Actually, it is sort-of useful to get an old supercomputer. If you have the space, cooling and power for it - it's a great development and teaching platform, as well as letting you do trials or smaller runs without taxing your allocation on the bigger, national/international HPC systems.

I recently had the pleasure of giving away about a third of our recently replaced HPC cluster to the physics department of the university I work for, and they were very very happy indeed. (in norwegian)

I do agree with the conclusions of TFA, although I think there are some holes and misunderstandings in it.. but, over the course of the last decade or so, any will whatsoever to offer guidance and help to "the entertainment industry" has vanished completely for me.

Reason? I've realized that this industry is not in the business of making content, but about _controlling_ content. They pay the creative people who make the content for the rights to control it, and through that ownership extract earnings. They are, effectively, a middle man who contribute nothing to the audience side of the equation, and their contribution to the creator side is merely as financiers and facilitators, a role I consider purely administrative.

I don't see why I should offer my experience and advice to them, unless they pay me to do so. I say let this industry rot if they can no longer operate successfully. And actively fight them, if they try to undermine the average citizen's freedoms in the process. Focus your funds and energy on supporting the creative people who actually make the art, encourage them to sell it to you directly, write to them and ask them as a fan to make it available to you in the form you want, so you an actually pay them without you or them being swindled by their pimps^Wdistributors.

..but I'll wait until a non-evil version appears.

Kindle just doesn't do what it should, and I'll never pay anything for anything that says "Sony", at least unless they publicly apologize and display a convincing understanding of where they went wrong.

While I agree with you that online-only play is one strategy that could work for a lot of games, I have to take issue with it or any other radical measures beeing seen as necessary for the PC games market 'to endure', as all the figures I can find seem to support my gut feeling that the PC gaming industry is bigger than it has ever been.

If there are companies that really feel that they struggle because people are downloading a copy rather than buying it in the officially provided format, then I humbly propose that those companies do some unbiased analysis of why people won't buy their packages. Could it be that people love the game, but hate the packaging?

Typing a long license number is the least problem when it comes to "copy protection".

The "CD-burning software stopping to work" issue you are mentioning was the StarForce protection scheme which basically replaced your cd/dvd driver with a modified one (without asking your consent or letting you know, ofcourse). This is a perfect example of the utter lack of respect for anyone or anything that a lot of proprietary software industry has for its clients. Far from being unique, this type of "copy protection" that actually sabotages the users operating environment is quite widespread.

I suspect that the decision makers who orders these sorts of things installed in their products are the least competent people to do so, since they are 100% management and 0% technical in their understanding of the problem. "People steal our games, so let's install some bear traps and landmines in them so people won't try to copy them". What they don't seem to want to face, is that all these traps are removed before the copying really starts. There is no method at present for avoiding your game being cracked and distributed, and in many, if not most cases, the paying customer gets a poorer product than the pirate, because of invasive and annoying copy protection schemes which invariably are ineffective against the warez scene anyway. The only reasonable way of insuring that most or all of your users are paying for the product is to make the game rely on online servers which have access to the payment details. You cannot have an offline/single player mode. You cannot have private servers. You cannot become so successful that people will bother to reverse engineer your protocol and write their own server software.

Having been an avid gamer for 25 years or so, I am convinced that the biggest selling titles are also the ones who are copied the most. I rarely, if ever, buy a game without trying it properly first. So my simple advice to games publishers is to keep sticking to the old serial number validation, and forget disc checks and other similar measures. They only cost you extra money and gets you nothing in return (other than hostility from your core demographic) Rather than make it hard for people to user and maintain their software, you should make it easy to pay and play, and don't force people to run unrelated software (like "EA Download Manager" or Steam or such 'agents'). The only logical way of dealing with this is to make it a hassle to crack the serial code validation, if you can, but not implent anything that will hinder the use of the product. Hope that people like your product enough that they want to buy it after trying it.

Same thing here, except i use one or two monitors, and 3x3 desktops with the Expo plugin in compiz, meaning i have 9 or 18 desktops depending on my location

Ctrl-Alt-arrow to navigate, ctrl-shift-alt-arrow to move current window, Meta-E to get an overview of all the desktops.

After doing this for some months, using any less than four desktops feels very restricted. Using something which only has _one_ desktop and a lesser window manager (like Windows) feels like trying to do the Macarena while handcuffed.