Starforce destroys PCs

Starforce is a piece of software bundled with some modern PC games that aims to provide unbreakable copy-protection. Unfortunately it falls quite short of that mark, and might actually cause quite a bit of harm.

For a start, it would be nice to know when you're going to have Starforce on your computer. Sure, I bet it's somewhere in the reams and reams of licence agreement that nobody ever reads. The licence agreement that you can only read after opening the game and trying to install it. Yes, the one you're accepting by buying the game in the first place, but are unable to read at the time of purchase.

Besides, nobody reads all that stuff. We all just trust it conforms to the realm of common sense. If I've just bought a game, you can bet it's because I want to have fun, something that is guaranteed not to happen if I sit down to read through the entire licence agreement. The game in question? DiRT.

Don't get me wrong: DiRT is great. Despite the pretentious lower case 'i' in the otherwise capitalised title, it plays like a great arcade rally game should. Then things start to go wrong. A crash here. A crash there. Totally unrelated programs, and at totally random times. I haven't made any changes to the system at all, so I can only assume that it's DiRT. Or more accurately, it's Starforce, that was installed on the sly by DiRT. If this was legitimate and above board, why wasn't I given a window allowing me to choose whether I wanted to install Starforce? If my sink breaks, and I call the plumber, I'm going to be pretty annoyed when I find him installing a new boiler and half a mile of pipes without asking. Why would it be any different with computer software?

No problem, I thought. Just uninstall DiRT, great game though it is, and Starforce and its associated problems will go away. Except the mouse is no longer moving. Come to think of it, nothing is happening because the computer has frozen. So much for uninstalling. That's the middle finger from Starforce right there. I press the power switch, turning the system off, then back on. Windows begins to load again, but wait! A blue screen of death appears, too briefly to read the message, then the system reboots itself.

Don't panic, I tell myself. It's just a freak occurrence. It happens all the time with PCs. Right? Rebooting again, the same thing happens. And a third time. This is now no coincidence; something is badly wrong. I attempt to load Windows into safe mode. The same thing happens. I attempt to start with the last known good configuration. The same thing happens. I then insert the Windows DVD, expecting to have to reinstall the operating system. The same blue screen of death happens again.

What's going on here? As a last resort, I unplugged the computer from the mains and left it for half an hour. As it happens, this sorted the problem, but this is not normal. A computer should not be doing this. After getting back into Windows and uninstalling DiRT, the random crashes continue. It turns out Starforce hasn't been uninstalled at all. Searching the net, I find that there is a removal tool provided by the developers of Starforce. I run it, and it tells me there is nothing to remove. On closer inspection, it turns out that the removal tool does not work with 64-bit Windows. It doesn't say "sorry, but this application won't work with your version of Windows." It flat out lies and claims to have functioned normally. This is surely deliberately malicious software design. This feature could never arise from sloppy programming or simple omission.

I'm now very angry, resorting to attempting to remove Starforce manually. This involves scouring the hard disk and registry for certain files, and removing devices (hidden devices) from the Device Manager. A 'regular' computer user just wouldn't have the knowledge nor the courage to undertake something like that. What an appalling piece of software.

I don't support software piracy. I don't want to see game developers going out of business because their products are distributed for free on the Internet. I do expect that software is open, transparent and easy to remove. Copy protection such as Valve's "Steam" actually works, and doesn't do damage to a computer. Copy protection such as Starforce is no less than malware: software that enters your system without your knowledge and prevents you from using your computer the way you want to use it.

Search for "Starforce" on Google. Go on, I dare you. How many of those results have something positive to say? I still haven't sorted my computer out. Things are still not working properly, and crashing randomly. There are stories of physical damage being caused to PCs by Starforce, and after my experience, although I have no proof either way, I am certainly ready to believe them. I have enough to deal with, handling spam emails and malicious trojans on the Internet. I can do without that kind of thing on the games I spend money on.

Sea Wolf

I went out on a bit of a limb and got hold of a copy of Sea Wolf's EP, Get to the River Before it Runs Too Low. I was really pleased by the way they sound so I'm glad I did. They sound something like an American Badly Drawn Boy; a pop-inspired sombre atmosphere with a barely noticeable uplifting edge to it. The main appeal is the completeness of the sound. The production standards are incredible and the range of noise achieved is amazingly diverse, from acoustic guitar-driven sections, through the orchestral strings, and on to light-hearted, clean electric guitar riffs.

If the high production standards are combined with the ease at which one can enjoy the EP, it leaves behind a trail of catchy, unintrusive, yet instantly appealing songs that you know will end up as a favourite on your mp3 player's playlist.

The best media player for large collections?

