Paul's Comments

I've been doing some practice videos on You Tube, and for anyone interested, they can go to my "channel" at http://youtube.com/rfc1394. This blog software will not allow embedding. I'll have to find how to correct that. In the mean time, the video is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=FIINEh0UI4w and as soon as I can figure out how to allow embedding the video will also appear here. I've installed the YouTube plugin, so supposedly it should be visible below.

The following is the text for the above video, which is called "When the Internet is Unavailable". Additional comments I thought about after I did the video appear in brackets [like this].

I'm not sure if I'm going to call this a "Rant", complaint, or a number of different things but,you're going to be watching this a considerable time after I have made it. Because, quite frankly, I am unable to upload it at this time because my Internet connection is not working. And that is a big problem.

I can't upload my material, but more importantly there are a number of things that I'd like to use that happen to be, for one reason or another, dependent upon the Internet possibly because the company is so afraid of being "ripped off" by people not paying.

They require you to be connected to the Internet to use their product. Now, I'm not referring to programs that like, Second Life, for example, that require you to have Internet connectivity to use the program. That's not what I'm referring to. What I am referring to, specifically, is the "Half-Life 2" series of programs, that is, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Portal, and the third-party add-in, "Garry's Mod." Now, I am specifically excluding Team Fortress 2, because that is a program that does require the Internet to be able to use it.

But the other programs, none of which require the Internet to operate, and none of which will operate, without an Internet connection. For whatever reason. I could understand if the programs required an Internet connection to operate. But they don't. Because you use them as single-player programs. In fact, you don't play them with other people the way you would with other games such as say, "Doom" or "Duke Nukem" which you can play with other people.

Okay, I'll admit you can play Half-Life 2, in Multi-player mode if you are running a custom map you've made for the game, or someone else has made. You could do the same thing with Half-Life 1. I've seen them, I've actually run them. But, in general, when you're playing Half-Life 2, usually you're playing it in single-player mode.

When I'm running Half-Life 2, or Half-Life 2 Episode One or Two, or especially Portal, I am intending to run the game as a single-player game. But I can't run the game on my computer if I don't have an Internet connection. Which is kind of stupid. But I guess they are so afraid that someone is going to play the game without paying for it they've in effect, instituted, a draconian method of protecting their program. I don't know.

I don't like the idea. Because I can't use my program, that I paid for, when my Internet connection is down, or unavailable. Now, I can understand in the case of "Team Fortress 2" which is a "cooperatiive first-person shooter" requiring an Internet connection, since you're going to play it that way. But it doesn't make any sense for the others to, and for some reason, you can't use any of them if your Internet connection doesn't work.

And this is... a thing I'm thinking about... I'm wondering, whatever happens if Valve goes out of business?

I mean, seriously, the Internet connection that these programs need isn't so that you can connect to other people or for other purposes. It's so that it can "phone home" to Valve's servers, wherever they are, to obtain updates to the program, or whatever. But if for some reason, Valve ceases operations (could be any number of reasons), they get out of the business, they go broke, the Internet goes down, something happens, you get into an area where the Internet isn't available. Whatever the reason. If you can't get to their servers, your game is wasted, it's gone. Same as if, your money's been taken and you no longer have use of the program you bought.

Yes, yes, I know, technically when you "buy" a computer program in the store you don't really buy it, you're only "licensing" it. Which is a whole another issue to get into. But, in general when you buy a program effectively you own that copy. For all intents and purposes. But this is one of the reasons why people do not like the idea of "D.R.M.", "Digital Restrictions Management" or, "Draconian Restrictions Management" as this video is indicating.

Because, simply enough, if something goes wrong with the method of these protection systems, whatever you own [that is protected by a DRM system that fails], you lose it. If either it can't "phone home" to the manufacturer, or for some reason the keys no longer work, or you lose your keys, you're stuck.

You buy a DVD, okay, you can still play that even if the movie manufacturer goes out of business. [The inability to do this is probably one of the reasons that killed the DIVX system that Circuit City offered.] But, if you have an electronic program like this, that requires you have an Internet connection and for some reason you can't reach them - or they're no longer available - you're hosed!