Yellowstone Trip

Last weekend, I went on a motorcycle trip to Yellowstone. I went to Butte on Friday, had a pint and a calzone with some good friends, and stayed the night. On Saturday I left Butte just before sunrise, and took the Interstate to Livingston. There I met up with one of my former classmates on his new Honda Shadow, and from there we headed down to the park. We spent most of the day sightseeing in the park, including a stop at the Old Faithful lodge for lunch, and to see the geyser erupt. It was a pretty good day, except that my clutch cable broke as we were heading out of the park. I managed to limp to West Yellowstone, where we spent a couple hours trying to find a new cable. I was eventually able to modify the linkage so I could work the clutch with my foot. Starting from a standstill was quite awkward, but my friend and I were able to get back to Butte. We stayed the night at a friend's place, then hung out for a while on Sunday morning before I headed to Missoula, where my folks met me with the pickup truck to haul me and my bike back home.

Even though my bike came home in the back of a truck, it was still an awesome weekend. I went just a bit more than 800 miles in the saddle in three days. When it was all said and done, I was exhausted, sore and baking in my leathers, and I can't wait to do it again.

Why I haven't upgraded to Vista

Let me count the reasons! Windows XP isn't really that impressive, but its vast user base has had the better part of a decade to learn how to deal with its shortcomings, and in its current state is one of the better operating systems Microsoft has produced.

1. Licensing and activation - XP was already a pain in the ass for this, and the process of calling some n00b in India to activate Windows after X installs/hardware changes could tax even the most patient person's sanity. At least corporate users don't have to put up with this bullshit.

2. Genuine Disadvantage - XP fell victim to Microsoft's lame attempt at reducing piracy, and unsuspecting customers with mass-licensed Windows installations (Dell, HP, etc) found themselves assaulted by little pop-ups with colorful logos accusing them of piracy. Vista's implementation would almost completely lock the user out of their computer. Apparently this "feature" has been recently scaled-back, but the bottom line is that Microsoft has the ability to revoke your right to use your computer at any time. No, thanks.

3. DRM - My feelings on Digital Rights Management are no big secret, and Vista bends over backwards to support invasive DRM schemes, to the point where these ridiculous schemes even affect your hardware.

4. System requirements - XP was considered to be horribly bloated and slow when it was released, and Vista is just more of the same. Sure, software is written to look good and perform well on modern hardware, but why can't it also scale well? Ubuntu looks amazing on my Athlon64 rig with 2 gigs of RAM, and runs butter-smooth with all the fancy effects turned on, but it also runs perfect on my old P-III laptop with no effects.

5. User interface - XP has a decent interface (except for the insane blue/green default color scheme), but all of the under-the-hood stuff is a bit inconvenient to access. With Vista, it feels a lot like they've just shuffled things around. Most things are no easier to access, just moved around. There is no advantage, just the pain in the ass of having to re-learn where everything is. Even something as simple as turning the PC off - the red "I/O" power icon doesn't bring up the shutdown dialog like it does in XP. Instead it suspends the OS, as if that would disguise the five-minute boot times. Once you get used to it, it's no more convenient - just different. Office 2007 pulled the same shit with their little pulsating uber-button in the upper left, that duplicated some of the functionality of the File menu it replaced.

I used to use Windows on all of my computers. Now, there are only three computers in this residence that have Windows (and all running XP at that) - my gaming rig, my brother's MacBook with Boot Camp, and my dad's PC. The only reason I still use Windows at all is for gaming. If Linux/WINE could run all of my games reliably, I would ditch XP tomorrow and forget about Vista forever. My dad's computing expertise goes as far as what button turns it on, how to use Firefox and how to read email, and I'm fairly certain that he could transition to Ubuntu much more easily than he could learn to use Vista. Not that his 5-year-old P4 rig could run Vista anyways.

While I'm at it:
6. Forcing the upgrade issue - Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP, but many businesses are dragging their feet when it comes to upgrading to Vista. Partly because it's still relatively new and unproven, and partly because in most cases it would mean spending massive amounts of money upgrading large numbers of workstations.