I guess you could say I have quite a large music collection. I have been collecting CDs since I was old enough to buy them for myself, I inherited a huge amount in the past, and my collection is bolstered by the many freebies from the huge range of unsigned bands I enjoy listening to. Up until recently I have been using a Windows Explorer session to find the mp3 I want to listen to, and then dragging it into a media player. Realising that there must be an easier way, I wanted to find out which, if any, of the modern media players could handle a large collection and which one is the best.

The music library is a 220GB store of around 40,000 files attached across a wireless "G" network (at "Excellent" signal strength), on a USB 2.0 external drive in an IcyBox enclosure. All of my systems run Windows XP.

In Brief
Winamp is clearly the best choice, as the smallest download, the easiest installation (beware of installing additional extras by not unticking boxes) and the least memory- and resource-intensive. If you want brainless autonomy, the better option would be Windows Media Player, although avoid iTunes at all costs, unless you're the 'pretty' type, or you have shares in Apple.

iTunes
Apple's media player is the obvious choice for many people because it's so closely associated with the overpriced and limited (but 'pretty') portable media player from the same company. The download is over 30MB, and despite my crippled (see the blogs about Virgin Media for more) broadband, it still downloaded at an unreasonably slow speed. Installation was fine though.

On loading the software, it looks pretty. All Apple things look pretty. Apple is the stereotypical blonde of the computing world. You'd never see an iPod outside the house with no make-up. Annoyingly, iTunes hungrily starts scouring your drives without even asking permission. I do some audio and video editing so I have things like partial clips and stock effects littering certain folders, which I certainly don't want importing into my media library. It's this kind of dumbing down of software that annoys the more experienced user. Finding the configuration for the media library locations was simple though, and I pointed it to the right place.

Several hours later I was still waiting for it to import. There is no indication of time elapsed or remaining, and no option to import in the background so that you can begin using the newly imported files. It really was laughably slow, and on a number of occasions I was considering clicking the cancel button and totally ditching the software. This is why you don't run the 400 metres in make-up and high heels. You look pretty, but you don't go fast.

Having perservered through what seemed like an eternity of importing files, I thought the ordeal was over. Alas, not so. The blasted software insisted on doing all kinds of crazy things to my files, such as downloading album art and even converting them! Apparently I didn't get a choice in the matter, as Apple's (pretty) monstrosity happily began devouring my collection. Fidelity is important to me. I consider myself an audiophile, and I use Exact Audio Copy and LAME mp3 encoder to get the maximum quality, regardless of speed. Just about everyone else I know would just press the 'rip' button and live with all the audio artifacts (pops and clicks from small CD scratches). They would probably also happily accept iTunes tearing through their music collection doing its own thing. Again this is dumbing down, and again I found myself infuriated. My mouse moved a little closer to the "uninstall" button.

Next there's the search. I couldn't even type letters into the search box, because after each letter, the program froze for a few seconds. The search did find what I was looking for, eventually, but not without leaving me feeling as though I had climbed a mountain. Oh, and it's using 120MB of RAM at the moment, shortly after loading it. It isn't playing any songs or sorting through any media. It's just idling.

All in all, iTunes is probably a superb piece of software if you want to do what all the other millions of emo MCR-obsessed sheep do, and transfer your post-grunge non-specific mediocre trash to your iPod. To me, it is a clunky, slow, unwieldy piece of software better suited to those with deep pockets, thanks to the prevalence of the links to the iTunes store. It's a resource hog, and it's frustrating to use. Did I mention it doesn't play WMA files? Come on, what kind of program won't play WMA files? On the plus side, it's pretty.

Windows Media Player 11
You can probably tell from the previous section that iTunes left me more than a little annoyed. It's one thing for a media player to get bloated, use all your RAM, slow down, and waste your disks by building an unnecessarily large music database on its own terms, but I am very careful with my files. Even if Jesus knocked on the door, accompanied by Elvis and Bill Gates, and asked if he could rearrange my H: drive, the answer would be a resounding "no."

Until recent times, Windows Media Player (WMP) was a rather ugly thing that imposed upon you and made a fuss about almost anything you tried to do, like a mother-in-law. Nowadays, it's a bit more sexy. In some ways it feels as though Microsoft have tried to copycat Apple's success with the iPod. After all, they released their own media player in the shape of the Zune (the what?) and the look of WMP has come a long, long way.

Download and installation is quick and simple thanks to it being part of the Windows Update process, although it does leave you feeling a little like you can't escape the update even if you had wanted to. Pointing it to the main music store, it began the slow and laborious task of scanning the entire 220GB collection. Although this wasn't a fast process, it had two crucial advantages over iTunes: firstly, there's feedback on how the operation is progressing, so you are kept in the know, and secondly, there's the all important 'run in background' button, so you can at least get on with listening to some music while the rest is being imported.

