Tag: DRM

Macworld 2009 Roundup

Paul

I’m not a really big fan of Macintoshes but I thought I’d share with you what happened at Macworld and what is coming out this month after the announcements. So here’s the run down on Macworld Expo 2009:

  • [ad#ad2-right]17 Inch Mac Book Pro (Buy it From the Amazon Store) — “$2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive” and They have a battery exchange program for those who have bad batteries.   Engadget has some really good video’s of this new Laptop.  I also looked around Slashdot did a really good job on the summary of what happened at Macworld.   They are claiming it will be able to run 8 hours on battery but I will wait to see what people say after they get there hands on this.

  • I-Life 09 (Buy the older version from Amazon 2008) — Today at Macworld, Apple showed it off.  You can see the photos from Gizmodo and it looks nice.  Some of the stuff this can do is Facial Recognition, also use it with Flickr and Facebook.   Geotag Reversal so it can look up where you took the picture and pin point it on the map for later reference.  I-life 09 will cost 79$ solo or 99$ for Family.

  • Garage Band 09 (Buy Garageband 2008 Tutorial DVD from Amazon) — Some very popular guitar artists teaches you how to play a guitar.     Some Names that teach you how to play are Sting, And Noah Johns.  You will be able to buy more lessons on Itunes for 3.99 a lesson!  Not bad if you want to teach yourself.

Last thing and this is really important, Itunes will begin selling 3 tiers of songs 69 cents, 99 cents, and 1.29$ depending the popularity of the songs.  Apple also dropped 8 Million Songs from DRM.  They expect to have it up to 10 Million songs buy March.  Apple will also sell songs over the air on the Iphone 3G (Buy the Iphone 3G fro Amazon), so you no longer have to have your computer near you to buy a song.    This is about all Apple talked about at Macworld Keynote, if you have any other things that I missed buy all means leave a comment.

Rumor is that Itunes will Remove DRM!

Paul

[ad#ad2-right]A report from last week brought to AppleInsider‘s attention by French technology site ElectronLibre asserts that it’s now “clear” Apple will spark new interest in its music store by removing DRM from tracks published by Sony, Universal and Warner on December 9th.

[Via Apple Insider]

Although, this is somewhat unlikely I’ve got my own theories on this.  You see If Apple did this tomorrow that would be a BIG deal, due to the fact that Microsoft will be releasing there patches on the same day.  I find it would be a momentous occasion.

[ad#ad2-left]I can only guess why and the guess is just a guess.  If Itune’s did remove there DRM the same time as Microsoft Patch Tuesday, I’d have to guess they will co-inside because of the difficulty of using the DRM, Digital Rights Management, on other products.  For example, Windows Media Player .  If Apple decided to approach Microsoft and come up with a way to make sure all DRM is stripped this would be the ideal situation.   Although this is highly unlikely, I’d have to think Apple wouldn’t wait till tomorrow to strip the DRM.  They know Microsoft schedule.  We will have to find out in the coming days.

GTA 4 Causes fatal error mma10, how to fix it!!

Paul

[ad#ad2-left]After seeing all this happened I thought I would help people out on how to fix it.   This seems to be a DRM problem according to some reports.  Others are thinking it is the Securerom.  Anyways the problem seems to be with the Rockstar Social Club and not to log in to that.  That will fix the problem, you will at least be able to play the single player game.  This is a temporary fix till the developers fix in the update.  This will also fix the Steam version of the game.

Is Spore Worth 49.99?

Paul

So I been doing a little digging and trying to find out what the heck people are complaining about and I found some great reviews telling me exactly why people hate EA.  They don’t necessarily hate Spore or Will Wright, but the Security around The Spore game.

So In a couple of these comments.  These reviews talk about Creating the creatures and All.  I’ll submit some of the reviews that I thought was relevant and let you decide for yourself.  I would however wonder the one big question?  Is Spore Worth the Money?   Here’s the details that I know of right now:

[ad]

  1. You can only install it 3 times before you have to call EA to get an override code.  (Although I heard rumors that if you unistall it, you will get a credit for an Install)

  2. You can not Install new hardware or upgrade your hardware because if you do, it’ll count as an install, According to this one person.

  3. The game only allows 1 login per Install.  So you can’t have more than one character and one universe according to this person.

  4. Part of the Copy Protection prevents you from taking your saved games off your computer and taking it over to your friends house, according to this Person.

  5. On the Mac Version, it tends to breaks subsequent versions of the system services according to this one person.

According to Amazon the reviews aren’t pleasant.  I tend to agree does this mean there are going to be even more people pirating it because they don’t want the DRM or Is EA going to send out a patch to fix this.  I am curious as to see how EA responds to all this NONE TOLERANCE to DRM.

After seeing all these reviews of Spore, I tend to agree with everyone.  I’ll probably wait and see before I buy my copy.  All the reviews however don’t look promising or even makes the games look like it wouldn’t be fun.

NBC-Vista copy-protection snafu reminds us why DRM stinks

Paul


The serves as a unsettling reminder that broadcasters can give instructions to the software built into DVRs, although they almost never do. Many DVRs and other, similar devices appear to be aware of the content-restriction flags set by broadcasters, even if they’re not programmed to “obey” them by default. Still, broadcasters would love to have the power to stop users from recording their shows, watching them later, and most importantly, skipping commercials when they do it.

[Via Arstechnica]

Yes that is right DRM does stink, I found this article to be a great reminder of how unrealistic it is that we should need DRM. Oh well, I’m just going to have to live with DRM!!