallets every time they release a new title, but, for those of us who prefer to have enough in there to maybe buy next week's groceries this attitude gets a little trying.
I do see people saying SCSI works because it bypasses checks. Then I see people saying it doesn't work because it bypasses checks a little TOO literally, as in it quits due to not having found what it was looking for simply because it never looked. As I understand it, this is the problem with Daemon-Tools for the people who are smart enough to change the bus and port names to avoid the blacklists (guess this is why version 4 is supposed to be adding a randomly chosen name during install.) It's a "SCSI" drive, so gets treated as if it were rather than an IDE (don't ask me why they had to make a virtual SCSI instead of virtual IDE because I don't actually know.) Anyway, most of us aren't blessed with the money needed for an external drive since they tend to cost in the upper $100, or even $200 range whereas a fast dual layer internal DVD burner can cost around $30 or so after shipping (typical Lite-On at Newegg.) I think the deal was that if you have any IDE drives, it ignores SCSI or any other method. Thus you have to not just disable the drive, but, I have read you have to actually unplug it to keep the OS from knowing you have a drive despite the BIOS setting or something.
As I understand it, StarForce uses some very brute force unpleasant methods to force all optical drives to hard reset. The way IDE is handled, the system doesn't really keep an eye on it, and usually if a drive suddenly dissapears, no big deal, it just had a power loss or something maybe. Kind of like floppy only a little less extreme. If you specify in the bios that you have a floppy drive and don't actually have one, the system says you do, windows says you do, as far as they are concerned, you've got a floppy drive no matter what anyone may say to the contrary, just, it's currently a little messed up because for some reason it won't respond, but, no big deal, just keep trying for a few moments before giving up.
Newer methods are getting more modernized since it actually occured someone that it might, just might, be theoretically possible to unplug certain things, such as an external drive. Thus, unlike the IDE where the system simply assumes it's there even if it doesn't see it because it detected it earlier, with the more modern methods, it will not assume this, and if it's not there, as far as the drivers are concerned, it has been removed so the user can use it elsewhere, so it unloads the drivers, clears up resources, etc -- I mean, hey, they aren't needed anymore, right? To it, you just unplugged the drive, so you don't need the stuff for it wasting resources. Then, a bit later, reset finishes, and the OS in it's typically long delays between checks finally noticed that the hardware has returned, so, clearly you just plugged it back in as far as it's concerned. It then proceeds to reload the drivers and reassign resources (which have to be negotiated, so you could end up with a different drive letter or something under rare conditions if something else should happen to grab it.) To the game, your drive just dissapeared in the middle of a validity check, which is definitely suspicious. It probably keeps retrying a few times to be sure, but, it will never find the same exact drive again because windows has removed it and will later add a new drive.
BTW, I have read that this brute force reset, besides the obvious problems associated with such a thing, also screws around with the OS priorities and can potentially cause crashes and such after a game like this. Those of you with legit copies that actually WORK might want to consider a reboot after playing the game (but, then again, many of you have to shut down and move things around back to normal anyway, so a reboot may be automatic to the process.) Actually, from what I've seen, I think this applies to illegit copies as well. I have also heard that it's using vender specific iffy codes to force this hard reset and those codes can indeed potentially damage a drive, though I would imagine this is very rare or they wouldn't dare release it (I imagine they'd ge
You might want to check this out: http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2005/02/use _an_illegal_.html
It's an old link, you can probably find a better one, but, I think that one's good enough for the gist of it. If you don't want to check the link, the basic synopsis of it is that the author named Anton Tomov of one tool for PocketPCs INTENTIONALLY placed malicious responses into the code for the program should it detect that it was an illegal copy. He claimed to not have done this, but, then later it seems as if people proved that he did if I recall (there's a post on the forum as I recall, and if I remember correctly, he basically just kept dodging the question without really answering beyond an initial claim.) All I can say is, though by now it's probably fixed if there was such a thing, I'm sure as heck not installing that software on my PPC, legit copy or no. I can't afford to loose the data I keep on it, and a hard reset is a real pain since I have to restore a backup (which obviously wouldn't be possible if the backup is wiped out and someone mentioned that it may possibly wipe flash card too.)
