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-James

How Spore ruined Christmas (or, DRM fail!)

Posted by james on Dec 9, 2008 12:00 AM

I found what I thought to be a great gift for this coming Christmas. It's a video game called Spore by the creator of Sim City and other games. It's been highly anticipated, and some friends of mine told me how fun it was to play. You can guide the evolution of a single celled organism all the way up through civilization and space exploration. Sounds awesome and interesting. But I'd also heard some issues with the DRM it uses, so I decided to research it.

Turns out Spore uses a DRM technology that means you have to authenticate it on the internet in order to play it. Originally they wanted to authenticate all the time, and if Spore was unable to contact the authentication servers for 10 days then it would disable itself. This is a horrible idea. Granted, many people will play online and wont have to worry about this. But there are plenty of times you might want to play disconnected, and how awesome would it be to play the game on a plane or at a house without internet only to have it shut off. Lame! They loosened that so now you only have to authenticate when you install and when you play online. Still a stupid idea. If you have to reinstall and don't have internet at the moment, you're screwed. They also limited the installs to 3 times. 3!!! When you run out, then you either have to call them up to ask them for an extra authentication (which they may or may not give, at their discretion), or you're screwed. Again. After a lot of controversy, they upped the limit to 5 installs. Yeah, great.

Besides the idiocy of the Spore's DRM scheme to begin with, the bigger concern here is the longevity of Maxis' (Spore's publisher) authentication servers. What happens when Maxis turns the server off? The argument they would make is that they wont turn the servers off. But that's a load of crap, not even they can guarantee that. They could go out of business, or more likely after a while it wont make business sense to keep the servers running. So they notify all users, "Thanks for playing our game. Now buy something else, 'cause we're turning it off forever." And then you're screwed.

Many people would argue that a "big company" like Maxis won't turn off the servers anytime soon, that that would be commercial suicide. And yet, it's happened with companies like Walmart, Yahoo, and Microsoft. All of those companies have had DRM authentication servers online for just a few years, and then decided to turn them off. "Thanks for paying us for music. Unfortunately, you wont be able to listen to it anymore. Have a great day!"

While those companies have made decisions to extend deadlines or offer gift certificates to reimburse users, the point here is that you cannot count on a companies servers to be online forever, even a company as big (and seemingly permanent) as Microsoft. Many people have stated that you cannot buy DRM'd content; you are only renting it. And I agree with that statement. If another company has control over whether you can use the content you "bought" from them, then you're really just renting it until they see fit to remove your access. And there's no guarantee that you'll be given any kind of reimbursement.

Maxis has stated that they hear their customer's frustrations but hope customers understand that DRM is a necessary part of their business model. I'd say "we don't", but I can't really include myself in "their customers." I will not be buying Spore, for myself or anyone else, so I'm not really one of their customers. I've decided that I wont be buying any kind of DRM'd content that has these problems. Those companies simply do not deserve my money, and do not deserve to profit off their rental content masquerading as content you can buy. Quite simply put, it's just a lie they tell to make a sale. I've talked to car salesmen before and I've had enough of that, thanks.

Fixing no mic sound on a Dell Inspiron 1420 (or similar?)

Posted by james on Dec 4, 2008 7:58 PM

I had a friend call me today for a problem on their Dell Laptop. They were using Skype and could hear & talk fine using the laptop's built-in speakers and microphone, but for some reason when they plugged in a headset they could hear fine but the other party could not hear them. My first thought is that they're using a USB headset and Skype is not recognizing the second audio device, but they were using a normal non-USB audio headset.

So I poke around on their machine, and have her connect her headphones. The computer gives a (ginormous, ugly) popup for the sigmaltel sound control panel, showing the 2 (yes, 2) headphone jacks and the 1 mic jack. It shows that she has 1 headphone jack plugged in and 1 mic jack plugged in. But I still can't hear here on Skype. After playing around with Skype sound settings, I go back to the sigmatel control panel. I click on the microphone jack, and it gives options for "Line In" and "Mic". "Line In" is selected, so I select "Mic" and it works! The "mic" jack on the laptop comes configured by default to act as a "line in" jack, which is what you use to connect CD players and iPods into the laptop, but not microphones. It had to be manually switched to "Mic" to be compatible with the mic in the headset. It's not just a matter of levels; electret mics need a voltage supply to operate, so w/o the voltage you will get no signal at all.

So that's that. Dell is stupid (yet again), ships their laptop with a bad default setting (honestly, do they really think the line in is more used than the mic?). But more importantly, the sigmatel software is something no computer newbie would know to go poking around in. They should revamp the UI so you could see all the options avaiable to you w/o having to click on drop downs, and they really should offer a wizard. Without a wizard, most people aren't going to know what settings they need.

Christmas Tree!

Posted by james on Dec 3, 2008 12:00 AM

9 pictures.

Enabling WPA on a Dell Precision M50 with a True Mobile 1150 wifi card

Posted by james on Nov 21, 2008 12:00 AM

I was just helping a friend by fixing is old Dell laptop, and I ran into a problem. It would not connect to my wireless network, and when I went in to manually add it I noticed there were only Open and WEP, but no WPA. The Truemobile 1150 card technically supports WPA, so I figured I'd download the newer drivers. I logged into Dell's site, entered the service code and found a list of drivers.

There was a Truemobile 1150 "utility", which was no more than a useless diagnostic utility, but no drivers. Finally, searching got me a forum link that found the updated Dell Truemobile 1150 drivers, dated 12/15/2003. The ones on the laptop were dated 7/1/2001.

Why didn't Dell put these updated drivers in the list for the Precision M50? Why do they have such incredibly bad support? This isn't the first time I've run into this kind of nonsense, and compared to my other experiences this is relatively benign.