« Cartoons | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | The man who knew too much »
November Gets on the Treadmill
Here. Personally I’d have mixed it with the theme from Rocky.
Cartoons
EA Denies DRM Problems With Sims 2
[Quote:]
“For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony’s SecuROM DRM software in the latest expansion pack, Bon Voyage. It seems paid customers have been having problems since day one of release, but EA is only now, 5 weeks later, issuing an official statement on the matter. A lot of what’s in the statement is outright fiction with proven reports of issues with disabling of disc burning software, optical disc drives, printers, cameras, system slowdown and even system crashes. Fan responses have been cold to say the least. Interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after it’s release.”
And once more the pirates not only deliver a product that is cheaper, but also of much higher quality: it actually works.
Total Music, Uh-Huh
[Quote:]
BusinessWeek has a story — “Universal Music Takes on iTunes”1 — regarding a supposed proposal from Universal Music chief Doug Morris to create a music-industry-owned subscription service called Total Music. BusinessWeek twists the story into pretzel-like contortions to present this scheme as clever and reasonable.
While the details are in flux, insiders say Morris & Co. have an intriguing business model: get hardware makers or cell carriers to absorb the cost of a roughly $5-per-month subscription fee so consumers get a device with all-you-can-eat music that’s essentially free.
So hardware makers will “absorb the cost”, rather than passing the cost along to consumers. Uh-huh.
Daring Fireball continues to rip it to pieces much better than I can, except perhaps for this quote I’m stealing from Slashdot:
So we have:
* Free as in speech (you’re free to do what you want with it)
* Free as in beer (you get it for free)
* And now there’s free as in Sony (we’re free to fuck you after we have your money)No thanks, Sony and UMG.
*M*i*r*r*o*r* *W*o*r*l*d*
Fox News: Gore’s Never ‘Actually Done Something For Peace;’ Give Petraeus The Prize
[Quote:]
Yesterday, after suggesting that Gore has never “actually done something for peace,” Fox ran a chyron advocating that a different American be awarded the peace prize: Gen. David Petraeus.
In the segment, Neil Cavuto hosted New York Sun editor Seth Lipsky, whose paper ran an editorial this week saying that Petraeus deserved the prize for his attempts to “save the nation of Iraq.” Lipsky said that Petraeus “deserves” the award “as a representative of G.I. Joe” because American troops “go overseas to liberate, they go overseas to make peace.” He then added that the use of “fighting” in a war doesn’t undermine the “idealism” of the Nobel Prize:
LIPSKY: I can’t think of anything more directly responsive to the idealism of the Nobel Peace Prize itself than the kinds of liberation and peacekeeping that our G.I. Joe and G.I. Jane has had as a mission since World War II.
CAVUTO: So, you say Gen. Petraeus, not Al Gore?
LIPSKY: I say Gen. Petraeus, not Al Gore.
[..]
When Alfred Nobel established the Peace Prize in his will, he specifically outlined the criteria by which the recipient should be chosen:
The prize for peace was to be awarded to the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses.”
Petraeus is the architect of Bush’s surge, a plan that has increased the number of forces in Iraq.
So to recap: Alfred Nobel’s definition of peace: reduction of standing armies. Fox News’ definition of peace: war without end.
I’ve had an interesting e-mail exchange with another (dutch) game developper, after having installed their game Overlord – which also uses SecuROM. The game worked for a week, then wouldn’t start. SecuROM told me my config had changed – it hadn’t of course – and it wouldn’t allow me to play the game. I asked both SecuROM and the software company to provide a sollution. They wanted a copy of the receipt and game disc, which I sent them.
Then they sent me a utility which would gather info on my setup and send that to SecuROM. There was no way for me to check what soft of info was actually gathered and sent, so I reclined. They weren’t much help after that. In the end I told them I found the perfect sollution to my problem: I installed a hacked version of the game found on internet, one which no longer used SecuROM, and only then was I able to do that which I had paid for: play the game.
The company replied I wasn’t being very cooperative, and should have made an effort to solve the problem with SecuROM. I didn’t bother to tell them they are insane, don’t show they care for their paying customers, because they really don’t seem to get it. I will never buy a game again which ‘features’ stuff like SecuROM – I learned the hard way.
http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/start.php?&openItemID=item.211,root.1,item.61,item.104,item.41,item.127,item.23&startRow=1#9f84f6dfde22e5794fba10d4b169ac39
Lots more simmers with this same problem, securom