WMP picked up on my album art, which I had carefully collected using a freeware album art tool, and stored as JPG files in the album folders. iTunes, on the other hand, preferred to check the Internet for every single piece of album art and painstakingly download it, ignoring what I already had. But iTunes is pretty.

It's easy to build a playlist containing individual songs, albums, or everything from a single artist in WMP, but the default action seems to be to play, rather than to add to the end of the playlist, so you do need to train yourself to use the right menu combinations or drag things to the right area to add things at the end of your list. The rating stars next to each track are a nice feature, but I'm not sure whether they link to anywhere like a central database, and this is more of a gimmick than a solid enhancement.

WMP comes with a visualization function that will display pleasing colours and animations in sequence with the music you're listening to. While it's fun at first, it's a bit wishy-washy and doesn't leave a lasting impression. Not to mention that it will slow down the computer a lot unless a powerful graphics card is installed.

I found that WMP kept scanning my networked music collection for changes without asking me, which created a lot of traffic on my network and a lot of unnecessary hard disk activity. There didn't seem to be an end to this, so I'm not sure whether it scans permanently, or whether the collection was just so large that it never reached the end during a normal listening session. In any case, this is unsuitable for large networked collections, and probably not good for my drives, either.

After loading it up and performing one search for music, WMP was using a respectable 46MB of RAM.

By far the most annoying aspect of the WMP experience was the large delay on loading the software. Sometimes when I get in, I want to be able to click a button and embrace a cacophony of sound. I don't want to click a button, wait two or three minutes, and then begin my embrace. It's a bit like the other person pausing during sex to answer the phone. It ruins the mood.

All in all, WMP is a solid experience with a few rough edges that need smoothing before it can properly handle a large collection of music. It's not a bad piece of software. It's just not overwhelming in any way, although it does look rather nice and you do get the benefits of an aesthetically pleasing media library (better-looking than iTunes in my own opinion) to plough through.

Winamp
Winamp has been around for a long time. It stakes its claim to being the first consumer mp3 player available. The latest version, 5.35, has come a long way since the early days. For a start, it is a tiny download, at just over 6MB. Installation is quick and easy, although there are a few boxes to untick to avoid unwanted extras. Winamp added my music to the media library faster than both of the other players. I have no idea why.

Playing back the music is really easy thanks to the way the playlist works, allowing music to be added easily from the media library. The media library's 'now playing' feature is useful; it will look up the current song and artist and display information on them. Unfortunately the information comes from AOL Music and this isn't the best or most complete source. Having said that, it's still a welcome addition, and there are even plugins that will grab the current song's lyrics from the Internet for you.

Let's face it: the default Winamp skin is ugly. Thankfully, there is a huge database of skins available at the Winamp site, allowing the look and feel of the player to be changed to any one of thousands of different choices. The player also has the option to bring up a random skin each time the song changes, although so far I haven't found a way of binding a specific skin to a song or album. Visually Winamp offers the most flexibility, allowing individual elements to be sized, coloured and arranged as desired, and even allowing different levels of transparency on different elements.

Winamp had almost no trouble with the large music collection, allowing quick searches (a couple of seconds) to yield results ordered by artist and by album. There is even the powerful 'filters' option where music can be displayed according to certain criteria. Assuming your music library is tagged properly, you can quickly see your whole collection in a new light. I chose to filter by year, showing me only tracks from 1994, for an extremely retro experience, but more complex filters are possible too. Bearing in mind that any of this music can be accessed at the touch of a button and a two or three second delay, this is extremely suitable for a large collection.

The visualization options in Winamp are a Maglite to WMP's candle. The Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) has thousands of presets available to download, and runs in a separate window so it can be customised to run in as much or as little detail as your computer can handle, or even in fullscreen mode. You are given the option of choosing how long each individual visualization lasts, which transitions are used between visualizations, and even how long the transitions last. There is also the opportunity to download one of a number of alternate visualization studios, each with their own plethora of presets.

After loading it up, performing a search and adding some tracks to the playlist ready for another intense listening session, I found that Winamp was using less than 9MB of RAM. Less than nine megabytes! I was surprised but extremely pleased by this, and my memory is screaming back at me from inside the computer, "Please don't make us load iTunes again! Please sir!"

For the purposes of my experiment, I just can't fault Winamp. Yes, it's not the most straightforward player to use, its critics would say. Yes, there are no shiny bars and there aren't many rounded corners in the default rendition. No, it won't reorganise your entire collection and convert it all automatically to its own ridiculous format. No, I don't care about that at all really. I think I'll be sticking with Winamp for now.

Conclusion
I admit that I was not rating the media players on the entire range of features. iTunes is the obvious choice if you have an iPod. It's really simple. (Did I mention it's pretty?) Windows Media Player is just 'there' and easy to use, with an edge of cool about it. I could have talked about how well USB devices synced up to the players. I could have talked about how they handled downloads of podcasts, or how many people are using each one. There is a lot of difference between all the various media players out there, including the ones I didn't touch upon, but there is no question that Winamp outshines the rest when it comes to keeping a large music collection organised.

