If you have to resort to calling names because you can provide nothing but appeals to emotion quit wasting my time, please go away. you did NOT say "In my opinion this is why I won't buy" you did NOTHING but give out one doom scenario after another.
Now you tell me EXACTLY how are you ANY different than RMS and his "Windows 7 sins"? answer...YOU AREN'T, both use appeals to emotion with NO evidence, NO citations, NOTHING but pulling out doom scenarios...well ya know what? Tomorrow Zombie Steve Jobs could release flying monkeys and destroy the USA...BOTH are equally likely, BOTH have the same amount of evidence, BOTH are just so much bullshit.
I'm sorry that while you rightly call out the FOSSies on their bullshit you can't see your own, but i have provided clear evidence and concrete proof that your doom scenarios simply can't happen. hell if valve got struck by a meteor tomorrow and wiped out the company it wouldn't matter if there was anybody to release their steam unlock patch or not, 5 minutes at gamecopyworld or megacracks and you would lose NOTHING, even if Steam was gone tomorrow.
So again show me ONE person, just one mind you, that has lost a single game from Steam. I can show you plenty of guys that have lost money on retail, hell he has had to crack over half his games because the versions of SecuROM or Starfuck just won't run.
so do us BOTH a favor, either admit you are a pirate and just don't want to pay for shit, which that is your business but be honest about it, or admit that like RMS it has to do with ideology and politics and not anything about Steam itself. i mean do you not play games at all? you have the exact same risk with more than 75% of the games out there because all it takes is the company pulling the plug you are SOL, only unlike valve companies like EA HAVE pulled the plug and made retail games worthless, try playing MP on any of the games in the MOH decade pack for instance,or any of their sports games that are more than 2 years old. At least with Steam i can fire up that copy of HL 1 DM and be fragging dozens of people in minutes and that is a 14 year old game.
Actually the winning move is to vote with your dollars and support the other guy. Sony has said that the PS4 will NOT be online only and while we haven't heard from valve on the Steambox since Steam itself can go for a month at a time without being online I doubt the Steambox will be any different.
Finally if you want to control the hardware instead of some corp building an HTPC has never been cheaper nor easier, hell the kits come with picture instructions now, you can get a full triple core kit for $220 after MIR but they have over a dozen under $340 with everything from dual core APUs to hexacores, so it all comes down to how much muscle you want your new system to have (I've built several HTPCs with the Athlon triples and they game just fine plus have close to a 75% core unlock rate) and if you want the little gaming console looking case geeks has them starting at $30.
I got my teen boys off the consoles onto PCs and we couldn't be happier, thanks to Steam we all have more games than ever at a HELL of a lot cheaper than they were spending on the consoles, with the rate things are going game wise I don't doubt we'll be able to game on those hexacores for several years with nothing more than a cheap GPU upgrade every couple of years. Most importantly WE control the hardware so WE say what runs and what don't and can actually vote with our dollars. if MSFT wants to be dicks, who cares? We can buy from Steam,D2D,GOG,origin, and retail, not to mention MP don't cost us shit and there are plenty of F2P games out there so you don't even need to spend money if you just want a new game to kill, in fact as I'm typing this I have Black Mesa (fan made remake of Half Life 1 with HL 2 level graphics) downloading and the oldest is having fun smacking people around in TF2.
So just don't take crap and vote with your dollars which we have seen with EA and Ubisoft DOES work, why anyone would pay good money to be treated like shit I'll never know. The new consoles are with the exception of the Wii u all X86 based anyway so you know that we'll see most games come out for the PC and probably simultaneously with the console to maximize their advertising dollar. So there really isn't any reason why you'd have to take crap from a console maker, not like you can't just plug in a wireless controller and pretty much every GPU comes with HDMI outs so even your grandma could hook the thing up, easy peasy.
Translation "I don't have anything but bullshit pulled right out of my ass because that is NOTHING but a doom scenario. Companies fail all the time? Nintendo is nearly 100 years old...BAM, your doom scenario is now TOTALLY WORTHLESS because I have just shown that EITHER scenario is just as likely, in fact I would argue that Valve being another Nintendo is MORE likely due to the facts, which are 1.- they have been VERY conservative when it comes to money, not funding any crazy ventures or stupid gambles, 2.;- by releasing a Linux version AND coming up with a completely new way to build consoles by handing out minimum specs to over a dozen companies and letting them compete they have thus made sure even if MSFT closed their doors tomorrow valve would NOT go anywhere, and 3.- By constantly listening to their customers and providing superior service they have one of the highest satisfaction ratings of ANY company, not just in gaming but PERIOD.
so I'm sorry but BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT and if you call the FOSSies out on their appeals to emtion "ZOMFG M$ could lock everyone out of their PCs in teh future ZOMFG!" then I MUST equally call you out sir because ALL you are providing is appeals to emotion and doom scenarios, not ONE cited harmed individual, not ONE single case where this supposed problem came to pass, NO evidence at all, NOTHING but doom scenarios. Either bring evidence or quit wasting people's time with shit pulled out of your ass because i say Zombie Steve Jobs will kill Ballmer and take over the world...what? prove me wrong.
Why is he labeled troll? I haven't seen bigger flame fodder since MovieBob tried to claim The Phantom menace wasn't THAT bad!
And do i really have to spell it out? Say it with me boys and girls correlation does not equal causation and with a subject THIS nebulous it could be frankly anything, maybe people that are willing to believe a sky bully has made them a special little creature is willing to believe that the magic placebo will work just fine, maybe they are more suggestible to just about anything, maybe they are just more optimistic all around and thus think things will work out...who the fuck knows.
Hell it ain't even a new idea, not only would every little shop owner like me say the same thing but that goes all the way back to Henry Ford, give the customers a good value for their money and you WILL end up with a loyal customer and repeat business, on the other hand treat them like shit? Watch them go out of their way to avoid giving you business.
Hell I won't even buy non Steam games anymore, because even the DRM free stuff like GOG doesn't give me as much value as Steam does. With steam i can simply drag a single folder to another drive to back it up or move my games, no dealing with CD keys or backing up registry settings, and unlike GOG I don't have to play "Find the patch" because Steam takes care of all that FOR me, even tells me when there is an update for my GPU drivers.
So I would say THAT should be the goal that the media cartels should be striving for, make it so damned simple and easy to use and give it features that give the users MORE value, not less, and watch the money roll in. hell with digital fingerprinting there is ZERO reason for not having something similar to Steam for video, where I can just register my DVD movies and box sets and be able to access them at any time or download them from the service in whatever format I need but thanks to their hard on for batshit levels of DRM the pirated version is better as you can just get that in MKV or AVI and use it on anything from that $39 Nbox player (Great product BTW, I have gotten several of those for customers and even family and they all love how simple and easy it is to use) to that $1000 laptop and not have to deal with bullshit.
I mean here we are in 2013 and the ONLY way I can legally play my Joss Whedon boxset is to drag around a USB DVD player for my netbook? Or have to pay for some service that has limited selection and won't even play if I'm at say my doctor's office (where I might actually WANT to watch because of the long wait times) because there isn't an Internet connection? I'm sorry but that is just bullshit.
But that won't actually accomplish the task at hand, all you have done is turn a general purpose PC into a single application. with GPOs I can have JUST that one program go to the designated ports and be run ONLY at the designated times while at the same time allowing other applications to run with as little or as much restrictions as you want. let me give an example, it'd probably be easy to get into the mindset which since you are coming from the server space isn't easy, because as i said its like the difference between a jet and a cropduster.
