That type of bullshit (your IE thing) is exactly why Virtual XP Mode exists; a pre-configured XP VM that is free to users of Win7 Professional edition or higher, and is based on a fairly stock XP image including IE6. Run it when you need it, kill or hibernate it when you don't, and carry on with life.
You're using Search completely wrong. It's not intended as a CMD replacement (it can partially be used as one, but holy cow, don't do that). Its purpose is to make opening programs, Control Panel items, and files much, much faster.
Example: Visual Studio. Hit the Windows key, type "vis", hit Enter. Even if devenv.exe is in your path (which it's not by default) that's still faster than typing "devenv" into CMD, and you don't have to know that the name of VS's executable is devenv.exe (though it's worth noting that if you type "devenv" into Start search, that works too). Second example: how about changing the Windows proxy settings. Start/WinKey, "prox", Enter. You are taken directly to the correct tab of the Internet Settings control panel. I'm not even going to try and guess what you'd type into cmd to get that. Third example: you want to run Command Prompt as Admin (due to the fact that you are not an idiot, you are not actually logged in as Administrator). Typing either "com" or "cmd" will work, but then you have to go mouse over to it, right-click, etc., right? NOPE! WinKey, "cmd", Ctrl+Shift+Enter (an easier chord than it may sound like, especially once you've done it a few times, because you have both hands on the home row of the keyboard already). This works for other programs too.
So many more... any time I try to use an OS without Start search, I drive myself nuts. It's more user-friendly than a command line, much faster than a mouse, and exceedingly convenient at one keystroke from anywhere.
I disagree on low-level stuff; to me it's more visible than in XP. To take the example you gave, I hit Start, typed "ip", and hit enter, just as a test to see what came up. What I got was the network connections screen, which looks nigh-identical to "My Network Places" -> right-click -> Properties. From there I can easily open the Properties of any connection and get a dialog that hearkens straight back to Windows 95. Of course, you can also just use ipconfig and netsh; neither one is new and they're both right where you left them.
The Start search feature is, in my opinion, the greatest improvement to Windows usability in the entire existence of the OS. Note that the search result for "ip" doesn't even have "ip" in the name; it just has search metadata that includes the word "ip". It's not perfect - "dns" goes to Proxy configuration by default - but it's excellent. Contrary to what all the fool nay-sayers who disregard this feature say, you don't have to know the exact name of the program. You don't even need to know the first part of the name of the program. It is far, *far* faster than navigating even a well-laid-out menu tree.
With all that said, kudos for not viewing UAC as "that annoying thing I turn off". I ran XP as a non-Admin; compared to needing to use the RunAs command (which only works on executable files; installing an MSI package meant using runas to manually invoke msiexec.exe) UAC is heavenly.
Oh, a few other little perks (many of these also apply to Vista): Win7 supports symlinks (the command is mklink). Win7 supports shrinking partitions, even its own system partition. Win7 does disk defragmentation automatically in the background. Win7 supports the TRIM command for SSDs, which is essential to having a long lifetime of good performance. Win7 has a great "what process is doing what" utility called Resource Monitor (see who is slamming your network, or holding a lock on that file, or...). Win7 changes the name of the default user profiles directory from "Documents and Settings" to the far more typable (and less space-containing) "Users". Win7 has a bi-directional firewall that is much more configurable than XPs.... I could go on. XP is obsolete garbage.
This is actually true even for non-NT versions. Just for a lark, somebody went and did a full upgrade path starting from either 3.1 or 95 (I forget which, but I think it was 3.1) through 98, ME, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8. Each time it was an in-place upgrade. I shudder to think what the state of the system must be after having been quite so roughly dragged into the 21st century, but you can do it.
Um... no. Fixing XSS is trivial. I work in this field myself; only a small percentage of our clients take more than a week to fix a reported issue, and many manage it same-day. This includes quite large and well-known software companies and websites, including in the financial sector (although I'll admit that the financial sector tends to be on the slower end of things).
