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Doom is Coming, Doom is Coming, Doom is Coming
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By Jeff Foster, Section UnFairUse
Posted on Mon Aug 09, 2004 at 04:10:26 PM PDT
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Doom 3 came out this week, and it turned out to be the second coming of Christ after all. Who woulda thunk it? I give it a 96%. For a fair-use connection, I will point out this thread on Shacknews, in which the poster complains about the awful copy protection included on the CD. Apparently, the game will not play if any virtual drive software is present on the disk. I actually talked about this protection scheme about a year ago, but it being included on such a major release seems like news to me. In the end, it's just an annoyance. The game showed up on p2p networks last Friday (I did not partake, thank you very much. I pre-ordered the game 2 years ago) so who was stopped from pirating the game? I doubt anyone. I don't doubt however, that Doom 3 was a huge factor in the very slow news week that fell upon us. Of course, it could just be that I was playing Doom 3 instead of looking out for fair-use items, so I missed them all. If so, leave a comment below or send me an E-mail at Jeff@malgenic.org
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SCO Threatens New Lawsuit Against IBM
Sigh. SCO, once again is revving up the lawsuit engine to sue IBM for information that has just come to light. See, apparently, IBM has been shipping AIX on the Power PC platform without a license for the last 3 years, and this has just come to SCO's attention. So, of course, they're going to sue. For billions of dollars, no doubt. Except for the fact that it seems as though SCO knew perfectly well that IBM was shipping AIX on PPC since the beginning, and, according to the article, went so far as to issue a press release at the time discussing what a great idea it was for IBM to do so and touting SCO's many contributions to this particular AIX release.
CAN-SPAM Doesn't
Compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, is, for statistical purposes, nil. According to the article, at one point CAN-SPAM compliance reached a whopping 3% of all spams sent (I never saw one), but now it has fallen to a measly 0.54%. Good thing that the whole Do-Not-Spam list never got off the ground, eh?
More Apple iTunes DRM fallout
First, it was Real, now Virgin is getting into the act, by complaining to the French government that Apple is participating in unfair business practices by refusing to license their DRM standard, Fairplay. You know, one would think that Apple would have figured out by now that perhaps closed standards don't pay off in market share in the long run. Or maybe not. I don't want any DRM, but if it has to happen, I would prefer that it be Apple's standard opposed to Microsoft's.
Why Wall Street Wants Google to Fail
MSN Money (of all places) has a very interesting article on how Google is upsetting Wall Street by going foreword with their dutch auction IPO, instead of giving big shot investors first dibs at the stock for low prices, which they are then guaranteed to sell at a higher price. I personally think that the dutch auction is a really cool idea, but I just don't see this Google stock market thing going along too smoothly, either for the stock market or for Google’s ethical sense. I hope I'm wrong.
Fun media 'O da week
Extreme Unicycling(as originally linked to by Blues News)
Other news of Note
Mac Still Holds Desktop Lead Over Linux
JibJab Populism(watching annoying Commercial Req.)
A Streetcar Named Copyright
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