When did using cat (aka 'concatenate files and print on the standard output') to concatenate multiple files and print them to the standard output as input to another command become 'useless use of cat'?
Any time you use cat to send one or more files' contents to grep is a "useless use of cat" because grep already supports that directly: grep [options] PATTERN [FILE...]
Saying this, I am going to go home now and close Steam, then try and browse to Braid in the file structure of my Steam installation. If I can run it without logging in to Steam, I will take all I've said about it back. I don't think that will be the case, though.
Quite a few games check by location whether they're supposed to run Steam or not, so try copying it to a different directory if it does try to start Steam.
Here in Switzerland we have done away with them since a very very very long time ago.
I guess Wikipedia is lying to me then, as it implies that the 1 rappen coin was in production until 2006 and the 5 rappen coin is still in production ("nickel" is the nickname of the USD and CAD 5 cent pieces).
The one dollar bill of the US just confounds me.
Good thing Canada doesn't produce dollar bills any more and instead uses the $1 loonie coin and $2 toonie coin.
The US has had a $1 coin in regular circulation since 1999 (and special printings in 1979-1981 before that). However, the government hasn't been able to convince people to use them instead of dollar bills.
"I remember the Microsoft whose products could be guaranteed to be technically excellent" I don't. I remember the Microsoft who sucked less than their primary competitors in the microcomputer world at the time.
I assumed he was talking about before I was born when Microsoft's only products were BASIC interpreters.
Since when are graphics card model numbers "confusing"? The first number is the generation. The second is if it is high end, mainstream or budget, and the rest are small differences.
Which is newer, the Radeon 7970 or 8500?
If you answered 8500, you're wrong. The 7970 was released this year, the 8500 was released 11 years ago.
I know reading 101 is a fail for most/. users, but for fucks sake even the summary points out it is an NVidia exploit. Or do you somehow think Linux would be magically immune to a kernel level exploit in NVidia drivers?
Good job failing reading 101 yourself.
The summary points out that nVidia's Windows Service is exploitable rather than the display driver itself. Why would you think that would affect Linux?
Oh, and that's without even mentioning that Windows and Linux drivers aren't written in the same language (C++ for Windows, C for Linux) and don't use the same kernel API.
On XP, root and SYSTEM are functionally identical. It wasn't until Vista introduced UAC that they became different (because Administrator is subject to UAC, but SYSTEM isn't).
Steam has a very consistent schedule of getting updates on Tuesday, many of which take the network down. I would not be surprised if this was the case. I've learned to avoid any games that require a Steam connection on Tuesdays. (Usually ones that are tracking achievements that affect the game or using steam cloud I would guess.)
Tuesdays are also the day that new games are released in the US (it's a brick and mortar thing). I wonder if that's related.
Most of the time, Steam downtime is announced in advance (for known downtimes) or confirmed that there's a problem on the Steam Downtime Announcements thread on the Steam forums.
However, it's not always done, particularly on weekends or holidays.
My experience is that Steam doesn't record achievements at all while in offline mode.
I really wish they'd change it to be more like the 360 and PS3 do (the syncing you mentioned), particularly since Steam already seems to have the capability to unlock achievements via their API.
First impression: so far they seem to have feature-parity with Windows; You run Steam and it launches into a download-without-resume upgrade immediately, from a window that you cannot select from the task selector (you have to uncover it by minimizing other apps) and which has no icon.
I'm assuming you filed a bug report about that? I don't recall the Steam client upgrade window as not having an icon on the Windows task bar, so I assume it's not intended to be like that.
The problem here is not Steam. The problem is that the companies that produce those games refuse to make them available without some form of DRM as they do not trust people not to pirate them
FALSE! There are other forms of DRM less odious than Steam. They don't prevent unauthorized copying, but neither does Steam.
It's possible to get "less odious" than Choose game from my Library to install it (or go purchase it from the Steam store, which then asks if I want to install it) and then once it's done installing, choose its icon from my desktop environment or Steam Library to run it?
For that matter, most Steam games on Windows can be moved out of the Steam directory structure and *poof* the Steam dependency disappears... although that doesn't work with SteamWorks games like Half-Life 2, Civilization 5, or Skyrim. Turns out most games use the same executable for their non-Steam versions and just check if they're in the steamapps directory when running.
