neckthrough

I think this thing has potential. Sure, there will be some stupid gimicky applications, but once the wow factor dies out I think it's possible to use this to really enrich the user experience for several gaming genres. As some have pointed out, it's probably not going to replace the traditional controller outright. No matter how precise the camera tracking is, humans are surprisingly inept at making accurate free-air gestures without some object to hold on to as leverage.

Good. Now I'll buy it. Holy crap, this is awesome! I'm getting this game for sure.

Yes, and the problem is that the definition of an "ideal" balance point is subjective. Many of us feel that the balance point content producers have found is tilted in a decidedly anti-consumer direction.

A quote from Stardock CEO about this (I added the italicized emphasis):

Well, frankly I don't blame them. In these trying economic times, companies are trying very hard to minimize spending and bring in as much revenue they possible. 21st century entertainment-business wisdom seems to dictate that pissing off and driving away customers is the most efficient and promising way to maximize revenue. Also bear in mind, Atari's primary competition is the behemoth EA, who has refined the process of screwing customers to an art form. Smaller companies like Atari can only hope to learn and keep up. Kudos to them.

FYI: 3 activations for MoW http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewt...4&forum=122

In general it's certainly true that user-friendliness usually implies hiding some control capabilities under the hood. That doesn't mean that the control isn't there or is not accessible at all. I didn't claim it did. I didn't claim it did. Many corporations (including the one I work for) use distros from vendors with a good record of providing support contracts. Let's not get personal. I didn't mean to provoke you. I merely challenged your specific assertion about the user friendliness of Ubuntu necessarily making it less capable than RedHat. They're both fundamentally similar GNU/Linux distros whose capabilities extend far beyond the small feature set you receive with the CD. All distros have access to the same massive open-source software pool. Some distros happen to be more convenient starting points for some sections of users, that's all. FWIW I would have had exactly the same reaction if you'd claimed that Suse is less capable than RedHat, or that RedHat is less capable than Mandriva. They're all similar, and you have the freedom to change whatever you don't like.

any OS that is more user friendly is necessarily less powerful. i don't use linux to play games or have fun. i use linux to develop signal processing systems. at one point red hat was the only NSA approved linux distribution for carrying out the types of missions i'm interested in (and fedora/red hat are essentially the same minus support). taks I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion that "more userfriendly == necessarily less powerful". What's the difference between Ubuntu and any other distro? Distros are just convenient starting points. You can build up any Linux system any way you want to. You can argue that the set of default packages that come on a Redhat distro suits your needs better than Ubuntu's default set. Or that you prefer the yum repositories to the apt repositories. Or that you dislike Ubuntu's use of proprietary blobs such as the NV driver (which you can choose not to install anyway). The entire point of GNU/Linux is that you can build and install anything the hell you want to. Ubuntu is no more and no less powerful than any other Linux distro. It's just a very nicely put-together package that appeals to Linux newcomers as much as it appeals to more serious users.

drove me nucking futs, too. however, if you are using your box for business purposes (well, business that doesn't require high-end 3D rendering), nvidia graphics solutions and drivers really aren't even necessary. no loss for me in particular, at least, not at the office. If you use Ubuntu's standard repository kernels as well as the auto-detected "restricted" Nvidia drivers from the respository, then the update process automatically does everything for you.

I'll second that, Flash has been a real nuisance on the 64-bit install I'm running on my mediacenter, but it works right out the box on a 32-bit install.

It does. You have to enter your DVD-key when you install the game and then it will "call home" the first time it is run. However, there might be an explanation for your lack of DRM - are you, perhaps, from Russia or the owner of a Russian copy? No, I'm from the US and have a US copy. I wasn't asked for the key at install, all I did was set the directory and clicked next. Maybe I just forgot, but I don't remember it asking for the key. Are you sure you didn't get a Swedish copy by accident? j/k, no offense to anyone.

This sounds really amazing.

Yes, I am almost positive that would be the case. Hell, you have to be an Administrator to even run the game if you have the Steam version. What he said. You do need to use an Admin account to install the game. Once they're installed, though, most games will *run* happily with a regular user account. The SecuROM process continues to run as Administrator, because on installation SecuROM sets itself up as a system-level service that activates on startup. You never know that it's running because it hides itself from the Task Manager, the file system and Add/Remove programs, and IIRC it's very hard to get rid of its keys from the registry. It also doesn't get uninstalled even if you uninstall all SecuROM-based games on your system. "I feel fantastic and I'm still alive".