UGSU Summer Ball

The Summer Ball for the University of Gloucestershire Students' Union, headlining the Ordinary Boys, and featuring Scratch Perverts, Koopa and the Rumble Strips. There's not many tickets left!



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Virgin still slow

With Virgin Media busy showing off their 20Mbps cable Internet service, I am still wondering why I'm paying for 10Mbps and getting a tenth of the speed. An engineer has been out to fix an apparent problem with the cable's power level, making no difference whatsoever. The problem is blatantly one of contention. A lot of other people in my area must be hogging all the bandwidth with their excessive YouTube watching and other needless activities, and I figure Virgin must just lack the capacity.

The official Virgin solution to the problem? Wait until my cable exchange (the bit where all the cables feed into) gets upgraded to accommodate the new 20Mbps service. When will that be happening? Nobody can tell me, except that it is "soon." Great. What will happen then? My bandwidth at peak times will increase from 1Mbps to 2Mbps? By then, you'll need a 10 meg connection just to browse the web. I wouldn't stand for it if I ordered a pizza and it came with nine of the ten slices missing, but there's very little I can do to push Virgin Media into giving me what I'm paying for.

On the plus side, they are offering me a refund for the slow service, although that's not going to help it get any faster.

Virgin Media Customer Service

The Internet was slow. So hideously slow. By dial-up standards, it was still blazingly fast, but this is the age of broadband. I pay a hefty amount for my 10 megabit Internet, so I expect a decent speed in return. YouTube wasn't working properly. I was seeing a few seconds of video, then having to wait about half a minute to see the next few seconds.

I had noticed the Internet going slowly for a while now, but I generally just browse the web at home, so it wasn't a big deal, until I wanted to do something like watch a YouTube video. My service is provided by Virgin Media, which used to be ntl and Telewest, but they're all the same thing now. Calling them up was the usual frustrating affair of going through a series of 'phone menus' and pressing 1 for this, 2 for that, 3 for hurry the hell up.

The chap on the other end was a scouser. The problem was that he didn't know the difference between kilobits and kilobytes. Despite my insistence that I was only able to download at 100 kilobytes per second, he kept insisting that this was the same as 1.25 megabytes per second which was how fast my line was. While it's true that 10 megabits is the same thing as roughly 1.25 megabytes, it's certainly not true that 1.25 megabytes is the same thing as 100 kilobytes. After I asked to speak to his supervisor, he agreed to give me the benefit of his doubt and assume that the Internet was indeed slow.

The problem is caused by the different units of measurement and the similarity of their names. When even people with training are getting confused, how can we make sure that 'unit confusion' doesn't happen? The problem is compounded when ISPs use slang in their advertising. For example, a lot of companies offer "10 meg broadband". If I'm talking about the capacity of a CD-ROM, I might say "700 megs". These are not the same units of measurement, even though they are described with the same word.

File sizes have always been measured in bytes. Bandwidth has traditionally been measured in bits. The fact that there are eight bits in every byte, or ten when transferred via TCP/IP, seems to have slipped most people by. Can't we just change the way ISPs describe their service speeds? Why not call it "one megabyte broadband" instead of "eight megabit broadband"? Of course, this makes it seem slower, so they're doing themselves out of business. Can't we just change the way filesizes are referred to? Highly unlikely, since almost every operating system shows file sizes in bytes and not bits, so it would be very difficult to change all this. We just need to educate people I suppose. I hope that the "iPod generation" of youngsters growing up with various gadgets and the obligatory hideously-decorated MySpace page will learn the difference by themselves.

The result of my phone call to Virgin? There is a problem with the line. But I knew that before I called. It just means I have to wait a few days until it is fixed. When it is, I can apparently claim some partial refund on my account. After all, if you bought a six-pack of beer and there was only one can/bottle in there, you'd take it back, right? Why should bandwidth be any different?

Programming niggles

Wow, so it's been quite a while since I last wrote anything. No matter though, I'll soon catch up again.

In the course of my job at oncampus:uk, I do a bit of Java programming. Recently I stumbled upon a problem which had me totally stumped. No matter how I looked at the problem, I couldn't get the result I wanted from my programming efforts. This killed hours of my time, until I finally came to the conclusion that part of the Java code itself was to blame. A quick Google search confirmed that others had suffered the same fate, but the whole process got me thinking.

How many times have I been saved by other people writing about their troubles on the Internet? Whether it's just a general outline of the problem, or a complete solution, I find that the Internet is a key resource for troubleshooting and it's far better than any programming manual. I'll try to document my problems on this blog in the hope that I can pass on some of this 'good will' to other people with the same problems I end up getting.