One last point to my horrid opinion on gaming... Back in the BBS days (yes, those), I used to be able to login and play the same game on my TRS-80 or on my friends Commodore 64 down the street... Tradewars... it's almost like pixels are finally catching up to ASCII in portability terms.
Not exactly catching up. Facebook games are right over there if you want to play them.
The catch being that's not the kind of games that Steam deals with.
Most people play games on whatever machine they already have, rather than buying a machine to play games. In that regard Apple computers are ahead of the curve a little bit as they aren't "budget" computers and are reasonably capable mid-range gaming machines. Linux on the other hand is on almost no over the counter computers. And well, Windows pretty much rules this space.
Apple has a nasty tendency to use mobile graphics cards in its desktops (with the exception of the Mac Pro). I wouldn't exactly call that "ahead of the curve."
I remember back when students were mainly using TI-82s and I had a TI-85 instead... I figured that the instructors wouldn't be that familiar with the 85, so I wrote a program that mimicked the TI-85 factory reset screen.
However, the instructors never actually cleared them.
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Sure, fine. But there are many, many more non-Valve games on Steam than there are Valve ones.
My point was apparently too subtle, so I'll come right out and say it: Valve is the one writing the specs.
Games tend to be particularly oinky for disk space... newer "big budget" games seem to be around 12 GiB (12.88GB) standard a piece these days.
Also, how big is Windows 8?
You earned yourself a Useless Use of Cat Award!
When did using cat (aka 'concatenate files and print on the standard output') to concatenate multiple files and print them to the standard output as input to another command become 'useless use of cat'?
Any time you use cat to send one or more files' contents to grep is a "useless use of cat" because grep already supports that directly:
grep [options] PATTERN [FILE...]
Miracast is too laggy for these kinds of video games. No one wants to play an FPS and deal with compression artifacts and latency from miracast.
"These kinds of games"? None of the games I've bought from Steam are FPSs.
Maybe you don't, but Steam is by Valve, and Valve makes FPS games almost exclusively (the major exception being DOTA 2).
Saying this, I am going to go home now and close Steam, then try and browse to Braid in the file structure of my Steam installation. If I can run it without logging in to Steam, I will take all I've said about it back. I don't think that will be the case, though.
Quite a few games check by location whether they're supposed to run Steam or not, so try copying it to a different directory if it does try to start Steam.
I can think of 3 consoles that stack:
NES front-loading model
PS2 (up until the PSTwo)
Wii
The Xbox 360 to a certain extent.
Word from Redmond is that Microsoft is going to attempt to clone Steam now.
They're working on a competitor called "Shaft."
So... new version of "Games for Windows â" LIVE"?
Samsung doesn't care. AT&T doesn't care. Customers don't care.
That doesn't leave much.
It leaves the developers who develop applications for Android.
Which is the group directly affected by terms of use changes to the SDK.
What's a penny? What's a nickel? ;)
Here in Switzerland we have done away with them since a very very very long time ago.
I guess Wikipedia is lying to me then, as it implies that the 1 rappen coin was in production until 2006 and the 5 rappen coin is still in production ("nickel" is the nickname of the USD and CAD 5 cent pieces).
The one dollar bill of the US just confounds me.
Good thing Canada doesn't produce dollar bills any more and instead uses the $1 loonie coin and $2 toonie coin.
The US has had a $1 coin in regular circulation since 1999 (and special printings in 1979-1981 before that). However, the government hasn't been able to convince people to use them instead of dollar bills.
"I remember the Microsoft whose products could be guaranteed to be technically excellent"
I don't. I remember the Microsoft who sucked less than their primary competitors in the microcomputer world at the time.
I assumed he was talking about before I was born when Microsoft's only products were BASIC interpreters.
Option 2 : If length() returned zero even on a null object, it still is sort of correct, the string is zero sized.
null isn't an object in Java, which is where the problem is coming from.
Since when are graphics card model numbers "confusing"? The first number is the generation. The second is if it is high end, mainstream or budget, and the rest are small differences.
Which is newer, the Radeon 7970 or 8500?
If you answered 8500, you're wrong. The 7970 was released this year, the 8500 was released 11 years ago.
