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Comment Re:What to do (Score 1) 572

by Necreia (#32192744) Attached to: Steam Client for Mac Launches, Linux Client On the Way

I know you're trolling, but I'll give it a go...

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, teach, I know these ones!
  How is we can take your games back at any time for no reason good DRM?
One's man 'no good reason' is another man's good reason. Provide some cases so we can judge on the merits, not your wild rantings.
  How is asking permission to play with your legally purchased toys good DRM?
Fuck, I don't even know what this means. Start Steam-->Start Steam game != 'asking permission'.

You can't install the game if you can't communicate with Steam server. You have to -Ask Permission- to install/'activate'

What happens if Steam goes offline?
You get to play your games. Seriously, the servers were offline yesterday, and I was quite busily shooting people in the face.

If you're already installed and in offline mode, yep. But you surely can't reinstall in this situation.

What happens if there's simply a screw up and you loose access?
Like, what, forgetting your logon details? That would just make YOU stupid.
  You have no legal recourse due to the contract you signed.
Spouted like someone who's never had to sit through contract law classes. Leave the hard work up to the adults, mmkay?

I don't know where you're going with this. You don't own the games provided by steam, you rent them. So, GP is right.

You have no first sale rights without Steams approval.
Whoa! Something approaching a useful point. Yes, that's technically correct, but I could theoretically 'give' or 'sell' my Steam account to someone else, without any hassle from Steam, so I'm not sure how histrionic we need to be.

All-or-nothing. You can't buy 10 games and sell 1.

Steam is the worst possible DRM.
Spoken like somebody who does fuck all gaming these days. Ever hear of Securom? You know, the DRM that keeps getting front page articles here on Slashdot? Yeah, I think that'd win a poll of 'Worst DRM' by a landslide.

I'll semi-buy this. The difference is, you buy those games and battle DRM. You rent these games and battle DRM.
Image

Oil Leak Could Be Stopped With a Nuke Screenshot-sm 799

Posted by samzenpus from the lesser-of-two-disasters dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast, a Russian newspaper reports. Komsomoloskaya Pravda, the best-selling Russian daily, reports that in Soviet times such leaks were plugged with controlled nuclear blasts underground. The idea is simple, KP writes: 'The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well's channel.' It's so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn't work once."
Security

Fake Antivirus Peddlers Outpacing Real AV Firms 245

Posted by kdawson from the catch-me-if-you-can dept.
An anonymous reader tips a writeup at KrebsOnSecurity.com detailing how purveyors of fake antivirus or 'scareware' programs have aggressively stepped up their game to evade detection. The posting is based on a report from Google's malware detection team (PDF). "Beginning in June 2009, Google charted a massive increase in the number of unique fake antivirus installer programs, a spike that Google security experts posit was a bid to overwhelm the ability of legitimate antivirus programs to detect the programs. Indeed, the company discovered that during that time frame, the number of unique installer programs increased from an average of 300 to 1,462 per day, causing the detection rate to plummet to below 20 percent. ... In addition, Google determined that the average lifetime of sites that redirect users to Web pages that try to install scareware decreased over time, with the median lifetime dropping below 100 hours around April 2009, below 10 hours around September 2009, and below one hour since January 2010."

Comment You can experience a game (Score 1) 733

by Necreia (#31902716) Attached to: Roger Ebert On Why Video Games Can Never Be Art

"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite an immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."

Tic Tac Toe? Generic FPS? Perhaps. But there are plenty of games that have either a unique artistic approach or interesting story that you can experience when you win. Heck, Final Fantasy 13 is almost exclusively a movie.

Has he never seen a "Choose your own adventure" book? Ugh.
Government

EU Piracy Estimates — Just How Inaccurate? 124

Posted by Soulskill from the pirates-across-the-pond dept.
Last week we discussed news that a US government report questioned the reliability of piracy statistics from the media industry. Reader superapecommando sends in a follow-up written by Glyn Moody that examines a similar problem in Europe. Quoting: "As far as I know, no similar analysis has been carried out for European reports. So I thought it might be interesting to look at one particular European report on the subject — not least because I've heard that its findings influenced some of the MPs voting on the Digital Economy Act. ... the net result of this 68-page report, with all of its tables and detailed methodology, is that four out of the top five markets used for calculating the overall piracy loss in Europe draw on figures supplied by the recording industry itself. Those apparently terrifying new figures detailing the supposed loss of money and jobs due to piracy in Europe turn out to be little more than a re-statement of the industry's previous claims in a slightly different form. As a result, as little credence can be placed in the report as in those criticised by the US GAO."

