Copy protection is dumb

For lack of a more eloquent argument we’ll leave it at that. Copy protection is a waste of time for all those involved. As far as tech arguments, people seem to like making analogies between whatever issue they’re debating and the car industry. It’s worth a shot:

Car Dealer: This is the fastest, nicest car we have.
Me: Wow, it sure is. I like the gold-plated-orphan-catcher on the front.
Car Dealer: Ah yes, that particular model was designed by William Morris.
Me: And the stereo, man…
Car Dealer: Yes, the Linn…
Me: I can’t wait to get this out on the open-road, blast some tunes and hit some orphans at high speed.
Car Dealer: Sir, I’m afraid that the noise-pollution laws have locked the volume knob at 3.
Me: And the high spe…
Car Dealer: The 80km limit.
Me: But, you don’t get the spatter at 80.
Car Dealer: Sir, we all miss the old days.

So, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But what if I said that I’d been playing GTA: San Andreas? It probably explains the splatter anyway.

Now that you’re thinking about the poor little children, it would be a good moment to mention the game’s copy protection. That’s right — the game with the punching and the shooting and the stealing of cars doesn’t want you to play on a modded xbox.

Seriously, Rockstar paid someone at least a few hour’s wages to make sure the game had copy protection. Now, let’s sit back and think about this: I have a game about the criminal element and I have an xbox that I’ve gone to the effort of soldering an extra chip on to. Do they really think copy protection will do anything other than annoy me? I don’t really want to buy any Rockstar products right now.

A few minor things

Wasn’t a big fan of the brick header, so I switched it over to the new “bunch of lines” header. Body font has been change to Lucida Grande, was sick of Verdana.

I was having some database problems earlier. I’m not sure if it was WordPress related or Dreamhost related, but the database seemed to stop cold at 10mb, I couldn’t post anything. I had been using the ShortStat plugin for WordPress and had amassed a tidy 7mb worth of stats, so I cleaned them out and everything seems to be back in working order.

Dreamhost Awesomeness

I’ve been with Dreamhost for almost five years now and the service has been continualy improving the entire time. Up to their usual trick, they’ve gone and done a few new things this week. The first big on is installing the new version of Ruby and Ruby on Rails for everyone. That’s gotta make the Rails people happy. It also means I can start playing and don’t have to spend time installing.

The second thing I found was a Gmail-esque announcement in my admin panel:

This is a big one. Starting today, we’re the only web host in the world
(as far as we know, and we didn’t check) that automatically GROWS every
shared customer’s disk and bandwidth quotas every week!

That’s right, every week from now on your quotas will be increased by
this much per active shared hosting plan:

  • L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
  • L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
  • L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
  • L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Now, that’s a pretty solid announcement — it raises the bar for other hosts and means lots of space for me to play with. They also found the time to update to PHP 5 and MYSQL 4.1. And add CPU usage tracking.