Actually, I would be interested to know what happened in the end with that case. I may have to look it up later when I have more time. Looks to me like he got away with it though, his website is up and going strong and the particular program that was in question is still selling. Back then I didn't even have a PocketPC, so didn't care much beyond the interest in the claim that someone had actually resorted to such things. The fact is, the EULAs of most software say, when translated from Lawyerese to English "We are not responsible if our software screws up your system and we won't replace any drives ruined by our copy protection methods. If you don't like that we have full immunity, too bad, you'll just have to not run the software you just bought. Also, by running the software, you agree to give up your legal rights to make duplicates (see DMCA) or anything else we don't like." Actually, from prior discussions on such matters with some people who know a bit more about the legalities of it all, I have the impression they can't TRULY make you give up your rights or get away with causing damage, but, by making the user agree that they are immune, the user will probably not even think of sueing them.
You know, I've always wondered just where figures like that estimated 50% actually come from. How do companies know who they loose sales to? It's like a joke I read in some book, probably by Terry Pratchett where they discussed crime prevention. Someone states that crime is prevented, and someone else points out that there's no way to know it's prevented because it never occured. Same here. Unless they know everyone who has an illegal copy, they don't know how many sales are lost. But, what I really want to know is if there's maybe some research out there somewhere where someone looks at how many sales were ACTUALLY lost. Because, as was stated earlier, the people who actually get pirated copies tend to be getting them because they can't afford the game or for some other such reason where they would not have chosen to buy the game even if there were no pirated copy out there. Thus, those pirated copies actually didn't affect sales at all (though as someone else stated much further back, it can actually increase sales because every now and then one of those people may like something enough to go back and actually purchase a legal copy to support the game's makers.) If we take that into account, I bet that 50% goes down a LOT. Not that there can be any accurate numbers anyway. I don't know how they get theirs, but, I suspect that normal means of collecting such information would get biased or otherwise skewed data because it would be focused too much in some particular area.
Here's a question for their number crunchers. Which is REALLY hurting them more. Ticked off customers who are fed up with crappy tech support and root-kit copy protection software or pirated copies by the rare few who would have actually bought the game had they not gotten the illegal copy? The numbers aren't as straight and simple as one might think. I have a suspicion that there's more and more harm due to the spending on crap like StarForce that, had the money been diverted to quality control, tech support, or, heck, even the marketing division, they might have made a heck of a lot more DESPITE those horrible horrible pirates who are set out to ruin them.
I've had runins with this sort of thing myself. Such as a game that used SafeDisc or some other hard to copy method where you need a 3.5 sheep burner or whatever to have even a chance of duplicating. My disc got scratched up, and I could no longer play the game I'd legally spent far far too much money on. The thing is, very very few stores will allow you to returned an open box of software, so the companies get away with this. It's only when users can return an item that the message gets back to the manufacturers that a particular method is unacceptable. The manufacturers are vaguely aware that people may be stealing their software, but, for the most part, they just pay the mafia -- excuse me, the ESA (aka ISDA, too many people were beginning to realize what they were, so they changed it again) -- and they handle all of it for the company, including protecting those games they made ten years ago and no longer produce in any way whatsoever or even still employ the people who made them or even actually still have the original copies of the data. In other words, your average company just is scared they'll loose money, so jump at the chance for something like StarForce if they can afford it. As far as they are concerned, what few sales are lost are just because the game wasn't as popular as they'd thought. Since you can't take the game back, most people just give up and go the illegal route, using patches and cracks and such to get the game they bought to actually work. They spent $40+ on the peice of junk, the least it can do is run, right? I think right now, more than anything else, the issue is lack of communication.
