Different issue. He's talking about giving these to cracked windows where windows is cracked in a way that is detected. It's a part of their WGA program where they give you the updates, but they also try to send you messages and such urging you to buy a license.
This particular hack is largely undetectable for microsoft. As far as W7 is concerned, it's a legit OEM copy.
Out of interest, more reliable in what way? I'm using geniune 7 OEM home premium right now, what kind of improvement can I expect if I move to a cracked version?
It's of no charge if I remember correctly, but pro license is significantly more expensive than home one.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if win8 actually made MS a significant chunk of extra profit by making people bump the license to pro just to get 7 upgrade rights.
To add to my other statement. Apparently they trick the bootloader by loading a separate loader before W7 bootloader loads which in turn adds ACPI tables to memory making W7 bootloader think it's running off a genuine OEM machine.
As far as W7 is concerned, its bootloader itself is not compromised in any way, and it has no way to check if it's booting off a secure machine as it has no secure boot. It's a pretty elegant hack that is very much future proof.
You can find all this stuff out by simply searching for "windows 7" on TPB, then locating the torrent with most seeds and checking the description and comments. It makes for pretty interesting read actually.
It's not a rootkit. It appears to be a mechanism to strip the protection entirely if I'm understanding the thread on TPB correctly. So far there has apparently been only one update for 7 that has not been addale through WAU directly.
And if something breaks, apparently all you need to do is deinstall the crack, run installation and reinstall the crack.
Strange how all those people pirating win 7 get their updates just fine according to the comment section of TPB on the most popular windows 7 torrent I just searched for to fact check this statement.
Could be they're all lying and it's a grand conspiracy. I'm going to go with more likely scenario - that pirate crowd have long cracked the protection and are enjoying their DRM free stuff as usual while the rest of us have to live with it.
I'd argue the opposite. Classic microsoft was "just pay us and we don't care what you do with it".
Contrasted with Google's "we'll data mine everything you ever do until we know that you're gay before you do" and apple's manic desire to control how their OS looks and interacts with the user, I'd argue that in this particular aspect, microsoft is (was?) definitely the best of those three consumer OS giants.
Oh, there are more then enough pirates today, simply because there was a period for last couple of years when it was so hard to get win7. It got pirated to heaven and back during this period. Take a look at TPB, you'll find 7 in all possible flavors you could ever desire.
Win8 on the other hand, I'd pay not to get with my new computer, which is what many today are doing by paying up to win8 pro license so they can upgrade the machine to windows 7.
So it makes sense to give basic 8 away for free. No one who can help it is buying it anyway.
And D3 got all the flak it deserved, to the point of many people who bought it because it was a "blizzard game" swore off buying blizzard games without checking what it is for foreseeable future.
But the reason why I will indeed stamp your forehead with the "moron" and stop arguing is your claim that WoW is P2W. I raided actively in WoW for several years. Your argument is about as dumb and meritless as it can get. Even buying the best character you can find from an ebay seller will not make you great at arenas or raiding.
I've been looking at current gen PCI-E based SSDs and I haven't found a single one that would support TRIM yet. Maybe some server grade ultra expensive stuff would. But current generation of consumer products does not.
This could be because most of these go for maximum speed, and shove a RAID0 controller on the SSD to improve speeds. This would be another factor that strips TRIM commands.
The much bigger reason for lack of interest in PCI-E SSDs is inability of that interface to pass on TRIM commands in the current implementations. In home use that is of far greater importance to speed over drive's life time than theoretical read and write times.
Pretty much this. Vast majority of SSDs on the market today are very similar in terms of speed in normal usage, because the bottleneck is now in SATA. You can overclock it all you want, but you'll need to start pushing disks to PCI-E or similar bus for it to start to matter.
And then there's the whole issue of "does it really matter when it's this fast on desktop?"