For the unaware: this is serious sarcasm. Fixing XSS is usually pretty trivial; just apply output encoding (usually HTML entity encoding, but there are other valid approaches) to the user-supplied data before reflecting it into the page. Even in weird edge cases, like where the user is explicitly allowed to insert their own HTML (Slashdot, for example) you can get around the problem by whitelisting certain elements and parameters, and rejecting (or removing, though this must be done carefully) anything which doesn't conform. It's A long-ago solved problem that some people still have incredible difficulty with.
Doing security work myself, I've seen XSS fix times ranging from "within the hour" to "three weeks or so", and the median is probably about two days. I always wonder what the hell is up with the companies on the long end of that scale.
For me, I block ads because they are actually a threat to browsing. In the old days, Flash ads that would pop out a player which extended off the end of the window would crash the browser. These days that's less of a problem, but there are plenty of others still around.
Privacy: advertising is probably the biggest non-government threat to online privacy. I don't really care whether advertisers would respect *my* DoNotTrack headers; I won't even connect to their servers. Supercookies? You'd need to be able to set them, first. Even if a certain site is allowed for some reason, I don't let it see my other browsing history; it gets only a distorted and meaninglessly narrow view.
Security: Advertising networks are one of the biggest problems to online security right now. At least once a month (on average, it comes in waves), one of the web comics I read gets hit with a malicious ad that attempts to serve malware / exploit kits to anybody visiting the site. This has also happened to high-profile reputable news sites and so forth as well. The ad providers don't seem to give a fuck, and the sites serving the ads can't really control the ad content before it's served. Whether it's browser exploits, Flash exploits, Java exploits, embedded PDF exploits, or something else, ad networks cheerfully serve up malicious garbage all the time. You know that advice about "avoid the seedier parts of the web"? Yeah, you can't do that without an ad blocker. Everything is seedy otherwise.
For sites that need money to keep them running, I donate. A few hundred dollars a year in donations is no big deal for me, and it's probably more money than the sites in question would get from my ad impressions anyhow.
In fairness, I should have considered that Pearl Harbor would be lumped into the second category and made it two days of car crashes. Also, if you take world-wide terrorism then (aside from the difficulty in deciding exactly what does and does not constitute terrorism) it's probably a good bit worse than that... but compare the security measures at countries that can actually legitimately claim to have a terrorism problem, and compare them to the security measures here, and theirs are more effective, less expensive, and less disruptive to society. A lot of that, of course, is because much of to deterrence is political, which the US government seems incapable of understanding no matter which major party is in office (though Obama sure talked like he understood it during the 2008 campaign, sigh...)
Eh... developers who are semi-aware of security are the kind of people who write the most insecure code, in my (professional) opinion and experience. Well, second most insecure I guess, the ones who copy-paste something off the web are worse. But at least their bugs are easy to spot. The people who are semi-aware of security are the ones who do things like TLS with certificate validation turned off (because it's still encrypted, right?) or store salted and hashed passwords (possibly even using a decent key derivation function rather than just a single round of SHA1) but have XSS all over their site and don't mark their cookies with the Secure flag. They are the dangerous ones: they don't know that they don't know.
Mind you, I suppose they're job security (though both they and I, and expecially their users, would prefer that a preemptive review, rather than an incident reponse, be the first time somebody actually competent in security looks at their code). It's easier to convince the ones who know that they don't know security that they actually need such a review, too.
I suspect you work somewhere related to security (or possibly as a dev in a security-conscious company) but not actually in the business of ensuring things are secure (or breaking them)... do that, and you get really jaded about people being dumber than a pile of rocks when it comes to security. It's a lot easier to be optimistic about half-baked security analysis like this one when you know somebody competent will take a look too.
Fair point on the vitrol. I forget what I needed to get out of my system, but it's out now. I did show the story to some of my co-workers, and they laughed, so I was probably just in a bad mood. Mind you, it wasn't a kind laugh - it's the kind of laugh you'd do at some idiot who drives away from the gas pump without removing the nozzle, or watching a kid flee in pants-wetting terror after throwing rocks at a big dog and discovering it wasn't actually leashed - but they did enjoy it anyhow.
In a household with serious console gamers? I'd be shocked if in any such place there is *only* two current-gen consoles per person; that would mean that on average each person is missing one of the big-name consoles. My sister, who is by no means a hardcore gamer of any kind, lives in a household with three Xbox 360s, a PS3, a PS2, a Wii, and a bunch of older stuff; these are the possessions of three twenty-something women. You can be damn sure they share games all the time, too.
