Because like their defragger while they can make a good OS they don't do the tools nearly as good? Like many products this is one MSFT bought from somebody else, specifically Giant AntiSpy...that's right, it wasn't a full fledged AV it was a lightweight spyware remover. Its good for geeks that aren't really going anywhere dodgy to start with, but its just not good at blocking drive bys or cleaning up after the fact.
This is not surprising to me, and why I've always said the MSE is only for geeks that aren't going anywhere dodgy and thus at little risk to start with. For normal folks there is Avast Free and Comodo Internet Security. Avast is good, but a little chatty but some people like chatty, and Comodo is good and pretty customizable but has a bit of a learning curve since it has sandboxing but if you stick with the defaults other than the occasional sanbox question it works good without getting in your way.
But I have taken machines I've got to wipe and refurb anyway at the shop and thrown different AVs on them and went to the kinds of sites I've seen the most bugs from, usually the "look at teh tittez" dodgy clip porn sites like redtube and the usual toplists and MSE was the ONLY one that never stopped a page loading, even ones that were obviously filled with malware, the rest would at least block most and keep the embedded malware scripts from running but not MSE, MSE seems to be more of a "scan a downloaded file" kind of protection rather than any good for dealing with modern nasties.
Oh and for those that need to clean up an infected box? May I suggest Comodo Cleaning Essentials as its a great tool to have to clean up an already nasty PC. You can run it from a flash or CD, no need to install, and its damned good at getting the nasties out. as you can see it got 4 and a half stars and is free, so if you have to clean up any infected machines its best to have both the 32bit and 64bit on a keyring ready to go.
Except for one little problem gameboy, and I'll be happy to bring citations if you like, and that is VERY often RMS has made polarizing statements just like that. For example when asked about 10 years ago how FOSS developers should be able to survive when anybody can just copy their work and put it in direct competition for free RMS said "They should charge for documentation" basically claiming they should be able to charge for that knowledge and he was okay with that. so what happens 5 years later when its brought to his attention that several FOSS programs were doing exactly that? he railed against the devs that charged saying "documentation should be free!" thus doing a 180 on his own statement from 5 years earlier.
So i'm sorry gameboy, but after watching the man for the past decade i think he just fucking hates programmers, at least all that won't worth for absolutely nothing. I USED to think he was just a classical communist, but then he never railed about how doctors or corps or CEOs should work for nothing, ONLY programmers get that "joy" in RMS' world. So I have NO doubt that if a programmer was stuck between choosing an appstore or doing without work RMS would tell him to starve, I truly believe this.And as the man gets older he just gets more and more radical, look at how he used the license as a weapon with the "TiVo clause", going so far as to name it after the company that pissed him off which is VERY unprofessional to say the least, well I truly believe that if the world goes to an appstore model rather than allow compromise he would let FOSS die out.
Don't worry I've been there, you think that logic and common sense actually work in a "black is white, up is down" total bullshit reality that is the melding of corporations and politics, but it has about as much to do with reality as the Star Wars prequels have to do with great storytelling, IE not even in the same galaxy.
Hell look at the numbers, do the numbers go down? Do ANY of the numbers EVER go down? I think you'd be hard pressed to find anybody that knows shit who won't tell you that piracy is WAAAY down since netflix and YouTube and iTunes and Steam have made it sooo damned easy to just get whatever you want 24/7 hassle free but has a SINGLE METRIC in their PPTs ever moved so much as a notch...yep UP, they've moved up across the board even though everybody that can read charts knows that sales have never been higher and being able to legally get anything you want with so many outlets, Hulu,D2D,GOG,Netflix,iTunes, hell ALL of these have MILLIONS, literally millions of people using them so if logic had any place at all here at least some of the numbers would go down...right?
Instead no matter what you do, buy legally,boycott, it honestly doesn't matter because no matter what you do their "projcted sales across the target demographics" will NEVER match ergo it must be piracy. Hell look at how they tried to blame the sales of of bombed movies on P2P, instead of just admitting for whatever reason it just didn't find an audience and flopped. Hurt Locker, fricking battleship, if they can find ONE GUY that has downloaded it thanks to PPT math every body has, and lets face you'll find at least ONE GUY that will watch a video of flies fucking for 4 hours, no matter how boring or pointless there is somebody that will download it, and all it takes is ONE downloader for their PPT math to say the entire planet downloaded it because they didn't make Michael Bay money on a stinkbomb.
So I can understand your pain, or why logic led you astray but as i tell those that Boycott "It doesn't matter if Spore stinks and nobody you know ever downloads even the demo, much less the game, because by PPT math if it does not sell X number of copies FOR ANY REASON then you are a pirate, simple as that" and it really is that simple, the accountants plug in numbers like number of females between 18-49 or whatever demographic they are targeting and if for ANY reason this target isn't hit? its piracy. Its like the old movie trope "a wizard did it" because no matter what reality says if the corp doesn't make X number of profit on this product then you are a pirate, period.
Like too big to fail they simply can't lose thanks to PPT math, and its depressing, but if you don't always take PPT math into account you are gonna be in for a shock when they post a record year and claim twice their profits were "lost" due to piracy and demand (and get) even more draconian copyright laws.
Uhhh...we had already seen how they work in space, so making the moon glow in the dark would make NO sense!
My guess is its more likely an "Operation Plowshares" kind of deal, everyone forgets that once upon a time they thought you could use nukes like really really REALLY big dynamite, they even looked at making canals by using shaped nuke charges.
Considering how many completely stupid things we did, what with the above ground tests and air bursts and water tests? Frankly we are lucky we aren't having to look at the moon as a new home, man we were REALLY stupid when it came to radiation back then. Of course back then our ships were filled with asbestos to cut down the risk of fires so long term thinking? REALLY not big back then.
What convenience? I have a 24/7 cable connection and Steam will run for quite awhile with no net (Don't know what the limit is, longest I had the net down was 4 days when somebody cut through the fiber backbone) and since like many Steam users I have it running 24/7 for the chat and the updates to my games it really is zero difference between GOG and Steam other than price. Heck its even just as easy to back my Steam games up as it is my GOG installers, just backup in Steam or drag the Steam folder onto a USB drive, either will do just fine.
so if you are on a dodgy DSL I can agree with you, although frankly I think you'd have bigger fish to fry like getting better service, but for many of us there really is no difference.
Are you on 32bit? Because so far the only ones i have heard of having any luck on that one have VERY specific hardware, specifically intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running Win 7 32bit. For those of us on 64bit or running AMD you end up with the "bouncing APCs" problem, look it up as there is some videos on YouTube showing it. What happens is ALL non mech vehicles in the game "bounce" hundreds of feet into the air and since you need the APCs for a couple of missions and have to kill all the vehicles on a couple of missions it makes the game unplayable.