You're confusing PC games with casual web/facebook games. Casual web/facebook games are the same category as phone games and designed for the same crowd and as a result typically share all the same problems, such as P2W stupidity.
In fact, as of typing this, PC market has been the most resistant one to pure P2W aspects of F2P market outside Far East. You have to have a fair F2P model if you want to go F2P on PC in the West - or you will fail hard.
Consider that several games on my list are in fact F2P. But they are PC F2P. Games like LoL, DOTA2, TF2 and path of exile make for great example of PC games that are F2P. Hell, even SC2 is now partially F2P, offering a very solid multiplayer game completely free of charge. And if you want the rest, you just pay for the box and you're golden.
So consolitis got more severe as the game got more sequels. This is not unusual.
Again, I'm talking about PC games. Not multiplatforms. You appear to have grabbed to "PC games" title and then assumed it means "multiplatform games also released on PC but designed for consoles". Which is strange, because I specifically draw the line in my initial post.
Try banished, the recently released one man job of a game. Good luck arguing it was "dumbed down".
Or try Starcraft 2. Or LoL/DOTA2. Or Path of Exile. Or many of countless others.
PC gaming is alive and well because current generation of PC games (not multiplatform, but actual PC games) are heavily pushing in their own niches. By extension, that's also why they sell less - they focus on their own audience and keep the experience fairly hardcore instead of watering it down to ensure the wider appeal. Stacraft 2 makes for a great example here, very little wide appeal but for the hardcore fast paced RTS fans it's a godly game. Even in shooters, PC shooters are pretty much niche, but very good at what they do. From Tribes Ascend to TF2 to various CS implementations, you can pick your poison.
And for console crowd, there will always be the one massive seller that is call of duty.
You're talking hypotheticals on most of your point. I'm talking about specific game (Thief) that has all the problems I listed.
It could be because it is designed for previous gen and not next gen of consoles. It's still tiny in terms of world size, trying to hide the loading screens in the "spam E to pull up the window while we load that next level" (still doesn't work properly on PCs due to a shitty port quality, people are reporting to get loading screens in the "middle of level" all the time).
Thief has always been about dark, decrepit, effectively collapsing society and attempts of higher strata of society to improve it that go very very badly wrong and you as the thief basically observing the results from level of average person, whom you rob. It's been that way in thief, in metal age and in deadly shadows. You do not play games like these with kids - these themes are exceptionally dark, adult and have a negative hit on young child's psyche.
That said if you think that this is okay for kids but the sexual perversion stuff isn't, I suspect that playing video games with kids is not the main problem you have...
I have the same problem on nvidia rig with 560Ti, 4 gigs of RAM and 4.2 GHz i5. Performs fine even on high settings as long as I turn SSAA off, but then it hits the HDD hard and FPS collapses. Same problem on medium. Haven't tried on low yet, but I suspect it will be the same problem again.
I suspect it's either shitty optimization or the game actually does need more than 4GB of RAM and I should just upgrade the machine.
That is correct. Multiplatform games released for PC are often dumbed down because they are: 1. Not PC games - they are multiplatform releases 2. Expected to sell more on consoles than PCs - as a result main aspects of game design are focused on console crowd. 3. Both thief and DX:HR make very good example of this dumbing down. A lot of core mechanics of originals are simplified for reasons that they must run on a console and be aimed at console crowd. That means axing more complex features in favor of fast QTEs, simpler controls, linear or simplified tactical approach and so on. All of these are present in thief. All of these were present in DX:HR. Both are still fun games in their own right, in part because originals were so good that even stripping them down still leaves a very good game.
Slashdot Mirror
You should also assume that every time you walk out of the door, every person out there is out to kill you.
I was serious. What advantages are there to circumventing the DRM? Quite ofter there are some, but I just don't see any at the moment.
It could be I'm ignorant, which is why I'm asking, and while I get your joke, I'm actually interested in a more practical answer.