I have an insurance company where with XP Mode they have IE 6 set JUST to allow an intranet app, any other attempts to do anything with IE 6 will fail, while at the same time their Chrome install is allowed to do general surfing, they have a program for CC numbers that is ONLY allowed to run during certain hours (because it has to go through the head office) and then in the evenings the systems are locked to anything but their backup program.
So you see thanks to the way MSFT designed GPOs you can get VERY fine grained control and what is more i only have to set that up once and through AD all the changes will be passed to the client systems and even THAT is fine grained as the managers have different permissions than the secretary and so on. Believe me friend, this isn't a slight on Linux, its just at the end of the day its really a server OS and if you want that pointed proved beyond a reasonable doubt go to ANY forum and say you need a drop in replacement for AD and GPO and see what horribly bad hacks you get told are "solutions" to your problem, last time I did that some of the software being touted had been abandoned and couldn't even run on the latest kernel!
There just aren't any tools in LinuxLand designed to replace the ease of use and power of AD and GPOs, simply because the millions spent on Linux development are geared to the server and NOT the desktop. As I said on a server its great, you can download a pre-configured VM and with a couple tweaks have it running in less than an hour, but you try to replace GPOs with something in Linux you'll quickly be banging your head on the desk in frustration.
So have your buddy buy his own games? Not like games on Steam are high and in many cases you can buy bundles of 4 so if you have friends that want to play you can just gift it to them.
Considering how many of the games use gamespy to tie a game into an account frankly you can't do that with a retail game either, your friend would have to have a gamespy account with that game in it or you are right back where you started. At least with steam i can pick ANY game I have and go straight to the store page and pick up a copy for a friend or just send him the link, try doing that with GFWL and see how quickly you just wanna scream as there is NO easy way to just go to a game or DLC and gift it, none.
Actually that isn't even a valid argument because there are just as many cracks for steam games as there are retail games so NO difference there. Go to gamecopyworld or megagames or any crack site, you can crack any game you bought on steam in less than 20 minutes, again NO different than retail. in fact i would argue the retail comes with serious drawbacks as 1.- requires the disc to be installed and said disc must be in good enough shape to read perfectly, many a game I've had even the tiniest scratch would cause it to fail, and 2.- nearly all discs use some form of DRM like SecuROM that quickly becomes obsolete so not only can you not install the game because for example the SecuROM has a 16bit installer and you are on a 64bit OS, but now you have TWO problems, you gotta get around the SecuROM installer AND patch the game.
So as you can see their argument just doesn't hold water, you are no more at risk from steam than from any retail disc, in fact you have less risk. I do agree about preferring games with Steam to games without, i no longer buy non steam games as its just not worth the hassle, steam gives a better experience than the retail disc does.
Hell you don't even have to do THAT because if a drop down menu is too hard for you then you can just copy the steam folder to a USB drive, in fact several of my customers didn't even know there WAS another way to back up games, I showed them how to drag and drop and it was just easier to do. Hell if you and a friend/family member have the same game they don't even have to download it, they can just copy yours to their steamapps folder and Bob's your uncle. my oldest is on a WISP with shitty caps so he'll just buy 2 copies when something he wants is on sale and gift one to me so I can just download it on my cable, still comes out cheaper than paying for the cap overage charges.
Now when you compare that to a retail disc,find the disc and load it, install the game, put in a 25 letter code, download countless patches and hope you don't fuck up and skip one because a LOT of them won't just patch to current, you have to get patch 123 before you can install patch 124 and so on, and if you need to back up? tough shit, better have made a traced install with Comodo program manager or Revo pro or you are fucked.
I think that when you compare that to Steam, drag and drop on USB drive, drag and drop onto new drive, fire up Steam...yeah not really any comparison, steam wins by a pretty big amount.
Again you are using a doom scenario and appealing to emotion, again I say in the future RMS will slaughter children...both are equally valid, both have zero evidence to back them up, both are just as much bullshit.
If Valve had some way to take your games that would be valid but guess what? THEY DON'T because there is this little place called "GameCopyWorld" where there are cracks for the Steam games NO DIFFERENT than for any retail game that you buy. What IS different is that Steam don't buttfuck you if you change OSes, I have games right now I can't play without downloading the pirated version because the old ass SecuROM or Starfuck DRM has a 16bit installed and a 32bit kernel hook and I'm on a 64bit OS...cue the WB"sucker" music. With Steam I can be on ANY Windows from XP-Windows 8, hell if its a game that actually has been ported I can even run it on Linux, NO hassles and NO risk.
So again show me somebody that has bought games from steam and been burned, just one, I can show you plenty of examples of those burnt by retail discs, just watch the video and look at his shelves and realize more than half of those games won't play because while the game code itself is fine, the shitty DRM code won't run so the game won't run. But the ONLY ones I have EVER found that have been supposedly "burned" by Steam turned out they were caught using wallhacks and aimbots and got banned which guess what? They would have got banned off the retail as well because nobody wants their games ruined by cheating douchebags.
So if there is actual evidence lets see it, I've already shown it is just as trivial to bypass Steam as it is ANY retail disc so Valve going under in the future (which with 7 straight years of doubling profits and coming out with a Linux version makes that unlikely) isn't any kind of evidence, its a doom scenario and appeal to emotion. Give us facts, give us citations, don't just say "They could do something bad in the future!" because I could raise Cthulhu in the future and rule the world at his side...hey it COULD happen, right?
Damn check out the old guy, I thought all you 4 digit guys were dead;-)
But its nice to see I'm not the only one with dozens of games I haven't even gotten to yet, what with bundles and sales and the like I actually have on average MORE games than I have ever had before and a LOT of that is because its so damned easy just to push the button and get a game or five, I too have bought some games like Deus Ex I liked back in the day but can't be bothered to go dig through the boxes in storage to figure out which one has my old games tucked away in it.
At the end of the day this is why I am happy to defend Steam and give my money to Valve because it actually is digital RIGHTS and not digital RESTRICTIONS. I can't find the CD key to that game I bought 3 years ago? no worries I had it registered with Steam so they have it. I need to get a bigger drive? no need to reinstall or mess with registry keys or bullshit, just drag the folder over and fire steam up, no worries. Its gotten to the point that if a game isn't on Steam I'm just not gonna buy it because its just too much bullshit, its easier just to let valve handle all the patches and keys and updates FOR me so that I have the right to get my games where I want and when I want and hassle free. This of course isn't counting the bundle sales which I just fricking LOVE as it takes all the DLC out of the equation, just buy the bundle and I get ALL the DLC included and installed, again hassle free.
So I don't see a problem with Steam, could i hack my games if I needed to? Sure in fact GameCopyWorld has dozens of Steam cracks...but why would I want to? They give me a centralized place where I can have ALL of my games patched and updated and take care of any keys, along with chat and butt simple matchmaking, and all of this at a fair price that is often cheaper than retail...what EXACTLY is the downside? because somebody can think up a "doom scenario" which IRL is about as likely as Zombie Steve Jobs showing up at MacWorld I should care? Show me REAL evidence of somebody that wasn't a cheating bastard (which would have gotten just as banned with a retail game for running aimbots and wallhacks) that has lost a single game because of Steam DRM and THEN I'll be happy to say that they have a point, until then they are just talking out their posterior.