That is why I can't believe GOG is selling i76, as maybe 10% can run that game OOTB, for the rest its a nightmare. the problem is i76 uses the core clock as a timer for some in game events and since it was made in the days of 400Mhz CPUs it doesn't know how to deal with the high clock speeds and it screws up the events. You can't even use MoSlo as we're not talking the clock speed of the CPU clock, but the timing clock on the board which you can't change. I have tried every trick on their forums before giving up, it just wasn't worth the endless hassle of trying to get it to run and in my apt there just isn't enough room to have a full Win9X tower lying around just for a handful of games like MW 3 and i76.
Ohhhh...I see where you are mistaken (Somebody is wrong on the Internet, I must swing into action!) and where you have gotten it wrong is this...PPT math.
What is PPT math? Its simple, its the way the *.A.A makes sure there is NO answer that doesn't give them tougher laws and bigger advantages, watch how it works "As you can see by this PPT our marketing data shows that X number of people like Y, so since X number of people didn't buy Y it MUST BE PIRATES ZOMFG!"
So you see it doesn't matter if the economy is down, or they are making record profits, if you look around you can actually find some of the PPTs used by the *.A.A and their data is THAT simplistic, no different than how they claim a number larger than the GDP of the entire planet is pirated each year. They simply take a teeny tiny subset of data and blow it up planet scale, doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, and they show it along with a big fat check and get what they want.
As you can see your logical thinking just doesn't work when you are talking corporations and politics. Case in point piracy HAS gone down for several years with the rise of netflix and iTunes, so what did the corps do? Let me put it THIS way....how many stories about "darknets" have you seen in the past few years, a few right? Well expect to see more because as REAL piracy goes down they need a new bullshit number to stick in and the new bullshit is gonna be darknets.
So you can do what you want, hell every person on the planet could give up downloading ANYTHING start tomorrow and it won't matter, if X doesn't sell Y then it HAS to be something other than their prices are too high and product too shit, ergo pirates. Hell I don't even know any pirates anymore, the game pirates are using Steam now and the movie pirates are using netflix and every music pirate I knew just grabs the tunes off YouTube, seen their numbers go down? Nope because the number is based on imaginary sales NOT reality, therefor it never goes down ONLY up. hell when LOTR broke records on DVD sales i actually saw the *.A.A saying they "lost" money due to piracy, when in reality many were just waiting on the special release.
In the end they have a GREAT scam going, its a "heads i win, tails you lose" kind of deal with no way for them not to get what they want.
Even better word is...VM. There are several Linux distros with VM support built in and VMWare has several LAMP builds already set up and ready to go.
Why a VM?because its pretty obvious that if this guy is going to ask Slashdot he has little to no experience at the task at hand (because if he did he'd already have preferences) so he is gonna make mistakes and with snapshots he can just roll back the image if he makes a boo boo without wasting all his previous efforts. So the smart move would be a minimal distro with VM support and one of the prebuilt LAMP setups from some place like VMWare, its the choice with the fewest risks.
What you do with Jaksta is launch it and then click on whatever video you want to download and pretty much if you can play it in your browser Jaksta can download it, even stuff that is only supposed to be streamed, be it flash or even WMV.
I'm pretty sure that Jaksta has a trial of their media recorder so you can give it a spin and see if its for you. I've had it for a couple of years now and so far i have yet to find a video it can't download.
On the contrary I would argue that it does, because when the laws are unjust and bought by the highest bidder then they should be ignored. Case in point see this video by Jim Sterling where even the artist that creates a property often has zero say in it anymore, its all tollbooths run by rich old fucks that don't give a shit about anything but screwing everyone, artist and consumer alike, in their never ending greed. then there is "Hollywood accounting" that allows companies like Cheap trick's former label to pay them NOTHING for every song sold on iTunes because digital didn't exist when they were under contract, or which allowed them to drive meatloaf into bankruptcy because they had the sheer unmitigated gall to say that Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that actually holds the WORLD RECORD for longest time on the Billboard top 200, didn't make a cent therefor they owe him NOTHING.
So I'm sorry but I really don't give a fuck, this is like a robber crying that somebody broke into his house while he was robbing you, really couldn't happen to a more perfect douchebag. does this mean I think you should be able to just go download anything on the day of release? No, but what it DOES mean is I think everything released more than 25 years ago is fair game, as that was what the original copyrights as written by the founding fathers was, and I think that once you have bought a game or movie that is it, if i can't find the disc or need the cracked version because their shitty 32bit DRM don't work on 64bit its nothing that I should have to give a fuck about.
Until We, The People actually get a seat at the table I'm sorry but I don't have a drop of sympathy, and if breaking a treasonous law written through bribery is theft then we should call these corps what they are, extortionists and muggers.
Uhhh...didn't bother to read my first sentence, did ya Drinkypoo? For those os us who aren't part of the "down with the man, fight the power!" crusade your argument means exactly jack and shit. For us Steam works just fine, it can be cracked in mere minutes, no different than any retail game, only we are paying less than the cost of a console rental, so WHY should we care again?
This is why FOSS OSes like Linux will never do shit on the desktop, because your ONLY selling point is "Down with the man, fight the power!" which frankly most of us don't give a rat's ass about your crusade, we just won't give a flying fuck as long as we get that magical combo of price, convenience, and ease of use. Steam keeps all my games updated, gives me a free chat client with all my friends and family instead of a spammy POS like messenger, has tons of free and cheap games, and I can even gift games to anybody on my list with a couple of clicks so...WHY should I care about your crusade again?
So if you think "fight the power!" is worth double or more the price? Good for you, and I mean that. There are a few things I believe that strongly in, such as I build AMD exclusively because i don't like the fact Intel was able to bribe OEMs and walk away scott free, but your fight against DRM? Really don't care, if Steam were 100% DRM free I'd have it running 24/7 in the background anyway for the features, so not only does their mild form of DRM not affect me in the slightest it actually has helped me in the past, because thanks to Steam I can back up my entire games folder with a single click and not have to worry about re-installing shit when i get a bigger drive, just point Steam at the new folder and voila! All done.
And at the end of the day, whether you like it or not, the public cares more about convenience, price, and ease of use than they do fighting some corp that frankly hasn't done anything to piss them off, see the lines around the block for the latest iDevice for just one example.
Because there were a LOT of games that came out between 95-2001 that were Win9X exclusives that HAVE to have some sort of hardware acceleration that simply won't run on WinNT?
You see that period was the first real boom when it came to 3D graphics, you had GLIDE and early DirectX and a LOT of truly great games came out back then...problem is a lot of those companies no longer exist, or the programmers are gone and having to do a full rewrite would cost more than the software is worth to the company, and the simple fact that winNT and Win9X are truly too completely different beasts.
While those that wrote their games well, like the NOLF series? those games can be run even on 64bit win 7 with no problem. But for every game like that you have a Mechwarrior 3 or i76 or Final Fantasy VII that used OS specific hacks to get more speed out of what was pretty weak hardware then and those games simply won't run native on anything WinNT based (hell it takes a miracle just to get MW 3 to run on XP, much less Win 7/8) and I have yet to see an emulator like VB do Win9X with enough speed and graphics prowess to make the games look like more than a slideshow. I mean you may laugh at them today but games like i76 and MW 3 were really pushing the hell out of the hardware back then, with MW 3 you had these huge landscapes with a half a dozen tanks and small vehicles PLUS as many as 4 mechs and ALL were just letting fly the missiles and lasers, which when you are talking about a 400Mhz CPU with GPUs with as little as 16Mb of RAM? Well they had to use every trick in the book to get decent framerates out of the hardware that was popular then.
