Gears of Wars PC Edition

Owners of Epic’s Gears of War were in for quite a interesting predicament when they tried to play the game on January 28th. Turns out that the DRM that came bundled with the program had a digital certificate that deactivated on that date and thus rendered the game useless.

If we’ve learned anything from the debacle that was Spore’s DRM, which limited you to only 3 activation of a single copy of your game, is that unrealistically restricting customers who spend their hard-earned money on your software is usually a bad idea.

To this day, there are games that I purchased in the late 90’s that I will install and play just for the nostalgia or to relive an absolutely wonderful story. I paid for the game so why would anyone restrict me as to when and how far apart I play the game?

This obviously begs the question as to why Epic would put an arbitrary drop-dead date about 3 years after the release of the game. I know that Gears of War is a trilogy and the second installment is available for the XBOX 360, but this is surely no way to forcing paying customers to grab the second installment.

These kinds of boneheaded issues is why I’m a wholly converted console gamer now.

Cheers

I grabbed the 2.4GB ISO and managed to download it in about 25 minutes. As I run Ubuntu at home, I wasn’t about to bother burning the DVD and doing an actual installation. I did, however, create a virtual machine within Virtualbox to see what Windows 7 has to offer.

I’ve been playing with Windows from the old 3.0 days and having installed every version of Windows except Vista I’m quite familiar with the installation process. The first thing that struck me with Windows 7 is the utter lack of options. I was shown the hard drive and given the option to create a partition with the size of my choosing. My only next option was to install Windows, which I chose and after a automatic restart I was begining my customization.

Once past the customization, I was looking at the new desktop with quite an impressive background image. The first thing that greeted me here was a Action Center message that I had no anti-virus software and was vulnerable to attack.  No big surprise there I guess, but it was interesting to see that I could grab a preview version of Kaspersky (Norton and AVG are also available) that works for a couple of months while I evaluate Windows 7.

With the latest Windows updates installed and Kaspersky protecting me from the evils on the Internet, I was asked to reboot and came back to a familiar Vista login page. Once I successfully logged back in the first thing that struck me was the change in the familiar Windows taskbar. The Start menu is very similar to the one in Vista from what I could tell with my limited playing around.

The gadgets you see on the right of the desktop are a straight carry-over from Vista. My experience with Vista was limited to a laptop that I had access to for some 2 months and so I don’t claim to be an expert with that OS, but Windows 7 to the untrained eye surely looks a lot like Vista. In general, it looks like Windows 7 hides a lot of the complexity associated with settings that were readily available in XP. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.

My Virtualbox virtual machine is configured to provide 768MB of RAM to Windows 7 and I found that it works quite well with the resources provided. More exploration is needed to see what goodies this OS provides, but so far I’ve found the new games.

Cheers

I got the newest Ubuntu Edgy Eft installer CD and booted into it and was surprised to see that I got the full GNOME window with a usable Linux as opposed to the usual install screen. This is, by far, the smartest thing any Linux distribution can do. Edgy Eft is actually a Live Linux CD that allows you explore what Linux has to offer before choosing to install it. All my peripherals were detected and optimized. So, I could watch videos, listen to music, browse the web and check my mail; all without having actually installed Linux.

Needless to say, I installed Ubuntu and couldn’t be happier. My hats off to an absolutely awesome distribution and installation method!

Cheers

Microsoft announced Friday it has hit the 100 million installation milestone for Internet Explorer 7, a figure that makes the new browser the second most used behind IE6. #

IE7 has been pushed out to many unsuspecting Windows users as part of the regular Windows Update cycle for quite some time now. Many Windows XP users have set the Update to happen automatically and seldom do they check to see what update is being installed when they are prompted. So Microsoft can hardly take pride in this milestone. A software that people must specifically find, download and install is worth counting as opposed to something that is essentially pushed to you, whether you want it or not.

The Linux Equivalent Project aims to provide that service, though in it’s infancy, I see potential for this service.