Let’s just get one thing straight. EVE does look like she was engineered by Apple, so you could say she’s like Mac or whatever. But WALL-E sure as hell ain’t Windows. He’s Linux straight up.

1. Is this a marketing ploy? As several people have pointed out, this sounds a lot like a bait-and-switch routine. They advertise a draconian DRM scheme and then go ‘woops’ and slide in the scheme they really intended, now a lot easier to swallow. It’s certain that the sighs of relief are quite palpable and smell of money as gamers report they now intend to buy the game. Personally I do think it is a marketing ploy, a point I feel is supported by the emphasis of the new system’s feature of allowing discless play. To me it smacks of something they planned all along but I realize this is more of a gut feeling.
2. Is piracy really a lost sale? No protection scheme has ever worked for long. Rather than go into the statistics of sales before the game gets pirated I would like to say that those who habitually pirate will continue to do so and will never buy the game. I feel that the percentage of people who pirate due to prohibitive drm schemes is far greater than those who buy because they can’t get around said schemes. Additionally, the former are guaranteed consumers if you’d only stop crippling their product whereas the latter would most likely not buy the game no matter what you do. What is the smarter percentage to mitigate?

In the end, I feel that crazy drm schemes only serve to hurt sales, raise the bottom line with more licensing fees, and strangle legitimate customers and by extension pc gaming as a whole. Companies simply need to trust their consumers to support the product. I feel that the only group of pirates they can possibly hope to get to pay is the one that does so only to use the product in a way they feel is reasonable. I know several people online and in real life who would pay for something if it was offered and usable in the same way illegal downloads are offered and used. Music is a good example, if you give people an online download system and allow them to move it from device to device, they are more likely and more willing to pay for it. Overall, crazy protection schemes only serve to increase piracy.

Please, please, PLEASE you big companies out there who give us this stuff. Trust us! Don’t cripple your legitimate buyers! Stop basing your business model on litigation and copy protection! We do value original authorship, we do believe that creators should be paid for their work, we do want to support the things we like! Make us happy and we’ll give you money!

Footnote: Steam. The reason I don’t mention it in the main article is because many companies are implementing copy protection on a game-by-game basis and don’t have an overall method of handling content. Steam is the exception, and a remarkable one at that. I feel it is the future of pc gaming as it not only handles drm in a way that is not crazy, it uses the features of our connected world to enhance the gaming experience. I can reinstall my machine, or replace it, or whatever; download Steam and I have access to my entire catalog of games without digging for discs. I can buy gifts for my friends. I can run my lighter-weight games on a laptop. I can access my games from another computer assigned to my use for whatever reason, say a machine at my parents house when I’m visiting. I can even play my games when I don’t have an internet connection. The point is that Steam enables me rather than disabling me, and it is so effective I have even purchased a second Steam copy of some games I bought by other methods. Take a hint big game companies.

Now I’m going to be inherently hypocritical here by even posting anything about it, but seriously guys, you take this way too seriously. To the guys who hate it, get over it and stop reading it. No one cares what you think. To the guys who defend it, it’s not really that big a deal. If people like it they read it, if they don’t who cares?

Now to get specific. Yes, PVP started as a gaming/pop culture comic. Guess what — that demographic is pretty narrow. The amount of content you can really use is very small for a number of reasons, the two most major reasons for that is the only thing that REALLY changes about video games (at least in terms of overall style) is the content and secondly every possible joke on it has been done to death. As for pop culture, a lot of it can be pretty obscure. In any case I think it’s apparent that Kurtz is attempting to expand his audience so guess what, it gets watered down. So what? Save the “good ol’ days” for the rest home.

As for his stories, he uses continuity to generate more chances for jokes (sometimes) but you take the stories way too serious. Every story I’ve seen from Kurtz is presented in a sarcastic or satirical way. Sometimes it seems he tries to get tender but it’s never for very long. If you look at his stories in a less serious, less life-or-death way, guess what, they’re actually mildly entertaining which is more than we can say for 90% of the internet.

Let me know how this works for you.

Anyway, I felt pretty leet for a moment. Then I realized all I did was use Google.

-sigh-

Therein lies the direction modern computing seems to be taking. Not only is virtualization taking place (sort of) at a hardware level, the hardware itself is becoming ridiculously cheap. This opens things up to all sorts of hacks, the biggest of which is virtualization at an OS level. My machine right now isn’t very powerful by modern standards, however it would be easy and pretty worthwhile to setup VMWare and run a second OS at all times. I use two OSes back and forth a lot anyway and I’ve used virtualization in the past. Take this to an enterprise level and what do you get? Entire servers dedicated to virtualization running 10 or however many different operating systems for many different purposes, and end users none the wiser for the most part. Amazon’s S3 services, for example, allow you to setup your own chosen operating system. You get web services with complete root access all hosted by Amazon and, in theory, you could have as many virtual machines as you want.

OSX users may already be familiar with some aspects of this. Windows has a lot of constituents so you can’t operate in any sort of people interactive environment without having some Windows functionality. Bootcamp was the beginning but now with Parallels you don’t even need to restart your machine. Also, with the latest versions, you can even run Direct3d applications like video games; probably the biggest reason I’ve heard for not switching.

In any case, virtualization is becoming more and more commonplace and more and more integrated. Linux and OSX are working with Windows and while Windows is still the arrogant, business-oriented fraternity boy; virtualization is reaching it through such third-party apps as VMWare.

In the end, our ultimate OS may not be made by any one company, it may just be the perfect homogenization of all OSes.

Then today I saw another awesome article about the PS3. Researchers from Dartmouth and University of California at Irvine were implementing a much-improved vision algorithm based on study of the brain, their PC-only configuration took 3 minutes to identify a bar stool out of a scene. So they networked 3 PS3’s up to it and got their recognition time down to 1 second! It’s effectively real-time and is a very exciting development for robotics in general.

Now to be clear the Folding@Home client and the vision algorithm are written in a way that actually utilizes the processor’s 8 cores. According to a friend of mine, he wasn’t very interested in the PS3 because the Cell was ‘a mess.’ However as with most processor technology one of the biggest issues is programming. The Cell doesn’t do you any good if you don’t code for it. However, according to the whitepapers I was reading the Cell was designed to simplify this process. I don’t know any specifics so I can’t say how easy it might be, but the potential is certainly exciting. For myself I became far more interested in parallel programming as a result of this and am extremely interested in seeing/developing ways that utilize multi-core processors more effectively and especially more easily. I don’t know how possible it might be, but some sort of software layer or possibly even a hardware layer that implements algorithms that can break programs up into chunks automagically would be the killer app in this case. We’ll see what happens.