Or, to turn your question back on you so you realize how silly it sounds: so you have two PCs?
You're alright with having to spend $1000 (for a decent gaming PC that will last anything close to the lifetime of a console, that's actually a bit low) and if I don't want to purchase each game in the household twice (even at $20 a piece, to be closer to Steam sale or indie game prices) then *I* am the one who doesn't understand? (Oh, and by the time I've tried out a game on a friend's account, the sale is probably over anyhow...)
Mind you, yeah, a PC has lots of other uses. We also each had one already. But, like a PC, consoles have multiple uses and if there's more than one TV (pretty common when multiple peoples' posessions are combined) then you might as well hook up a console to each so that if somebody is playing a game / watching a show / watching a game / watching a movie / hanging out in the living room / whatever, you can still do your own thing. In any case, I don't want to buy everything for each system in duplicate (or triplicate, or whatever), especially for games that I might play for a few hours, put down, and never bother picking up again... but in the meantime, it's really not cool to tell my friend(s) that he can't play games because I want to try one of his.
Note: buy un-DRMed games, and this probably miraculously vanishes.
Linux on the Surface Pro is dead easy (disable secure boot - a simple and well-documented procedure - and then install as normal). What are you smoking (reading)? All Win8 devices with Secure Boot are required (by Microsoft, of all people) to allow the user to disable Secure Boot and/or add their own signing keys.
Valid point. Microsoft really should fix that (or rather, should have had it already fixed...). The battery life of RT is actually pretty decent, but nothing outstanding.
More people died that day 12 years ago in car crashes than have died in all terrorist attacks within the USA *ever*. The TSA has killed more people than the terrorists did by making flying less pleasant so people take the far less-safe option of driving (actually, the break-even point for deaths from the Sep 11 attacks vs. deaths from TSA asshattery was passed over seven years ago).
I'm not saying it shouldn't be prosecuted or anything like that, but you (and well-meaning idiots like you, along with plenty of less-well-meaning people out to make a buck or grab some power) have blown the whole thing massively out of proprotion. How many people have died as a *direct* result of the US's response to those terrorist attacks, huh? Hell, how many of just US citizens? How many billions of dollars of military materiel? How many government expenditures on things like increased survellance and provably-ineffective airport scanners (strap a knife to your side; they can't see it)?
Let's assume that those $100 billion were all *directly* attributable to the terrorists (and not to, for example, re-routing planes all across the continent, shutting down airports, etc.). Wow, that sounds like a lot of money! Now, let's look at the damage to the US economy from the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse. The terrorists are all dead, and we spent a fuckton more money to go hunt down everybody connected to them. How about those bankers, though?
You go mourn your few thousand. Those of us who try to not let logic override our sense will fight the bigger threats to society, such as people who massively overreact to terrorism and do more damage to the country than the terrorists themselves could ever have dreamed of causing. Please stay the fuck out of our way.
This eliminates many of the conveniences of Steam (background updates for all your games, friends list, cross-game perks, no need to "swap CDs" (swap accounts, in this case), plus it adds the hassle of needing to create new accounts all the time. I think it's also forbidden by their TOS, but I could be wrong (most online services prohibit this, but not all). However, it is in fact the only way to use Steam with paid games without getting shafted by their DRM.
It's not unclear; it's well established that if you play any game on your account, it kicks them off, regardless of what game they were playing. Only one person can access any given person's library at a time. This isn't sharing games at all... more like sharing a single account with multiple passwords. Nothign to see here, DRM still sucks.
No. If it were "as best they can" then I could hand my roommate a virtual copy of game X to play while I play game Y, just like I can do with real games. It's not like there's some technical reason they can't do this. When I share a copy of a game with a friend, I temporarily lose access to that copy of that game. I don't lose access to my entire library (for the pedantic: I don't have to kick him off if I want to play something else from my library, which amounts to losing access because I am not a dick to my friends).
GOG is absolutely, strictly, no DRM. Games which had DRM, they generally patch it out. Some games will still say things like "enter word 7, line 5, page 23 from the manual" but you just click OK and they go away.
