So it looks like the Viliv S10′s pricing is going to start at $699. That’s according to Dynamism, anyway. I like the WXVGA display and the 7-10 hour battery life, but $699, and that’s for a model with Windows XP and a 60GB hard drive. Yeah, right.

I have, in the past, taken forum talk as “confirmation” of DRM-based restrictions. For instance, I thought Bioshock 2 wouldn’t allow you to save games if you weren’t connected to the internet. This turned out to be an exaggeration, as you are able to create an “offline” Games For Windows Live profile once you’ve activated the game. With the offline profile you can save games even if you’re not connected to the internet (though, I repeat, you have to connect to the internet at least once to activate the G4WL DRM).

Ubisoft has put some ridiculous DRM into effect that I’m comfortable calling ‘confirmed’, as the source is the magazine PC Gamer.

The game in question? The PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2. The ridiculous restriction? Even though it’s a single-player game, you can’t play the game unless you’re connected to the internet. Yes, that’s right.

If you’re playing the game and your internet connection fails, you will be kicked out of the game.

Guess what? If their servers go down, that’ll kick you out of the game too.

Way to alienate your fan base. Of course, the terrible sales will be chalked up to PC games being a dying market, having nothing to do with increasingly awful DRM.

Fuck that, and fuck Ubisoft.

The story has changed a bit, though Ubisoft seems to be contradicting themselves. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a really good writeup on the whole situ.

Lark

Just bought the Motorola S9-HD, stereo bluetooth headphones. Thought I’d throw up some first impressions and notes.

As I said in a really old post, I’m going to start putting videos on a site like blip.tv someday soon. Naturally, I’ve been paying extra attention to how other sites have been implementing video ads. In that last post I just talked about some video streaming sites. Now we get to the meat of my current interest, online video with ads.

This isn’t meant to be seen as a comprehensive guide of all sites and different types of online ads, just a few notes and thoughts regarding the way I’ve seen some sites display ads. For extra fun, picture me saying it in the whiny, meandering voice of Andy Rooney.

One of the reasons I bought an N900 was so I could put a 16GB microSD card in it and use it as an mp3 player. The N900 has 32GB of storage–about 26GB of that are available due to the N900 needing about 6GB for system files. Adding a 16GB SD card makes 40GB total available for files such as mp3s.

I don’t even have 40GB of mp3s on this device, because I need to save space for downloaded files, photos, etc. Right now I have maybe 35GB of music on my N900, split between the internal storage and the microSD card. This, by the way, from someone who nearly ran out of space on a 120GB Zune. 110GB – all music, no videos (the Zune Pass subscription service was primarily to blame).

Right now the device has 8,465 songs on it, according to the N900′s default media player.

How a tablet PC “inks,” or how it handles handwriting with a stylus is one of my primary concerns when looking at a new device. There are a lot of considerate individuals out there helping people who care about inking by posting videos of inking on various devices.

In fact, type the model of a tablet PC along with the term “inking” into Google and there’s a pretty good chance it’ll find a video for you. I don’t want to demean or insult anyone who helps people out by making such videos. However, a lot of the videos are lacking a few things. I’ve made a list of requests, okay, rules, for making inking videos more helpful to people like myself:

I’ve been working pretty hard on a few projects as of late, and that generally results in my taking mini-breaks by wandering around my room and tidying things up. It’s started to seem pretty ridiculous to me that I have so many papers. When writing, it’s just easier to brainstorm and work out outlines with a notepad and a piece of paper. It might not be as fast and the result is quite a bit harder to read, but it’s just easier for some reason.

If you have or want an N900, then I’m sure it has something to do with it’s amazing web capabilities.

Here’s a quick run down of my experiences with the 2 main browsers you’ll play with, the default ‘microB’ and Firefox.

I’ve started and stopped this post about a dozen times. The N900 is a relatively new device, and a lot of the times I start to write something, I think, “Oh, maybe it works this way…” and I get sidetracked by playing with my new phone for another while.

Then I get into forum posts, wikis, tutorials, etc. I completely forget I even started a blog post.

Trying not to get in over my head here, I’m going to try and write a lot of small posts instead of one big one.

First, let’s talk about T-Mobile. I had the phone for a day before I got my T-Mobile SIM, so I already had 40GB of mp3s put on it, as well as a lot of games, apps, email accounts, etc.

So not only did I just get a Nokia N900 that, to be fair, I have been saving up to buy for a while. Play time with this phone probably won’t be over for a few more weeks.

Not only am I really busy with work, meaning the grindstone now has the shape of my nose worn into it.

Not only that, I just bought Mass Effect 2. I know, I know. I don’t know why.