DISQUS

One of the problems I have it with EA's decision to, seemingly at the last minute, change the policy to only allow the game to work on a single user account per machine. If two people who use the same machine want to play the game, you have to buy two copies (despite the manual clearly stating otherwise). This changes things, and is essentially saying to people who have already bought the game, they can't enjoy it with other people. My girlfriend bought Spore, despite my protests, and I can't play it. This is the first time I've ever come across this and I've been bad mouthing it to everyone I've discussed it with. I can GUARANTEE that at least five people have not bought this game because of what I've told them, and that's five customers EA has lost. So no, I won't be pirating a game we, as a couple, have already bought, I won't be touching it either. And I'll make damn sure everyone I talk to knows how idiotic some of the imposed restrictions are.

It could be worse, I've got a Nokia N95 which has built in GPS. Usually the GPS tries to stream maps over the air, which costs a fortune. Fortunately they provide a piece of software which allows you to load maps directly onto a memory card. Unfortunately, it's one of the least usable applications I've ever come across. The biggest problem, and this is HUGE, is that when you add a new map, it deletes any existing ones. So, picture the scene, I live in the UK, and was traveling to New York. So the night before I left I loaded maps for New York State. Fine. Then, the morning after when I tried to navigate to the airport, the UK maps were gone! And to make matter worse, it's a non-standard Windows application, so all the buttons and controls look different (I can see no good reason for that), and there's no OSX version. The PC suite is just as bad (fortunately I can just use iSync on OSX, which is much easier).

I think by far the best was the flying penguin story (and video!) from the BBC. it actually had me going for a second.

I've added it to my site almost out of curiosity alone but at the same time I have some major concerns, most of which I posted about here: A New Traffic Exchange System for Bloggers?

I like you point about making sure you have at least five posts up. My blog got dugg (to death) on one of it's first posts which meant I had thousands of visitors who had nowhere else to go after they had read the post. That was such a wasted opportunity, I'm still kicking myself for it!

I have to say, I reviewed the BBC iPlayer beta and hated it. Forget about the DRM limitations, which another commenter rightly pointed out don't need to be there, but the application itself was a mess. Unstable and not a single ounce of thought had gone into usability and interface design, they obviously thought it was more important to make everything shiny. Not to mention the confusing DRM restrictions they've decided on.