Whispers from the Wild

The idea behind Reaganomics – which Bush and McCain believe in – is as follows.  You put wise people in charge, you give them the money, and they work out how to trickle it down to everybody else.

Let me show you in one very succinct paragraph why that’s a load of rubbish.

Say you give me $10m and total control over it, and the poor under me have no ability to influence how I use it.  What, from my point of view, is the sensible way to distribute this cash?  Give it all to the poor?  HELL no.  I’ll take as much of it as I possibly can, stick it in MY high interest savings account, where it earns ME money, and to hell with the poor.

That’s why this “bailout” plan Bush keeps pushing can’t work.

It certainly looks like a good game, and a very good experiment.  In fact, despite the outrageous price (the space edition of Spore is $79.99) I was at Future Shop the other day interested in getting hold of a copy.

Until I read the back of the box, and was alerted to the fact that it uses Digital Rights Management to “protect” itself against piracy.  I decided to do a little more research on the system used.

The BBC have a good article about it, basically the digital rights system permits each copy of the game to be installed a maximum of three times.  Along with other, more normal details, the DRM transmits the serial number of the individual CD Disk to Electronic Arts during the activation sequence, so that even if your system gets wiped, or you have more than one machine, the limit is three installs per purchased copy.  Although it can’t write to the CD Rom, what it does is each CD Rom has a unique serial number which is included in the serverside activation.  If the server has received this number more than three times it refuses to grant the passkey to the enquiring system in order to activate the product.

Needless to say, there has been a tremendous backlash from games players.  On Amazon for instance, the game has been voted down massively due mostly to the DRM.  Naturally there are some people who will try and vote it up purely because it’s a good game, but that misses the point.  All well-selling games are good games.  Only Spore so far has treated it’s purchasers as criminals needing draconian control measures.

It should also be noted that if you don’t have an internet connection at all, don’t bother to buy the game.  There’s no ability to play it without activation, and activation requires an internet connection.  Because the serial number is embedded within the DRM, this limits the ability to use phone activation in a way not seen before.  If you purchase Windows and didn’t have an internet connection or couldn’t get it working, you could call Microsoft over the phone, give your license number and get an activation key dictated back which you then entered onto your machine to activate the product – by the nature of the DRM that doesn’t work with Spore.  It’s possible if you’re prepared to go through a long, drawn out conversation with EA to activate it, but it’s not something that a novice user should have to go through, and God help EA if they put that feature on a premium charge telephone line.  Even if you overcome this, it is not possible to have multiple logins on one machine.  With our World of Warcraft accounts, it’s possible for me to login on Andrea’s machine, or her to log in on mine in the event that one machine or the other has a problem.  This is not the case with Spore.  Each installation is locked to the account name that activates it.

Which is also a killer for Children.  Because the installation is locked to the activation ID, you can’t put saved games on another media – USB Pen Drive for example – and go play your saved game on another machine.  No popping over to a friends house to enjoy an afternoon of gaming, EA won’t permit it.  Try explaining to children how they can’t play on your machine because it will ruin your gaming experience… I guarantee you they won’t be terribly understanding about it.

No, Spore held great promise, but I’m simply not interested in paying a company what amounts to a rental fee that’s only valid for three installations.  Companies do put a lot of time and effort into games, and I do not condone games piracy that stops a company getting its fair due in return for the hours of fun a game provides.  But this is going too far.  When you buy a game, you own the rights to play that game in an unlimited manner, up to and including selling it on privately.  When you buy a game it shouldn’t matter if you own one machine or one hundred machines.  It shouldn’t matter if you have a single computer in a bedroom that you play on all the time, or a main machine, laptop and machine at work on which you’re permitted to play games during break times.  You are paying the company for the unlimited right to play the game so long as you aren’t profiting off it (for example by pirating or by selling the copy you bought but keeping it) – you’re not paying the company for limited rights to install at the companies permission.

Electronic Arts, I like many other gamers, will not put up with this.  I left Future Shop with the copy of Spore I looked at sitting right back on the shelf, and I have no intention of considering Spore for purchase unless and until this DRM system is reliably patched out.

I was talking with someone a few days ago who raised a very interesting point about anti-abortionists.  The fondness they have of referring to themselves as “pro-choice” promotes the concept that they want to let the fetus have a ‘vote’ in its termination.

Well, guess what:  it’s totally irrelevant.

Why?  Because of that thing called the “age of majority”.  No, it’s not a computer roleplaying game, it’s the age which, by law, a person becomes able to make their own decisions.  Some places it’s 16.  Others it’s 18.  Still others it’s 21.  Nowhere is it within the first nine months.  Up to that point in time, the decision legally rests with the parent or guardian of the underaged child.  So even if you regard a fetus still developing and unable to exist outside the womb without medical miracles as a child, it still legally has its decisions made for it by its parents.