But that again can be easily fixed, it all comes down to marketing. Look at how Marvel got back the rights to their characters and now do their own flix under Disney, people see that Marvel logo and know that even their B list stuff is frankly entertaining so the brand HAS become worth something, even to those that don't read comic books. Hell my dad is 71 and never read a comic book in his life and when I brought over the Avengers for us to watch when he saw the Marvel logo he said 'Oh good, they make good movies" because they had put out several titles like Ghost Rider he really enjoyed.
So again not hard to build brand identity, just have a catchy opening logo and make a good product. But again the bigger point is they have ZERO evidence the batshit DRM is helping them and plenty of evidence from pissed off customers that the DRM is hurting them. I have a LOT of HTPCs out in the field, in fact its one of my more popular builds, yet not a single one had or will most likely have a Blu Ray drive, even though they are hooked to 1080p sets...why? Because with DVD its easy for Joe Normal to just rip the movie he has bought to his big fat hard drive and thanks to a couple of freeware programs I hand them they can then just thumb through their movie and TV collections virtually, with the box art and synopsis all being downloaded and loaded automatically.
The bitch is that the Real corp had a product that would have made it easy for users to do this that didn't even remove the DRM from DVDs or even the commercials but the studios have such a fucking hard on for DRM that even that teeny tiny bit of convenience, end result? Not only will my dozens of HTPCs not have Blu Ray any time soon thanks to its nastier DRM but more and more of the customers are asking me to show them how P2P works and buying media tanks because they heard they can bypass the bullshit and just download a MKV already ripped with the subtitles and in full 1080p.
So it all comes down to that saying which any retailer will tell you is practically law, which is the customer is always right. Give folks the products they want at a fair price point and a minimum of bullshit? They WILL buy, again look at how Steam has allowed Valve to double profits for 7 years in a row, their DRM doesn't cockslap the user constantly and frustrate the hell out of them so the users are happy, actually happy, to hand Valve money. But look at EA and Ubisoft for what happens when you go batshit and care more about the pirates and squeezing every penny than in what the customer actually wants, EA sunk a ton into origin which is a mega-flop, both EA and Ubisoft spent fortunes on DRM only to watch the sales dry up, you have to give the customers what they want or at the very least make them feel they are getting a fair value for their money but instead all this DRM cockslapping does is make the customer feel cheated so naturally they won't buy from you in the future.
I'm sorry sir but I am a crusader against bullshit and I'm calling BULLSHIT. A doom scenario without ANY proof or evidence is just fucking bullshit, I can say Bill Gates will fuck goats and zombie Steve Jobs will be brought back by sacrificing newborns and it is JUST as valid a statement because in both cases you are appealing to emotion and don't have jack shit for evidence.
As for not needing DRM? Again bullshit as we DO have evidence and the evidence shows that games with zero DRM are pirated just as much if not more than other games so the honor systems DOES NOT WORK. Steam does ONE THING and it does it quite well, it keep people from just handing out their games by slapping them on a flash stick. What is fucking AMAZING about that is it does so without penalizing the user is ANY way and in fact makes it easier than a retail disc in a LOT of ways. For example did you know that if my kids have the same game I do that they do NOT even have to download the game, that I can just slap the files on a flash and hand it to them? this makes it VERY easy for my oldest who is stuck on a WISP while I'm on cable. You can also back up all your games by simply dragging the folder onto a USB drive so if your OS gets hosed or the drive dies (or in my case you move from a 500GB to a 2TB) you can just drag it off the USB and be back up and running faster than you can be with ANY other software.
So I'm sorry if you thought that just because I call out the FOSSies on THEIR bullshit that I would agree with yours, bullshit IS bullshit IS bullshit and steam is better than every other previous system by a pretty damned large amount. I have plenty of games from the 90s I have to hack and jump through hoops to get to work because the SecuROM or Starforce they have had a 16bit loader and 32bit kernel hooks and I'm on a 64bit OS (and God help you if you fuck up and manage to install one WITHOUT hacking first, I've seen old SecuROM completely destroy a 64bit install) but with Steam? No worries, it doesn't matter if the game came out yesterday or like the Deus Ex I bought came out over a decade ago it "just works".
So either come up with some specific examples of people hurt by Steam that are NOT pirates or fucking cheating bastards and then I'll be happy to concede you have a point, otherwise you are no different than the FOSSies using appeals to emotion and doom scenarios trying to make the other guy look bad with ZERO evidence or anything more than words pulled out of your ass.
But that is easy to prove its bullshit, all one has to do is compare valve to ubisoft. One went batshit with the DRM and one did not, so what happened? One has doubled their profits 7 years in a row, the other is backpedaling and releasing patches that remove the DRM in a hope to get a few sales to stop the bleeding.
The bitch is that time and time again we have seen that a common sense approach will maximize profit while minimizing casual piracy. The problem comes in when companies foolishly believe that every pirate is a lost sale and decide they are gonna get zero piracy or bust. I've known a LOT of pirates, was even one myself for awhile back in the day but if they would have cranked the DRM to 11 I still wouldn't have bought because I was broke and while I'm sure there are some pirates out there that are just cheap bastards and don't want to pay from what i have seen most pirates fit into one of two camps,
1.-Don't have the money, in which case like Gates said its better to have them pirate your stuff as you can get them liking your stuff and when they have money will then lean towards you, and 2.- Those that collect stuff simply because they can and those people aren't gonna buy no matter the price because its not the object itself they give a shit about, its simply the getting stuff part. I knew a guy that had every single ROM for every single system out there...he played MAYBE 12 games out of the entire bunch, he just downloaded them and filed them away in case some day he MIGHT want to play them. I've known guys that did similar things with music or movies, have drives just full of the stuff...just to say they have a drive full of stuff.
But as long as they insist on going batshit with the DRM there simply can't be any compromise, we have to fight them every step of the way. because these guys won't just use HTML V5 DRM for movies, nope they'll push to have it on everything so that they can be sure that nobody is getting to see or hear anything that didn't come with a dollar value.
What you are doing is no different than the bullshit the GPL guys use to make BSD sound evil, you are throwing out doom scenarios which I can say in the future RMS and Torvalds will eat babies and what do ya know? just as accurate or useful.
Can you name ONE PERSON, just one, that had their games taken away that WERE NOT being giant fucking douchebags and ruining the game for everyone else? because i sure as hell can't, the only ones I've EVER heard of get banhammered from Steam were the cocksuckers using wallhacks and aimbots that frankly just destroy MP for everybody else. those people would have been banned with a retail disc just as quickly if a company gave a shit about its MP because the surest way to kill a game is to do nothing about cheaters.
but bitching about what Steam could or could not do in the future is NO different than me saying RMS will burn babies in the future, in both cases we have absolutely zero evidence to back this up and are pulling shit out of our rear ends.
I want everybody to take a good look at this because this just proves what some of us have been saying all along, which is voting with your dollars works it just isn't magic and when you are talking about a large corp with a huge bank account it takes time to work.
I mean look at how well it has worked with consumer friendly gaming companies VS consumer unfriendly gaming companies, Valve treats customers well, has doubled their profits for 7 years in a row, EA treats customers like shit? Laying off workers after the CEO bailed rather than be fired, Ubisoft who used to practically give bonuses to those in the company who could come up with a nastier way to treat customers? Removed their DRM from their current titles and from what i understand is putting out patches that remove it from previous titles, and of course Activision which is "restructuring" which is a nice way of saying "trying to stop the bleeding".