Things were evolving so rapidly then that often a PC that was barely a year old would already be strating to struggle with the graphics for the latest games so naturally designers used every trick in the book so their games would play on the widest variety of systems. Smart move then but sucks now as its such a PITA to get going. And the problem with your idea is two fold, one they would pretty much have to write the VM around Win9X because of its quirky 16/32bit hybrid nature and two the emulation would have to be VERY low level because as i said they used some pretty fucked up methods back then, such as i76 using the board clock to time in game events, so if you did high level emulation the clock on the board is still gonna be so fast that the game just won't run.
So believe me friend while I wish someone could do your idea the only way I could see it working is if someone were to build a clone of Win9X ala DOSBox so you could basically tailor the VM to the OS and release it as a package, which will most likely never happen simply because of how much work it would take to clone all the Win9X underpinnings, or for MSFT to release Win9X under some sort of freeware license so devs could simply bundle win9X with the emulator and of course it'll be a cold day i hell before THAT happens.
But the reason that was doable with XP on win 7 is you were just running a 32bit NT on top of a 32 or 64bit NT, compare this to Win9X which was basically 3 OSes slammed together, you had DOS as a bootloader and for some low level access, you had the 16bit subsystems for backwards compatibility with win 3.x and you had the 32bit Win9x with support for more modern features like long file names and DirectX. It would frankly be a nightmare to program and most of us simply don't have the room to pick up some Win9X tower on CL just to run those games.
Its a damned shame but I have a feeling a LOT of those games from that era that weren't popular enough to warrant a rebuild so they can sell it on Steam or GOG will simply be lost to time, its just too hard to emulate an OS as weird as Win9X.
French huh? I bet everyone is thinking I'm gonna go for an easy joke but in actuality I bet it must be really hard for you to try to write and more importantly understand American English as from what I've been told French actually has rules which you stick to mostly, while American English is this bastard mix of a dozen languages with rules that are pretty much thrown out the window because like i said, dozen different languages all thrown together. Just be glad you don't have to deal with all the accents, because if you think our language can be tricky you ought to try dealing with the huge range of accents, you slap someone with a Boston accent and someone with a classic southern drawl in the same room they'll be lucky if they can even understand each other, much less having non natives understand WTF they are saying.
As for TFA I have to agree this guy was probably scapegoated, I mean surely to God a company with as much R&D cash as Apple did alpha and beta tests internally on this app and knew which competitors it needed to be tested against to see if it was good or not...right? To me this thing smelled like...well a Ballmer kind of move, shove out a half baked product that isn't ready for prime time and if it takes off fine, if not blame some schmuck that is low on the totem pole and then fix all the fuckups so that V3 or V4 might actually be good.
One thing is for sure this isn't the same company under Cook as it was under Jobs, because i can't think of a time Apple put out software THIS badly done. With Jobs most of what people hated were design decisions, love him or hate him the man did have a thing for simplifying and streamlining software, but I can't think of a time that they put out a major piece of software under Jobs that was THIS badly done, putting out alpha quality and then fixing it later has always been more of a Ballmer thing than Jobs and even though I don't buy Apple products I really hope this isn't the way of the future, last thing we need is two companies putting out beta quality and calling it RTM only to fix later.
I'm sorry but when you refuse to even speak with anybody that doesn't use "your words" in the manner you proscribe? that is the very definition of touchy and pedantic. don't take my word for it, look it up, the man has walked out on interviews like a prima donna rock star because a reporter DARED to use the wrong word...sorry but that is touchy and pedantic.
As for what I'd ask him? I'm sure i'll get hate, but fuck it, i hate how all these things devolve into "Oh how do you feel about being so wonderful?" circle jerks and somebody needs to be asking the hard questions so here goes:
How do you expect FOSS to survive in a world that increasingly is going to a pay for software model? In a world that is appstores the traditional ways of making money while using FOSS, the services model, selling hardware, or the tin cup, simply don't work, so since developers have to eat how do YOU propose they make a living in the appstore model when the redistribution clause means anybody can undercut them with their very own product? How can someone actually make a living writing software if the above 3 models that are the traditional ways to make money with FOSS do not apply?
So there you go, but I seriously doubt RMS would EVER give an answer to those questions because if anything the man becomes more radical and more hardline as he gets older, so his answer would probably be something like "You can't use appstores because they are non free" which of course would be consigning FOSS to the dustbin of history since both Apple and MSFT have already embraced the appstore and they together own the desktop and a pretty large chunk of mobile.
Thank you, its nice to see SOMEBODY gets it! I'm sooooo damned sick of the "Linux is superior" uberdweebs when it has some seriously FUCKED UP design choices that are stupid, poorly thought out, and obviously NOT the way to go about things, but because that was how UNIX did that shit in 1979 then by God that's what they are gonna do, whether it makes sense or not!
I mean when you point out what should be obvious shit, like crapping INI files all over the damned place is a bad idea, or how it STILL doesn't have a last known good config or rollback drivers button all you will EVER get is..."You must be teh shill, for we are teh leet!"
But what they are doing is NOT leet, its taking every bad design choice from an OS that died ages ago and trying to shoehorn that shit and still have the brass balls to claim that your OS belongs in the 21st century! There is a REASON why OEMs avoid it like the clap, its because support costs for that INI riddled mess will cost several times more than a Windows license, and yet here we are, more than 20 damned years after it arrived on the scene and its STILL a lousy 1%!
If you give away your product for over 20 fricking years and still can't do any better than 1 lousy percent? How big of a cluebat do you need to get hit with? instead of anybody asking the hard questions, like "What are we doing wrong that the competition is doing right?" all we get is insults, a bazillion rebuilds and forks, throwing out stable software for alpha quality because...well the devs are bored i guess, and then they have the unmitigated gall to complain that nobody wants their shit, even when Ballmer throws out an uberfail like Win 8!
if you make a better product your share WILL rise, but if all you do is keep the bad design choices and try to cover it up with elitist douchebag bullshit and claim the world will just have to "do things your way" even when its a giant time wasting PITA? Well enjoy being lower than the margin for error, you frankly deserve it along with heaps of scorn and ridicule.
But this screws GOG because unless the ONLY thing you care about is lack of DRM steam having the same game at the same time for less than half of what you are selling it for (and often in a bundle so you get more games with Steam) means that many people (like me with Grimlock and TL) will look at both and simply buy the Steam version.
So GOG either needs to price match or make bundles or do something to keep from being undercut so badly, because with both coming as digital downloads there really isn't any advantage for somebody that uses both to go with the GOG version over the Steam version. After all I have Steam running 24/7 anyway so my friends and family can pop up a chat or ask me to jump into their games, so why would I buy Grimlock for $8 when i can get myself AND a friend the game in Steam for the same price?