Comment It's because Windows IS easier for a greenhorn (Score 0, Troll) 742

by Necreia (#31888262) Attached to: Why Linux Is Not Attracting Young Developers
Young developers are typically interested in Game Development of some form. C# & DirectX[XNA] is worlds easier than the (usual) counterpart of C++ & OpenGL. It's a sad direction, but it's the result of 'path of least resistance'. They are typically not aware of the engines/options actually available when they are newbies.
PC Games (Games)

Ubisoft DRM Problems Remain Unsolved 430

Posted by Soulskill from the think-of-is-as-encouraging-you-to-find-a-new-hobby dept.
ocean_soul writes "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial 'always on-line' DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keep growing daily. One reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promise of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday." Or perhaps that it's wise to avoid games with such DRM altogether. So far, Ubisoft hasn't shown any sign that they're reconsidering the requirement of a constant connection. They've recently said it's "vital" to the success of their games and promised that their DRM would "evolve and improve" over time.
Networking

Ubisoft DRM Causing More Problems 279

Posted by Soulskill from the there's-a-lesson-here-that-nobody-will-learn dept.
Joe Helfrich writes "Ubisoft's Settlers 7 servers have been causing problems for over a week for users worldwide, and Australian gamers are hardly able to connect at all. 'The problem reportedly strikes after the game has already confirmed an active Internet connection, and prevents the user from playing even the single-player campaign, returning the error "server not available." But they are available, because other people are logged into them and merrily playing away.' Wonder how they're going to describe this one as an attack."
Space

Is Mimas Hiding Pac-Man? 99

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nature-is-a-strange-thing dept.
cremeglace writes "Shaped into the likes of the Death Star of Star Wars fame by the giant crater Herschel, 396-kilometer-diameter Mimas was expected to have its warmest surface temperatures on the equator, where it was early afternoon. Instead, it was warmest in the morning (all of 92 K), giving rise in the science team's temperature-calibrated color scheme to a very large Pac-Man."
Microsoft

Anti-Piracy Windows 7 Update Phones Home Quarterly 819

Posted by kdawson from the who-owns-your-computer dept.
Lauren Weinstein sends in news of a major and disturbing Microsoft anti-piracy initiative called Windows Activation Technologies, or WAT. Here is Microsoft's blog post giving their perspective on what WAT is for. From Lauren's blog: "The release of Windows 7 'Update for Microsoft Windows (KB71033)' will change the current activation and anti-piracy behavior of Windows 7 by triggering automatic 'phone home' operations over the Internet to Microsoft servers, typically for now at intervals of around 90 days. ... These automatic queries will repeatedly — apparently for as long as Windows is installed — validate your Windows 7 system against Microsoft's latest database of pirated system signatures (currently including more than 70 activation exploits known to Microsoft). If your system matches — again even if up to that time (which could be months or even years since you obtained the system) it had been declared to be genuine — then your system will be 'downgraded' to 'non-genuine' status until you take steps to obtain what Microsoft considers to be an authentic, validated, Windows 7 license. ... KB971033... is scheduled to deploy to the manual downloading 'Genuine Microsoft Software' site on February 16, and start pushing out automatically through the Windows Update environment on February 23. ... [F]or Microsoft to assert that they have the right to treat ordinary PC-using consumers in this manner — declaring their systems to be non-genuine and downgrading them at any time — is rather staggering." Update: 02/12 02:08 GMT by KD : Corrected the Microsoft Knowledge Base number to include a leading 9 that had been omitted in the pre-announcement, per L. Weinstein.
Role Playing (Games)

Dragon Age: Origins Expansion Coming In March 80

Posted by Soulskill from the well-met-warden dept.
ishanjain tipped news that BioWare has announced an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, called Awakening, that is due out on March 16th. Awakening "is supposed to run about 15 hours and will allow for players to import and edit characters they've broken in from the core game," and it will take place "in the in the role of a Grey Warden Commander who's been tasked with rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and finding out how the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon." A trailer is available at the official site, as well as some information on a new bit of DLC that will be out shortly, entitled Return to Ostagar. (It was originally due for release on January 5th, but was delayed.)
Government

Ireland's Blasphemy Law Goes Into Effect 845

Posted by Soulskill from the joe-pesci-is-angry dept.
stereoroid writes "As of January 1, it is a crime in Ireland to commit Blasphemy. The law was changed in July 2009 to fill a gap in the Irish Constitution, which states that it is a crime but does not define what it is, an omission highlighted in a Supreme Court decision in 1999. To mark the occasion, Atheist Ireland published a list of 25 blasphemous quotations on the blasphemy.ie website, from such controversial figures as Bjork, Frank Zappa, Richard Dawkins, Randy Newman, and Pope Benedict XVI. (The last-mentioned was quoting a 14th Century Byzantine Emperor, but that's no excuse.)"
Data Storage

HDD Manufacturers Moving To 4096-Byte Sectors 442

Posted by CmdrTaco from the zomg-the-world-will-collapse dept.
Luminous Coward writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, according to AnandTech and The Tech Report, hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries."

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