It's actually really funny too; they released The Witcher 2 (CDProjekt RED owns GOG) on both Steam and GOG. The widely distributed pirated version? Steam with the DRM cracked. The completley DRM-free version, which cost the same amount, we mostly ignored for large-scale piracy. Proof enough that DRM doesn't work, if anybody needed another one.
Sounds like you were kind of a dick... by the time I was 9 (and I'm the eldest child) everybody in the family had their own PC though. I will admit to occasionally using my sister's for Total Annihilation, however, (it had more RAM; mine couldn't run 7 Islands).
Ha! That actually goes all the way back to WC2, never mind SC1. Good to see them getting back to one of the things that helped make SC a big deal, though. Does it allow offline LAN play yet?
Also, just to be clear: "this" is "play the same game with a friend without buying it". StarCraft may allow it, but Steam does not and nothing in this announcement changes that.
Actually, Microsoft was going to do *much* better than this: they would allow two people to use the same account *AT THE SAME TIME* which Steam (still) does not allow. Two different people could play different games that were both purchased on the same account. Steam doesn't even let two people use the same account at the same time at all.
The always-online thing was, I think, a bigger deal than the first-sale issue; Steam has *never* respected the doctrine of first sale, and people sing its praises all the time. All DRM (including both Steam and downloaded games on the Xbox) on so-called "purchases" can go die in a fire, along with everybody pushing it.
(I'm OK with DRM on things that are explicitly rentals, like Netflix, so long as they're reimburse me if it doesn't work for me because of the DRM.)
On the other hand, if I want to play one game (say, Halo: ODST) while a friend plays a *different* game, say Halo 3, we can do that. Even though I, and not he, own both games. Steam doesn't let you do that, even with this so-called "Sharing" feature. I didn't want to share access to my account's games list, I wanted to share access to my games, individually. Don't let us both play Foo at the same time if you must, but if I want to play Foo and he wants to play Bar, why the fuck not?
To hell with that, still no way for me to play Foo while my friend plays Bar. If I want to play Halo ODST while my friend plays Fable 3, I hand him the Fable disc and put the Halo disc in my own console. Even though both games are in my "library".
Steam is still DRM bullshit. This just slightly improves the current system of sharing a single actual Steam account between multiple people. Note the key word "slightly" in there.
Really? You "enjoyed" a reading the "discoveries" of somebody who didn't even realize that psexec requires Admin, at which point the whole thing is completely moot? You want to know how else I can replace the password on the Administrator account? Computer Management (mmc.exe, as Admin please), Local Users and Groups, Users, Administrator, right-click, Reset password.
But that doesn't let him talk about how 1337 he is for tweaking an outdated program to work on a modern Windows version... Seriously, the guy is a bit of an idiot. Calling it a Windows vuln was icing on the cake; if anything, this kind of "exploit" is actually easier on Linux.
There's "out-of-the-box thinking and problem solving" and then there's "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about but have you heard of this cool program that lets you totally break Windows security guys?!?" I hang out a lot in the security community, and I see this sort of shit all the time. I've never seen anybody who started out spewing this kind of idiocy ever actually amount to anything even years later, though. They never actually learn. That garbage he posted in the article? that's probably as smart as he will ever get with regard to security, because he doesn't even understand the basic concept of what user accounts or access permissions *are*. Not doesn't understand them - hell, at least on Windows, that's hardly anything unusual - he doesn't even know what they are. For example, you can access the SAM just fine without using SYSTEM at all; just use Admin privileges to modify the ACLs on the SAM registry key. He's not even aware that there *are* such things as ACLs; he just thinks it's "magic" that SYSTEM can do some things that everybody else (because he runs as Admin, because he doesn't have any idea why you wouldn't) can't do.
Too true. Sadly, most people - even on/. these days, it seems - don't know a damn thing about OS security. If the idiot of an article author had pulled a Linux volume and gone fucking about in/etc/shadow to do exactly the same thing, though, then it wouldn't have appealed to the general/. groupthink nearly so well...
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That type of bullshit (your IE thing) is exactly why Virtual XP Mode exists; a pre-configured XP VM that is free to users of Win7 Professional edition or higher, and is based on a fairly stock XP image including IE6. Run it when you need it, kill or hibernate it when you don't, and carry on with life.