The problem with that friend is there is NO DOSBOX that emulates Win9X..man I wish there was, but since it was a 16/32bit hybrid that gave devs practically bare metal access to the OS they were able to do hacks that they couldn't even do under DOS.
So that would leave ONLY those that had real actual Win9X era hardware and running a PC shop I can tell you most of that stuff? Its just gone man, the caps back then just weren't great and of course its just painful surfing on some 733Mhz so most of that stuff is in the great dumpster in the sky.
What we need is a Win9X emulator similar to DOSBox, something that emulated...ohh say a 900Mhz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that like DOSBox or WINE you could use the actual Win9X files on to give it better emulation. But I do agree there should be a disclaimer...hell I think there are several games like i76 on GOG that needs a disclaimer NOW because they are soooo damned hard to get running. Ironically its not the more primitive DOS that we are gonna be in danger of losing, its those Win9X era games because there just isn't an emulator that does Win9X well, at least not any that I've seen where you can play games on it without it being a slideshow.
I'm sorry but R&D? it actually costs MONEY and without SOME sort of copyrights and patents you'd basically end up with nothing but races to the bottom because nobody that made shit could compete because the guy next door could just rip it off and since he didn't pay shit for R&D can do it cheaper than the guys that actually invented it.
This is why software is frankly worthless in the FOSS world, but ironically you never hear about RMS telling doctors, lawyers, and CEOs they should all work for nothing JUST programmers. basically in FOSS you only have 3 ways to make money, all of which suck in one form or another. you have the services model, this sucks because it gives you an incentive NOT to put out a truly excellent product because if its excellent WTF do they need your support for? Then there is the hardware model, this one sucks because other than finding some tiny niche nobody else wants (like the Pi) you have just made sure the big guys will win, because they can get economies of scale that you can't, and finally there is the tin cup model...do i even need to explain why this one sucks?
I find it rather telling that other than a few server products all you get from FOSS is badly done half baked ersatz versions of popular non free software, see Libre Office, GNUCash, and the fifty fucking billion bad MP only Q3 Arena knockoffs for examples. Why if FOSS is so great do you only get knockoffs? Because surprise surprise, software developers have to eat, pay their bills, and you just can't make money on FOSS software if it doesn't fall into one of the above examples so all you get is knockoffs done by amateurs. Since this is a story about gaming this is fitting as you'll never see a FOSS Bioshock, or L4D or any other truly epic game with great story, incredible graphics, great characters, memorable dialog, instead when the latest DOOM engine is released all we'll see is again another pile of cheap knock offs, because for many forms of software FOSS just doesn't work.
Does that make FOSS bad or evil? Nooo, it just means that unlike those that look at the GPL like the 10 commandments would have you believe, there are simply plenty of use cases where the FOSS models simply don't work. this is why FOSS will never own the desktop and Canonical will go under for example, because without tens of millions to get everyone on the same page what you get is a bunch of differing groups "doing their own thing" which makes the final product a mismatched hodge podge just slapped together.
While I wish it weren't so as "everybody shares" sounds great in theory, in practice there is a lot of places where it simply don't work. after all the theory of communism sounded great too, everybody shares and works for the betterment of all, but in reality it just doesn't work, and neither does FOSS in many places, because at the end of the day SOMEBODY has to pay for all the artwork, and sound recording, and actors, and...well you get the picture.
Once upon a time I agreed with you...until treasonous bribery turned copyrights into "forever minus a single day" and art that was made by artists long dead will be still held behind a tollbooth by rich old fuckers long after I have joined them in wormy earth. I would also add this is why we have so many great games in this legal limbo, as nobody even knows who has the rights to what anymore because a LOT of those 80s-90s shareware companies passed through so many hands, but thanks to forever minus a single day those games WILL be lost forever.
Sure there is, a LOT of the win9X era games used hacks that frankly only worked on win9X so selling those games? yeah...you're just ripping people off. hell some of the games on GOG like i76 are damned near impossible to get to run on a modern system, and good luck trying to get something like MechWarrior 3 or Final Fantasy VII to run on a modern machine.
Thanks Crosshair, I slapped it on the flash i keep in my wallet so when i come across those customers that just love the FF extension i can just install that one in Dragon instead.
I personally don't need it as I switched to Jaksta streaming media converter a couple of years back, well worth the money IMHO as it'll download from pretty much any site, even captures streams. But for my customers that live for YouTube downloader I'll have it ready to go, thanks.
Well Sparky WHY THE FUCK should I care, really? Linux hasn't done jack shit except arrange deck chairs on the sinking ship for a fucking decade, the ONLY gains it has EVER made was when Google bitchslapped the devs and just took the thing for themselves, so why the fuck should myself or the average users I sell to give a rat's ass about Secureboot? Oh the horror, while hundreds of millions won't have to worry about rootkits and boot sector viruses the 0.7% of the planet's population that actually run linux on a desktop will have to...gasp!...switch a setting in the BIOS! Oh the humanity, won't someone think of the Linux users too damned stupid to flip a BIOS switch?
And for the love of God, you are SCARED of Ballmer, really? the guy whose list of failures makes Uwe Boll look like Coppola? Ohhh he won't let us hack their ARM tablet...so the fuck what? like we aren't ASS DEEP in ARM tablets right now! You wanna slap Linux on an ARM tablet just fucking buy one of the bazillion on chinamart and STFU already, its not like its MSFT or the highway ya know. what is sad but telling is this is the SECOND big flaming turd that Ballmer has squeezed out and linux STILL won't gain dick, its like MSFT gives you a 30 yard head start and instead of just waltzing across the finish line you shoot yourselves in the foot with yet another God damned fork or rebuild of shit that didn't need rebuilding in the first place, then you sit down in the middle of the track to jerk off to a bash script...hell its almost like kicking a retard, its just too damned easy to make fun of this level of FAIL.
BTW you wanna know what you and your little attitude sound like to me? Here ya go yet another bleeting fanboi that hasn't had to deal with real people in their whole damned life, just sitting in their basement thinking they are "sticking it to teh man" by running Linux on some dumpster dived P4...You have NO marketshare, NO major B&M carries your product, hell even Dell has to run their own badly out of date repo to keep Linux from shitting on the drivers...why should I care about your product again?
Look dumbass, which part of bigger screens make it easier for average people to see do you not fucking get? By your logic if a screen was 1 inch across as long as its 1366x768 then it doesn't fucking matter, because they are ALL the same!
Are you REALLY that fucking dense? I wouldn't be talking to people about thought processes when you can't seem to grasp something as fucking simple as size matters.
Oh I'm sorry but you kinda missed the entire POINT of that paragraph, my point was even when they are on sale Steam has it at a LOWER price than GOG! I have bought several games off Steam simply because I could get 2 for the price of 1 of the same game on GOG and that is WITH them on sale. Examples, Grimlock, they had it on "sale" for $8, steam? $3.74, Torchlight 1 they had on sale for $5, Steam $3 or if you preordered TLII you got TLI for free.
