Ars Technica | PC Game Developer has a Radical Message: Ignore the Pirates

I’ve been saying this for years – the only people that are affected by copy protection are your paying customers.  Anyone who is going to pirate the game has already found a way around the copy protection.  There are plenty of websites out there with cracks for just about every game ever made.  And if you download your pirated software from an on-line source it’ll usually come pre-cracked.  All these expensive, time-consuming, annoying piracy countermeasures only affect your paying customers.

They have to put up with the annoyance of making sure the disc is in the drive.  They have to deal with flaky and incompatible drives that refuse to work with certain copy protection schemes.  And some portion of the money they’re paying for that shiny new game is actually going to pay for some crappy copy protection scheme.

And the pirates, meanwhile, don’t have to deal with it at all.  They get their game for free, and never have to deal with any of the annoyances of copy protection.  There’s a real problem when the pirates have a better product than your paying customers do.

Slashdot | A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports

C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that’s fairer.

Frankly, I’m surprised at some of the ports they picked…

Parallel and PS/2 are both listed.  I do agree that they’re basically obsolete and have been largely supplanted by USB, but I still see them on plenty of machines – even brand new ones.

Firewire is listed, despite its near ubiquity in high-end audio and video devices.  It’s nearly impossible to find a decent video camera without firewire.

What absolutely amazed me was the inclusion of SCSI on the list…  It is virtually impossible to build a server without SCSI.  High-end storage is still SCSI.  Sure, the cables have changed…  It’s serial attached SCSI now, instead of the old parallel ribbon cables…  But it’s still SCSI.  And I still wind up using the old parallel SCSI controllers for tape drives all the time.  SCSI is about as far from obsolete as you can get.

Alright…  So I wasn’t really a fan of having the Olympics in Beijing from the start.  I had plenty of issues with China’s numerous human-rights violations, and that seemed like a good enough reason to pick some other place.

Then reports started coming out about how they were clearing all the stray cats and dogs off the streets there, which had me even more worried.

But now I’m really starting to get a little worried.  Slashdot is reporting that China plans to control the weather over the ginormous open-air stadium that they’re building for the Olympics.

“While we made light of it before, the MIT Review is taking a serious look at China’s plans to prevent rain over their open 91,000 seat arena for The Olympics. From the article: ‘China’s national weather-engineering program is also the world’s largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers — mostly peasant farmers — who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.’ They plan on demonstrating their ability to control the weather to the rest of the world, and expanding on their abilities in the future.”

I’m sure I’ve seen bad sci-fi movies that started out this way…  Someone gets the brilliant idea to try to control the weather over their swimming pool and suddenly you’ve got a new ice age rolling in.

Slashdot | Windows 7 Likely Going Modular, Subscription Based

“When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft’s most ‘modular’ operating system to date. That’s not necessarily a good thing, of course; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. From Microsoft’s perspective, though, there are many possible benefits. The OS’s developers can add/remove functionality module by module. New modules could be sold post-launch, keeping revenue streams strong. A modular approach could also allow the company to make functionality available on a time-limited basis, potentially allowing users to ‘rent’ a feature if it’s needed on a one-off basis. Microsoft is already testing ‘pay as you go’ consumer subscriptions in developing countries.”

I think modularity is great.  One of the things I’ve always liked about Linux is how modular it is.  You can leave out the GUI entirely if you don’t want it…or pick from several different GUIs if you do want them.  You can even swap out the scheduler if you really want to.

It’d be great if Windows became more modular.  I’d love to be able to install a flashy GUI with all sorts of eye candy on my pimped-out home gaming machine…  And install a much simpler, basic GUI on my work machine…  And maybe just use the command line on a server…  Modularity sounds great!

But subscription based?  It makes sense if you’re constantly using someone else’s resources…  Like an MMORPG where your characters are stored on their server and you’re chewing up gigs and gigs of bandwidth…  But for my very own computer?  Why would I have to keep paying to use my very own computer?