The thing that probably ticks me off the most of all though is the fact that you may not legally backup your game. Oh sure, the law says you can make a backup, but, they managed to get a law passed adding a loophole that ensures you may no longer make a backup. You are not allowed to circumvent any copy protection (however minor) to make a backup as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong, it really worries me that they can actually get away with this, but, as nearly as I can tell, they somehow did with the DMCA.) If there's a game out there without even the cheapest most basic copy protection in it, it's because it's an illegally released internal beta or an opensource/otherwise free game. (Ok, I exagerate, I'm sure there's some exception somewhere, I just haven't seen it in a long time.) So, we may no longer make backups even though the law says we're supposed to have a right to, and my discs have a habit of getting scratched somehow even though I keep them in the cases and take good care of them, holding by the edges, not leaving them lying around, etc (I swear there's some kind of mini gremlin that gets in there and runs it's claws across my CDs or something.) It just bugs me so much knowing that I've bought the right to play the game for as long as I darned well please, but, they lied to me because most of us mere humans can't make a disc last as long as some games are actually worth keeping for, so they actually just sell us the right to use them for a while while falsely advertising that we can use them as long as we like. If the disc breaks well, off to the store with you to increase their revenues a bit further if you want to keep playing. BTW, has anyone else noticed that lately discs seem to be a little cheaper and softer, or is it just my imagination?
Anyway, I once tried a friend's copy of X3. Or I tried to try it. We couldn't get it working with his legitimate IDE drive (and if you're a SCSI user, well, the game no longer costs $50, it actually costs $70 because you are required to buy an IDE drive to legally play X3 from what I've read since StarForce is poorly designed enough to assume there's no such thing as a SCSI cd-rom.) After what I swear felt like an hour of it trying to verify, it failed. Needless to say, he wasn't particularly happy considering that he bought it soon af
Thanks. Ironically enough, it loaded almost instantly once I got home and saw your post. Don't know if the slashdot bomb finally settled or if maybe it was that connection where I was having troubles reaching that server for some reason.
Anyway, I'm glad to see that they seem at least mostly supportive. None in there exploded at the thought of someone modifying their content or anything. It all felt a little rehearsed to me though. I wonder how the greater majority of devs feel though. They just interviewed some people involved in some of the most recent most modded games, but, I still wish I knew better how some of them feel about those that were clearly not meat to be modded. Still, the more PR in favor of modding, the more future games will fully support it I would hope.
I have to disagree with LG about modding getting harder I must say. I played around a bit here and there over the years with various moddable games and I have to say that the skill level required for modding has actually not changed very much overall. From games like ZZT & MegaZeux which utilized ASCII art and OOP programming to todays games like Doom 3, the aforementioned Morrowind, and so on, I'd say the main thing that has changed is the amount of individual skill levels. For example, it's best these days to get someone who works with CAD a lot than to try to make your own graphics with no experience, but, back in the day of MegaZeux with it's loadable font ASCII art it still required amazing time and effort to make things have a clean good look. I've noticed a lot the sheer ease of doing things despite the complexity of game engines the last time I played around with Morrowind's toolset and tossed together my own little underground hiding hole (complete with persistant storage, training areas, and so on of course.) Morrowind had it's downfalls, but, it was no simple engine (one of, if not the first commercial game to make use of programmable pixel shaders in fact.) A little more recently I dabbled a bit in NWN's toolkit and it was simplicity itself to build the actual maps. Adding new graphics, writing up the code for scripted events or such, and adding other such content has definitely not gotten any harder. I'd say with more and more designing with mods in mind these days, modding has probably gotten easier.
Wow, I try to get to that and can't. It's already slashdotted and yet only three people have commented on it. It strikes me that Slashdot needs to have it's own internal caching system.
Anyway, I have to admit I'm particularly interested in what the designers think about it. Some games, such as Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights to name a couple I've played a lot recently, show that the devs honestly want to see their product become something bigger that what it started as. Morrowind, NWN, and many other such games that should be considered old still have active communities developing mods today (though, admitedly, a lot of people have slowed down on NWN due to the impending release of NWN2.) I doubt the devs originally planned for those games to still be selling in the stores today when they first released them, but, by allowing users to make what they wanted out of the games they took on a life of their own and those companies still get the occasional profit from it.