Because like their defragger while they can make a good OS they don't do the tools nearly as good? Like many products this is one MSFT bought from somebody else, specifically Giant AntiSpy...that's right, it wasn't a full fledged AV it was a lightweight spyware remover. Its good for geeks that aren't really going anywhere dodgy to start with, but its just not good at blocking drive bys or cleaning up after the fact.
This is not surprising to me, and why I've always said the MSE is only for geeks that aren't going anywhere dodgy and thus at little risk to start with. For normal folks there is Avast Free and Comodo Internet Security. Avast is good, but a little chatty but some people like chatty, and Comodo is good and pretty customizable but has a bit of a learning curve since it has sandboxing but if you stick with the defaults other than the occasional sanbox question it works good without getting in your way.
But I have taken machines I've got to wipe and refurb anyway at the shop and thrown different AVs on them and went to the kinds of sites I've seen the most bugs from, usually the "look at teh tittez" dodgy clip porn sites like redtube and the usual toplists and MSE was the ONLY one that never stopped a page loading, even ones that were obviously filled with malware, the rest would at least block most and keep the embedded malware scripts from running but not MSE, MSE seems to be more of a "scan a downloaded file" kind of protection rather than any good for dealing with modern nasties.
Oh and for those that need to clean up an infected box? May I suggest Comodo Cleaning Essentials as its a great tool to have to clean up an already nasty PC. You can run it from a flash or CD, no need to install, and its damned good at getting the nasties out. as you can see it got 4 and a half stars and is free, so if you have to clean up any infected machines its best to have both the 32bit and 64bit on a keyring ready to go.
Except for one little problem gameboy, and I'll be happy to bring citations if you like, and that is VERY often RMS has made polarizing statements just like that. For example when asked about 10 years ago how FOSS developers should be able to survive when anybody can just copy their work and put it in direct competition for free RMS said "They should charge for documentation" basically claiming they should be able to charge for that knowledge and he was okay with that. so what happens 5 years later when its brought to his attention that several FOSS programs were doing exactly that? he railed against the devs that charged saying "documentation should be free!" thus doing a 180 on his own statement from 5 years earlier.
So i'm sorry gameboy, but after watching the man for the past decade i think he just fucking hates programmers, at least all that won't worth for absolutely nothing. I USED to think he was just a classical communist, but then he never railed about how doctors or corps or CEOs should work for nothing, ONLY programmers get that "joy" in RMS' world. So I have NO doubt that if a programmer was stuck between choosing an appstore or doing without work RMS would tell him to starve, I truly believe this.And as the man gets older he just gets more and more radical, look at how he used the license as a weapon with the "TiVo clause", going so far as to name it after the company that pissed him off which is VERY unprofessional to say the least, well I truly believe that if the world goes to an appstore model rather than allow compromise he would let FOSS die out.
Don't worry I've been there, you think that logic and common sense actually work in a "black is white, up is down" total bullshit reality that is the melding of corporations and politics, but it has about as much to do with reality as the Star Wars prequels have to do with great storytelling, IE not even in the same galaxy.
Hell look at the numbers, do the numbers go down? Do ANY of the numbers EVER go down? I think you'd be hard pressed to find anybody that knows shit who won't tell you that piracy is WAAAY down since netflix and YouTube and iTunes and Steam have made it sooo damned easy to just get whatever you want 24/7 hassle free but has a SINGLE METRIC in their PPTs ever moved so much as a notch...yep UP, they've moved up across the board even though everybody that can read charts knows that sales have never been higher and being able to legally get anything you want with so many outlets, Hulu,D2D,GOG,Netflix,iTunes, hell ALL of these have MILLIONS, literally millions of people using them so if logic had any place at all here at least some of the numbers would go down...right?
Instead no matter what you do, buy legally,boycott, it honestly doesn't matter because no matter what you do their "projcted sales across the target demographics" will NEVER match ergo it must be piracy. Hell look at how they tried to blame the sales of of bombed movies on P2P, instead of just admitting for whatever reason it just didn't find an audience and flopped. Hurt Locker, fricking battleship, if they can find ONE GUY that has downloaded it thanks to PPT math every body has, and lets face you'll find at least ONE GUY that will watch a video of flies fucking for 4 hours, no matter how boring or pointless there is somebody that will download it, and all it takes is ONE downloader for their PPT math to say the entire planet downloaded it because they didn't make Michael Bay money on a stinkbomb.
So I can understand your pain, or why logic led you astray but as i tell those that Boycott "It doesn't matter if Spore stinks and nobody you know ever downloads even the demo, much less the game, because by PPT math if it does not sell X number of copies FOR ANY REASON then you are a pirate, simple as that" and it really is that simple, the accountants plug in numbers like number of females between 18-49 or whatever demographic they are targeting and if for ANY reason this target isn't hit? its piracy. Its like the old movie trope "a wizard did it" because no matter what reality says if the corp doesn't make X number of profit on this product then you are a pirate, period.
Like too big to fail they simply can't lose thanks to PPT math, and its depressing, but if you don't always take PPT math into account you are gonna be in for a shock when they post a record year and claim twice their profits were "lost" due to piracy and demand (and get) even more draconian copyright laws.
Uhhh...we had already seen how they work in space, so making the moon glow in the dark would make NO sense!
My guess is its more likely an "Operation Plowshares" kind of deal, everyone forgets that once upon a time they thought you could use nukes like really really REALLY big dynamite, they even looked at making canals by using shaped nuke charges.
Considering how many completely stupid things we did, what with the above ground tests and air bursts and water tests? Frankly we are lucky we aren't having to look at the moon as a new home, man we were REALLY stupid when it came to radiation back then. Of course back then our ships were filled with asbestos to cut down the risk of fires so long term thinking? REALLY not big back then.
What convenience? I have a 24/7 cable connection and Steam will run for quite awhile with no net (Don't know what the limit is, longest I had the net down was 4 days when somebody cut through the fiber backbone) and since like many Steam users I have it running 24/7 for the chat and the updates to my games it really is zero difference between GOG and Steam other than price. Heck its even just as easy to back my Steam games up as it is my GOG installers, just backup in Steam or drag the Steam folder onto a USB drive, either will do just fine.
so if you are on a dodgy DSL I can agree with you, although frankly I think you'd have bigger fish to fry like getting better service, but for many of us there really is no difference.
Are you on 32bit? Because so far the only ones i have heard of having any luck on that one have VERY specific hardware, specifically intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running Win 7 32bit. For those of us on 64bit or running AMD you end up with the "bouncing APCs" problem, look it up as there is some videos on YouTube showing it. What happens is ALL non mech vehicles in the game "bounce" hundreds of feet into the air and since you need the APCs for a couple of missions and have to kill all the vehicles on a couple of missions it makes the game unplayable.
