• 12Aug 08

  Recent purchases

  Games
  
  
  
  
  
  DVD
  
  
  
  
  I actually won King of Kong and I have pre-ordered Wanted.
  
  • Posted Aug 12, 2008 1:11 pm PT
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• 29Jun 08

  NFL - London 2008 - I have tickets :)

  After getting up at the early time of 9am (yes that is early for me), I had to have a long wait until 10am for the tickets to be put up for sale. I managed to get the tickets after about a minute and a half. Problem was though it wouldn't accept my card, so after a quick phone call I managed to get my parents details using there credit card, great. Nope I was wrong, I was then timed out for the tickets, so had to wait another eight minutes in a queue to see if I could get tickets, then finally after a while I was able to get them. So after twenty minutes I had them, but I didn't realise how close I was on not getting them.

  "
  The second sale for tickets for the International Series game between the San Diego Chargers and New Orleans Saints at Wembley Stadium is now closed after selling the full allocation of 15,000 tickets in just 30 minutes.

  "

  I got really good tickets on the first tier row 29. It only cost me £179.20 for two tickets and £225 for two nights in a hotel, right next to the stadium. Looks like I have some long working days ahead of me to pay for it, luckily my brother is coming so we are halving everything. Roll on October.

  • Posted Jun 29, 2008 5:53 am PT
  • Category: Sports
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• 18Apr 08

  Is DRM evil?

  Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short stands for the technologies used by publishers, use to control access to the usage of digital data or hardware that in theory restricts the use of the digital hardware or information. This is so that the information can not be copyrighted illegally, and distributed around. New technology has meant that media can be copied endless times without no degradation of the quality. The increase of personal computers, the ease of ripping media files from a CD, combined with the Internet, file sharing tools and programs, has made unauthorized copies of digital files much easier to produce. This has created concern among digital content publishers, leading most of them to pursue DRM technologies to prevent these actions, accruing constantly.

  People claim that there is nothing inherently evil about DRM, they say it is a neutral tool, and you can do good or evil things with it. Sometimes I am a bit surprised to hear this. The name "Digital Rights Management" doesn't make it sound something positive. The point of DRM is to keep someone from making full use of some data they have, but I can not imagine what is good about that. It is certainly bad when it keeps me from putting my music or DVD's on all my devices. It is bad when it keeps me from recording the TV shows I watch, too, and even when it has potential security applications, I think it is bad. Sure, a company could use DRM-like technology to keep its internal correspondence away from competitors and journalists.

  To describe if DRM is good or evil you need to say for example "Are fingerprint-resistant automatic rifles good or evil? You would have to answer "is it evil even if you found it on the street, left by a gang, and by accident you are attacked by a maniac wielding an axe, who kills your dog with a single blow and threatens to kill you, and everyone you know. So while you can agree it is potentially evil if used in a incorrect manner it can also be good if you used in the correct way. This scenario is doesn't have a straight yes or no answer, this is the same with DRM, if you see DRM used in a evil way you are going to automatically say it is going to be evil, but you after thinking about it you could see the potential of thinking DRM is actually a good thing that should be use on products, such as media devices, DVD players.

  Now I must say that there is no doubt that the creators have the right to license their work as they wish and will probably agree that piracy needs to be eliminated, the thing is that all of that has nothing to do with DRM. DRM although provides some sort of protection against copyrighting, it doesn't provide a great deal, from people such as pirates but it makes the honest person life much more difficult (the fact that you need to backup the license or else you cannot play it on some device brands or on some computers). DRM is assuming everyone is guilty and therefore restricts everyone even though most of us would pay for the music even if it did not have DRM, this is proven in the market now by many stores that sell DRM-less indie music.

  This is a common occurrence with the xbox 360, I have 2 xbox 360's, one which my brother uses and one that I use, but why should I have to pay twice to get the same content to use under the same house. As the content is protected for obvious reasons due to the Internet the information would be easily passed around. Though Microsoft has every right to do this why can't they have the ability to have 2 gamer profiles under a group which means that people with one or more profiles are able to share the content between profiles in the same house.

  • Posted Apr 18, 2008 6:45 am PT
  • Category: Editorial
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