Re: Or Wine on Linux?

Drivers isn't really much of a problem in Linux anymore actually. One of my Linux box is running on a very exotic setup (two GeForce450s in an SLI configuration, and a SoundBlaster X-Fi E-MU PCI card). NVidia proprietary drivers for the graphics card aside (which required me to agree to enable a repository in Ubuntu and running the proprietary driver detection tool), the rest of the hardware were recognized and worked without a hitch on installing Ubuntu.

Re: Time to move to reactOS I wonder...

Well, here's hoping ReactOS 1.0 goes gold the day MS shuts off support for XP (or worse, shut off XP's activation servers). I'd really love to dump all the MS crud I have and switch to ReactOS, but sadly, there's just games I have that cannot be run under ReactOS or even WINE because of stupid copy protection mechanisms that for some reason fails in ReactOS, or because it used undocumented calls that ReactOS cannot handle. Hopefully, by then ReactOS would've ironed out all their bugs and problems by then.

Re: Old School

Damn you had me for a second :/

I'd do anything to have my PS3 play PS2 games again. Given that my PS2 just started exhibiting clock troubles recently :(

Beer. Because I have a few games I was playing on my PS2 when the clock trouble arose and now want to drown my sorrow.

This is why I start up Steam as soon as I get to my PC, then I let it run in the background while I go browse El Reg for a bit. Then when I'm ready to play, the update's either done or almost done :P

I have no problem with that actually. It's no different from other online games I have.

But yes, as pointed out before, you can disable updates on a per-game basis. Just don't complain when a server refuses to let you on when you want to play multiplayer, because you're running an outdated version of the game.

Well, Macs don't use direct x, and there's a Steam client for it.

I'll bet that the Linux version of Steam is actually a port of the Mac version, given how Macs are pretty much Unix boxes with lipstick anyway. Sure, it uses a BSD kernel instead of the Linux kernel, but uses most of the same core libraries that Linux does (including zlib) - even using OpenGL. The only difference is the low-lying sound layer and the low-lying video layer. They'd need to change from PortAudio to ALSA and QE to MESA. Which shouldn't be too much work.

Re: Other distros

> "it is insane to expect users to constantly be upgrading their distribution every 6-ish months

> to keep up with the latest bleeding edge distributions."

Not really. The simplest trick in the book would be to build every dependency into Steam and it's game as static. That way, the games would run regardless of your other libraries' version. Sure, each game would become bloated as heck compared to their windows counterparts, but then Valve is already doing that with their Mac releases anyway.

An alternative is to bundle the required libraries in steam's directory (Linux is usually smart enough to try to match the binary's call to the most compatible library) and have the games call those instead of the libraries that shipped with the distro. Unfortunately, this will only work well with Valve's own games. Third party games distributed through Steam will either need to build their games using the libraries Valve use, or ship with their own libraries as well.

Actually...

I see that happen to Windows 7 all the time. On both AMD and NVidia kits.

@AC

Let me see...

XBL? Nope, not available in Malaysia

Zune? Nope, not available in Malaysia

Store? Yes, but very limited compared to other countries'.

Bah, even Apple has finally gotten off their asses and launched the music store and movie store in Malaysia now.

WinPho? No thanks, for the crap support MS has in store for Malaysian users, I'd pass.

Just you wait

I'm sure someone would come up with a bootloader or such that'll allow Mountain Lion to run on older Macs. It has been happening since the PowerPC days, and I suspect it will continue happening.

That said, I will consider first before upgrading. I needed to wait donkey years for Oki to put out Lion drivers for my color laser printer (Let's see. Bought new Mac with Lion in October 2011. Oki C3300N drivers for the darn OS only shown up in April 2012). Reason? The driver code was PowerPC, which required Rosetta, which wasn't present in Lion.

Also, Lion broke NTFS3G. Was a PITA to re-enable (needed to patch some of the binaries). And I refuse to pay for Paragon or Tuxera.

The problem is...

Web-based email has been around for almost two decades (assuming Hotmail is the first, that's 16 years). These web-based mail have became the defacto mail for almost everyone. If it's not hotmail, it's GMail or Yahoo Mail.