Different issue. He's talking about giving these to cracked windows where windows is cracked in a way that is detected. It's a part of their WGA program where they give you the updates, but they also try to send you messages and such urging you to buy a license.
This particular hack is largely undetectable for microsoft. As far as W7 is concerned, it's a legit OEM copy.
Out of interest, more reliable in what way? I'm using geniune 7 OEM home premium right now, what kind of improvement can I expect if I move to a cracked version?
It's of no charge if I remember correctly, but pro license is significantly more expensive than home one.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if win8 actually made MS a significant chunk of extra profit by making people bump the license to pro just to get 7 upgrade rights.
To add to my other statement. Apparently they trick the bootloader by loading a separate loader before W7 bootloader loads which in turn adds ACPI tables to memory making W7 bootloader think it's running off a genuine OEM machine.
As far as W7 is concerned, its bootloader itself is not compromised in any way, and it has no way to check if it's booting off a secure machine as it has no secure boot. It's a pretty elegant hack that is very much future proof.
You can find all this stuff out by simply searching for "windows 7" on TPB, then locating the torrent with most seeds and checking the description and comments. It makes for pretty interesting read actually.
It's not a rootkit. It appears to be a mechanism to strip the protection entirely if I'm understanding the thread on TPB correctly. So far there has apparently been only one update for 7 that has not been addale through WAU directly.
And if something breaks, apparently all you need to do is deinstall the crack, run installation and reinstall the crack.
Strange how all those people pirating win 7 get their updates just fine according to the comment section of TPB on the most popular windows 7 torrent I just searched for to fact check this statement.
Could be they're all lying and it's a grand conspiracy. I'm going to go with more likely scenario - that pirate crowd have long cracked the protection and are enjoying their DRM free stuff as usual while the rest of us have to live with it.
It was successful as windows 7. Not "as successful as..." Literally. People bought to 8's pro license and used it to install 7.
The word play is hilarious because it's true.
I'd argue the opposite. Classic microsoft was "just pay us and we don't care what you do with it".
Contrasted with Google's "we'll data mine everything you ever do until we know that you're gay before you do" and apple's manic desire to control how their OS looks and interacts with the user, I'd argue that in this particular aspect, microsoft is (was?) definitely the best of those three consumer OS giants.
Oh, there are more then enough pirates today, simply because there was a period for last couple of years when it was so hard to get win7. It got pirated to heaven and back during this period. Take a look at TPB, you'll find 7 in all possible flavors you could ever desire.
Win8 on the other hand, I'd pay not to get with my new computer, which is what many today are doing by paying up to win8 pro license so they can upgrade the machine to windows 7.
So it makes sense to give basic 8 away for free. No one who can help it is buying it anyway.
And D3 got all the flak it deserved, to the point of many people who bought it because it was a "blizzard game" swore off buying blizzard games without checking what it is for foreseeable future.
But the reason why I will indeed stamp your forehead with the "moron" and stop arguing is your claim that WoW is P2W. I raided actively in WoW for several years. Your argument is about as dumb and meritless as it can get. Even buying the best character you can find from an ebay seller will not make you great at arenas or raiding.
I'll state it once again: read the initial post. I will not copy/paste it.
They are played on consoles as well. And on mobile devices. And on a damn fridge as long as it has a decent browser.
Refer to original post for more details, I cannot be bothered to literally copy/paste the same argument again.
I've been looking at current gen PCI-E based SSDs and I haven't found a single one that would support TRIM yet. Maybe some server grade ultra expensive stuff would. But current generation of consumer products does not.
This could be because most of these go for maximum speed, and shove a RAID0 controller on the SSD to improve speeds. This would be another factor that strips TRIM commands.
The much bigger reason for lack of interest in PCI-E SSDs is inability of that interface to pass on TRIM commands in the current implementations. In home use that is of far greater importance to speed over drive's life time than theoretical read and write times.
That's not a finger.