Sure…  If I decide I need to be able to join a machine to a domain, charge me $10 for the domain module.  If I need to share files charge me $5 for the file sharing module.  Microsoft is a business, they need to make money…  But once I’ve got the file sharing module there really isn’t any reason for them to keep charging me from one day/month/year to the next.  They wrote the code, I bought it, done deal.

We rented I Am Legend last night. Terri and I are suckers for vampire movies, and I enjoy just about anything with even a hint of sci-fi to it, and the previews looked pretty good. We actually intended to go see it in the theater, but never managed to find the time for it… So we’ve been eagerly waiting for it to come out on DVD. So eagerly, in fact, that we couldn’t wait for Netflix to ship it out and we grabbed it locally.

What a waste.

I really was not terribly impressed with the movie at all. I’m not sure if I can point to anything in particular and say “this was bad, this is what ruined the movie for me.” All the individual parts seemed relatively well done… Decent special effects… Decent acting… Decent plot… But none of it really hung together.

I think a major part of the problem was a distinct lack of exposition. We’ve given the impression that Mr. Neville is a very driven, almost obsessive man… He refuses to give up his quest for a cure… He says more than once that he can’t leave his post, can’t let it happen, even after it has already happened… It might have been more satisfying to see that personality trait developed in some way. Maybe he lost family in 9/11 and wasn’t going to let something horrible like that happen on his watch. Maybe he had been opposed to the viral research in the first place but kept his mouth shut and now feels guilty. Maybe he pushed the viral research through because his parents had cancer, and now feels guilty. It’s an odd enough bit of personality that it stands out, but nothing is really ever done with it.

He also screams about how everyone is dead…almost as if he doesn’t want to admit the possibility of survivors.

And as he dictates into his computer about the day’s events he claims that “social de-evolution is complete,” despite evidence to the contrary – such as the creatures howling to each-other, setting a trap for him, and showing concern for each-other when one is caught. Again, as if he doesn’t want to admit the possibility that these creatures have any humanity left in them.

It is also fairly obvious that the creatures are somewhat intelligent and social. One of them in particular appears to be more or less in charge. But we never see these creatures as anything other than monsters. We never see them doing anything other than attacking.

I really would have liked to see more of the story. I would have liked to see why Neville is who he is – why he is so obsessed with finding a cure, why he won’t admit that the darkseekers are intelligent or social, why he doesn’t want there to be survivors. I would like to see what the darkseekers do when they aren’t trying to kill Neville. I’d like to see some of the descent into chaos – what the world looked like as people were succumbing to the virus and becoming darkseekers.

And the ending just plain did not fit the story at all. I’m not just talking about it not matching the original book – it does not fit with the tone of the rest of the movie. The movie is so bleak and empty… Neville really is the last man on Earth, struggling against the darkness, trying to hold back the night. And in the last few minutes you find out that he was not, in fact, the last man alive. You find out that there was an entire survivor colony that could have been helping him. He did not need to struggle on his own. He was, instead of some lone valiant knight, a stubborn fool who never sees the error of his ways.

I’m kind of running out of enthusiasm for World of Warcraft.  It really isn’t because of WoW itself…  I still enjoy the game mechanics quite a bit.  I really think they got the mix of questing and grinding, the button-mashing, the difficulty all just about right.  It’s certainly one of the most fun MMORPGs I’ve played.  And there are still classes that I thoroughly enjoy playing and characters I’d like to get to 70.

The problem, really, is with my guild.  Terri and I seem to have a knack for joining guilds that seem very casual-friendly…  Very friends/family oriented…  Claim to be all about kicking back, enjoying yourself, chatting with your friends, and maybe raiding a little bit now and then…  Only to have them suddenly decide to turn raid-oriented on us.

It happened with Legion, it happened again with Night Haven, and it seems to be happening now with Poison Arrow.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always enjoyed raiding, but not to the exclusion of all else.  Not to the point that it eclipses spending time with friends and family.  Not to the point that we recruit people based solely and completely on their ability to raid.  Not to the point that we all but discard the folks who don’t raid.  And that seems to be happening right now in Poison Arrow.