So voting with your dollars DOES WORK, it is just like any real solution isn't a magic wand one can wave to make things change instantly. As I pointed out to those that poo pooed the idea "At least i'm not paying for the right to be treated like shit" and by refusing to give those that treat me as dirt money I know I'm doing my little part in making sure they don't get rewarded for being assholes while at the same time having plenty of truly great games to play. its not like there aren't plenty of companies out there that won't be happy to treat you as a valued customer, when the stink about Diablo 3 being always online so they could nickel and dime you with money markets hit I spread the word about how Runic games was even allowing modding in Torchlight II and had a lot of folks tell me how much they loved the game. BTW if anybody doesn't have it yet? Great game and to celebrate adding Steam workshop support they gave us the Half Life headcrab as one of the pet choices. of course i had to name mine Lamar, just wouldn't be right otherwise LOL.
If a company insists on treating you like shit? Don't buy from that company and be quick to point out alternatives to anybody who is thinking of buying it. As we can plainly see here it does work, it simply takes time to hurt a huge corp like EA.
Well a good example is the one that started the thread, you have a VM that 1.- can ONLY be allowed to run a single application and 2.- That application can ONLY go to specific addresses and specific ports with nothing else allowed.
With GPOs that wouldn't be hard to do because pretty much anything can be set with GPOs to limit usage in pretty much any way you can think of, like I said telling the PC that Bob is ONLY allowed to run a specific program every other Tuesday really isn't hard at all to do. This is why I say that for SMBs and SOHOs and even consumers you just can't beat Windows, they spent crazy amounts of money to make everything friendly while at the same time giving admins the power to limit the living hell out of the system WITHOUT breaking the system.
Like I said try tweaking Linux desktop apps and see how quickly things go to crap when you differ from the defaults. I spent nearly 3 years fighting Linux because I actually bought the whole "Linux is ready!" bit and found that once you stray from the default permissions things just start breaking.
Yeah, why don't you play around with that a little bit and get back to me. I've found most programs out there have a bad case of "works for me!" in that nobody ever bothered to test the thing with anything but default install and default permissions so any changes to either one? welcome to your nightmare. With GPOs you can say "Bob gets to use this but only on Thursday between 3-5 PM" and I don't even wanna see what a mess of hacks it would take to do something that fine grained with nothing but r-w-e, it'd be a mess.
As for why all the devs are on windows? that is easy, I haven't coded in a few years but it was probably what kept me on VS which is good old intellisense. Intellisense is a great example of MSFT making a damned good tool for day to day work as it takes out a lot of the drudgery of programming, I don't know if its still that way (as I said its been awhile, i quit programming when VB 6 was retired) but the FOSS IDEs I tried were frankly not much better than a glorified text editor, great if you know the language like the back of your hand and just need to whip something off fast but it would also happily let you fuck up syntax and never say a word. again if that has changed my bad, certainly have no desire to program anymore so not gonna be messing with IDEs, but at least when I was programming intellisense was worth its weight in gold to me.
Unless you are just a freeloader that isn't the problem at all, the problem is they don't know where to stop.
Take the company I often use as an example because frankly they are the ONLY ones who have gotten DRM right...Valve. why do you think it was so easy for Valve to get Steam running on Linux, even though they can't put kernel level DRM hooks? Because Valve knows DRM isn't there to stop piracy its there to stop Billy Bob from just handing out a copy of his steamapps folder to all his buddies on a flash drive. Can you bypass Steam? Sure you can, in fact a good number of the game cracks out there work just fine on Steam games but do you see Valve cracking down and making steam a DRM nightmare? Nope and because of this they have doubled their profits 7 years in a row.
So the DRM itself isn't the problem, done right it would run on Linux or Windows or your grandma' lawnmower if it had a supported chip, nope the problem is they always go batshit with DRM so the consumers can't use what they bought while the pirates laugh their ass off. Lets be honest folks if the DRM ran just as good on Linux as it does on windows this wouldn't even be an issue except for the batshit brigade that think "The web should be free herpa de derp!" yet I don't see them on a street corner giving away THEIR labor for nothing, talk about hypocrites. if you want to give away YOUR work that is fine and dandy, give it a CC license and call it a day, but those that don't want to give their labor away should have the right to try to make a living same as you do.
In the end it comes down to two and ONLY two choices, either some form of DRM so those that create content can get paid for it (since obviously the honor system alone ain't gonna cut it) or we stick with the whole "Have to sell to a multinational megacorp so they'll have the money to sue everybody" strategy, pick one. Maybe if both sides could come to the table like adults instead of making it political we could sit down and work out a nice compromise, but sadly what we'll get is either locked down tighter than a nun's thighs or nothing at all, and that is just a damned shame.
Well I work with SMBs, SOHO, and consumers and I can tell you its SUCKS with a capital S, Linux on the desktop frankly hasn't gotten ANY better than it was 5, even 10 years ago. Oh its gotten prettier, its gotten nicer to look at, but the same hassles, the same driver issues, and the same backward ass design choices are still there.
Now in the server space? I can honestly see the appeal, I really can. but you have to admit what you are running on a server and what you run on a desktop is two totally different cans of worms, with a server you are usually running headless or a minimal GUI at best, no desktop, no sound, no Wifi, its like comparing a crop duster and a fighter jet, they really are about as different as that.
But when it comes to small business I'm afraid nobody has anything in the same ballpark, not even close. i have systems that have been in the field for 7-9 years now, not a single bug nor glitch,heck why do you think XP has lasted this long? Because its stable, its easy to use, runs on pretty much anything, and is easy peasy to lock down with group policy. hell you wanna go BOFH with group policy you can say WHAT they can run, WHEN they can run it and HOW it is allowed to operate. Nothing Linux has even comes close, which is why I'm so quick to call out the "Linux is read for the desktop!" crowd. Sure if ALL you do with a desktop can just as easily be done on a Kindle or iPad? Then sure Linux will work as a desktop...but why not just get the iPad or the Kindle?
But at the end of the day MSFT didn't end up with a billion XP desktops out there by accident, they got that high by giving the SMB, SOHO, and consumer markets EXACTLY what they wanted, an easy to use desktop that any kid dragged in off the street can pick up in no time yet is just as easy to set limits on thanks to GPOs.
So you traded getting locked into Amazon for getting locked into a bunch even more controlling and who gouges on their hardware...congrats.
Frankly the better move would be to tell both of them to get fucked and if you can't watch it for free on the net fuck that show, not like there isn't more shows than you can ever watch, games than you can ever play, and music than you can ever listen to being offered for free right now on the web, right?.
As the other poster pointed out its too early to tell if the revenue was from unprofitable divisions, there is no telling with a company that old what kind of shit they have bringing in money that is losing more than it makes so I'm willing to cut her a little slack and she if she can turn it around.
After all she can't be any worse than Yang, turning down that huge pile of money which honestly was more than twice what the company was worth? I don't see how she could possibly do anything that epic a fail.
Well we southerners constantly get slapped upside the head by grammar nazis bitchin' about using ain't so most of us don't use it when we type. Of course i would say that in itself is ironic since most dictionaries recognize ain't as a word so all those years of getting slapped upside the head by teachers fur nuthin;-)
Uhhh...didn't we have an article the other day talking about Yahoo's numbers are up? Considering how long the numbers have been nosediving it sounds like she is doing SOMETHING right, although one could argue whether it was Yahoo doing something right or MSFT running off all their older customers by fucking Messenger and Hotmail, but for whatever the reason numbers are up so props to her for that.