You're using Search completely wrong. It's not intended as a CMD replacement (it can partially be used as one, but holy cow, don't do that). Its purpose is to make opening programs, Control Panel items, and files much, much faster.
Example: Visual Studio. Hit the Windows key, type "vis", hit Enter. Even if devenv.exe is in your path (which it's not by default) that's still faster than typing "devenv" into CMD, and you don't have to know that the name of VS's executable is devenv.exe (though it's worth noting that if you type "devenv" into Start search, that works too).
Second example: how about changing the Windows proxy settings. Start/WinKey, "prox", Enter. You are taken directly to the correct tab of the Internet Settings control panel. I'm not even going to try and guess what you'd type into cmd to get that.
Third example: you want to run Command Prompt as Admin (due to the fact that you are not an idiot, you are not actually logged in as Administrator). Typing either "com" or "cmd" will work, but then you have to go mouse over to it, right-click, etc., right? NOPE! WinKey, "cmd", Ctrl+Shift+Enter (an easier chord than it may sound like, especially once you've done it a few times, because you have both hands on the home row of the keyboard already). This works for other programs too.
So many more... any time I try to use an OS without Start search, I drive myself nuts. It's more user-friendly than a command line, much faster than a mouse, and exceedingly convenient at one keystroke from anywhere.
It is a *huge* time-saver.
I disagree on low-level stuff; to me it's more visible than in XP. To take the example you gave, I hit Start, typed "ip", and hit enter, just as a test to see what came up. What I got was the network connections screen, which looks nigh-identical to "My Network Places" -> right-click -> Properties. From there I can easily open the Properties of any connection and get a dialog that hearkens straight back to Windows 95. Of course, you can also just use ipconfig and netsh; neither one is new and they're both right where you left them.
The Start search feature is, in my opinion, the greatest improvement to Windows usability in the entire existence of the OS. Note that the search result for "ip" doesn't even have "ip" in the name; it just has search metadata that includes the word "ip". It's not perfect - "dns" goes to Proxy configuration by default - but it's excellent. Contrary to what all the fool nay-sayers who disregard this feature say, you don't have to know the exact name of the program. You don't even need to know the first part of the name of the program. It is far, *far* faster than navigating even a well-laid-out menu tree.
With all that said, kudos for not viewing UAC as "that annoying thing I turn off". I ran XP as a non-Admin; compared to needing to use the RunAs command (which only works on executable files; installing an MSI package meant using runas to manually invoke msiexec.exe) UAC is heavenly.
Oh, a few other little perks (many of these also apply to Vista): ... I could go on. XP is obsolete garbage.
Win7 supports symlinks (the command is mklink).
Win7 supports shrinking partitions, even its own system partition.
Win7 does disk defragmentation automatically in the background.
Win7 supports the TRIM command for SSDs, which is essential to having a long lifetime of good performance.
Win7 has a great "what process is doing what" utility called Resource Monitor (see who is slamming your network, or holding a lock on that file, or...).
Win7 changes the name of the default user profiles directory from "Documents and Settings" to the far more typable (and less space-containing) "Users".
Win7 has a bi-directional firewall that is much more configurable than XPs.
This is actually true even for non-NT versions. Just for a lark, somebody went and did a full upgrade path starting from either 3.1 or 95 (I forget which, but I think it was 3.1) through 98, ME, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8. Each time it was an in-place upgrade. I shudder to think what the state of the system must be after having been quite so roughly dragged into the 21st century, but you can do it.
Um... no. Fixing XSS is trivial. I work in this field myself; only a small percentage of our clients take more than a week to fix a reported issue, and many manage it same-day. This includes quite large and well-known software companies and websites, including in the financial sector (although I'll admit that the financial sector tends to be on the slower end of things).
For the unaware: this is serious sarcasm. Fixing XSS is usually pretty trivial; just apply output encoding (usually HTML entity encoding, but there are other valid approaches) to the user-supplied data before reflecting it into the page. Even in weird edge cases, like where the user is explicitly allowed to insert their own HTML (Slashdot, for example) you can get around the problem by whitelisting certain elements and parameters, and rejecting (or removing, though this must be done carefully) anything which doesn't conform. It's A long-ago solved problem that some people still have incredible difficulty with.