On the other hand, I see some games that show more of an unfriendliness towards modding. Some that make it nearly impossible to do so seemingly intentionally, and I believe I recall seeing one sometime in the past where they actually threatened a group that was writing a mod until they dropped the project (mind you, this was mainly because the game was so unmoddable that the only way to mod it was to hack it.) Ok, it's clear that some devs feel differently than others, but, I'm kind of curious how the majority overall feel about it. Do more hate the idea of something they've worked so hard on being changed by unsolicited people with too much time on their hands (not to mention that each game will have it's own set of bad mods and inevitably a nude mod or three, which is obviously inappropriate) or are more devs proud to see that their product is made so well that it can take on a life of it's own and, essentially evolve through the help of free fanwork so that it lives on long after the devs have given up on squashing whatever bugs may remain and shut the doors on the old dusty project for a new one?
Legal contracts can't impinge on basic rights. Let's just say, as a for example, that you sign a contract that says "I _____, hereby give ______ the right to shoot me directly in the head with the intentions of killing me." If the person then shoots you, they will go to jail for murder, despite the fact that you signed the contract saying it was alright. Fundamental rights are just that, fundamental, and cannot be given up. Now don't get me wrong, there's a point where you go beyond fundamental rights, such as if he truly did name a specific name or otherwise directly attempt to harm the school's business like telling people to absolutely not go there because the school intentionally hires bad teachers or something stupid like that, but, simply stating an insult and his opinion about one unnamed teacher is clearly not intended in this manner.
Personally, I agree most with the earlier example of the children. He stuck his tongue out and now they're punishing him for it. They got mad and immediately threw the worst they could think of at him in anger, then, when the anger cooled a bit, they realized they went too far and retracted part of it (you can still come to the party, but, I'm keeping the toys I loaned you.)
One thing I did have to admit to though, the school isn't 100% unfounded in getting angry. Mind you, they definitely went way too far, and he wasn't trying to harm them in any way so really shouldn't be punished, but, one thing to bear in mind is that the medical field is a rough place. Reputation is important, and the word "malpractice" is spoken in a quiet whisper when at all (even a malpractice suit that fails can sometimes ruin some people in the medical field.) So they can be excused in getting so upset. They can't be excused for attempting to punish someone simply for speaking an opinion out of anger though. Actually, personally, if my college tried to kick me out then told me I'd have to do 100 hours of community service just because I insulted one of my teachers to a few students, I'd be talking to a lawyer that very day.
Oh yeah, I forgot to say, but, a lot of new drives automatically limit their speeds to 1x when they detect a video disc, whether ripping or playing, so if MS is saving us from ourselves, they need to make drives with that hardware "issue" stop working too while they're at it. Well, it's no worse than forcing people with old drives that were working just fine to have to buy a new one just because MS says so.
That's just it. To me the problem isn't that they kill off support for some ancient dropped standard, but, that they kill off support for something that still is supposed to be within the current standard but is just a little old. Anyway, it's still annoying on the principle that MS is doing yet another little thing to further their love of digital media protections. Next thing you know we'll be hearing that Vista won't play any video files without MS certified DRMs.
Honestly, I think this is just another means for microsoft to get their tracking methods and more control over certain things that they had been loosing more and more of with the fall of popularity of their internet explorer "product." While Firefox and it's predecessors had actually been quite popular among those who know what they are doing for a while, the average joe farmer type didn't know anything about browsers, he just wanted to click on a link and it do everything for him. MS can't get much on the more knowledgable person's computer, but, average joe farmer has only just recently started to put Firefox on his system recently (on a relative scale.) With this solution, average joe farmer is going to back on their database where he belongs (according to them anyway.) Plus they need to exert a little control over Firefox and right now haven't a base to stand on to do it, so they have to start slow.
Call me cynical if you like, it's just that they've done similar enough things in the past.
I'm sorry, I know it's wrong, but, I'm just enjoying every minute of SONY's pain in this. Right now about the only thing I'd enjoy more is if it were Microsoft whom everyone had just discovered had placed rootkits on everyone's PCs with their latest Internet Explorer. ^_^ Don't get me wrong, I don't want to see SONY die or anything, I just want them taken down a peg to where they have to compete properly again.
Unless they are lying and plan to change that to selling royalty-full licenses later, I'm very glad to see this. This is very nice of them and will ensure that companies such as MS who just love to snatch up every little thing won't be able to slow down the linux developers from many potential innovations. Always a nice thing to hear. Let's just hope it's completely true and that they don't decide to start selling them instead a year or two in.