That is why I can't believe GOG is selling i76, as maybe 10% can run that game OOTB, for the rest its a nightmare. the problem is i76 uses the core clock as a timer for some in game events and since it was made in the days of 400Mhz CPUs it doesn't know how to deal with the high clock speeds and it screws up the events. You can't even use MoSlo as we're not talking the clock speed of the CPU clock, but the timing clock on the board which you can't change. I have tried every trick on their forums before giving up, it just wasn't worth the endless hassle of trying to get it to run and in my apt there just isn't enough room to have a full Win9X tower lying around just for a handful of games like MW 3 and i76.
Ohhhh...I see where you are mistaken (Somebody is wrong on the Internet, I must swing into action!) and where you have gotten it wrong is this...PPT math.
What is PPT math? Its simple, its the way the *.A.A makes sure there is NO answer that doesn't give them tougher laws and bigger advantages, watch how it works "As you can see by this PPT our marketing data shows that X number of people like Y, so since X number of people didn't buy Y it MUST BE PIRATES ZOMFG!"
So you see it doesn't matter if the economy is down, or they are making record profits, if you look around you can actually find some of the PPTs used by the *.A.A and their data is THAT simplistic, no different than how they claim a number larger than the GDP of the entire planet is pirated each year. They simply take a teeny tiny subset of data and blow it up planet scale, doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, and they show it along with a big fat check and get what they want.
As you can see your logical thinking just doesn't work when you are talking corporations and politics. Case in point piracy HAS gone down for several years with the rise of netflix and iTunes, so what did the corps do? Let me put it THIS way....how many stories about "darknets" have you seen in the past few years, a few right? Well expect to see more because as REAL piracy goes down they need a new bullshit number to stick in and the new bullshit is gonna be darknets.
So you can do what you want, hell every person on the planet could give up downloading ANYTHING start tomorrow and it won't matter, if X doesn't sell Y then it HAS to be something other than their prices are too high and product too shit, ergo pirates. Hell I don't even know any pirates anymore, the game pirates are using Steam now and the movie pirates are using netflix and every music pirate I knew just grabs the tunes off YouTube, seen their numbers go down? Nope because the number is based on imaginary sales NOT reality, therefor it never goes down ONLY up. hell when LOTR broke records on DVD sales i actually saw the *.A.A saying they "lost" money due to piracy, when in reality many were just waiting on the special release.
In the end they have a GREAT scam going, its a "heads i win, tails you lose" kind of deal with no way for them not to get what they want.
Even better word is...VM. There are several Linux distros with VM support built in and VMWare has several LAMP builds already set up and ready to go.
Why a VM?because its pretty obvious that if this guy is going to ask Slashdot he has little to no experience at the task at hand (because if he did he'd already have preferences) so he is gonna make mistakes and with snapshots he can just roll back the image if he makes a boo boo without wasting all his previous efforts. So the smart move would be a minimal distro with VM support and one of the prebuilt LAMP setups from some place like VMWare, its the choice with the fewest risks.
What you do with Jaksta is launch it and then click on whatever video you want to download and pretty much if you can play it in your browser Jaksta can download it, even stuff that is only supposed to be streamed, be it flash or even WMV.
I'm pretty sure that Jaksta has a trial of their media recorder so you can give it a spin and see if its for you. I've had it for a couple of years now and so far i have yet to find a video it can't download.
On the contrary I would argue that it does, because when the laws are unjust and bought by the highest bidder then they should be ignored. Case in point see this video by Jim Sterling where even the artist that creates a property often has zero say in it anymore, its all tollbooths run by rich old fucks that don't give a shit about anything but screwing everyone, artist and consumer alike, in their never ending greed. then there is "Hollywood accounting" that allows companies like Cheap trick's former label to pay them NOTHING for every song sold on iTunes because digital didn't exist when they were under contract, or which allowed them to drive meatloaf into bankruptcy because they had the sheer unmitigated gall to say that Bat Out Of Hell I, an album that actually holds the WORLD RECORD for longest time on the Billboard top 200, didn't make a cent therefor they owe him NOTHING.
So I'm sorry but I really don't give a fuck, this is like a robber crying that somebody broke into his house while he was robbing you, really couldn't happen to a more perfect douchebag. does this mean I think you should be able to just go download anything on the day of release? No, but what it DOES mean is I think everything released more than 25 years ago is fair game, as that was what the original copyrights as written by the founding fathers was, and I think that once you have bought a game or movie that is it, if i can't find the disc or need the cracked version because their shitty 32bit DRM don't work on 64bit its nothing that I should have to give a fuck about.
Until We, The People actually get a seat at the table I'm sorry but I don't have a drop of sympathy, and if breaking a treasonous law written through bribery is theft then we should call these corps what they are, extortionists and muggers.
Uhhh...didn't bother to read my first sentence, did ya Drinkypoo? For those os us who aren't part of the "down with the man, fight the power!" crusade your argument means exactly jack and shit. For us Steam works just fine, it can be cracked in mere minutes, no different than any retail game, only we are paying less than the cost of a console rental, so WHY should we care again?
This is why FOSS OSes like Linux will never do shit on the desktop, because your ONLY selling point is "Down with the man, fight the power!" which frankly most of us don't give a rat's ass about your crusade, we just won't give a flying fuck as long as we get that magical combo of price, convenience, and ease of use. Steam keeps all my games updated, gives me a free chat client with all my friends and family instead of a spammy POS like messenger, has tons of free and cheap games, and I can even gift games to anybody on my list with a couple of clicks so...WHY should I care about your crusade again?
So if you think "fight the power!" is worth double or more the price? Good for you, and I mean that. There are a few things I believe that strongly in, such as I build AMD exclusively because i don't like the fact Intel was able to bribe OEMs and walk away scott free, but your fight against DRM? Really don't care, if Steam were 100% DRM free I'd have it running 24/7 in the background anyway for the features, so not only does their mild form of DRM not affect me in the slightest it actually has helped me in the past, because thanks to Steam I can back up my entire games folder with a single click and not have to worry about re-installing shit when i get a bigger drive, just point Steam at the new folder and voila! All done.
And at the end of the day, whether you like it or not, the public cares more about convenience, price, and ease of use than they do fighting some corp that frankly hasn't done anything to piss them off, see the lines around the block for the latest iDevice for just one example.
Because there were a LOT of games that came out between 95-2001 that were Win9X exclusives that HAVE to have some sort of hardware acceleration that simply won't run on WinNT?
You see that period was the first real boom when it came to 3D graphics, you had GLIDE and early DirectX and a LOT of truly great games came out back then...problem is a lot of those companies no longer exist, or the programmers are gone and having to do a full rewrite would cost more than the software is worth to the company, and the simple fact that winNT and Win9X are truly too completely different beasts.
While those that wrote their games well, like the NOLF series? those games can be run even on 64bit win 7 with no problem. But for every game like that you have a Mechwarrior 3 or i76 or Final Fantasy VII that used OS specific hacks to get more speed out of what was pretty weak hardware then and those games simply won't run native on anything WinNT based (hell it takes a miracle just to get MW 3 to run on XP, much less Win 7/8) and I have yet to see an emulator like VB do Win9X with enough speed and graphics prowess to make the games look like more than a slideshow. I mean you may laugh at them today but games like i76 and MW 3 were really pushing the hell out of the hardware back then, with MW 3 you had these huge landscapes with a half a dozen tanks and small vehicles PLUS as many as 4 mechs and ALL were just letting fly the missiles and lasers, which when you are talking about a 400Mhz CPU with GPUs with as little as 16Mb of RAM? Well they had to use every trick in the book to get decent framerates out of the hardware that was popular then.
