A note from the editor: The content trapped behind the jump is potentially NSFW and does not represent the views of Icrontic, its editors, its owners, or even the author. People just like to read ridiculous talking points get run through the mud. Someone has to deliver the goods.
Where have I been? Vacationing in the Maldives to escape the pain of deliberately dredging the internet for material worthy of ridicule. While you’re settling in to spend the next ten minutes ROFLing, I spent the last two hours subjecting myself to corporate numbskullery. I’m serious. This stuff is enough to give anyone an aneurysm. But they say misery loves company, so I intend to drag you down with me.
Now prepare for my triumphant return! My day in the sun! My vict– forget it. Two years after the gits that run this site extorted issue four out of me I pleasantly delivered my fourth issue, I’m back because my hatred of today’s topic exceeds my intense love for the admirable powers that be. My just-announced marital bliss to hubris allows me to put Starcraft II, Intel and Wal*Mart square in my sights.
Blizzard: Upgrading to level 3 Asshole Generators
Is it even possible for a country to spontaneously combust on three separate occasions? That just may happen when each of Blizzard’s three installments to the Starcraft II universe hit Korea and the lesser remainder of the world.
“Wait, three installments?”
Zeratool of the Proto$$. He is cloaked and inside your wallet right god damn now!
Yeah. Starcraft II proves that not even Blizzard is above the douchebaggery of episodic content. Citing the desire to avoid a protracted development period — a disease that Blizzard practically invented — Blizz numbly decided that the story of each race will be its own game.
Blizzard also hopes that the three installments, starting with the Terrans’ Wings of Liberty campaign, will allow them to expand on the single player aspect.
HAY GUES WAT NOBODY CARES. I just want to cannon creep and Reaver drop to victory while I steamroll some poor bastard who decided it would be a smashing idea to build Terran air superiority. I don’t care what this wanker to the right is going to do in the Xel’naga temples, okay?
If these installments are anything more than $15 a crack, I’m going to CTRL+1 some feet and teleport them into some collective developer ass.
But there’s a silver lining here and it appears that the multiplayer aspects are complete, meaning it will ship with the Terran pack so the world can go ^ ^ over comp stomps, bunker wars, and other terribad game types. El Blizz promises that the single player aspects will not expand multiplayer capabilities, and therefore can’t be considered an expansion. Except they totally are.
Look, Blizzard, I’m on to you. You don’t want to spend the next decade polishing Starcraft II. You just want to get to the money-making now while the twits who care about “campaigns” and “stories” slam their heads into a wall until they’re stupider.
On the upside, I won’t have to read new Kerrigan slash fic until 2034.
Intel, or how big girls apparently do cry
Propped up by the same indescribable powers that probably create a psi-blade, AMD has somehow managed to avoid sinking faster than Jimmy Hoffa. A few months back, before they booted the retarded CEO responsible for the Phenom to the curb, AMD announced it would be going to an “asset light” strategy. Basically it means they’re going to stop sucking a whole bunch at fabbing chips, which we all know they’re about 27 years behind on that anyhow. AMD, finally having some business plan behind this investor placation, revealed that the first step was to ditch its in-house chip-making equipment and make it a new company.
QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ
A dash of UAE oil money, a bit of asset reallocation and several thousand worried employees later: Et voila tut, The Foundry Co. was born.
Alright, sweet, AMD may finally have a chance to stop stringing themselves out on crack while living in Intel’s dumpster. But Intel, not content to let this go, has gone to rousing rabbles by saying that this new fab company isn’t really AMD any more, but a whole new company that has to relicense the x86 patents.
So the butthurt Intel is threatening to take away AMD’s x86 licenses which would surely end their company. This, of course, belies the point that AMD could take away Intel’s x86-64 and send Santa Clara hustling back to the dark ages of the Pentium D.
Now we have a CPU cold war where nobody is going to win and, like most whining of this sort, will end in handshakes, masturbatory PR and smiles all around.
Intel, do everyone a favor, repopulate your third pant leg and move along.
Wal*Mart: Letting you keep your rented music a little longer
Microsoft added DRM to their WMA specification in 2004. Songs protected with this WMA10 DRM scheme must communicate with an external server for licensing before the song can be played back. If a user ports these songs to a non-Microsoft OS, reformats, or the licensing server ever goes kaput, the music is screwed forever.
Therefore, protecting your investment has two avenues:
- Illegally download DRM-free copies.
- Illegally break the DRM with FairUse4WM.
Oops. You have no legal way of keeping the music that you paid for. That’s what fraud feels like, but it’s perfectly legal because the copyright institution has been lobbied into letting it be so.
Apparently not confident that this encrypted music would properly play on a variety of devices, Microsoft started the PlaysForSure initiative which was a series of tests to assure that WMA10 music would play on WMA10 devices. The ridiculous paste-eaters in Redmond couldn’t even assure that its own ecosystem would work as planned. Dear readers, you may want to make for higher ground as the groundswell of feces will soon overtake your legs.
This label certifies that the product it is attached to will be rendered worthless when some asshole in a suit decides it should be worthless.
Did we mention that the PlaysForSure-certified Zune couldn’t read PlaysForSure-certified WMA10 songs in its formative years? Oops again.
At last we come to Wal*Mart, the American cultural destination for the erosion of labor rights, which offered copyright-protected songs prior to February of 2008. Wal*Mart intended to axe their authentication servers which would have made thousands upon thousands of songs unplayable while whatever profits gleaned by Wally World went unreturned.
The nine owners of Wal*Mart-branded DRMed songs capable of operating an email client went ballistic and set the rest of the internet ablaze with Wal*Mart/DRM hate. Wal*Mart has since decided to postpone the inevitable robbery by operating their servers until they really don’t feel like operating them, at which point they won’t.
Of course, this whole debacle certainly proves that DRM is the most preposterous technology in recent memory. Were its paradigm applied to any other product, I’m positive that bricks would become a new window accessory. “Oh, we see that you missed your 40,000 mile oil change. I’m afraid that’s against our end-user policy, so we’ll be back tomorrow to repossess your car. Thank you and have a nice day!”
This analog does not differ from the value proposition of DRM, except digital music is not a tangible product, so it’s different and therefore okay. It’s so different from a physical product that music piracy is just like stealing a physical product. Wait.
Thank you for reading. Get bent.
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