Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
- Joined
- October 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540
3/4 of the discussion is beyond my feeble little brain, but the trivial detail of limited installs is what actually troubles me the most. I still try to load up my M&M games, among others.
The installs are limited to two *unless* you uninstall the game. You can do any number of uninstall-reinstalls. If you do need to do more than two installs (e.g., you nuked your hard drive, twice), you can phone the publisher to get a new activation code. That sounds reasonably reasonable to me.
And yes, there will be a problem if SecuROM goes out of business and nobody issues a patch to get around the DRM. (I've no doubt the game will have been cracked by then, and I for one would have no qualms whatsoever about applying the crack under those circumstances.)
I'm a little touchy to the whole rootkit thing since my best guess is that a rootkit is what killed my old rig.
That's kinda unlikely. Most rootkits I've heard of don't kill computers; they're evil because they're used to hide stuff that does do nasty things.
That said, I'm not smart enough to differentiate between ring 0, ring 1, ring 3, and nose ring.
It's pretty simple: the "rings" simply describe architecturally walled-off areas that allow different levels of access to the computer hardware. Ring 0 is "kernel mode" -- you can do anything the computer can do, like write any series of bits to any device or memory location. Ring 3 is "user mode," meaning you only have access to high-level calls and can't, for example, write to or read from a file that has been flagged as off-limits to you. In Windows, rings 1 and 2 aren't used much, although I understand some drivers do things with them. (This could have changed with Vista; I understand UAC uses them.)
If some copy protection package is lurking somewhere in my system, I'm not likely to recognize it anyway. I guess I'm willing to live in ignorance. OTOH, if at some point in the future I can't play a game that I paid good money for, I'll be reaching for the pitchfork. Unfortunately, that situation kind of implies that there won't be a castle to march on, but my wailing shall be loud.
Unfortunately, that's pretty much bound to happen with or without DRM. Stuff gets obsolete and back compatibility breaks.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2006
- Messages
- 8,540