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If you have to resort to calling names because you can provide nothing but appeals to emotion quit wasting my time, please go away. you did NOT say "In my opinion this is why I won't buy" you did NOTHING but give out one doom scenario after another.
Now you tell me EXACTLY how are you ANY different than RMS and his "Windows 7 sins"? answer...YOU AREN'T, both use appeals to emotion with NO evidence, NO citations, NOTHING but pulling out doom scenarios...well ya know what? Tomorrow Zombie Steve Jobs could release flying monkeys and destroy the USA...BOTH are equally likely, BOTH have the same amount of evidence, BOTH are just so much bullshit.
I'm sorry that while you rightly call out the FOSSies on their bullshit you can't see your own, but i have provided clear evidence and concrete proof that your doom scenarios simply can't happen. hell if valve got struck by a meteor tomorrow and wiped out the company it wouldn't matter if there was anybody to release their steam unlock patch or not, 5 minutes at gamecopyworld or megacracks and you would lose NOTHING, even if Steam was gone tomorrow.
So again show me ONE person, just one mind you, that has lost a single game from Steam. I can show you plenty of guys that have lost money on retail, hell he has had to crack over half his games because the versions of SecuROM or Starfuck just won't run.
so do us BOTH a favor, either admit you are a pirate and just don't want to pay for shit, which that is your business but be honest about it, or admit that like RMS it has to do with ideology and politics and not anything about Steam itself. i mean do you not play games at all? you have the exact same risk with more than 75% of the games out there because all it takes is the company pulling the plug you are SOL, only unlike valve companies like EA HAVE pulled the plug and made retail games worthless, try playing MP on any of the games in the MOH decade pack for instance,or any of their sports games that are more than 2 years old. At least with Steam i can fire up that copy of HL 1 DM and be fragging dozens of people in minutes and that is a 14 year old game.
Actually the winning move is to vote with your dollars and support the other guy. Sony has said that the PS4 will NOT be online only and while we haven't heard from valve on the Steambox since Steam itself can go for a month at a time without being online I doubt the Steambox will be any different.
Finally if you want to control the hardware instead of some corp building an HTPC has never been cheaper nor easier, hell the kits come with picture instructions now, you can get a full triple core kit for $220 after MIR but they have over a dozen under $340 with everything from dual core APUs to hexacores, so it all comes down to how much muscle you want your new system to have (I've built several HTPCs with the Athlon triples and they game just fine plus have close to a 75% core unlock rate) and if you want the little gaming console looking case geeks has them starting at $30.
I got my teen boys off the consoles onto PCs and we couldn't be happier, thanks to Steam we all have more games than ever at a HELL of a lot cheaper than they were spending on the consoles, with the rate things are going game wise I don't doubt we'll be able to game on those hexacores for several years with nothing more than a cheap GPU upgrade every couple of years. Most importantly WE control the hardware so WE say what runs and what don't and can actually vote with our dollars. if MSFT wants to be dicks, who cares? We can buy from Steam,D2D,GOG,origin, and retail, not to mention MP don't cost us shit and there are plenty of F2P games out there so you don't even need to spend money if you just want a new game to kill, in fact as I'm typing this I have Black Mesa (fan made remake of Half Life 1 with HL 2 level graphics) downloading and the oldest is having fun smacking people around in TF2.
So just don't take crap and vote with your dollars which we have seen with EA and Ubisoft DOES work, why anyone would pay good money to be treated like shit I'll never know. The new consoles are with the exception of the Wii u all X86 based anyway so you know that we'll see most games come out for the PC and probably simultaneously with the console to maximize their advertising dollar. So there really isn't any reason why you'd have to take crap from a console maker, not like you can't just plug in a wireless controller and pretty much every GPU comes with HDMI outs so even your grandma could hook the thing up, easy peasy.
Translation "I don't have anything but bullshit pulled right out of my ass because that is NOTHING but a doom scenario. Companies fail all the time? Nintendo is nearly 100 years old...BAM, your doom scenario is now TOTALLY WORTHLESS because I have just shown that EITHER scenario is just as likely, in fact I would argue that Valve being another Nintendo is MORE likely due to the facts, which are 1.- they have been VERY conservative when it comes to money, not funding any crazy ventures or stupid gambles, 2.;- by releasing a Linux version AND coming up with a completely new way to build consoles by handing out minimum specs to over a dozen companies and letting them compete they have thus made sure even if MSFT closed their doors tomorrow valve would NOT go anywhere, and 3.- By constantly listening to their customers and providing superior service they have one of the highest satisfaction ratings of ANY company, not just in gaming but PERIOD.
so I'm sorry but BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT IS BULLSHIT and if you call the FOSSies out on their appeals to emtion "ZOMFG M$ could lock everyone out of their PCs in teh future ZOMFG!" then I MUST equally call you out sir because ALL you are providing is appeals to emotion and doom scenarios, not ONE cited harmed individual, not ONE single case where this supposed problem came to pass, NO evidence at all, NOTHING but doom scenarios. Either bring evidence or quit wasting people's time with shit pulled out of your ass because i say Zombie Steve Jobs will kill Ballmer and take over the world...what? prove me wrong.
Why is he labeled troll? I haven't seen bigger flame fodder since MovieBob tried to claim The Phantom menace wasn't THAT bad!
And do i really have to spell it out? Say it with me boys and girls correlation does not equal causation and with a subject THIS nebulous it could be frankly anything, maybe people that are willing to believe a sky bully has made them a special little creature is willing to believe that the magic placebo will work just fine, maybe they are more suggestible to just about anything, maybe they are just more optimistic all around and thus think things will work out...who the fuck knows.
Hell it ain't even a new idea, not only would every little shop owner like me say the same thing but that goes all the way back to Henry Ford, give the customers a good value for their money and you WILL end up with a loyal customer and repeat business, on the other hand treat them like shit? Watch them go out of their way to avoid giving you business.
Hell I won't even buy non Steam games anymore, because even the DRM free stuff like GOG doesn't give me as much value as Steam does. With steam i can simply drag a single folder to another drive to back it up or move my games, no dealing with CD keys or backing up registry settings, and unlike GOG I don't have to play "Find the patch" because Steam takes care of all that FOR me, even tells me when there is an update for my GPU drivers.
So I would say THAT should be the goal that the media cartels should be striving for, make it so damned simple and easy to use and give it features that give the users MORE value, not less, and watch the money roll in. hell with digital fingerprinting there is ZERO reason for not having something similar to Steam for video, where I can just register my DVD movies and box sets and be able to access them at any time or download them from the service in whatever format I need but thanks to their hard on for batshit levels of DRM the pirated version is better as you can just get that in MKV or AVI and use it on anything from that $39 Nbox player (Great product BTW, I have gotten several of those for customers and even family and they all love how simple and easy it is to use) to that $1000 laptop and not have to deal with bullshit.
I mean here we are in 2013 and the ONLY way I can legally play my Joss Whedon boxset is to drag around a USB DVD player for my netbook? Or have to pay for some service that has limited selection and won't even play if I'm at say my doctor's office (where I might actually WANT to watch because of the long wait times) because there isn't an Internet connection? I'm sorry but that is just bullshit.
But that won't actually accomplish the task at hand, all you have done is turn a general purpose PC into a single application. with GPOs I can have JUST that one program go to the designated ports and be run ONLY at the designated times while at the same time allowing other applications to run with as little or as much restrictions as you want. let me give an example, it'd probably be easy to get into the mindset which since you are coming from the server space isn't easy, because as i said its like the difference between a jet and a cropduster.