We recently recruited a number of folks who transferred over to Elune from another server.  They used to be genuinely hardcore raiders and had tons of raid experience.  And they were basically handed control of our guild.  Our long-time recruiting officer vanished overnight, one of the new folks was made recruiting officer, and the very next day they were posting on the Elune forums and shouting in trade chat.  We’ve since recruited a number of people based solely on their ability to raid – their class, spec, and gear.

There are now a ton of people in the guild that I don’t know at all.  Where I used to be greeted with a chorus of hellos when I logged in, now there’s only silence.  And since I’m not raiding all the time with the cool kids, nobody wants to waste any time playing with me.  They’d rather be helping get gear and materials for someone who is going to be raiding with them.

I guess I can’t really blame them…  It is a game.  You are supposed to be having fun.  And I can’t expect them to waste their time playing with me if they don’t find it fun.

I’m really not terribly upset that they want to raid either – it’s the sudden and unexplained change.  Nobody ever said that we were going to switch to putting emphasis on raiding.  Nobody ever explained that the leadership was bored with seeing the same content over and over and wanted to see some new stuff.  Nobody ever told us that we were going to actively recruit raiders to replace our more casual players.

Instead, folks just suddenly started changing.  We had new people I barely knew as officers.  Old officers disappeared.  Long-time players stopped showing up.  And guildchat was now filled with raid strategies and statistics instead of humor.

So, now I’m not sure what to do with myself in WoW.  Once you’ve hit 70 you can basically either PvP or raid.  I’ve never been a big fan of PvP, and I really don’t enjoy raiding with these new folks.  I’ve got some alts that I enjoy playing, and I could level them to 70…but I’m not sure what the point is if I’m not going to play them once I get there.

I’ve said many times that I’d still be playing City of Heroes if I could afford to, and I’ve contemplated re-activating me account, but I’m faced with the same dilemma.  There’s still plenty of things I’ve never seen or done in CoH, and I’m sure I’d have plenty of fun on my way to 50 (or whatever the maximum level is now), but once I’m there it’ll once again be all about PvP or raiding – and without a group of people that I enjoy playing with raiding loses its appeal.

The same thing goes for EVE Online – I’ve wanted to play it for ages, but there really isn’t much of a point if I don’t have anyone to play with.

If it was simply a matter of killing time I could certainly find ways to occupy myself.  I’ve been having fun with Penumbra and Soulstorm, I’ve got plenty of books to read, there’s always something that should be done around the house, we’ve got our Netflix subscription, and if all else fails I could always watch TV…  But it’s also a matter of spending time with Terri.  Terri and I are both gamers, we always have been, and MMORPGs have been a good way to spend time together while getting our gaming fix.

I’ve always greatly enjoyed sharing the experience of killing something big and nasty with my wife.  Seeing some strange new vista together.  Wandering into the unknown together.  The shared experience was always far more enjoyable than doing it yourself – much like reading the same book and then being able to discuss it afterwards, or going to a movie together.

So, I’m now trying to find something fun and time-consuming…  Something with a good deal of replayability, vaguely RPGish aspects, some kind of multiplayer support…  Something that Terri and I could kill a few hours playing together.  And I’m having a fairly difficult time coming up with ideas.

I called in sick today, didn’t go in to work.  Instead I slept until noon and then spent the rest of the day trying to keep my head from exploding.  This cold-thing I’ve picked up from work is just plain nasty.  I’m not feeling nauseous or anything like that…  But my sinuses are plugged up and hurt like hell, I’m achy from head to toe, and I keep getting dizzy.  Not fun stuff.

I’ve been drinking tons of liquids, getting lots of vitamin C into my system, keeping warm, and taking medicine…  But none of it is making much of an impact.  I still feel like my skull is going to explode at any moment.

I sure hope I feel a whole lot better tomorrow…  I’m sure there’ll be plenty of work waiting for me.