Hardware DRM

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Peter Jensen wrote on 08 Jun 2005 13:50:24 GMT

Hmm...the tricky part of this patent is the "prevented from using data storage areas buttociated with other applications". The rest might have been done on the Amiga or Atari ST systems back in the 1980s.

Of course, the devil's in the details -- and some of them are rather odd.

There are four directoriesa,a-b,c, andc-d, stipulated, rather verbosely, in the patent. At the end of the day, this patent shotguns multiple issues, such as how to properly represent saved gamestates within the game, where the game is (it's buttumed *off-disk*), and where one might put such data as the gamesave timestamp, which game, and where the user was within the game during saving.

I think Descent II was doing some of this in the late 1990s' (it showed the user's approximate position in a little subwindow), though I don't know how it names its savefiles offhand and it doesn't display other savefiles unless someone accidentally drops a file of the right name, in which case I have no dea what the game will do -- probably complain nastily, if not crash. DOOM, Quake, and Unreal do not show where the user is. None of these have an iconic view of saved gamefiles for other games (easily done within Windows or using Nautilus, perhaps).

Strange patent.

There's one innovation I know Microsoft did: integration of a series of stuff into their OS in such a way that it's difficult to get out without crippling it. :-) That, and some of their marketing innovations selling vaporware.

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.