I think anyone – i.e. you and me – who codes in enough slack that when the specs change – and change they will – should certainly get bonus marks.

The trick is to allow for slack WITHOUT making hte original solution unreadable or having too much overhead for the simple case.

Being a Gamer effectively all my life, it’s pretty easy to see that company’s are shying away from the PC platform, but that isn’t solely due to Piracy.

Piracy is definitely a part of the problem, but another problem is that as consoles are getting more and more powerful in both graphics and processing ability, developers seem to be less likely to want to bring out things on the generally more finicky PC’s (so many hardware configurations).
Add to that the fact that Consoles are both mainstream and affordable, PC’s are looking to get left in the dust as a gaming platform, except for those games that use a Mouse and Keyboard, which are mainly RTS’s and FPS’s, and that could change soon given the uprise of pointing device on consoles. (at least Nintendo and Sony)
That certainly doesn’t mean Multi-Platform releases aren’t feasible, but that’s generally going to be Microsoft titles.

On the DRM front, I believe SKIDROW has cracked the UOSP for Assassin’s Creed II. Apparently for great justice.

And Project $10/Sometimes-$15 is reasonable, but that doesn’t give company’s the right to charge you for a game disc and then also charge you for some maps that are on that disc you already bought. That is bull.

It’s also wrong of developers to make a game, cut out a few of the level, and then sell them snipped levels back to you at extra cost as DLC. WRONG.

Anyway, better shut up now, before this turns into a blog post in itself.
- XW

This is somewhat reminiscent of a problem I faced last year on the 360 where I couldn’t use any downloaded content during a time I didn’t have an internet connection due to having bought a new console and the content being associated with the original console.

Sure, the fix was eventually simple, as I just needed to connect my console to the internet, follow some simple steps to to rights migration and then download the entire content I’ve ever downloaded again, but that still took a couple of hours and it’s hardly possible taking a 360 to a coffeeshop to use the internet!

I am fully supportive of Project 10 Dollar. Mass Effect 2 has done it brilliantly.

DRM is making life difficult for those that buy games; anyone who wants to download the game illegally will normally find a way around it anyway.

Kudos for a great Sql Server article – Trackback from SqlServerKudos…