I'm sorry. I misread your tone. The wikipedia article is trying to explain that despite being called a "root"-kit, its purpose is not to allow an unauthorized user process to hack into an uncompromised system and obtain root access. For example, I cannot walk up to a system I don't own and wrest admin privileges by using a rootkit on a USB drive. Unless I have root access on the target machine to begin with, I cannot install a rootkit on it. A rootkit is usually installed unwittingly by a system user that already has admin privileges. For example, if I'm running IE as Administrator on a Windows system and manage to reach a malicious website, the website could potentially use some exploit in IE to install the rootkit on my machine. Another example is if I install a piece of software (which you almost always need to do as an Administrator on Windows), the software could maliciously install a rootkit without my knowledge. Once the rootkit is installed on my system, however, it owns me. A well-designed rootkit can be completely invisible to you and to any antivirus. Unlike a virus, the purpose of a rootkit is usually not to cause any immediate harm to your system, but to lie dormant and keep your system in a compromised state for future ease of access to a hacker, although there's probably some overlap in terminologies. SecuROM gets into your system when you install the game as an Admin. If you didn't have admin privileges, you couldn't install either the game or SecuROM. Edit: Here's the Wikipedia overview of a rootkit, verbatim. I've bolded the bits that I believe are applicable to SecuROM as well.

You're a coder, you know the answer to that. It runs with root privileges. Unless you've encrypted your data it has access to your complete system. Of course, tens of services run with root privileges, but these are all visible and need to run as root to keep my system running. SecuROM makes every effort to hide itself both in the process space as well as the file system. But you know all this. If you have a genuine criticism of my logic or paranoia, you could have asked me the question directly instead of posting a sarcastic remark.

I don't think anybody is defending the right of pirates to infringe on the copyright of game companies. They obviously don't have such a right - I don't think that's really in question here. Yes, absolutely. I don't even understand why we keep bringing up this question at all. I do remember a couple of pro-piracy posts, but by and large my impression has been that the discussion in this thread has been based on the fundamental notion that copyright infringement is illegal and unethical. Nobody's trying to challenge this. If anyone feels the need for a discussion on the merits/demerits of intellectual property, copyright law, and personal ethics w.r.t. intellectual property, I think there should be a separate thread for it. They do have some generic vagueness in their EULAs about the potential use of some software to safeguard their intellectual property. It doesn't describe exactly what the software does to the average user. Which is why most regular users do not care. If they read on the box that the game installed a piece of software that could read their tax documents, personal pictures, videos, and every bit of data under the sun that they store on their personal computers, and that the software is able to contact the parent company and transfer any data that it wanted to without their knowledge or consent, and that it could take over and disable not only the operating system but also physical devices on their machine, I wonder how many users would be willing to put up with it. It's like your television manufacturer asking for your home keys when you buy a TV from them. Sure, you can trust the manufacturer, after all, they're a big well-known corporation, why would they want anything from your home. But you still wouldn't give them your keys, would you? Yes, your PC isn't the same as your home, but MANY users have a lot of important personal data on their PCs today. If they knew the true extent to which SecuROM had access to your machine, I'm not sure they wouldn't think twice before purchasing the game. I read recently that the FTC (or some other org) was trying to force publishers into explaining the nature of their copy protection in more detail, and on the retail box instead of a fscking EULA. I suspect it's still going to be vague though. Seriously, SecuROM ain't all that different from a trojan, it fits almost all of the definitions of a trojan. Sony tried this crap once with their copy-protected audio CDs, but thankfully they had a class-action slapped on them and they lost. Bastards.

