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The DRM monster is on the loose again, with the release of Will Wrights long awaited SPORE. Users are so unhappy with SPOREs included Digital Rights Management (DRM), they are downloading pirated torrents of the game in record numbers making it the most pirated game ever. Add to this an appalling one star user rating at amazon.com and it really is a looming public relations disaster if Electronic Arts (EA) does not act quickly.

To give you an idea of just how draconian SPOREs DRM is, the manual included with the game clearly states “You may have multiple Spore accounts for each installation of the game” but EA has admitted that this is a printing error. So for two people to play the game on one computer you will need to purchase a second copy of the game. Great. You can’t even back up the game without paying for EA’s Extended Download Service.

Including such draconian anti-piracy measures with possibly the most awaited game since Duke Nukem Forever is just baffling. Understanding how EA has failed to learn from disasters like Sony’s root kit debacle or Creatives Message to Daniel_K (just to name a couple) can only be achieved by Vulcan Mind Melding with every EA staff member responsible for the decision to include the DRM. Dare I say the meld would have to include Will Wright himself? I hope not. I can understand EA treating its customers like this in search of profit, but surely not Will himself. I’m going to cling to the hope that he knew nothing about it until I learn otherwise.

You can read more about the backlash on TechCrunch, and for more about DRM in general I highly recommend and article by Matt Martin from Gameindustry.biz appropriately titled “User Friendly“.

I just received this on my Facebook Superwall titled “Facebook is going to clear facebook accounts if ..”

We all know that Facebook is an extraordinary social network where you can talk to friends, find old friends, and so much more.
The Facebook team is well aware that Facebook is getting over populated due to the fact that registrations have increased 50% since February 15 2008. At their signing in database, it shows that more than a quarter of the members of Facebook havn’t logged into their accounts in over a month.
So where is this leading to you may ask. Facebook is clearing their entire data base and deleting users who have not sent this message to their friends. If you are one of the these people, you will get your user account wiped and would have to re add all your friends. So send this message to as many of your friends as you can, I know you don’t want to start all over from scratch so send away, show your pride for members Facebook!

- Irin rayiz

Update: It seems this is making the rounds again as Tom has pointed out below. It originally appeared after Facebook announced they were rolling out “new facebook” which some users were not happy about. I think the author was trying to add fuel to the fire of discontent in the hope of forcing Facebook to abandon their rollout plans, but that’s just my opinion. Rest assured though, it is definitely a hoax.

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As of 5 minutes ago nine out of fifteen stories on the front page or digg.com have been reported as inaccurate by diggers. That is sixty percent of all the stories on the front page at the moment. When I logged on I was confronted with so many potentially inaccurate stories I just had to reach for the print screen key and share it with you.

It’s election season, and all but one of the stories is political so that is almost certainly the source of the inaccuracy. What is surprising though, to me at least, is that most of the “inaccurate” stories are about the Republican Sarah Palin. In my experience it is right wing conservatives that spew the most inaccurate information but here we have a conservative that appears to be the victim of exaggerated and inaccurate attacks. This is such a turnaround it makes my head spin.

It might be that my view of conservatives has been poisoned by people like Bill O’Reilly to such an extent that is hard for me to comprehend these sort of attacks happening the other way around. But I also think it a reflection of how desperate the American people (and the world) are for change, and out of desperation some progressive thinkers are lowering their standards to that of Bill O. This sort lowering of standards is a slippery slope. Just imagine if everyone argued like Bill O’Reilly. It would be impossible to express a logical balanced opinion without getting shouted down by some simple minded political bigot.

Whatever the reasons, this is easily the greatest number of inaccurate stories I have seen on digg at one time. I just hope this isn’t a continuing trend :p
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I came across this interesting if nerdy physics thought experiment…

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

I added this site to Technorati.com barely a week ago and things were going great at first but in the last couple of hours I have been getting constant errors. When I visit Technorati I get the following friendly message:

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again. We’re scouring the blogosphere attempting to find it. Back in a flash!

And this is what it looks like:

Sometimes I don’t even get the Technorati Monster error page and instead get a Proxy Error that looks like this:

Technorati is a great service for bloggers so It would be a real shame if they couldn’t sort these problems out quickly.

I know this sounds bizzare so hear me out before you get your knickers in a knot. I wanted to add a link to the blog from the main page at www.intreipd.com.au, so I changed the name of an existing flash button and gave it an appropriate name. When I uploaded the new page and button then loaded it in my browser neither the new button or the old button appeard. I sort of expected this because I have encountered it in the past when changing flash buttons, and I have no idea why.

So I cleared my Firefox 2 cache and reloaded the page, no change. I then fired up both IE and Opera but still the new button did not appear. I went back checked everything, no spelling mistakes in the code and all the needed files were indeed on the server. Loaded the page on my laptop, still no dice. So I’m getting a little frustrated about now wondering why it was happening and whether or not users could see the button because it looked stupid with just a gap where there should be a button. I was sure it was some sort of weird caching problem so I came up with the idea of doing a clean browser install. The only other browser I had on my drive was Firefox 1.5 so I installed that and lo and behold, the button works.

So it was indeed a cache problem. I still don’t know what or why but I am finally getting to the point of this post, I like Firefox 1.5. Not because it loaded the flash button properly, that would have happened with any clean browser install. No, I like 1.5 because it is loading pages faster than 2.0, and also because there is just one close tab button, so I can just click on one spot to close multiple windows. Just a few taps of the button and all the tabs I don’t want are gone. Nice. Now that I think back to pre 2.0 days I can remember thinking this was one (of many) reasons why Firefox was better than safari which had a close button on every tab.

Now I’m sure someone will tell me about better security or better features of Firefox 2 but I’ m not too interested in that, all I want to do is load pages as quickly as possible and use it as quickly as possible and on those fronts I have to say 1.5 has 2.0 beat. You might also say that 2.0 is infact faster than 1.5 but thats not my experience. So it has me a little worried about the impending Firefox 3.0 release, I haven’t used the beta so I Just hope it lives up to the hype because despite my criticism, I do love firefox.

On a completely different topic to that last post, McDonalds Australia recently re-introduced the McFeast and when I heard about it I felt just a little bit fuzzy inside. Not because I’m a huge Maccas fan, but because it is easily their best burger and the closest thing to a real hamburger they have ever made and several years ago they stopped making it. But have you noticed that it’s not a McFeast but a McFeast Deluxe. That shouldn’t be a problem I thought because Deluxe is better right? Well I have tried the burger and it’s fairly close to the original but there is just one flaw, they use way too much sauce. It tastes OK but the excessive amount of sauce drips out everywhere and just ruins the whole experience I telly you.

While on the topic of Junkfood re-releases I have to mention Maggie 2 minute noodles. Again I’ve never been any huge fan but they go down well when your hungry and need food instantly. The problem is that Maggie have re-introduced them as New Maggie noodles. Why they have done this is I can only guess but the problem this time is that the new flavours are disgusting. I notice that the noodles are no longer made in Australia but imported from Malaysia this is obviously why they taste so different. I have no problem with them being imported and nothing against Malaysia, in fact my girlfriend is half Malaysian but I do have a problem with the fact that they are so bad I just cant eat them. I guess they are doing me a favour because I definitely won’t be buying them anymore so that’s less junk food in my diet. Thanks Maggie!