In an industry that moves at such a fast pace, voluntarily staying off the upgrade bandwagon makes me feel like an old codger geek, going around muttering to himself about VAXen and "kids these days" and all that. Is it so much to ask for an operating system that's lightweight, stable, reliable, and free of overly-restrictive licensing/registration/activation schemes?

Rights, and the Digital Manifestations Thereof

WARNING - wall of text ahead!

So, Spore is coming out soon. I've been waiting somewhat impatiently for this game since I read about it in PC Gamer a couple years ago. It's Will Wright's latest masterpiece, and it looks like it just might eclipse many of his earlier works of genius.

There's just one problem - the game is being published by EA, who have decided to include a ridiculous "protection" software called SecuROM. The original scheme was for the game to re-authenticate every ten days to make sure you haven't turned into a filthy software pirate in the week since you installed the game. The 10-day interval has been dropped, but the game can still only be activated three times.

So, if I were to buy this game and install it, there's one activation gone. What if I reinstall my operating system, or my hard drive dies? That's two activations. What if I upgrade my video card, or processor, or add a wireless network adapter? That's another activation. Or is it? No-one but EA and the publisher of SecuROM know exactly what hardware changes will trigger a re-activation.

Restricting a customer's use of software in the name of preventing piracy is commonly referred to as "Digital Rights Management". One wonders about the origins of this term - specifically, the word "Management", and whose rights are being managed. It may be the rights of the copyright holder - to receive due credit for, and profit from, their creative work. This is a noble goal, and the publishers can hardly be blamed for pursuing it. But, the implementations of this "management" often conjure a very different connotation - that the end users' rights are being dealt with as one would "manage" a noxious weed or an outbreak of genital warts.

The idea is to make software piracy as difficult as possible. Unfortunately, even the most brutal, invasive copy-protection schemes rarely buy more than a few days before pirated works begin appearing on Bittorrent trackers and alleys in developing countries. The end result is that the software is pirated anyways, while paying customers are saddled with software that's a pain in the ass to use.

The worst part is that the pirated wares (or maybe warez?), with the copy-protection fooled, crippled or outright removed, may actually perform better than the commercial version that the customer paid his or her hard-earned money for. How bad is it when the pirate gets a better user experience than the paying customer?

I'm not convinced that piracy is as big of a problem as the software industry is claiming, but it's a problem nonetheless. It is obvious to me that something should be done to deter piracy, but it is also obvious that these ridiculous, customers-be-damned measures are not the way to go.

So, I'm faced with a problem - what to do about Spore? It is a game that I want - that I've wanted for a very long time - but now that release date is less than a month away, I'm not sure if I'll be making the purchase. I suppose I could purchase a copy so that I would have a valid license, put it on a shelf and install a copy that's more...convenient, but it's reasonable to assume that a fully-functional, valid copy would be necessary to access the online functionality and content.

Is Spore's online content and extended functionality worth jumping through a few hoops? From what I've seen and heard, yes. Is it worth the risk of stuffing up my operating system install, then dealing with EA's toll-based tech support just to reinstall the game if I've already used my three installs? I'm just a bit doubtful. What if a large portion of their customer base decides to boycott the game? My money would be on EA blaming piracy for lagging sales, and try to screw their customers even harder the next time they publish a game.

This presents me with quite a dilemma: if I (and large swaths of the PC gaming community) boycott games with DRM to make a statement, publishers will continue to use the piracy-is-killing-us excuse to keep screwing their customers, driving more of us away with each new release. They may eventually stop developing games for PC. I could give a shit if Halo 3 never came to the PC, but I would sorely miss being able to play games like Crysis and GTA 4. Then again, if we keep buying games with DRM, publishers will screw us anyways in the name of the bottom line.

One final note: the Spore Creature Creator (a demo with a small portion of the game's functionality) has the same protection, and pirated copies of it appeared on Bittorrent trackers a couple days after it was released. The significance of this? The protection has already failed. All the energy devoted to employing this "protection", and the coming backlash from legitimate customers, was all for nothing. They know damn well it's pointless, little more than posturing to appease the shareholders.

This is not my first rant on DRM, nor is it likely to be my last.