http://club.ign.com/b/list/custom?lid=100018&owner=throx&mode=vown

1. PlayTV : I don’t have a DVR, or any sort of working video recorder at the moment and PlayTV looked like just what I’d want.  Full HDTV compliance and a guide I can record from.  The only downside is a little bit of messing around if I want to copy stuff to watch later on another device, but that’s because of the stupid “FreeView” restrictions (note that FreeView doesn’t actually give the consumers anything, it restricts what they can do with the TV signal they receive).
2. Final Fantasy XIII : This game was designed with the PS3 (and its Blu-Ray drive) in mind, with the X360 coming in later, causing textures to have to be cut down for the X360 version.  I’d rather see it in full original quality.
3. Less region restrictions : Imported PS3 games can be played without any issues on an Aussie PS3.  The X360 is restricted.
4. Little Big Planet
5. Most of the games I would want on the X360 are also available for the PC, and with my XBox Controllers for Windows, are easily as enjoyable.  Steam allows me to purchase these games quite cheaply (if I wait for the specials) so there’s just not as much value in the X360 for me right now.
6. User replaceable parts (like upgrading the HDD).

Of course, I picked up Assassin’s Creed 2 for the Playstation.  No PC sale for me with that DRM – they forced me to move to a console so their idea that their DRM is saving the PC gaming industry is just wrong.

Hoping…

(No, I haven’t bought it myself)

That’s right – a single player game that requires a full-time internet connection ONLY for making sure you’re not a criminal.  That’s what Ubi thinks of its customers and frankly this really has the capability of hurting them.  The pirates (and make no mistake, the game will be “cracked” and available for download within a day of release) have a significantly better product that can be enjoyed by anyone at anytime, so the only real result I see for Ubi is much more piracy.

I have no intention of purchasing the game with that sort of restriction.  My internet is not too bad, but I don’t want to be held to something out of my control while enjoying a single player experience.  I can imagine how this would work for someone on satellite internet, dial-up or worse (like in the armed forces).  It’s fundamentally a really dumb decision.

In any case, I find the whole thing extremely deceptive and have lodged an inquiry to their behaviour with the ACCC:

I am concerned by the evolution of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) used in the games shortly to be released by Ubisoft, in particular “Assassin’s Creed 2″ and “Splinter Cell Conviction” but reportedly included in all future titles. Details can be found at Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/02/ubisoft-details-drm.ars) but to summarize: Despite being a single player experience the game will not permit the user to play without being continuously connected to Ubisoft’s license verification servers. Disconnection or interruption of that connection results in the game terminating and Ubisoft maintains the ability to remotely terminate the end user’s ability to use their licensed product without significant recourse from the consumer.

Games are marketed as boxed products, which give the impression and feel of a standalone product and while it may be recognized that many current games require some form of “activation”, these do not mandate a continuous connection and there is no consumer expectation that this should exist. Without significant warning labels it is likely that a large section of the consumer market (which either do not have internet, do not have continuous connections or have interrupted connections) will be impacted by this decision and potentially find themselves with a product that may not work at all in the way expected. Similarly, with internet bandwidth being metered in Australia users may find themselves liable for additional costs.

Ubi’s response to the concerns raised by gamers is typically dismissive and frankly reeks of an expectation that people should throw money at them regardless of the crap they shovel out.  I’m not playing that way – it’s my money and I can choose to not spend it.

Yes, piracy is a significant concern and this dumb move just made the pirate’s product a lot more attractive.  Good job at alienating your customers, Ubi.

http://www.ag.gov.au/gamesclassification

Personally, I think it’s crazy we continually have issues with the top games coming out because they are unsuitable for minors.  The game industry has changed in the last 30 years and now adults are being prevented access to some of the best (and worst) games simply because they are unsuitable for a child.  This is ridiculous.  I’m not in favor of removing classification but surely adults are able to make their own decisions instead of being treated as children.

Whatever side you are on, make a submission.