Things were evolving so rapidly then that often a PC that was barely a year old would already be strating to struggle with the graphics for the latest games so naturally designers used every trick in the book so their games would play on the widest variety of systems. Smart move then but sucks now as its such a PITA to get going. And the problem with your idea is two fold, one they would pretty much have to write the VM around Win9X because of its quirky 16/32bit hybrid nature and two the emulation would have to be VERY low level because as i said they used some pretty fucked up methods back then, such as i76 using the board clock to time in game events, so if you did high level emulation the clock on the board is still gonna be so fast that the game just won't run.
So believe me friend while I wish someone could do your idea the only way I could see it working is if someone were to build a clone of Win9X ala DOSBox so you could basically tailor the VM to the OS and release it as a package, which will most likely never happen simply because of how much work it would take to clone all the Win9X underpinnings, or for MSFT to release Win9X under some sort of freeware license so devs could simply bundle win9X with the emulator and of course it'll be a cold day i hell before THAT happens.
But the reason that was doable with XP on win 7 is you were just running a 32bit NT on top of a 32 or 64bit NT, compare this to Win9X which was basically 3 OSes slammed together, you had DOS as a bootloader and for some low level access, you had the 16bit subsystems for backwards compatibility with win 3.x and you had the 32bit Win9x with support for more modern features like long file names and DirectX. It would frankly be a nightmare to program and most of us simply don't have the room to pick up some Win9X tower on CL just to run those games.
Its a damned shame but I have a feeling a LOT of those games from that era that weren't popular enough to warrant a rebuild so they can sell it on Steam or GOG will simply be lost to time, its just too hard to emulate an OS as weird as Win9X.
French huh? I bet everyone is thinking I'm gonna go for an easy joke but in actuality I bet it must be really hard for you to try to write and more importantly understand American English as from what I've been told French actually has rules which you stick to mostly, while American English is this bastard mix of a dozen languages with rules that are pretty much thrown out the window because like i said, dozen different languages all thrown together. Just be glad you don't have to deal with all the accents, because if you think our language can be tricky you ought to try dealing with the huge range of accents, you slap someone with a Boston accent and someone with a classic southern drawl in the same room they'll be lucky if they can even understand each other, much less having non natives understand WTF they are saying.
As for TFA I have to agree this guy was probably scapegoated, I mean surely to God a company with as much R&D cash as Apple did alpha and beta tests internally on this app and knew which competitors it needed to be tested against to see if it was good or not...right? To me this thing smelled like...well a Ballmer kind of move, shove out a half baked product that isn't ready for prime time and if it takes off fine, if not blame some schmuck that is low on the totem pole and then fix all the fuckups so that V3 or V4 might actually be good.
One thing is for sure this isn't the same company under Cook as it was under Jobs, because i can't think of a time Apple put out software THIS badly done. With Jobs most of what people hated were design decisions, love him or hate him the man did have a thing for simplifying and streamlining software, but I can't think of a time that they put out a major piece of software under Jobs that was THIS badly done, putting out alpha quality and then fixing it later has always been more of a Ballmer thing than Jobs and even though I don't buy Apple products I really hope this isn't the way of the future, last thing we need is two companies putting out beta quality and calling it RTM only to fix later.
I'm sorry but when you refuse to even speak with anybody that doesn't use "your words" in the manner you proscribe? that is the very definition of touchy and pedantic. don't take my word for it, look it up, the man has walked out on interviews like a prima donna rock star because a reporter DARED to use the wrong word...sorry but that is touchy and pedantic.
As for what I'd ask him? I'm sure i'll get hate, but fuck it, i hate how all these things devolve into "Oh how do you feel about being so wonderful?" circle jerks and somebody needs to be asking the hard questions so here goes:
How do you expect FOSS to survive in a world that increasingly is going to a pay for software model? In a world that is appstores the traditional ways of making money while using FOSS, the services model, selling hardware, or the tin cup, simply don't work, so since developers have to eat how do YOU propose they make a living in the appstore model when the redistribution clause means anybody can undercut them with their very own product? How can someone actually make a living writing software if the above 3 models that are the traditional ways to make money with FOSS do not apply?
So there you go, but I seriously doubt RMS would EVER give an answer to those questions because if anything the man becomes more radical and more hardline as he gets older, so his answer would probably be something like "You can't use appstores because they are non free" which of course would be consigning FOSS to the dustbin of history since both Apple and MSFT have already embraced the appstore and they together own the desktop and a pretty large chunk of mobile.
Thank you, its nice to see SOMEBODY gets it! I'm sooooo damned sick of the "Linux is superior" uberdweebs when it has some seriously FUCKED UP design choices that are stupid, poorly thought out, and obviously NOT the way to go about things, but because that was how UNIX did that shit in 1979 then by God that's what they are gonna do, whether it makes sense or not!
I mean when you point out what should be obvious shit, like crapping INI files all over the damned place is a bad idea, or how it STILL doesn't have a last known good config or rollback drivers button all you will EVER get is..."You must be teh shill, for we are teh leet!"
But what they are doing is NOT leet, its taking every bad design choice from an OS that died ages ago and trying to shoehorn that shit and still have the brass balls to claim that your OS belongs in the 21st century! There is a REASON why OEMs avoid it like the clap, its because support costs for that INI riddled mess will cost several times more than a Windows license, and yet here we are, more than 20 damned years after it arrived on the scene and its STILL a lousy 1%!
If you give away your product for over 20 fricking years and still can't do any better than 1 lousy percent? How big of a cluebat do you need to get hit with? instead of anybody asking the hard questions, like "What are we doing wrong that the competition is doing right?" all we get is insults, a bazillion rebuilds and forks, throwing out stable software for alpha quality because...well the devs are bored i guess, and then they have the unmitigated gall to complain that nobody wants their shit, even when Ballmer throws out an uberfail like Win 8!
if you make a better product your share WILL rise, but if all you do is keep the bad design choices and try to cover it up with elitist douchebag bullshit and claim the world will just have to "do things your way" even when its a giant time wasting PITA? Well enjoy being lower than the margin for error, you frankly deserve it along with heaps of scorn and ridicule.
But this screws GOG because unless the ONLY thing you care about is lack of DRM steam having the same game at the same time for less than half of what you are selling it for (and often in a bundle so you get more games with Steam) means that many people (like me with Grimlock and TL) will look at both and simply buy the Steam version.
So GOG either needs to price match or make bundles or do something to keep from being undercut so badly, because with both coming as digital downloads there really isn't any advantage for somebody that uses both to go with the GOG version over the Steam version. After all I have Steam running 24/7 anyway so my friends and family can pop up a chat or ask me to jump into their games, so why would I buy Grimlock for $8 when i can get myself AND a friend the game in Steam for the same price?
