I was playing games friday night with friends and ran into to problems that exploit just how screwy software protection is, and why I prefer not to work in windows.
Note, the tools I am using in this video, tcpview.exe and procexp.exe are available from Microsoft. Sysinternals
made this programs originally, but
Securom protected games will not run if you use procexp.exe before hand, as demonstrated in this video.
Punkbuster is used on all of Dice/EA’s games, and is the major reason these games can’t be played in wine, which is the reason I don’t play them on wine.
But in Windows, if “PnkbsterB.exe” or “PnkbstrA.exe” or both come down you will be unable to get on a game server.
In the video I demonstrate how I to keep PnkBstrB.exe up if it should come down, permitting you to play BF2 if you have a similar problem.
Sysinternals was the same company that found the Sony rootkit on Sony’s music CD’s, used to permit Sony to monitor people’s use of their CD’s (inspired by DRM protected audio files as CD’s don’t contain DRM, so this was how Sony planned to add DRM to CD’s, patch peoples windows kernels to hide Sony’s activities and permit them to illegally shutdown someone’s machine if they are illegally distributing Sony music).
I don’t know which is more evil, SOny or Microsoft or Electronic Arts, but this is what you sacrifice when buying software from these companies. But you have only yourselves to blame, Microsoft has been testing consumer trust from the very beginning, and seeing how much consumer rights can be penetrated in the interest of making more money.
Yes this is another one of my griping videos, but I have some proof this time of some of the crap that goes on Windows that makes absolutely no sense on the Ubuntu platform..
See if you get a machine with Windows ready installed, you may never learn to install an operating system.. Then you may be of the opinion that all PC’s run Windows, that not running windows is not a choice. Even knowing why you wouldn’t want to run Windows is not discussed. I’m here to reveal why Windows sucks.. Zero privacy, insecure, and full of bugs.. I use it every now and then to play games, but I try to avoid using Windows altogether.. And I hope to play all my games on Ubuntu, screw Windows. There is no need for it.
This video was captured at a variable rate hovering around 5 frames per second, at 640×480, in camstudio on windows XP. Because the video format was variable frame rate, I was not able to edit it in blender’s video sequence editor as I would in linux, so I reboot and tried to work on it in Ubuntu. OggConvert wouldn’t read the video file, so I converted it to ogg theora/vorbis format with mediacoder running in wine, then I converted it a second time with oggconvert to compress the file even more, source format was 900MB, this one is 50MB, 34 minutes long. In fact most all the video I upload to youtube is in Ogg Theora/Vorbis (Ogg is a open source media container format, unlike WMV and Quicktime which are used to lure users onto the Mac and Windows platforms, Ogg is the standard video format used on the linux platform, and unpatentable by Microsoft (a method Microsoft uses to avoid competition is to patent related technologies to limit the flexibility of competitors technologies, as well as open source applications).
If you want to be freed of file format dependency, best thing to do is switch to the linux platform as most all file formats used on linux are there to free people of these limitations imposed by commercial software developers selfishly focussed on their own needs.
Open Source secures systems, makes them less vulnerable to hackers and viruses. The only thing pushing open source is the intent to say “there is a better alternative” to commercial software that makes sense.