According to this thread, edit the profiles.xml in the TVersity folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\TVersity\Media Server on my machine) and add the following before the last </profileList> entry:

Samsung Profile for TVersity

Worked like a charm for me – now I can get rid of all the other DLNA apps on my PC and just use this single server.

Edit:  Updates thanks to rafaelg on the comments

Luckily, I found this fix which worked brilliantly.  Amazing the fuse blows so easily, and so irrevocably and yet nothing else on the USB chain had any issues at all.  Bad Microsoft hardware I guess…

Opening the receiver (use a knife or something to lever the top off):

Unscrew and turn the circuit board over then solder across F1:

Notes from the comments:

• You can test whether this will work by connecting something like a paperclip across the fuse without desoldering it, then plugging it into your PC.
• Apparently you can use foil paper and electrical tape to connect across the fuse.  Personally I’d recommend soldering, but if you don’t have a soldering iron it’s worth a try.
• If “lever the top off” isn’t explicit enough for those not insane enough to pull apart everything they own, to get the case off jam, and I mean JAM, a butterknife in. Wedging it in the crease that is above the wire (between grey and white). Getting it in there good then wiggle and twist all about until the glue gives way. Because every inch other then where the wire is was thoroughly glued down. The circuitboard is receased so no need to be gentle, just don’t angle down.

Having purchased Jade Empire from Steam for the cool price of $15, I was having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to run.  Basically the configuration program would crash every time I attempted to run the application, and it refused to run the actual application without running the configuration program.

Searching on the net proved pretty much worthless – turned out quite a few people were having the problem, but no one seemed to know any way to fix it.  Other people were saying it ran fine if you just skipped the config program but the issue is you can’t skip the config program on the “first run”.  That was the trick – how to convince the game it was no longer the first run.

First stop, good old post-moretem debugging with Windbg.  Sadly, this told me that it was crashing trying to free a block of memory that had either not been allocated or had already been freed (the call stack was inside HeapFree, and through a few compatibility layers Win7 had tossed in for me).  No help there, and telling it to ignore the exception didn’t make matters any better – even to get it through the “first run” stage.

Next stop, Process Monitor (one of those evil apps that daft DRM companies like SecuRom decide shouldn’t be allowed because they may actually help you fix their games for them I guess?).  The last file it tried to access before crashing was SystemInformation.xml in the game’s data directory.  Turned out that file didn’t exist, and so was a big clue about what the game used to determine whether the config had run or not.

Nothing to lose – create a blank file with Notepad and save it as SystemInformation.xml in C:\Program Files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\jade empire\data.  Attempt to run the config program and it still crashes.  Next, attempt to run the main game and it skips the config and actually starts and plays without issue (at least to character creation so far).

Cool – not a waste of $15 after all!

Edit:  As pointed out in the comments, make sure you run Notepad as Administrator to create the file or it won’t do what you think.  Thanks to Blog Kindle for the tip.

I noticed today that both my Vista sp1 machines (one x64 and one x86) were getting a bunch of errors in the log claiming that

The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

and

The server was unable to allocate a work item 1 times in the last 60 seconds.

This was rather disconcerting as it was making it difficult to copy files between the machines without errors.  A quick google search showed I wasn’t the only one and after a little bit of digging, I came on the quick and dirty issue – Vista appears to have some sort of memory leak in the new SMB2 server that makes it eventually reach an internal limit and refuse to allocate any more.  This makes network shares break.

Not wanting to just disable the SMB2 sharing as it’s amazingly fast at copying files across gigabit networks, I went looking for the more simple solution but wanted to get some data first.  Firing up poolmon to look at the nonpaged pool before and after and restarting the “server” service, I noticed the entry marked “LS2w” dropped from 256k of allocated nonpaged pool to 0 allocated nonpaged pool – fairly obviously the source of the leak (LS2 is pretty clearly an acronym for Lanman Server 2, which is really old school naming).

In any case, the easy solution is to just go into the “Services” part of managing “My Computer” and just restart the “Server” service.  Makes the problem go away for another week or two.

In the end, although it didn’t really give me any information to work on the issue, it might be useful for someone at Microsoft if they’re eventually trying to track down the bug.  Hope so…