The problem with that friend is there is NO DOSBOX that emulates Win9X..man I wish there was, but since it was a 16/32bit hybrid that gave devs practically bare metal access to the OS they were able to do hacks that they couldn't even do under DOS.
So that would leave ONLY those that had real actual Win9X era hardware and running a PC shop I can tell you most of that stuff? Its just gone man, the caps back then just weren't great and of course its just painful surfing on some 733Mhz so most of that stuff is in the great dumpster in the sky.
What we need is a Win9X emulator similar to DOSBox, something that emulated...ohh say a 900Mhz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that like DOSBox or WINE you could use the actual Win9X files on to give it better emulation. But I do agree there should be a disclaimer...hell I think there are several games like i76 on GOG that needs a disclaimer NOW because they are soooo damned hard to get running. Ironically its not the more primitive DOS that we are gonna be in danger of losing, its those Win9X era games because there just isn't an emulator that does Win9X well, at least not any that I've seen where you can play games on it without it being a slideshow.
I'm sorry but R&D? it actually costs MONEY and without SOME sort of copyrights and patents you'd basically end up with nothing but races to the bottom because nobody that made shit could compete because the guy next door could just rip it off and since he didn't pay shit for R&D can do it cheaper than the guys that actually invented it.
This is why software is frankly worthless in the FOSS world, but ironically you never hear about RMS telling doctors, lawyers, and CEOs they should all work for nothing JUST programmers. basically in FOSS you only have 3 ways to make money, all of which suck in one form or another. you have the services model, this sucks because it gives you an incentive NOT to put out a truly excellent product because if its excellent WTF do they need your support for? Then there is the hardware model, this one sucks because other than finding some tiny niche nobody else wants (like the Pi) you have just made sure the big guys will win, because they can get economies of scale that you can't, and finally there is the tin cup model...do i even need to explain why this one sucks?
I find it rather telling that other than a few server products all you get from FOSS is badly done half baked ersatz versions of popular non free software, see Libre Office, GNUCash, and the fifty fucking billion bad MP only Q3 Arena knockoffs for examples. Why if FOSS is so great do you only get knockoffs? Because surprise surprise, software developers have to eat, pay their bills, and you just can't make money on FOSS software if it doesn't fall into one of the above examples so all you get is knockoffs done by amateurs. Since this is a story about gaming this is fitting as you'll never see a FOSS Bioshock, or L4D or any other truly epic game with great story, incredible graphics, great characters, memorable dialog, instead when the latest DOOM engine is released all we'll see is again another pile of cheap knock offs, because for many forms of software FOSS just doesn't work.
Does that make FOSS bad or evil? Nooo, it just means that unlike those that look at the GPL like the 10 commandments would have you believe, there are simply plenty of use cases where the FOSS models simply don't work. this is why FOSS will never own the desktop and Canonical will go under for example, because without tens of millions to get everyone on the same page what you get is a bunch of differing groups "doing their own thing" which makes the final product a mismatched hodge podge just slapped together.
While I wish it weren't so as "everybody shares" sounds great in theory, in practice there is a lot of places where it simply don't work. after all the theory of communism sounded great too, everybody shares and works for the betterment of all, but in reality it just doesn't work, and neither does FOSS in many places, because at the end of the day SOMEBODY has to pay for all the artwork, and sound recording, and actors, and...well you get the picture.
Once upon a time I agreed with you...until treasonous bribery turned copyrights into "forever minus a single day" and art that was made by artists long dead will be still held behind a tollbooth by rich old fuckers long after I have joined them in wormy earth. I would also add this is why we have so many great games in this legal limbo, as nobody even knows who has the rights to what anymore because a LOT of those 80s-90s shareware companies passed through so many hands, but thanks to forever minus a single day those games WILL be lost forever.
Sure there is, a LOT of the win9X era games used hacks that frankly only worked on win9X so selling those games? yeah...you're just ripping people off. hell some of the games on GOG like i76 are damned near impossible to get to run on a modern system, and good luck trying to get something like MechWarrior 3 or Final Fantasy VII to run on a modern machine.
Thanks Crosshair, I slapped it on the flash i keep in my wallet so when i come across those customers that just love the FF extension i can just install that one in Dragon instead.
I personally don't need it as I switched to Jaksta streaming media converter a couple of years back, well worth the money IMHO as it'll download from pretty much any site, even captures streams. But for my customers that live for YouTube downloader I'll have it ready to go, thanks.
Well Sparky WHY THE FUCK should I care, really? Linux hasn't done jack shit except arrange deck chairs on the sinking ship for a fucking decade, the ONLY gains it has EVER made was when Google bitchslapped the devs and just took the thing for themselves, so why the fuck should myself or the average users I sell to give a rat's ass about Secureboot? Oh the horror, while hundreds of millions won't have to worry about rootkits and boot sector viruses the 0.7% of the planet's population that actually run linux on a desktop will have to...gasp!...switch a setting in the BIOS! Oh the humanity, won't someone think of the Linux users too damned stupid to flip a BIOS switch?
And for the love of God, you are SCARED of Ballmer, really? the guy whose list of failures makes Uwe Boll look like Coppola? Ohhh he won't let us hack their ARM tablet...so the fuck what? like we aren't ASS DEEP in ARM tablets right now! You wanna slap Linux on an ARM tablet just fucking buy one of the bazillion on chinamart and STFU already, its not like its MSFT or the highway ya know. what is sad but telling is this is the SECOND big flaming turd that Ballmer has squeezed out and linux STILL won't gain dick, its like MSFT gives you a 30 yard head start and instead of just waltzing across the finish line you shoot yourselves in the foot with yet another God damned fork or rebuild of shit that didn't need rebuilding in the first place, then you sit down in the middle of the track to jerk off to a bash script...hell its almost like kicking a retard, its just too damned easy to make fun of this level of FAIL.
BTW you wanna know what you and your little attitude sound like to me? Here ya go yet another bleeting fanboi that hasn't had to deal with real people in their whole damned life, just sitting in their basement thinking they are "sticking it to teh man" by running Linux on some dumpster dived P4...You have NO marketshare, NO major B&M carries your product, hell even Dell has to run their own badly out of date repo to keep Linux from shitting on the drivers...why should I care about your product again?
Look dumbass, which part of bigger screens make it easier for average people to see do you not fucking get? By your logic if a screen was 1 inch across as long as its 1366x768 then it doesn't fucking matter, because they are ALL the same!
Are you REALLY that fucking dense? I wouldn't be talking to people about thought processes when you can't seem to grasp something as fucking simple as size matters.
Oh I'm sorry but you kinda missed the entire POINT of that paragraph, my point was even when they are on sale Steam has it at a LOWER price than GOG! I have bought several games off Steam simply because I could get 2 for the price of 1 of the same game on GOG and that is WITH them on sale. Examples, Grimlock, they had it on "sale" for $8, steam? $3.74, Torchlight 1 they had on sale for $5, Steam $3 or if you preordered TLII you got TLI for free.