Hmm, a possible trojan from a torrent site vs. a guaranteed trojan from EA... which one's worse? I wonder. (Don't bother answering that, it wasn't a real question.) In all seriousness though, from 50,000 feet they aren't all that different. They both install themselves in a way that they can take complete control of my computer, that I purchased, and where I keep my personal information. EA has absolutely no business touching my computer. In general I'm opposed to DRM for a mix of practical and idealistic reasons, but I'm willing to live with non-intrusive implementations that give me certain value-additions (e.g. Steam). Crap like SecuROM, on the other hand, enrages me to an entirely new level. I cannot believe it is legal and I cannot believe people are willing to put up with it. The rampant copyright infringement that is prevalent today is indeed a serious problem, but installing rootkits on customers' computers is not the solution. I honestly believe installing spyware on a user's computer without their knowledge is in my view easily as despicable a crime (if not worse) as illegally copying a piece of IP for personal use. /rant (just a general rant, I wasn't challenging anything particular you said. I know what your stand is.)

I disagree that this group is small in size. It seems to me that the latest DRM methods specifically target this group, with limited installs and whatnot. Heck, even the CD Copy Protection was done primarily to combat this, as it prevented people from simply copying a CD to another CD. It's no coincidence that CD Copy Protection measures became more common when CD burners became more common. This was definitely true in the past, but I think times have changed. 10 years back very few people had multi-megabit connections and torrents weren't popular, so DRM would be a major annoyance to anyone that wanted to copy a game. Today anyone that wants a free ride will just queue up a torrent. The notion of "casual copying" is just not that common anymore. This has a positive effect too - I'd say Amazon MP3 et. al. have significantly reduced the amount of casual copying of songs from friends.

But I'm not sure if that group itself is that large. They are a vocal minority, sure, and they wield the power of the internets. But I have a pretty good feeling that 90% of customers don't care about limited installs and all that. They just want the game to work when it is put in the PC. That's probably true. But because the vocal minority have made their sentiments abundantly clear, we're beginning to see EA back down on its increasingly draconian practices. This is a win for *all* consumers, not just the minority.

These groups are not mutually exclusive. Well, yes and no. The guy that downloads the torrent from Pirate Bay doesn't care if the original game had DRM or not, he's getting a clean uninfected version. The guy that wants to borrow/copy a game from a friend does care and would be pissed off with DRM, but I would think that this group is pretty small in size. Also, many people in this group would probably resort to torrents once they figure out they can't get games from friends. Once they start file-sharing, DRM is a non-issue. I certainly believe that the largest set of people that are most vehemently and vocally opposed to DRM are genuine pissed off customers.

Ipods sound like crap. Not sure if its the inbuilt amp or the earbuds. Probably a combination of both. Damn things look so sexy though... I haven't listened to any of the Creative players, but from what I've read they're supposed to sound quite good.

From the article that Mamoulian posted: Interesting.

This is great news! I can live with serial keys just fine. Now, if only they'd do this for a game I actually cared for...

That's sort of what I mean. With the possible exception of WOW that I've never played (though I doubt it'll prove an exception), no Blizzard story is actually any good as a story. They're just generic mediocre stuff. Put Starcraft's plot next to FO3's and... okay, yeah, Starcraft's plot will still be better because it actually makes sense, but uh, let's move on. What SC did well was use those briefings and such to really deliver that story well. What I guess I'm trying to drive home is that it is Blizzard's excellent direction of voice acting, art style and cutscene editing, as well as making good choices on when to tell the story, how much, and when to shut up (as opposed to overindulgent Hollywood wannabes a la FO3 ending and Guild Wars cutscenes, which were actually hilarious if you looked at it as a parody of generic fantasy). And I think their writing itself gets overhyped because of their ability to deliver. With Boyarsky on board for Diablo 3 and such I am quite interested to see what happens when Blizzard's ability to deliver stories meets... a well fleshed out and complex setting. Yeah Guild Wars' cutscenes were so bad they made me cringe with embarrassment. Blizzard's stories are straightforward and generic, but the dialogues are well-written and presented well. They do a good job of tying the gameplay together, and blending into the background once the gameplay kicks in. It'll be interesting to see if they can pull off a real RPG where the story is in the foreground.

Source: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...82E16813130183R Is it because it's built-in that it's automatically ? Or is it the brand that's important? In which case this built-in sound = or..? Feel free to explain. FWIW I've been using an MSI board with an older SB Live integrated onto the mobo and it's stellar. Audio quality is superb -- the DAC seems to be a lot better than the standard Realtek 7.1 integrated sound cards, and I haven't had any problems with drivers in Windows or Linux.