I have an insurance company where with XP Mode they have IE 6 set JUST to allow an intranet app, any other attempts to do anything with IE 6 will fail, while at the same time their Chrome install is allowed to do general surfing, they have a program for CC numbers that is ONLY allowed to run during certain hours (because it has to go through the head office) and then in the evenings the systems are locked to anything but their backup program.
So you see thanks to the way MSFT designed GPOs you can get VERY fine grained control and what is more i only have to set that up once and through AD all the changes will be passed to the client systems and even THAT is fine grained as the managers have different permissions than the secretary and so on. Believe me friend, this isn't a slight on Linux, its just at the end of the day its really a server OS and if you want that pointed proved beyond a reasonable doubt go to ANY forum and say you need a drop in replacement for AD and GPO and see what horribly bad hacks you get told are "solutions" to your problem, last time I did that some of the software being touted had been abandoned and couldn't even run on the latest kernel!
There just aren't any tools in LinuxLand designed to replace the ease of use and power of AD and GPOs, simply because the millions spent on Linux development are geared to the server and NOT the desktop. As I said on a server its great, you can download a pre-configured VM and with a couple tweaks have it running in less than an hour, but you try to replace GPOs with something in Linux you'll quickly be banging your head on the desk in frustration.
So have your buddy buy his own games? Not like games on Steam are high and in many cases you can buy bundles of 4 so if you have friends that want to play you can just gift it to them.
Considering how many of the games use gamespy to tie a game into an account frankly you can't do that with a retail game either, your friend would have to have a gamespy account with that game in it or you are right back where you started. At least with steam i can pick ANY game I have and go straight to the store page and pick up a copy for a friend or just send him the link, try doing that with GFWL and see how quickly you just wanna scream as there is NO easy way to just go to a game or DLC and gift it, none.
Actually that isn't even a valid argument because there are just as many cracks for steam games as there are retail games so NO difference there. Go to gamecopyworld or megagames or any crack site, you can crack any game you bought on steam in less than 20 minutes, again NO different than retail. in fact i would argue the retail comes with serious drawbacks as 1.- requires the disc to be installed and said disc must be in good enough shape to read perfectly, many a game I've had even the tiniest scratch would cause it to fail, and 2.- nearly all discs use some form of DRM like SecuROM that quickly becomes obsolete so not only can you not install the game because for example the SecuROM has a 16bit installer and you are on a 64bit OS, but now you have TWO problems, you gotta get around the SecuROM installer AND patch the game.
So as you can see their argument just doesn't hold water, you are no more at risk from steam than from any retail disc, in fact you have less risk. I do agree about preferring games with Steam to games without, i no longer buy non steam games as its just not worth the hassle, steam gives a better experience than the retail disc does.
Hell you don't even have to do THAT because if a drop down menu is too hard for you then you can just copy the steam folder to a USB drive, in fact several of my customers didn't even know there WAS another way to back up games, I showed them how to drag and drop and it was just easier to do. Hell if you and a friend/family member have the same game they don't even have to download it, they can just copy yours to their steamapps folder and Bob's your uncle. my oldest is on a WISP with shitty caps so he'll just buy 2 copies when something he wants is on sale and gift one to me so I can just download it on my cable, still comes out cheaper than paying for the cap overage charges.
Now when you compare that to a retail disc,find the disc and load it, install the game, put in a 25 letter code, download countless patches and hope you don't fuck up and skip one because a LOT of them won't just patch to current, you have to get patch 123 before you can install patch 124 and so on, and if you need to back up? tough shit, better have made a traced install with Comodo program manager or Revo pro or you are fucked.
I think that when you compare that to Steam, drag and drop on USB drive, drag and drop onto new drive, fire up Steam...yeah not really any comparison, steam wins by a pretty big amount.
Again you are using a doom scenario and appealing to emotion, again I say in the future RMS will slaughter children...both are equally valid, both have zero evidence to back them up, both are just as much bullshit.
If Valve had some way to take your games that would be valid but guess what? THEY DON'T because there is this little place called "GameCopyWorld" where there are cracks for the Steam games NO DIFFERENT than for any retail game that you buy. What IS different is that Steam don't buttfuck you if you change OSes, I have games right now I can't play without downloading the pirated version because the old ass SecuROM or Starfuck DRM has a 16bit installed and a 32bit kernel hook and I'm on a 64bit OS...cue the WB"sucker" music. With Steam I can be on ANY Windows from XP-Windows 8, hell if its a game that actually has been ported I can even run it on Linux, NO hassles and NO risk.
So again show me somebody that has bought games from steam and been burned, just one, I can show you plenty of examples of those burnt by retail discs, just watch the video and look at his shelves and realize more than half of those games won't play because while the game code itself is fine, the shitty DRM code won't run so the game won't run. But the ONLY ones I have EVER found that have been supposedly "burned" by Steam turned out they were caught using wallhacks and aimbots and got banned which guess what? They would have got banned off the retail as well because nobody wants their games ruined by cheating douchebags.
So if there is actual evidence lets see it, I've already shown it is just as trivial to bypass Steam as it is ANY retail disc so Valve going under in the future (which with 7 straight years of doubling profits and coming out with a Linux version makes that unlikely) isn't any kind of evidence, its a doom scenario and appeal to emotion. Give us facts, give us citations, don't just say "They could do something bad in the future!" because I could raise Cthulhu in the future and rule the world at his side...hey it COULD happen, right?
Damn check out the old guy, I thought all you 4 digit guys were dead ;-)
But its nice to see I'm not the only one with dozens of games I haven't even gotten to yet, what with bundles and sales and the like I actually have on average MORE games than I have ever had before and a LOT of that is because its so damned easy just to push the button and get a game or five, I too have bought some games like Deus Ex I liked back in the day but can't be bothered to go dig through the boxes in storage to figure out which one has my old games tucked away in it.
At the end of the day this is why I am happy to defend Steam and give my money to Valve because it actually is digital RIGHTS and not digital RESTRICTIONS. I can't find the CD key to that game I bought 3 years ago? no worries I had it registered with Steam so they have it. I need to get a bigger drive? no need to reinstall or mess with registry keys or bullshit, just drag the folder over and fire steam up, no worries. Its gotten to the point that if a game isn't on Steam I'm just not gonna buy it because its just too much bullshit, its easier just to let valve handle all the patches and keys and updates FOR me so that I have the right to get my games where I want and when I want and hassle free. This of course isn't counting the bundle sales which I just fricking LOVE as it takes all the DLC out of the equation, just buy the bundle and I get ALL the DLC included and installed, again hassle free.
So I don't see a problem with Steam, could i hack my games if I needed to? Sure in fact GameCopyWorld has dozens of Steam cracks...but why would I want to? They give me a centralized place where I can have ALL of my games patched and updated and take care of any keys, along with chat and butt simple matchmaking, and all of this at a fair price that is often cheaper than retail...what EXACTLY is the downside? because somebody can think up a "doom scenario" which IRL is about as likely as Zombie Steve Jobs showing up at MacWorld I should care? Show me REAL evidence of somebody that wasn't a cheating bastard (which would have gotten just as banned with a retail game for running aimbots and wallhacks) that has lost a single game because of Steam DRM and THEN I'll be happy to say that they have a point, until then they are just talking out their posterior.
