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Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."
Bug

Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files 126

Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."

Comment Fortran rocks (Score 1) 794

Many years ago I did a real-time military radar simulation using a flavor of Fortran. At the next job, I helped build a stratigraphic wellhole analysis package using Fortran. At the third job the team built a package that predicted thermal, radiation and other propagations through hardware, wetware and urbanware. At no time was there more than 4 people in the development team. Fortran has done serious work over the years, and people forget there's more to life than the GUI.

Comment Re:PR (Score 1) 169

Dunno why the parent is marked as a troll. They're not being paid to humanise the face of Gates, they're being paid to remind the world that Gates Sr exists, because Gates Sr has a book published next week.

Comment Re:The corner of Irrelevant and Nonsensical (Score 1) 327

iPhone is popular in Japan, but the market works against it: It's carried by Softbank, the #3 player in the market after Docomo and au. Softbank's market share means that the #1-selling phone on the Softbank network for any particular month is around #25 among all phones in Japan. For most new phones, the peak sales period is the first 6 weeks after release. After that, the numbers plummet. In contrast, iPhone has been Softbank's best-selling phone month after month. So, among the people who are in a position to buy it, it's popular. SB's got around 18 million subscribers. Because of the way phone contracts are written, people keep their phones for just over 2 years. So each month, iPhone's maximum potential market is only 720,000 people.

Comment iPhone is popular, but it's in a small pond (Score 1) 884

iPhone is popular in Japan, but the market works against it: It's carried by Softbank, the #3 player in the market after Docomo and au. Softbank's market share means that the #1-selling phone on the Softbank network for any particular month is around #25 among all phones in Japan. For most new phones, the peak sales period is the first 6 weeks after release. After that, the numbers plummet. In contrast, iPhone has been Softbank's best-selling phone month after month. The only product I've identified with a similar sales profile is Softbank's 815T, a Toshiba product with replaceable covers that has been selling in reasonable numbers for around a year. Therefore, in terms of the market available to it (i.e. Softbank subscribers), the iPhone is a very successful product. It does miss many features Japanese take for granted, such as 1seg, but it succeeds despite that. In Japan, form over function can win through.

New Congressional Bill Makes DMCA Look Tame 895

An anonymous reader writes "Representative Lamar Smith is sponsoring the Intellectual Property Protection Act. The new bill is designed to give the Justice Department 'tools to combat IP crime' which which are used to 'quite frankly, fund terrorism activities,' according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Among the provisions is lowering the standards for 'willful copyright violation' and increasing the corresponding prison term to 10 years." More information is also available at publicknowledge.org.

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