Pretty much this. Vast majority of SSDs on the market today are very similar in terms of speed in normal usage, because the bottleneck is now in SATA. You can overclock it all you want, but you'll need to start pushing disks to PCI-E or similar bus for it to start to matter.
And then there's the whole issue of "does it really matter when it's this fast on desktop?"
You're confusing PC games with casual web/facebook games. Casual web/facebook games are the same category as phone games and designed for the same crowd and as a result typically share all the same problems, such as P2W stupidity.
In fact, as of typing this, PC market has been the most resistant one to pure P2W aspects of F2P market outside Far East. You have to have a fair F2P model if you want to go F2P on PC in the West - or you will fail hard.
Consider that several games on my list are in fact F2P. But they are PC F2P. Games like LoL, DOTA2, TF2 and path of exile make for great example of PC games that are F2P. Hell, even SC2 is now partially F2P, offering a very solid multiplayer game completely free of charge. And if you want the rest, you just pay for the box and you're golden.
So consolitis got more severe as the game got more sequels. This is not unusual.
Again, I'm talking about PC games. Not multiplatforms. You appear to have grabbed to "PC games" title and then assumed it means "multiplatform games also released on PC but designed for consoles". Which is strange, because I specifically draw the line in my initial post.
Really?
Try banished, the recently released one man job of a game. Good luck arguing it was "dumbed down".
Or try Starcraft 2.
Or LoL/DOTA2.
Or Path of Exile.
Or many of countless others.
PC gaming is alive and well because current generation of PC games (not multiplatform, but actual PC games) are heavily pushing in their own niches. By extension, that's also why they sell less - they focus on their own audience and keep the experience fairly hardcore instead of watering it down to ensure the wider appeal. Stacraft 2 makes for a great example here, very little wide appeal but for the hardcore fast paced RTS fans it's a godly game. Even in shooters, PC shooters are pretty much niche, but very good at what they do. From Tribes Ascend to TF2 to various CS implementations, you can pick your poison.
And for console crowd, there will always be the one massive seller that is call of duty.
You're talking hypotheticals on most of your point. I'm talking about specific game (Thief) that has all the problems I listed.
It could be because it is designed for previous gen and not next gen of consoles. It's still tiny in terms of world size, trying to hide the loading screens in the "spam E to pull up the window while we load that next level" (still doesn't work properly on PCs due to a shitty port quality, people are reporting to get loading screens in the "middle of level" all the time).
You play thief games with kids? What the f...?
Thief has always been about dark, decrepit, effectively collapsing society and attempts of higher strata of society to improve it that go very very badly wrong and you as the thief basically observing the results from level of average person, whom you rob. It's been that way in thief, in metal age and in deadly shadows. You do not play games like these with kids - these themes are exceptionally dark, adult and have a negative hit on young child's psyche.
That said if you think that this is okay for kids but the sexual perversion stuff isn't, I suspect that playing video games with kids is not the main problem you have...
I have the same problem on nvidia rig with 560Ti, 4 gigs of RAM and 4.2 GHz i5. Performs fine even on high settings as long as I turn SSAA off, but then it hits the HDD hard and FPS collapses. Same problem on medium. Haven't tried on low yet, but I suspect it will be the same problem again.
I suspect it's either shitty optimization or the game actually does need more than 4GB of RAM and I should just upgrade the machine.
That is correct. Multiplatform games released for PC are often dumbed down because they are:
1. Not PC games - they are multiplatform releases
2. Expected to sell more on consoles than PCs - as a result main aspects of game design are focused on console crowd.
3. Both thief and DX:HR make very good example of this dumbing down. A lot of core mechanics of originals are simplified for reasons that they must run on a console and be aimed at console crowd. That means axing more complex features in favor of fast QTEs, simpler controls, linear or simplified tactical approach and so on.
All of these are present in thief. All of these were present in DX:HR. Both are still fun games in their own right, in part because originals were so good that even stripping them down still leaves a very good game.