But that again can be easily fixed, it all comes down to marketing. Look at how Marvel got back the rights to their characters and now do their own flix under Disney, people see that Marvel logo and know that even their B list stuff is frankly entertaining so the brand HAS become worth something, even to those that don't read comic books. Hell my dad is 71 and never read a comic book in his life and when I brought over the Avengers for us to watch when he saw the Marvel logo he said 'Oh good, they make good movies" because they had put out several titles like Ghost Rider he really enjoyed.
So again not hard to build brand identity, just have a catchy opening logo and make a good product. But again the bigger point is they have ZERO evidence the batshit DRM is helping them and plenty of evidence from pissed off customers that the DRM is hurting them. I have a LOT of HTPCs out in the field, in fact its one of my more popular builds, yet not a single one had or will most likely have a Blu Ray drive, even though they are hooked to 1080p sets...why? Because with DVD its easy for Joe Normal to just rip the movie he has bought to his big fat hard drive and thanks to a couple of freeware programs I hand them they can then just thumb through their movie and TV collections virtually, with the box art and synopsis all being downloaded and loaded automatically.
The bitch is that the Real corp had a product that would have made it easy for users to do this that didn't even remove the DRM from DVDs or even the commercials but the studios have such a fucking hard on for DRM that even that teeny tiny bit of convenience, end result? Not only will my dozens of HTPCs not have Blu Ray any time soon thanks to its nastier DRM but more and more of the customers are asking me to show them how P2P works and buying media tanks because they heard they can bypass the bullshit and just download a MKV already ripped with the subtitles and in full 1080p.
So it all comes down to that saying which any retailer will tell you is practically law, which is the customer is always right. Give folks the products they want at a fair price point and a minimum of bullshit? They WILL buy, again look at how Steam has allowed Valve to double profits for 7 years in a row, their DRM doesn't cockslap the user constantly and frustrate the hell out of them so the users are happy, actually happy, to hand Valve money. But look at EA and Ubisoft for what happens when you go batshit and care more about the pirates and squeezing every penny than in what the customer actually wants, EA sunk a ton into origin which is a mega-flop, both EA and Ubisoft spent fortunes on DRM only to watch the sales dry up, you have to give the customers what they want or at the very least make them feel they are getting a fair value for their money but instead all this DRM cockslapping does is make the customer feel cheated so naturally they won't buy from you in the future.
I'm sorry sir but I am a crusader against bullshit and I'm calling BULLSHIT. A doom scenario without ANY proof or evidence is just fucking bullshit, I can say Bill Gates will fuck goats and zombie Steve Jobs will be brought back by sacrificing newborns and it is JUST as valid a statement because in both cases you are appealing to emotion and don't have jack shit for evidence.
As for not needing DRM? Again bullshit as we DO have evidence and the evidence shows that games with zero DRM are pirated just as much if not more than other games so the honor systems DOES NOT WORK. Steam does ONE THING and it does it quite well, it keep people from just handing out their games by slapping them on a flash stick. What is fucking AMAZING about that is it does so without penalizing the user is ANY way and in fact makes it easier than a retail disc in a LOT of ways. For example did you know that if my kids have the same game I do that they do NOT even have to download the game, that I can just slap the files on a flash and hand it to them? this makes it VERY easy for my oldest who is stuck on a WISP while I'm on cable. You can also back up all your games by simply dragging the folder onto a USB drive so if your OS gets hosed or the drive dies (or in my case you move from a 500GB to a 2TB) you can just drag it off the USB and be back up and running faster than you can be with ANY other software.
So I'm sorry if you thought that just because I call out the FOSSies on THEIR bullshit that I would agree with yours, bullshit IS bullshit IS bullshit and steam is better than every other previous system by a pretty damned large amount. I have plenty of games from the 90s I have to hack and jump through hoops to get to work because the SecuROM or Starforce they have had a 16bit loader and 32bit kernel hooks and I'm on a 64bit OS (and God help you if you fuck up and manage to install one WITHOUT hacking first, I've seen old SecuROM completely destroy a 64bit install) but with Steam? No worries, it doesn't matter if the game came out yesterday or like the Deus Ex I bought came out over a decade ago it "just works".
So either come up with some specific examples of people hurt by Steam that are NOT pirates or fucking cheating bastards and then I'll be happy to concede you have a point, otherwise you are no different than the FOSSies using appeals to emotion and doom scenarios trying to make the other guy look bad with ZERO evidence or anything more than words pulled out of your ass.
But that is easy to prove its bullshit, all one has to do is compare valve to ubisoft. One went batshit with the DRM and one did not, so what happened? One has doubled their profits 7 years in a row, the other is backpedaling and releasing patches that remove the DRM in a hope to get a few sales to stop the bleeding.
The bitch is that time and time again we have seen that a common sense approach will maximize profit while minimizing casual piracy. The problem comes in when companies foolishly believe that every pirate is a lost sale and decide they are gonna get zero piracy or bust. I've known a LOT of pirates, was even one myself for awhile back in the day but if they would have cranked the DRM to 11 I still wouldn't have bought because I was broke and while I'm sure there are some pirates out there that are just cheap bastards and don't want to pay from what i have seen most pirates fit into one of two camps,
1.-Don't have the money, in which case like Gates said its better to have them pirate your stuff as you can get them liking your stuff and when they have money will then lean towards you, and 2.- Those that collect stuff simply because they can and those people aren't gonna buy no matter the price because its not the object itself they give a shit about, its simply the getting stuff part. I knew a guy that had every single ROM for every single system out there...he played MAYBE 12 games out of the entire bunch, he just downloaded them and filed them away in case some day he MIGHT want to play them. I've known guys that did similar things with music or movies, have drives just full of the stuff...just to say they have a drive full of stuff.
But as long as they insist on going batshit with the DRM there simply can't be any compromise, we have to fight them every step of the way. because these guys won't just use HTML V5 DRM for movies, nope they'll push to have it on everything so that they can be sure that nobody is getting to see or hear anything that didn't come with a dollar value.
What you are doing is no different than the bullshit the GPL guys use to make BSD sound evil, you are throwing out doom scenarios which I can say in the future RMS and Torvalds will eat babies and what do ya know? just as accurate or useful.
Can you name ONE PERSON, just one, that had their games taken away that WERE NOT being giant fucking douchebags and ruining the game for everyone else? because i sure as hell can't, the only ones I've EVER heard of get banhammered from Steam were the cocksuckers using wallhacks and aimbots that frankly just destroy MP for everybody else. those people would have been banned with a retail disc just as quickly if a company gave a shit about its MP because the surest way to kill a game is to do nothing about cheaters.
but bitching about what Steam could or could not do in the future is NO different than me saying RMS will burn babies in the future, in both cases we have absolutely zero evidence to back this up and are pulling shit out of our rear ends.
I want everybody to take a good look at this because this just proves what some of us have been saying all along, which is voting with your dollars works it just isn't magic and when you are talking about a large corp with a huge bank account it takes time to work.
I mean look at how well it has worked with consumer friendly gaming companies VS consumer unfriendly gaming companies, Valve treats customers well, has doubled their profits for 7 years in a row, EA treats customers like shit? Laying off workers after the CEO bailed rather than be fired, Ubisoft who used to practically give bonuses to those in the company who could come up with a nastier way to treat customers? Removed their DRM from their current titles and from what i understand is putting out patches that remove it from previous titles, and of course Activision which is "restructuring" which is a nice way of saying "trying to stop the bleeding".
