You have to love these people. here's the latest Boing Boing post on StarForce. No way I'm giving a company that stupid the chance to run code on my computer any more. Cory Doctorow: A company that was criticized on Boing Boing has threatened to sue me, and claims to have sworn out a complaint against me with the FBI. Yesterday, I posted about StarForce, a harmful technology used by game companies to restrict their customers' freedom. StarForce attempts to stop game customers from copying their property, but it has the side-effects of destabilizing and crashing the computers on which it is...

And here we go again... This just came up on BoingBoing Cory Doctorow: A group of gamers has started a site to spread a pledge to boycott video-games that come with a dangerous anti-copying mechanism. Starforce is an anti-copying program that some games covertly install when you install the game. The software causes system instability and crashes. The company that makes Starforce refuses to address the damage their software causes; instead, they blame the people on whom their malware has been forced: "According to our research those of users [sic] that do run into compatibility problems are beginner-level-hackers that try to go...

As soon as their registration software is finished and working our entire team is signing up for this conference. http://www.waterfall2006.com/ I’ll see you all there! — bab   [Via Brian Button - One Agile Coder]

Are Apple going to release a tablet PC? Well this is an easy one, no they're not unless they seriously upgrade their ink software. I plugged my graphics tablet in to see if it would work (I still had to go download drivers. You'd think Macs would come with Wacom drivers built in) and I noticed a new icon in System Preferences called "Ink". This lead on to me turning on the handwriting recognition to see how it compares to Windows. I need to be honest here and declare my computing preferences here because I'm about to say Microsoft is...

I guess I should just come out and say it: I thought I could handle it, but I was wrong. I thought I could just use this mac as a nice small and quiet box to be a media server, but it's sitting on my desk being a desktop. I know it's slow and needs more memory, but I find I'm using it for more and more recently. I even upgraded to Tiger. I think I can't deny it any longer, I am a Mac User. I realised earlier this week when my quest for a new laptop started to...

Eve is a massively multiplayer space game that I've played on and off since it launched a few years ago. They're what I would consider to be one of the success stories of the field, and no other game even comes close to having the same number of people logged into the same copy of the world at any one time (24,000 or so is the record, I haven't been able to log into World of Warcraft recently because the server I play on is full, and that's only going to be a few thousand users per server). Of course...

I'm currently (slowly) working through a history degree in my spare time, but I'm also working on a few topics of my own. My latest is an exercise in landscape archaeology. In case you don't know what that is, and if you don't watch Time Team you probably don't get much exposure to it, it's looking at bumps in the ground to see what was there without digging holes. Oh, and maps are involved too, which is the part that I've been working on for the last few days. The subject of my reseach is something called "Odiham Race Course", which...

Here's a missing bit of Team Server functionality for you. I suspect it's an error in the VS.NET source control interface, and if so it'll be an interesting one to fix before TFS is released. If you unload a project with files that you have modified then say to check it in then you don't get the check in dialog. This means that you don't get any warnings about check in policies.

The strangest thing is happening. I keep thinking that iTunes is missing basic functionality. What's strange is that I never thought that before, in fact I thought it was pretty near spot on for what I needed. That was before Media Player 11 came along, and now I just miss basic functionality in iTunes. Don't get me wrong, iTunes is still a great music player but the music library features are really basic. A month ago I thought they were really advanced, but apparently I was wrong. Where's my list of albums? Where's my list of genres? How do I play...