DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) was introduced some years ago, and pulled headlines e.g. with Sony’s “invisible on the Running Processes software” that was secretly installed onto computers when a music CD from Sony was loaded. I personally bought a number of songs on iTunes a couple of years ago only to realize they’re unplayable on my main machine because it doesn’t support DRM. Since then, it seems iTunes music is DRM-free, but I’m still wary of touching the thing again.

Game software copy protection goes far back beyond that, of course, and in contrast, GCP (I invented this acronym, probably) can be justified a bit more. Music is something that we, on a nearly instinctual level, love to share with each other, be that by playing together or listening together or simply showing each other the kind of stuff that makes us feel certain ways. Music is such an integral part of the human society that’s been with us for as long as we’ve had hands to play with or mouths to sing with. The industrialization thereof is perhaps the most critical error of ours. Games on the other hand may have been with us for a long time (Go for example dates back to the 4th century BC), but it’s not as intimately associated with sharing as music. That said, game piracy of course thrives just as any other software piracy does, and the game developers seek new methods to battle the piracy.

Most recently, Ubisoft, the makers of titles such as Assassin’s Creed, have decided to take this a step further, thus evolving the DRM. Rock Paper Shotgun has an article on the subject of how Ubisoft not only restricts the player from starting the game without doing an online check to verify the game has not been pirated, but it even throws the player out of the game if their internet connection at any point in time drops offline, while playing.

I actually think that’s pretty awesome. I mean, the balls required to do that? Not to speak of, the conviction that their players will be loyal to the point of ridicule, that they buy the game anyway. Reminds me of Metallica.

To most people, there are two options out there when it comes to computers — Windows or Mac OS. The former is cheaper (in the sense that its hardware is cheaper) but stable as nitroglycerin (improving, but I’ve yet to meet a Windows user who doesn’t regularly reinstall Windows and/or suffer from crashes or failures sporadically). The latter is more expensive, tightly controlled, but prettier. And more stable. And unless you’re a gamer, or simply used to the former, there’s really no reason to go with anything else, unless you treasure money over convenience. Then to some of us there is also linux, the open source alternative. It’s great, unless you want to play games on it, in which case it blows monkey brains.

Personally I’m the monkey brain blowing type, and I know how bad that sounds. I used MS-DOS and then migrated, unwillingly, to Windows, and from there I bounced back and forth between linux, which was a reeking pile of clusterfuck poured delicately over a yummy-looking pile of maggot-excrement and Windows. Still, linux did beat Windows even then, because Windows back then was about as useful as a web server made up of glued-together sheep wool and saw dust, with no ethernet port, and so finally linux is where I remained. Mac OS was like an unfathomable, lurking beast in the village marsh — I knew about it, I’d even seen it occasionally, touched it once or twice, but … as a kid I happened to like games, and Macs just didn’t have much of that back then.

This was back in the ’90s though. Ten years later, I find myself running Ubuntu 9.10, released about 4 months ago, and it feels like I installed Windows 3.1 all over again. The new pulseaudio service that is supposed to handle what ALSA cannot, is filled with wagons after wagons filled to the brim with stinking diarrhea, stretching to the horizon and beyond, steadily and irrevocably being injected into my blood stream. It – literally – fucks – with – everything – I – do. It fucks with mplayer, it fucks with Firefox, it fucks with World of Warcraft, it fucks with Skype, it fucks with Ventrilo. It literally clusterfucks itself into fuckblivion, and it just keeps on fucking itself like a horny teenager on prom night. Pardon the French. It has, for some ungodly reason, a new input method handler (for non-alphabetic languages, like Japanese), which resulted in me having to help my fiancée rip it out and put the old one back in because the new one — you guessed it — sucked balls and worked nothing like what a Japanese person would expect.*

And then on the far, far other corner of the spectrum I am simultaneously using my new MacBook Pro and iPhone, learning the ropes of Xcode and reading up on iPhone development in general. It’s cool. It’s closed. Oh, so closed. It puts me, the soulless donkey, between two stacks of hay into which the disastrous organizational abilities of Open Source has peed in the one, and the detrimental-to-evolution, devastating-to-our-rights Apple has peed in the other. Neither pile looks very convincing right about now, but hunger is the greatest spice of all, or so they say.

A fellow developer sent me a coupon to get his game on my iPhone to test it out right before it was going to be shipped, and then I got “this coupon can only be redeemed on the US iPhone Store”. That was the first cultural shock that lead down the path of cultural shocks. To develop for the iPhone I actually have to buy an Apple Developer account for (at the cheapest) $99 a year. It’s unthinkable for an old commie linux user like myself that I’d actually have to pay money to help them make their product better, by adding content to it, but it’s Apple, and they are in their own playing field.

Actually, I was convinced a long time ago that the whole closed off, shut off, hold my ears and screw my rights deal was a failure, as proven by Microsoft time and time again, but seeing Apple now, today, was as big an eye-opener as was the first time I ever visited the (North American) South — I’d been convinced from childhood that religion was being phased out in the world, in favor of reason…

Ultimately, I’m conflicted. As I grow more accustomed to the antics of my MacBook (and indeed, to a non-Mac user, there are quite a few, like the unwillingness to maximize, for one), I grow impatient with the bullshit of my main desktop (linux) machine, I grow annoyed with the feeling of being chastised and told where to stand and what to do by my Mac, and if there’s one thing I’ve become more aware of, it’s my rights as a user. The iPhone and the upcoming iPad are clearly changing how we think about computers in general, and while half the crowd aren’t half as impressed as Apple wishes they were, there’s such a huge potential in these two devices alone that nothing will be what it used to be by the time they’re old news.

So Apple is the pioneer, and we’re dragged along. I’m excited and, ultimately, conflicted.

(* I’ve seen this before. I’ve been using linux for over 10 years. I’ve seen the pattern. It’s time to stop this retarded behavior, folks. You can’t throw something random into the distribution, release it and “hope for the best”, and then have it actually working better than its counterpart three years later. It’s not acceptable anymore. We’re better than this. But I saw it with Firefox, replacing Mozilla. I saw it with ALSA, replacing OSS. (Fuck, ALSA replacing OSS is even today a big clusterfuck of clusterfucks where people sacrifice baby maggots daily just to get their set up of game + team speak app of choice in place.) And I see it again, with pulseaudio and ibus.)

279 points, i.e. 69.75% i.e. fail. By 1 point = 0.25%.

Actually, I knew I’d failed all along. I’m actually surprised I got that high.

Next time Kalle will get the opportunity to (with any chance of success) try this test: approximately 2015.

Yes, I do indeed feel like a fucking loser. Now back to your regularly scheduled (albeit seldomly updated) blog.