So voting with your dollars DOES WORK, it is just like any real solution isn't a magic wand one can wave to make things change instantly. As I pointed out to those that poo pooed the idea "At least i'm not paying for the right to be treated like shit" and by refusing to give those that treat me as dirt money I know I'm doing my little part in making sure they don't get rewarded for being assholes while at the same time having plenty of truly great games to play. its not like there aren't plenty of companies out there that won't be happy to treat you as a valued customer, when the stink about Diablo 3 being always online so they could nickel and dime you with money markets hit I spread the word about how Runic games was even allowing modding in Torchlight II and had a lot of folks tell me how much they loved the game. BTW if anybody doesn't have it yet? Great game and to celebrate adding Steam workshop support they gave us the Half Life headcrab as one of the pet choices. of course i had to name mine Lamar, just wouldn't be right otherwise LOL.
If a company insists on treating you like shit? Don't buy from that company and be quick to point out alternatives to anybody who is thinking of buying it. As we can plainly see here it does work, it simply takes time to hurt a huge corp like EA.
Well a good example is the one that started the thread, you have a VM that 1.- can ONLY be allowed to run a single application and 2.- That application can ONLY go to specific addresses and specific ports with nothing else allowed.
With GPOs that wouldn't be hard to do because pretty much anything can be set with GPOs to limit usage in pretty much any way you can think of, like I said telling the PC that Bob is ONLY allowed to run a specific program every other Tuesday really isn't hard at all to do. This is why I say that for SMBs and SOHOs and even consumers you just can't beat Windows, they spent crazy amounts of money to make everything friendly while at the same time giving admins the power to limit the living hell out of the system WITHOUT breaking the system.
Like I said try tweaking Linux desktop apps and see how quickly things go to crap when you differ from the defaults. I spent nearly 3 years fighting Linux because I actually bought the whole "Linux is ready!" bit and found that once you stray from the default permissions things just start breaking.
The one I thought nailed it was "Dogs love you as you are, cats merely tolerate you for the food".
Yeah, why don't you play around with that a little bit and get back to me. I've found most programs out there have a bad case of "works for me!" in that nobody ever bothered to test the thing with anything but default install and default permissions so any changes to either one? welcome to your nightmare. With GPOs you can say "Bob gets to use this but only on Thursday between 3-5 PM" and I don't even wanna see what a mess of hacks it would take to do something that fine grained with nothing but r-w-e, it'd be a mess.
As for why all the devs are on windows? that is easy, I haven't coded in a few years but it was probably what kept me on VS which is good old intellisense. Intellisense is a great example of MSFT making a damned good tool for day to day work as it takes out a lot of the drudgery of programming, I don't know if its still that way (as I said its been awhile, i quit programming when VB 6 was retired) but the FOSS IDEs I tried were frankly not much better than a glorified text editor, great if you know the language like the back of your hand and just need to whip something off fast but it would also happily let you fuck up syntax and never say a word. again if that has changed my bad, certainly have no desire to program anymore so not gonna be messing with IDEs, but at least when I was programming intellisense was worth its weight in gold to me.
Unless you are just a freeloader that isn't the problem at all, the problem is they don't know where to stop.
Take the company I often use as an example because frankly they are the ONLY ones who have gotten DRM right...Valve. why do you think it was so easy for Valve to get Steam running on Linux, even though they can't put kernel level DRM hooks? Because Valve knows DRM isn't there to stop piracy its there to stop Billy Bob from just handing out a copy of his steamapps folder to all his buddies on a flash drive. Can you bypass Steam? Sure you can, in fact a good number of the game cracks out there work just fine on Steam games but do you see Valve cracking down and making steam a DRM nightmare? Nope and because of this they have doubled their profits 7 years in a row.
So the DRM itself isn't the problem, done right it would run on Linux or Windows or your grandma' lawnmower if it had a supported chip, nope the problem is they always go batshit with DRM so the consumers can't use what they bought while the pirates laugh their ass off. Lets be honest folks if the DRM ran just as good on Linux as it does on windows this wouldn't even be an issue except for the batshit brigade that think "The web should be free herpa de derp!" yet I don't see them on a street corner giving away THEIR labor for nothing, talk about hypocrites. if you want to give away YOUR work that is fine and dandy, give it a CC license and call it a day, but those that don't want to give their labor away should have the right to try to make a living same as you do.
In the end it comes down to two and ONLY two choices, either some form of DRM so those that create content can get paid for it (since obviously the honor system alone ain't gonna cut it) or we stick with the whole "Have to sell to a multinational megacorp so they'll have the money to sue everybody" strategy, pick one. Maybe if both sides could come to the table like adults instead of making it political we could sit down and work out a nice compromise, but sadly what we'll get is either locked down tighter than a nun's thighs or nothing at all, and that is just a damned shame.
Well I work with SMBs, SOHO, and consumers and I can tell you its SUCKS with a capital S, Linux on the desktop frankly hasn't gotten ANY better than it was 5, even 10 years ago. Oh its gotten prettier, its gotten nicer to look at, but the same hassles, the same driver issues, and the same backward ass design choices are still there.
Now in the server space? I can honestly see the appeal, I really can. but you have to admit what you are running on a server and what you run on a desktop is two totally different cans of worms, with a server you are usually running headless or a minimal GUI at best, no desktop, no sound, no Wifi, its like comparing a crop duster and a fighter jet, they really are about as different as that.
But when it comes to small business I'm afraid nobody has anything in the same ballpark, not even close. i have systems that have been in the field for 7-9 years now, not a single bug nor glitch,heck why do you think XP has lasted this long? Because its stable, its easy to use, runs on pretty much anything, and is easy peasy to lock down with group policy. hell you wanna go BOFH with group policy you can say WHAT they can run, WHEN they can run it and HOW it is allowed to operate. Nothing Linux has even comes close, which is why I'm so quick to call out the "Linux is read for the desktop!" crowd. Sure if ALL you do with a desktop can just as easily be done on a Kindle or iPad? Then sure Linux will work as a desktop...but why not just get the iPad or the Kindle?
But at the end of the day MSFT didn't end up with a billion XP desktops out there by accident, they got that high by giving the SMB, SOHO, and consumer markets EXACTLY what they wanted, an easy to use desktop that any kid dragged in off the street can pick up in no time yet is just as easy to set limits on thanks to GPOs.
So you traded getting locked into Amazon for getting locked into a bunch even more controlling and who gouges on their hardware...congrats.
Frankly the better move would be to tell both of them to get fucked and if you can't watch it for free on the net fuck that show, not like there isn't more shows than you can ever watch, games than you can ever play, and music than you can ever listen to being offered for free right now on the web, right?.
As the other poster pointed out its too early to tell if the revenue was from unprofitable divisions, there is no telling with a company that old what kind of shit they have bringing in money that is losing more than it makes so I'm willing to cut her a little slack and she if she can turn it around.
After all she can't be any worse than Yang, turning down that huge pile of money which honestly was more than twice what the company was worth? I don't see how she could possibly do anything that epic a fail.
Well we southerners constantly get slapped upside the head by grammar nazis bitchin' about using ain't so most of us don't use it when we type. Of course i would say that in itself is ironic since most dictionaries recognize ain't as a word so all those years of getting slapped upside the head by teachers fur nuthin ;-)
Uhhh...didn't we have an article the other day talking about Yahoo's numbers are up? Considering how long the numbers have been nosediving it sounds like she is doing SOMETHING right, although one could argue whether it was Yahoo doing something right or MSFT running off all their older customers by fucking Messenger and Hotmail, but for whatever the reason numbers are up so props to her for that.