I know reading 101 is a fail for most /. users, but for fucks sake even the summary points out it is an NVidia exploit. Or do you somehow think Linux would be magically immune to a kernel level exploit in NVidia drivers?
Good job failing reading 101 yourself.
The summary points out that nVidia's Windows Service is exploitable rather than the display driver itself. Why would you think that would affect Linux?
Oh, and that's without even mentioning that Windows and Linux drivers aren't written in the same language (C++ for Windows, C for Linux) and don't use the same kernel API.
On XP, root and SYSTEM are functionally identical. It wasn't until Vista introduced UAC that they became different (because Administrator is subject to UAC, but SYSTEM isn't).
Betteridge's law of headlines suggests that the answer is no.
Steam has a very consistent schedule of getting updates on Tuesday, many of which take the network down. I would not be surprised if this was the case. I've learned to avoid any games that require a Steam connection on Tuesdays. (Usually ones that are tracking achievements that affect the game or using steam cloud I would guess.)
Tuesdays are also the day that new games are released in the US (it's a brick and mortar thing). I wonder if that's related.
Most of the time, Steam downtime is announced in advance (for known downtimes) or confirmed that there's a problem on the Steam Downtime Announcements thread on the Steam forums.
However, it's not always done, particularly on weekends or holidays.
My experience is that Steam doesn't record achievements at all while in offline mode.
I really wish they'd change it to be more like the 360 and PS3 do (the syncing you mentioned), particularly since Steam already seems to have the capability to unlock achievements via their API.
First impression: so far they seem to have feature-parity with Windows; You run Steam and it launches into a download-without-resume upgrade immediately, from a window that you cannot select from the task selector (you have to uncover it by minimizing other apps) and which has no icon.
I'm assuming you filed a bug report about that? I don't recall the Steam client upgrade window as not having an icon on the Windows task bar, so I assume it's not intended to be like that.
They could also easily port over any old DOS games which use DOSBox or ScummVM to run. If they bothered doing it at least.
It's the devs/publishers that would have to do that.
For instance, the copies of older iD games (Doom, Doom 2, etc...) use DOSBox, but Zenimax would have to update them to work with it.
No idea how this would affect the copies of Doom and Doom 2 included in Doom 3: BFG Edition. Those may actually be running under Windows itself.
The problem here is not Steam. The problem is that the companies that produce those games refuse to make them available without some form of DRM as they do not trust people not to pirate them
FALSE! There are other forms of DRM less odious than Steam. They don't prevent unauthorized copying, but neither does Steam.
It's possible to get "less odious" than Choose game from my Library to install it (or go purchase it from the Steam store, which then asks if I want to install it) and then once it's done installing, choose its icon from my desktop environment or Steam Library to run it?
For that matter, most Steam games on Windows can be moved out of the Steam directory structure and *poof* the Steam dependency disappears... although that doesn't work with SteamWorks games like Half-Life 2, Civilization 5, or Skyrim. Turns out most games use the same executable for their non-Steam versions and just check if they're in the steamapps directory when running.
One last point to my horrid opinion on gaming... Back in the BBS days (yes, those), I used to be able to login and play the same game on my TRS-80 or on my friends Commodore 64 down the street... Tradewars... it's almost like pixels are finally catching up to ASCII in portability terms.
Not exactly catching up. Facebook games are right over there if you want to play them.
The catch being that's not the kind of games that Steam deals with.
Most people play games on whatever machine they already have, rather than buying a machine to play games. In that regard Apple computers are ahead of the curve a little bit as they aren't "budget" computers and are reasonably capable mid-range gaming machines. Linux on the other hand is on almost no over the counter computers. And well, Windows pretty much rules this space.
Apple has a nasty tendency to use mobile graphics cards in its desktops (with the exception of the Mac Pro). I wouldn't exactly call that "ahead of the curve."
Since AMD is worth about twice what Valve is and has 60x the employees, I think it'd be the other way around.
Valve is a privately held company, making it virtually impossible to tell how much they're worth.
I remember back when students were mainly using TI-82s and I had a TI-85 instead... I figured that the instructors wouldn't be that familiar with the 85, so I wrote a program that mimicked the TI-85 factory reset screen.
However, the instructors never actually cleared them.