Doing security work myself, I've seen XSS fix times ranging from "within the hour" to "three weeks or so", and the median is probably about two days. I always wonder what the hell is up with the companies on the long end of that scale.
For me, I block ads because they are actually a threat to browsing. In the old days, Flash ads that would pop out a player which extended off the end of the window would crash the browser. These days that's less of a problem, but there are plenty of others still around.
Privacy: advertising is probably the biggest non-government threat to online privacy. I don't really care whether advertisers would respect *my* DoNotTrack headers; I won't even connect to their servers. Supercookies? You'd need to be able to set them, first. Even if a certain site is allowed for some reason, I don't let it see my other browsing history; it gets only a distorted and meaninglessly narrow view.
Security: Advertising networks are one of the biggest problems to online security right now. At least once a month (on average, it comes in waves), one of the web comics I read gets hit with a malicious ad that attempts to serve malware / exploit kits to anybody visiting the site. This has also happened to high-profile reputable news sites and so forth as well. The ad providers don't seem to give a fuck, and the sites serving the ads can't really control the ad content before it's served. Whether it's browser exploits, Flash exploits, Java exploits, embedded PDF exploits, or something else, ad networks cheerfully serve up malicious garbage all the time. You know that advice about "avoid the seedier parts of the web"? Yeah, you can't do that without an ad blocker. Everything is seedy otherwise.
For sites that need money to keep them running, I donate. A few hundred dollars a year in donations is no big deal for me, and it's probably more money than the sites in question would get from my ad impressions anyhow.
In fairness, I should have considered that Pearl Harbor would be lumped into the second category and made it two days of car crashes. Also, if you take world-wide terrorism then (aside from the difficulty in deciding exactly what does and does not constitute terrorism) it's probably a good bit worse than that... but compare the security measures at countries that can actually legitimately claim to have a terrorism problem, and compare them to the security measures here, and theirs are more effective, less expensive, and less disruptive to society. A lot of that, of course, is because much of to deterrence is political, which the US government seems incapable of understanding no matter which major party is in office (though Obama sure talked like he understood it during the 2008 campaign, sigh...)
Eh... developers who are semi-aware of security are the kind of people who write the most insecure code, in my (professional) opinion and experience. Well, second most insecure I guess, the ones who copy-paste something off the web are worse. But at least their bugs are easy to spot. The people who are semi-aware of security are the ones who do things like TLS with certificate validation turned off (because it's still encrypted, right?) or store salted and hashed passwords (possibly even using a decent key derivation function rather than just a single round of SHA1) but have XSS all over their site and don't mark their cookies with the Secure flag. They are the dangerous ones: they don't know that they don't know.
Mind you, I suppose they're job security (though both they and I, and expecially their users, would prefer that a preemptive review, rather than an incident reponse, be the first time somebody actually competent in security looks at their code). It's easier to convince the ones who know that they don't know security that they actually need such a review, too.
I suspect you work somewhere related to security (or possibly as a dev in a security-conscious company) but not actually in the business of ensuring things are secure (or breaking them)... do that, and you get really jaded about people being dumber than a pile of rocks when it comes to security. It's a lot easier to be optimistic about half-baked security analysis like this one when you know somebody competent will take a look too.
Fair point on the vitrol. I forget what I needed to get out of my system, but it's out now. I did show the story to some of my co-workers, and they laughed, so I was probably just in a bad mood. Mind you, it wasn't a kind laugh - it's the kind of laugh you'd do at some idiot who drives away from the gas pump without removing the nozzle, or watching a kid flee in pants-wetting terror after throwing rocks at a big dog and discovering it wasn't actually leashed - but they did enjoy it anyhow.
In a household with serious console gamers? I'd be shocked if in any such place there is *only* two current-gen consoles per person; that would mean that on average each person is missing one of the big-name consoles. My sister, who is by no means a hardcore gamer of any kind, lives in a household with three Xbox 360s, a PS3, a PS2, a Wii, and a bunch of older stuff; these are the possessions of three twenty-something women. You can be damn sure they share games all the time, too.
Or, to turn your question back on you so you realize how silly it sounds: so you have two PCs?