The point of anti-abortion is to make up the parents mind for them – by legislation and making abortion illegal if possible – and try to somehow claim it’s all “giving the unborn a voice”.  But when a baby is born it still doesn’t have any legal rights to have its voice heard until it reaches the age of majority.

Just another example of the sham that is anti-abortionism, and what Sarah Palin and John McCain are fighting to force on parents throughout the United States.

Digital Subscriber Line.  DSL.  Also known as “broadband on the cheap”.  I absolutely hate it.

The major problem these days with broadband is that companies won’t spend the money on laying a proper backbone outside cities.  So those away from direct cable links have to either have expensive satellite links, or DSL.

DSL is notoriously picky.  It shares its existence with a phone line, which means that every phone has to be filtered, and it’s not good at sharing with wireless handsets, particularly the cheaper ones.  Miss out a filter or have a really bad wireless base station or handset and your DSL life will be a misery.

But it gets worse than that.  Last week I went to a person who had, until recently, had DSL for years without a problem.  All of a sudden, one day, the DSL light on his modem went out and didn’t come back on again.  When I trained with British Telecom I learned that a major cost is involved to telecommunications companies in providing the extra voltage that DSL requires to carry a high speed, consistent DSL signal.  Some companies who want to cut budgets have adopted a rather nasty technique, whereby they lower the voltage over a period of several months, until complaints of cut services start coming in.  By doing that they save a few pennies here and there by cutting the cost of the electricity used, but at the expense of their customers.

I’m all for cutting costs, but the nastiest element to all this is plausible deniability.  And the worst part about that, from a customer point of view, is the “script monkeys” these companies have working at outsourced call centers in different countries.  These people have absolutely no idea what DSL does, how it works or how it’s set up, they just follow the scripts on their screen.  If there’s an ambiguous area, a “grey” answer to a black and white question, they’re totally lost.

This was Bell Sympatico, a company who we’ve had problems with before.  From the chat I had with their script monkey, company policy consists of three stages:

1. Try and blame the customer.  Has any hardware changed?  If so, if for example you’ve plugged in a USB microphone, then oh dear it’s all YOUR fault.  Bell Sympatico won’t support your DSL problem because you’ve plugged in a (whatever it is) which isn’t their equipment.  Unplug it, put it all back the way it was, then call in again and get another script monkey who hasn’t a clue that you’ve already been through this stage and will ask you all the questions again
2. If you can’t blame the customer, find someone or something else to blame.  A really popular trick here is to refuse to continue the diagnosis until the customer has used their own money to gamble on buying replacement parts that probably aren’t faulty in the first place.  Case in point, in this particular case the script monkey fixated on the cable between the DSL modem and the wall, and refused to go any further until we’d changed it (at our expense) – and then called in again to go through the same procedure with another script monkey.  He was only convinced this wasn’t an option when we told him that ALL the cabling was put in by Bell and so if something was faulty, it was their equipment and their responsibility – but given half a chance, he’d have blamed someone elses wiring, someone elses wall socket… and in fact ANYONE else just so long as it ended the call
3. If you can’t blame the customer, and can’t find any other person or piece of equipment to blame, then put the customer on hold for “second line support” for over half an hour, in the hopes they’ll end the call before getting through to someone who can actually book an engineer.  For goodness sake don’t let the customer talk to someone who can actually help

I should add that all this followed us getting tired of waiting for the engineer to arrive.  An engineer had been booked for the day I was supposed to be sorting out this machine, and this call to support finally revealed that the engineer had already claimed to have been and found no problems – a blatent lie since we’d been waiting for him.

There are just so many things that can go wrong with DSL that I won’t touch it at all.  If forced to make a choice between DSL and Satellite, even though satellite is more expensive I have to say I’d go with that.  DSL and the companies that maintain such bad, outsourced support, is more trouble than it’s worth.

Our Rogers high speed uses exactly the same model of modem that our Telewest cable broadband used in the UK.  They’re stable, they’re easy to diagnose, and there’s practically nothing that can go wrong with them.  A quick log on to the modem can diagnose if the problem is in the modem or the signal the modem is getting (for goodness sake, this modem can actually give a signal strength level – why is that conspicuously absent in DSL modems?).  Cable is, by and large, stable (capacity problems at the ISP not withstanding) and it’s easy to spot problems.  DSL is a minefield, full of ways to blame other things.  It’s safe to say that ALL the connection equipment we have is owned by Rogers, so if we can’t plug a laptop directly into the modem and get a connection, the problem lies with Rogers’ equipment, and its their duty to sort out.  This kind of cut and dry case discourages the ISP from shifting blame and gives a generally better customer satisfaction level.

I hate DSL, I really do.  And the companies that use it.  The best advice I can give is make it a last possible option for broadband wherever possible.

As a footnote to this entire sorry tale, the customer decided to cancel his DSL and go with cable.  Less than an hour later, his full service suddenly, miraculously came back on line.  If this isn’t an obvious “Quick, turn the voltage back up” fix, nothing is.