Category: General

Copy Protection

I found an excellent article summing up software copy protection. It’s written by Brian Hook, who’s site has a number of well written articles that I may cover later. But onto copy protection.

Like most of us, I love digital technology. The possibilities that it presents for the future are amazing, and the ability to preserve the past and make it available is also one of my favoite features of the digital medium. With the growth of the download speeds in the US with broadband connections, the ability to get intellectual property (music, movies, games, software in general) for free over the net has increased. This is all well known and well documented, and also better covered by thousands of sources out there. Moving on.

Brian Hook’s article covers software protection. He mentions at the beginning of his article that most any computer user has “pirated” at least $50 worth of software sometime in their user experience. Probably a copy of MS Office, or getting a copy of Warcraft II from your dorm buddy. Thinking back, I was way over that $50 before I was even a teenager. My friends and I readily traded back and forth games and their schemes for copy protection (usually some sort of manual look up (oh do I remember the days of “Page 32, Paragraph 3, Line 4, Word 13”)). It was natural almost. It’s not that we didn’t buy games, but it was generally understood that if we bought games, somehow our friends had copies too.

Fast forward to the 90’s where games got bigger (whoa, multi-media) and making copies was unfeasable, and my dialup was certianly not going to get me the latest Tie Fighter expansion. I bought during this period, after playing demos of games that I was interested in. Quake, Diablo and more. I played, knew it worked well on my system, and wanted more, so I bought it. I had the disposable income to do so in a few ways.

Nowadays though, sigh, I wish I could say I bought all of the software on my system. It’s not the case, and while I know I’m only one of hundreds of thousands with something I didn’t buy on my system, I know there is room for improvement. Taking a look around these days, if I need a new application to help get something done, I’ve started to look on Sourceforge first to see if there is an open source option for the program I’m interested in. Be it an FTP program, browser or random editing tool. I love this option. Also as my system ages, I like the option of demos for games. Independant software developers have always been good at this and I love the trend.

Back to the article, Brian does a good job of covering excuses, complaints and reasons of software piracy, but as well covers how improvements might be made to prevent losses, and as well as prevent alienating their paying user base with intrusive copy protection schemes and authorizing features. Excellent read, and worth the time.

The Hedge Knight

The Hedge Knight
I picked up this handy graphic novel collection of the comic adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s – The Hedge Knight. It was a short story in an anthology called “Legends” and someone saw fit enought to dress it up a bit and put it to print.

The story is set in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, but 100 years before the events of the novels. The story of a squire who takes up his dead knights arms and ends up doing a lot of harm and a lot of good.

I remember hearing about this adaptation a number of months ago but was glad to find it at my local comic store. It was the first time I’ve set foot in one for years. A bit of nostalgia, the sad realization that all those “hot” books I bought in the early 90’s are all worth… cover price or less. Sigh. Oh well. I’m kinda getting back into a comic kick these days. At least reading the collections and graphic novels. I don’t think I could go for another time of buying series and collecting that way.

Links again.

– Curmudgeon Gamer has posted the final article in their series covering the Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1. The author has gone and covered in depth each of the games in the collection, and presents relevent strategy.

– As if India’s software growth continuing wasn’t completely obvious.

– Apperently Intel think’s the the Interweb is dying and can only be saved by them!

– Even better, a new self-propogating computer “Worm now installs a packet sniffer so it can send back information, like passwords and logins. Great.

– Game commercials from the 80’s on for practicaly everything! Fun for nostalgia and more.

Google’s GMAIL

I recently got an invite from someone to Google’s Gmail service. It might have been hard to miss some of the hype surrounding it, but basically think of Hotmail, but with 1 gigabyte of storage, and not controlled by the Bill Gates empire. It’s web based, and the theory is that you won’t have to delete all your old e-mails, but since you have all that room you can store them and search them out later and keep all your old favorites around.

Anyways, since I have it now, I’ve also been given some extra invites to give to others. So… If you want one, e-mail me at nixon66 at gmail.com or leave a comment.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern RecognitionWilliam Gibson’s – Pattern Recognition

During a bit of random surfing I ran across Emilythink and read her review of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

I had the opportunity to see William Gibson when he was here last year promoting his latest book. He gave a quick reading out of it and signed a few autographs and answered the usual lame questions he must get frequently. (The larger the crowd in a QA time, the less intelegent the questions will be) I was impressed by him, being very tall and thin, but he’d blend into a crowd with ease. The nerd in me got the book signed (thankfully without the tacky “To Brian”, just his signature).

Pattern Recognition as covered by Emily above, was a great novel. Interesting in its modern setting, it might feel dated in a decade, but it really rings true with our current day connectivity. “Googling” people before it became vogue. Emily makes comments about Gibson’s jet lag theories, with were new to me when I read the book, but now I’m thinking that it will become my view of the lag. Your soul being left behind, and taking time to catch back up.

The book had a strong narritive, and was interesting in its portrayal of pop culture and trends and the seething of “hipness” from the narrator as she plows through her life. Damn good book. Now if only I could find my copy of it. I’ve got the slip cover hanging around, but I can’t for the life of me actually find the book and I’ve been having a hankering to read it again. Damn.

The Village

I went and saw The Village this last weekend. Having read about it before hand, I kind of knew what to expect, and I was sad that I had read a few spoilers for the movie.

M. Night Shyamalan’s movies are best seen the first time with little pre-knowledge going into them. Then they reward you with repeated viewings with little hints and clues that make the movie still enjoyable to watch. Another way to put it, Shyamalan rewards you for paying attention. Little small things, but they add up.

The Village though. Good and bad. I like the movie. It places second right now my personal list of his movies (with Unbreakable being the first). Good things: beautifuly shot, the pacing was great, pulled great performances out of his actors, and made for some great suspense. Bad things: I’m all for period pieces, but the dialect pulled me out of the movie too much, and I felt like it was too forced to be genuine, also he seems to be not as sublte with his “twist” endings anymore but lays it on heavy so you can’t miss it. Then again, I know that some people didn’t see it coming and were very suprised as to the twist.

Anyways, go see it. Bring your significant other. It’ll be fun.

Coffee Roasting – Victrola Style

I saw a coffee related article on Gizmodo and I knew I had to click it.

The article linked was from Tonx of Victrola Coffee. It’s a local shop up in Seattle, just down the street from where my wife works. They used to use beans from Vivace, a local Seattle coffee institution. Their shop has great ambiance, though I never felt as a barista that I’d ever be hip enough to work there, but besides that they had a nice comfortable setup. I’m glad to see they’ve got a guy tracking his coffee and communicating it to the wide world.

Also fun is that he’s a Word Press user, and he’s using the same template as me for his site. Quality.

Word Count

I found RandomURL through some obscure link clicking that eludes me now, but I found a link that made me smile. Enter Wordcount. Seems they’ve taken and done “an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words.” Kinda fun. Sad thing is, it looks like it’s been around since 2003 (At least that’s the copyright). Ah the wonders of the web, and the latency in discovering something on it.

Taking from the about section of the Wordcount page, the designer of it has his own very nice flash page, Flaming Toast. Great visual design and interesting navagation.

Bitnami