You're alright with having to spend $1000 (for a decent gaming PC that will last anything close to the lifetime of a console, that's actually a bit low) and if I don't want to purchase each game in the household twice (even at $20 a piece, to be closer to Steam sale or indie game prices) then *I* am the one who doesn't understand? (Oh, and by the time I've tried out a game on a friend's account, the sale is probably over anyhow...)
Mind you, yeah, a PC has lots of other uses. We also each had one already. But, like a PC, consoles have multiple uses and if there's more than one TV (pretty common when multiple peoples' posessions are combined) then you might as well hook up a console to each so that if somebody is playing a game / watching a show / watching a game / watching a movie / hanging out in the living room / whatever, you can still do your own thing. In any case, I don't want to buy everything for each system in duplicate (or triplicate, or whatever), especially for games that I might play for a few hours, put down, and never bother picking up again... but in the meantime, it's really not cool to tell my friend(s) that he can't play games because I want to try one of his.
Note: buy un-DRMed games, and this probably miraculously vanishes.
Linux on the Surface Pro is dead easy (disable secure boot - a simple and well-documented procedure - and then install as normal). What are you smoking (reading)? All Win8 devices with Secure Boot are required (by Microsoft, of all people) to allow the user to disable Secure Boot and/or add their own signing keys.
Valid point. Microsoft really should fix that (or rather, should have had it already fixed...). The battery life of RT is actually pretty decent, but nothing outstanding.
More people died that day 12 years ago in car crashes than have died in all terrorist attacks within the USA *ever*. The TSA has killed more people than the terrorists did by making flying less pleasant so people take the far less-safe option of driving (actually, the break-even point for deaths from the Sep 11 attacks vs. deaths from TSA asshattery was passed over seven years ago).
I'm not saying it shouldn't be prosecuted or anything like that, but you (and well-meaning idiots like you, along with plenty of less-well-meaning people out to make a buck or grab some power) have blown the whole thing massively out of proprotion. How many people have died as a *direct* result of the US's response to those terrorist attacks, huh? Hell, how many of just US citizens? How many billions of dollars of military materiel? How many government expenditures on things like increased survellance and provably-ineffective airport scanners (strap a knife to your side; they can't see it)?
Let's assume that those $100 billion were all *directly* attributable to the terrorists (and not to, for example, re-routing planes all across the continent, shutting down airports, etc.). Wow, that sounds like a lot of money! Now, let's look at the damage to the US economy from the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse. The terrorists are all dead, and we spent a fuckton more money to go hunt down everybody connected to them. How about those bankers, though?
You go mourn your few thousand. Those of us who try to not let logic override our sense will fight the bigger threats to society, such as people who massively overreact to terrorism and do more damage to the country than the terrorists themselves could ever have dreamed of causing. Please stay the fuck out of our way.
This eliminates many of the conveniences of Steam (background updates for all your games, friends list, cross-game perks, no need to "swap CDs" (swap accounts, in this case), plus it adds the hassle of needing to create new accounts all the time. I think it's also forbidden by their TOS, but I could be wrong (most online services prohibit this, but not all). However, it is in fact the only way to use Steam with paid games without getting shafted by their DRM.
Me? I just don't buy shit on Steam anymore.
It's not unclear; it's well established that if you play any game on your account, it kicks them off, regardless of what game they were playing. Only one person can access any given person's library at a time. This isn't sharing games at all... more like sharing a single account with multiple passwords. Nothign to see here, DRM still sucks.
No. If it were "as best they can" then I could hand my roommate a virtual copy of game X to play while I play game Y, just like I can do with real games. It's not like there's some technical reason they can't do this. When I share a copy of a game with a friend, I temporarily lose access to that copy of that game. I don't lose access to my entire library (for the pedantic: I don't have to kick him off if I want to play something else from my library, which amounts to losing access because I am not a dick to my friends).
GOG is absolutely, strictly, no DRM. Games which had DRM, they generally patch it out. Some games will still say things like "enter word 7, line 5, page 23 from the manual" but you just click OK and they go away.
