The interview (as opposed to the article) is at least a little more interesting.

There is nothing fancy here but he is trying to explain about the distinction between between running five tasks at once (a classic "threading" model), and splitting one task into five work units.

Many common threading models in video-game engines do not reduce latency; eg, "render thread", "audio thread", etc. You get a big win from doing two or three threads, but after that your physics takes an entire frame, or your rendering takes an entire frame, and you bottleneck. No matter how many more CPU cores you throw at it, those fixed number of threads are not getting any faster.

Nine women can't deliver a baby in one month, etc etc.

Hardly groundbreaking, but still a nice achievement given the state of most video game engines out there today. Burnout Paradise runs at 60hz with very low latency between input and screen. That's worth some kudos.

What, you mean like ActiveX and code signing? Anything goes, as long as the user knows it's dangerous?

The era of "trust the user to make intelligent decisions" is long gone. I would argue that it never really existed in the first place. Computers are for people who don't want to know how the computer works. They don't want to see Big Scary Dialog Boxes where they have to make the Right Choice or else their system could be compromised.

The onus is on application developers to minimize the frequency of scary choices, and to mitigate the impact of a wrong choice as much as possible.

There will always be malware that wants to install itself, websites that spread misinformed "security" tips, scammers who trick people into making wrong choices. And of course there will always be buggy or exploitable code.

Increased testing is useful. Increased architectural safety is MORE useful.

No, because the submission is unreasonable inflammatory rhetoric made by someone who thinks that he is much smarter than he really is. The explanation for all the "problems" this user is having is PEBKAC, not DRM.

You need to give your customers what they want, but not necessarily what they ask for. There is often a very gulf between the two, and unless your customers are professional designers they are very likely to mistake one for the other.

The job of a designer is to incorporate feedback and continually improve the design. That does not mean implementing every request, but rather addressing the root problem that leads to the requests.

In other words, don't give people a free hint button if playtesting shows that it reduces overall accomplishment. Figure out why people are finding certain puzzles so frustrating, and do something about that instead. Or else incorporate the hint mechanic in a way that rewards players for using it sparingly.

The submitter is trolling, and all the arguments about DRM are pointless. This has absolutely nothing to do with DRM.

Gears of War is, like all "good" Windows programs (according to Microsoft), a signed executable. It is also a game with online multiplayer, so it has an integrity check that tries to make sure you're not playing with modified game files (eg where all walls are rendered transparently or the player models have 50-foot-high red arrows above them).

The integrity check has a simple bug. It expects the signing certificate to be valid based on today's date, instead of on the date of signing. That's it.

It has nothing to do with rights or intentional expiration. Many other applications with expired signing certs work perfectly well.

It's just a bug. Please shut up about DRM.

Surely everyone who plays video games has had at least one "Tetris effect" moment in his or her life, where you see something in the real world and think about how to solve it according to the rules of the last game you were playing.

Maybe you played a stunt-based car-racing game and later thought about how sweet a jump would be if you drove your car up a ramp. Or maybe you played an adventure/puzzle game and then looked around a room and wondered if certain items were "important".

It's impossible to claim that that video games are perfectly compartmentalized in the human brain and do not transfer any weight into real-world decision making.

That's still a long way from saying that video games desensitize people, or that violent games promote real-world violence. But the brain definitely connects things that it learns inside a video game to other situations in the real world. That should not be a shock to anyone.

Well, it might work if you keep telling your neighbors that.

Uhh, TBC came out in Jan 2007. It is now Nov 2008.

They announced that they would LIKE to do yearly expansions. So far there is nothing yearly about them.

"these people are powergamers. they do it with an attitude more serious than any job they work in"

Actually, in the case of this guild, it is their job. TwentyFifthNovember is a sponsored "pro-gamer" team.

Thanks for reading them through for someone whose brain shuts off after the first page break of a scanned document :) It sounds like the complaint is based on prior versions of SecuROM, so I'd be interested as to what comes out of the discovery phase. I guess I'll keep a news alert out on it in case something interesting crops up.

The problem is that the information in all the other posts is of the "I found this on the internet and haven't tested it" type.

I would happily accept that if it weren't for the fact that I have a copy of Spore Creature Creator installed and my Daemon Tools work fine, my Process Explorer works fine, and none of the files that these instructions tell me to remove even exist.

The problem is that I don't believe the article, because it's written by someone totally clueless as to how his own computer works.

Interfering with the firewall? It made an internet request, and the firewall popped up an accept/reject box. That's exactly what it's supposed to do (internet authentication), and the firewall is working exactly as it should.

It hides a folder in Application Data? Try this on for size: the Application Data folder is hidden by default. Furthermore, the files in the Application Data \ SecuROM folder have a README.txt explaining exactly what they are and what they are used for.

It disables Process Explorer? No it doesn't. It doesn't let you run the game until you reboot if you have run an old version of Process Explorer, and that was fixed a long time ago (by Microsoft) as of Process Explorer v11.

The only thing that site has under Player Stories is a bunch of people saying things like "My XXX software doesn't work or is buggy! I blame SecuROM!". The claims (it disabled my antivirus! my hard drives crashed and my dvd phyiscally broke!) border on hysteria and don't offer any more solid proof.

All I want is someone to actually look at the SecuROM protection that comes with Spore or Mass Effect and then tell me why it is bad, without falling back on "I heard that SecuROM does terrible things!"

Well, I've installed Mass Effect PC and Spore Creature Creator, and I don't have any of those files or registry entries.