Re: Plan B

Or it could be the reason Elop doesn't know the plan yet- only the investors- the plan is to stuff Elop into a giant shoe, put on a catapult, and have the investors scream "You're fired" at the top of their lungs before launching said shoe towards the ocean.

And then, they'd just elect one of the investors as CEO. Hopefully one that's far more competent than Elop.

Re: Obvious to me

Heh, what I was hoping for too.

Re: BAU for the US then?

It just finished pouring over here.

Re: Nintendo has already won just by not being Sony

> wasn't actually a rootkit

Explain then, why it hijacks the filesystem and OS and makes Windows Explorer hide certain files even if the user has Explorer display all files including System files. More egregiously, It also obfuscates it's process name in the Windows Services console and in the task manager- legitimate programs don't have a reason to do that.

And it was that hijacking feature that many malware for windows that was later spotted in the wild took advantage of, too.

Also Sony made the big mistake of playing the "people are idiots" card in public. Saying "people don't know what a rootkit is, why should they care?" isn't a smart move at all.

Re: Affects Linux too, differently

Hmmm, I've been having a different problem on Linux - Flash video colors comes out all wrong if hardware acceleration is enabled. Had to turn off hardware acceleration and now every time I watch a video the CPU load shoots up. Thankfully, tho, it's a quad-core Phenom 2, so it's still not too bad.

As for windows- well, I'd think it's probably a potent combination of Firefox 13 and Flash, and probably Aero. I'm using Classic with Seamonkey 2.10.1 and I'm still able to watch flash videos fine.

Re: SWOTR...

Boot Camp? What ever happened to Crossovers and other Wine distillations?

Re: Oh sweet jesus...

Recreated Program Manager? More like took a few steps back from Program Manager. At least Program Manager supported grouping icons into categories. I don't see it happening with Metro.

That said, without all the 3D bling, at least systems will run cooler and be able to put more juice into the programs running. I personally shunned Aero and still use Classic in the face of 7, because it frees up GPU cycles which I can then put towards getting more FPS out of the running game. Plus, I'm using 64-bit Windows. There's a nasty exploit that targets Aero on x64 platforms that MS wasn't arsed to fix.

Re: When / where?

East Asian countries, particularly South Korea and Japan.

Especially Japan. People there seem to use video calls for practically everything. Then again, Japanese culture is complex (for example, they seem to be perfectly fine with things westerners find revolting) and doesn't apply much anywhere else.

Elsewhere, enterprises are starting to find it important to have video at teleconferences for some reason. I know companies who're looking into installing video conferencing kits into their branches because other companies insist on seeing the who's on the other end before being willing to get down to business.

Re: Inevitable if you think about it.

Well, if the power station is staffed by an incompetent army of Homer Simpson clones (i.e. Chernobyl), I'd be very afraid.

Have you tried using that BBC Dimensions thing to see what happens if a Chernobyl style disaster happens in the middle of Alice Springs (the most isolated area in Australia)?

Here, I'll pull it up for you: http://howbigreally.com/dimension/environmental_disasters/chernobyl#Alice_Springs

Re: flash baked in? so adverts unavoidable?

Just find a list of all the ad-servers' address in the world, add them to the hosts file, and alias them to 127.0.0.1. Troublesome, but it was the oldest method in the book.

Re: 20gb?

I can have the base OS, OpenOffice AND the entire GCC suite, PHP, Mono, Python, Perl, Ruby, TCL/Tk and a whole other bunch of dev tools on just one 8GB SD card with room to spare on Ubuntu!

You're telling me that Windows 8, which does not come with an office suite and a development environment, is 20GB? And with that $#!* UI?

Makes me glad I've changed my mind about putting Win 8 on the third rig with the announcement that Steam is coming to Linux (nothing wrong with Wine, just that, well, ELF binaries will run better than PE binaries with a translation layer). Now, if only the ALSA project can get them E-Mu 20k1 cards fully working. I have a old X-Fi on the Linux rig and I can't offload MIDI synthesis to it...

