News for Saturday, 13 December 2008

Seagate was among the last company to offer a 5-years warranty on its HDs dedicated to consumer electronic market. Starting January 3rd, 2009 (billing date), this warranty will be aligned with the conditions currently offered by other HD manufacturers: 3-years warranty.
In reality, it will most likely not change things a lot, as a 3-years old HD features such a lower storage capacity and performance level, that it is often not worth sending it back for repair or claiming for the warranty coverage.
As Mac users, we would have strongly preferred that Seagate recognize the issue with some of its 2.5" HD used in Apple notebooks, as they usually died less than 2 years after their installation. It seems that Apple is using much less Seagate HDs since this problem.

Couple of weeks ago, we were reporting, of a potential financial and/or technical issues related to illegal usage of patented PCI prefetch function by NVidia in its PCI-based motherboards.
OPTi announced to have won a similar legal action against Apple concerning functions used by the company in its chipset during the pre-Intel era. (PPC)
If Apple is forced to followed NVidia, Cupertino will have to release Firmware update for all PCI-based Mac models (including notebooks: iBook and PowerBook), from roughly 1996 till Intel transition! Thankfully, current PCI-Express-based computers are not affected by those legal decisions.

Source: Branchez-vous (in French)

According to estimates, the most pirated game of 2008 is SPORE. Some think that this is due to the extremely draconian DRM protection that EA added to the game.
Legitimate buyers of the game (that's some 2 million folks) had to have their machine connect to an activation server in order to validate their install, and could only do it twice (which means that if you bought a new machine, then maybe upgraded to a newer version of Windows, you were out of luck). Add to that the fact that EA's activation servers suffered strokes under the massive load of activation requests after the game launch, and customers where less than happy.
After all, you could get a free copy on the pirate networks, WITHOUT the painful DRM. So it is thought that some people who bought a copy of the game actually ended up downloading pirate copies of it, so they could use it without the hassle.
Our point is not to encourage piracy, but you have to wonder about software publishers putting obstacles that will only annoy honest customers, while pirates won't even notice them.