It's actually really funny too; they released The Witcher 2 (CDProjekt RED owns GOG) on both Steam and GOG. The widely distributed pirated version? Steam with the DRM cracked. The completley DRM-free version, which cost the same amount, we mostly ignored for large-scale piracy. Proof enough that DRM doesn't work, if anybody needed another one.
Sounds like you were kind of a dick... by the time I was 9 (and I'm the eldest child) everybody in the family had their own PC though. I will admit to occasionally using my sister's for Total Annihilation, however, (it had more RAM; mine couldn't run 7 Islands).
Ha! That actually goes all the way back to WC2, never mind SC1. Good to see them getting back to one of the things that helped make SC a big deal, though. Does it allow offline LAN play yet?
Also, just to be clear: "this" is "play the same game with a friend without buying it". StarCraft may allow it, but Steam does not and nothing in this announcement changes that.
Actually, Microsoft was going to do *much* better than this: they would allow two people to use the same account *AT THE SAME TIME* which Steam (still) does not allow. Two different people could play different games that were both purchased on the same account. Steam doesn't even let two people use the same account at the same time at all.
The always-online thing was, I think, a bigger deal than the first-sale issue; Steam has *never* respected the doctrine of first sale, and people sing its praises all the time. All DRM (including both Steam and downloaded games on the Xbox) on so-called "purchases" can go die in a fire, along with everybody pushing it.
(I'm OK with DRM on things that are explicitly rentals, like Netflix, so long as they're reimburse me if it doesn't work for me because of the DRM.)
One account / game is the way to go if you absolutely must use Steam. It lets you do such crazy things as re-sell games (unofficially) as well...
DRM is bullshit, Steam included. GOG, HumbleBundle (the not-DRMed ones, thanks), or direct from the dev!
For games that don't offer split-screen, yes.
On the other hand, if I want to play one game (say, Halo: ODST) while a friend plays a *different* game, say Halo 3, we can do that. Even though I, and not he, own both games. Steam doesn't let you do that, even with this so-called "Sharing" feature. I didn't want to share access to my account's games list, I wanted to share access to my games, individually. Don't let us both play Foo at the same time if you must, but if I want to play Foo and he wants to play Bar, why the fuck not?
DRM is such incredible bullshit. Steam included.
To hell with that, still no way for me to play Foo while my friend plays Bar. If I want to play Halo ODST while my friend plays Fable 3, I hand him the Fable disc and put the Halo disc in my own console. Even though both games are in my "library".
Steam is still DRM bullshit. This just slightly improves the current system of sharing a single actual Steam account between multiple people. Note the key word "slightly" in there.
Really? You "enjoyed" a reading the "discoveries" of somebody who didn't even realize that psexec requires Admin, at which point the whole thing is completely moot? You want to know how else I can replace the password on the Administrator account? Computer Management (mmc.exe, as Admin please), Local Users and Groups, Users, Administrator, right-click, Reset password.
But that doesn't let him talk about how 1337 he is for tweaking an outdated program to work on a modern Windows version... Seriously, the guy is a bit of an idiot. Calling it a Windows vuln was icing on the cake; if anything, this kind of "exploit" is actually easier on Linux.
There's "out-of-the-box thinking and problem solving" and then there's "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about but have you heard of this cool program that lets you totally break Windows security guys?!?" I hang out a lot in the security community, and I see this sort of shit all the time. I've never seen anybody who started out spewing this kind of idiocy ever actually amount to anything even years later, though. They never actually learn. That garbage he posted in the article? that's probably as smart as he will ever get with regard to security, because he doesn't even understand the basic concept of what user accounts or access permissions *are*. Not doesn't understand them - hell, at least on Windows, that's hardly anything unusual - he doesn't even know what they are. For example, you can access the SAM just fine without using SYSTEM at all; just use Admin privileges to modify the ACLs on the SAM registry key. He's not even aware that there *are* such things as ACLs; he just thinks it's "magic" that SYSTEM can do some things that everybody else (because he runs as Admin, because he doesn't have any idea why you wouldn't) can't do.
Too true. Sadly, most people - even on /. these days, it seems - don't know a damn thing about OS security. If the idiot of an article author had pulled a Linux volume and gone fucking about in /etc/shadow to do exactly the same thing, though, then it wouldn't have appealed to the general /. groupthink nearly so well...