Re: Talk about betting the farm on it

> Just look at Ubuntu to see what happens when you force a fondleslab interface on

> desktop users, they leave in their droves.

Well, to simply put, yeah. But the truth is, everyone just switched to the Xubuntu respin or quickly installed XFCE and switched to that instead.

I myself use Kubuntu, although I think I'll switch to using XFCE as my primary environment, given that I'll be doing lots of gaming on that box.

Re: time on mars

Patience, we need to send trees there first to terraform the environment and turn all those carbon dioxide into oxygen.

That will take a few hundred years.

And will only happen once someone at NASA has figured out a way to get tree saplings onto the planet en masse.

Re: It's time

Sadly tho, I agree with this. The Gimp is quite easy to use for most part (some stuff takes some adjusting, but I can cope). But when it comes to fancy stuff like adding drop shadows to text or even just simple text outlines, pain ensues. Adding drop shadows or outlines to text only takes a few clicks of a mouse in PS5. In Gimp, either one requires half a dozen steps which always ends with a rigorous swiping of the mice with a paintbrush, or another few dozen clicks with the paint bucket.

And don't get me started on creating circling text, which wasted half of my day (though this is mostly caused by outdated tutorials confusing the sanity out of me).

Still, I've mostly warmed up to Gimp since I don't deal with text much. Just that it's a real chore when I do end up needing to apply effects to text.

Re: Well developed

Well then, explain to me why some of the apps on my fondleslab has started crashing regularly since the iOS 5 upgrade.

Not that I have anything against the fondleslab, but it gets irritating when IM+ just crashes on me in a middle of a conversation with some online buddies.

This isn't a ploy to get me to buy a new fondleslab, is it? I've decided to stick to my first gen one a little longer given how I have to readjust my finances to some other higher priority stuff that crept out. And it's bad enough that Adobe Photoshop Touch isn't allowed to run on it for whatever stupid excuse Apple and Adobe has.

Thunderbolt converter?

Well, given that Thunderbolt is a external version of PCIe x4, some enterprising bloke could come up with a chipset that adds a Firewire port to the mix by converting from Thunderbolt. After all, Firewire 400 traffic flows smooth enough to be implemented on legacy PCI and PCIe x1 can even handle Firewire 800 traffic smoothly, so a PCIe x4-based interface could theoretically do just fine.

Sucks to need to cough up money for the adapter tho...

As for me, I'll be sticking to my existing Mac Mini, it's only mainly used for syncing my fondleslab anyway (aside from light gaming and casual Internet browsing) because iTunes for Windows is faff and backing up a fondleslab on Linux isn't something I have the time to explore right now.

Re: I ditched 7-Zip...

You sure you're using the version of 7-Zip that corresponds to the architecture of your OS? Installing the 32-bit version of 7-Zip on a 64-bit version of Windows will result in shell integration problems (as I witnessed back in the early days of 64-bit computing. Ran XP Pro x64 on one of my rigs, but at that time 7-Zip was only available in 32-bit). Shell extension started working properly once they came up with 64-bit native versions of 7-Zip.

re: Avast

I agree with AC on this one. All you need to do is renew Avast every year. No big deal, just renew it on the day of expiry.

Also, I should note that you do in fact get the sandbox protection in the free version of Avast, just that it's not as flexible as the paid for version.

Re: Give me just the screen, kthx

Surround mult-touch :P

Spied an enemy trying to come up on you from the far right? instead of panning with the mousae, just tap the screen to center the view, then fire away :P

It's basically using an additional layer in 3D surround mode to cheat in FPSes.

Re: Linux

> NEVER had that happen

Well, I run OpenSUSE Factory and Debian Sid with self-rolled kernels :P

You'll only see the drivers break when they come out with a new major XOrg release (usually because the ABI's too radically changed in the version), and the kernel break if you roll your own kernel and opt for the latest and greatest, and something changed in their structure too (iirc this happened in 3.1. Some of the kernel header's locations changed and as a net result it wreaked havoc on the driver's module source during compile-time).