things
http://imgur.com/gallery/zBD2S
So if you knew one country on the list had a PM who owns half the media and has a dubious penchant for underage girls, which one would you guess it was?
In other news, there is a games company called Ubisoft who are releasing some game with terrible DRM requiring a constantly active network connection. It is quite likely that a certain hacking group will DDoS the servers on the day of release. But I don’t recommend this option. It 1) is illegal, 2) disrupts people who just want to play the game, and 3) generates publicity *for* the game. A better avenue for protest is Amazon reviews. If the average review score is lowered, then a lot of casual/uninformed shoppers are just going to skip over it because it has only one star. This is honest and fair, because restrictive DRM does severely degrade the quality of the experience and therefore the value of the game (as a product). If you agree, write a quick review saying so.
In other other news, I have been EXERCISING. We have a step machine (stepping? stepper?). I used it yesterday for 10 + 2*15 minutes (40), and today for 20 + 15*2 minutes (50). What I hope to gain from this is general physical well-being (and stamina). I will start work at some point and it will probably kill me, so I thought it would help if I was in better physical shape. Not that I am fat, in fact on a scale of 1-10, my fatness is 0. I am in deficit of fat. But that doesn’t mean I am in good shape, because it turns out there’s more to ‘good shape’ than ‘not being fat’. Your body has to learn how to efficiently turn oxygen into activity and it doesn’t do that by simply not being fat. Also, it might make me feel better about myself just if I’m doing something other than F5ing Slashdot when I’m bored. I wouldn’t say it has so far made me feel better. It has made me feel noticeably more tired. And my calf muscles ache a bit. urrrrrrgh. But this is good I think. It means it is having an effect.
Fallout New Vegas DRM
I’m a hardcore Fallout nerd and I’d like to play Fallout New Vegas. But I have a problem. Fallout New Vegas it relies on a program called Steam. Steam is basically a digitial shop and integrated social networking for games. It’s probably okay if you are interested in its features, but they’re only really of use for multi-player games. In the case of many games that depend on it, Steam is merely a means of enforcing entirely artificial limitations on what the user can do while providing no benefit whatsoever to the user, AKA DRM, digital ‘rights’ (restrictions) management. Steam is a particularly obnoxious form of DRM because at its core, what’s going on is: you buy a game from a shop, you take it home, install it, and then you have to install and open Steam which asks a server in America whether you are allowed to play the game you bought. Imagine if you bought a car then had to phone up the showroom every time you wanted to drive it. It’s a wholly unacceptable way to do things.
The developers will happily offend their customers because they think it will reduce piracy. So the pivotal question is: does it work? Is it effective enough to make it worth reducing the value of your product? Does it turn more pirates into customers than it does customers into non-customers? Well let’s see, New Vegas was released in the US on the 19th and Europe on the 22nd, and, a torrent to the cracked version was uploaded to The Pirate Bay on the 19th at 19:25GMT, or about 14:25EST. So there you have it, it was cracked 14 hours after its release date in the US and 2 days before its release date in Europe. Currently there are about 18,000 people downloading it. Even better, the cracked version doesn’t require Steam at all, so the pirates offer a better product!
I bought the collectors’ edition of Fallout 3. I paid full price for the game on release and then I paid a bit more for the bonus DVD, the lunch-box, the vault boy bobble-head, and the art book. I love Fallout. It turned out F3 wasn’t exactly the second coming of Christ, but it was entertaining. I would love to buy New Vegas, but any game that depends on Steam or in any way implements artificial constraints and controls over how the user is allowed to use the software has a value to me of precisely £0.00. Unfortunately my connection is too slow for me to be bothered with downloading it, so I won’t be playing it until either they release an official non-Steam version or I get a faster connection.
Similar story for Civ V.
