They don’t do that because they want the key in house, it a marketing ploy ala valve- steam, they want your eyeballs on their site despite packet loss, lag etc...so they can keep you coming back and sell you more shit. I was a very involved gamer until valve pulled that crap.
I cannot run the game and simply reach out to a server for others without trafficking their site. It sux.

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Obama-e fungis nati homines....

Interesting. My experience with Steam has been much different. It was a little rough at release, but now it keeps all my games updated and organized, facilitates in-game IM even for games that I didn't purchase through Steam, and I haven't seen any connection issues in years.

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When they come a wull staun ma groon
Staun ma groon al nae be afraid
Thoughts awe hame tak awa ma fear
Sweat an bluid hide ma veil awe tears

I see a parallel to OS development in commercial airplanes.
If you look at a picture of an airplane from the first 50 years of aviation, you can usually guess with 10 years when it was first built.
There was tremendous development going from wooden airframes covered with canvas to metal airframes, streamlining to jet engines, and then even though there have still been improvements, the look of airplanes hasn't changed much in 50 years.
There are still 707s and DC-8s in service, heck the average B-52 is around 50 years old.
The point is you get to a point with a technology where the technology matures and there isn't a big demand for the next step.
The Concorde is now retired from service and the supersonic look never took off with commercial aviation.
At some point in time the OS will be fine, the processing speed will be fine and there just won't be the new applications that make your computer so slow you need to get a new one.
Microsoft monopolized the OS market when there weren't any Operating Systems in use, so they have dominated through a period of market expansion, but once the market gets saturated where does the revenue come from?

Each upgrade cycle is taking longer, I was replacing windows 3.1 machines with XP machines last year, those new machines could be around for 15-20 years, there just isn't the need to upgrade the technology to meet business requirements.

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“The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.”

Senator Thad Cochran, Mississippi (R)
on McCain

“I decided I didn’t want this guy anywhere near a trigger.”
Senator Pete Domenici, New Mexico (R)
on McCain

“My anger did not help my campaign ... People don’t like angry candidates very much.”

McCain on McCain

Yeah, they call 'em dongles here too (at least the older guys do ). And, that's a good point about them crapping out. That does happen periodically - the most common problem is the internal clock going on the fritz. No big deal with our customer base - we just overnight another one - but that would certainly alienate casual users.

I think your point about open sourcing your software is valid to allow them to find uses for hardware, but it doesn't and can't really apply to my company. I probably shouldn't go into the reasons as I'd likely have to explain some proprietary stuff.

I still think that making the gaming software "unpiratable" in a general sense with it is feasible. Sure, a cracker with a few days/weeks on his hands will be able to get in, but he won't be able to allow other users to simply download a "cracked" copy of the game with the key search embedded in the binary files. Of course, there are even ways around this, but I think it would eliminate a lot of the people who use pirated software without knowing what they're doing.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

You would argue that they aren't? In the past, the biggest motivations to do web development with J2EE technologies were that J2EE was free and that Microsoft didn't really offer anything of substance. Now, Microsoft offers .NET express for free and leverages their VB API for web development.

If you want to develop in Java, you have to download the Java SDK, download a compatible JRE, make sure your users have a compatible JRE, download Eclipse, download Eclipse plugins, download a framework (Spring, Struts, etc), download more Eclipse plugins for the framework, configure Eclipse, download different JRE/SDK because you discover yours don't support your Eclipse, make your users get a new JRE, download Apache or Tomcat, download more plugins for Eclipse to be compatible with these servers, setup your project XML's, download Ant and its plugins for Eclipse, create an Ant Build script, write the javascript/html for "hello world" and then cross your fingers that it all goes right when you build the project and launch the web server. Then, you get to write all the manual code for reading from a text box.

If you want to develop in .NET, you download .NET Express, make sure you and your users are running the .NET runtime, and you're all set. If you want a text box, you simply drag and drop it, and the API takes care of generating all the business and GUI logic you have to write manually in Java.

The biggest reason that people opted to hassle with approach number 1 is that it was free where Microsoft wasn't. Now, Microsoft has a solid API and charges you nothing to develop, which severely undercuts the motivation to hassle with J2EE setup. Now, we're back to traditional *NIX vs Microsoft issues - do we want cross platform capability, do we want to bundle and distribute as an OEM, do we want to pay for OS, etc.

So, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that they didn't score a major victory with .NET. They stopped hemorrhaging developers with its release. And, development technology dictates the rest of the brand adoption in the market.

That's a Catch 22. It would, if they didn't dominate the market. But, if they didn't dominate the market, they wouldn't have the leverage or motivation to generate all that proprietary stuff. Open source stuff finds a niche in being flexible, but it's also hampered by it. Supporting X different kinds of hardware and OS API is X times harder and more time consuming than doing it for one. Which means, Microsoft cranks out shit X times faster and X times better, pound for pound.

Uh, okie-dokie. I don't really go in for fan-boy shit. I'm in this to make money.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Wow...was that a shot at Jim Gray?

You never cease to amaze me at times Solletica....

When you want to migrate to Linux, you have to be aware of a few things first:

- hardware compatibility, is my hardware going to be recognize by Linux? Play a CD Live, run Wubi under Windows, try it

If you hardware is fully compatible, Ubuntu is just a piece of cake, anyone can use it, when you buy a PC, a printer, just make sure it is fully compatible.

- Your use of it, If you just use Word some time to times, MSN, Skype, Internet, of course Ubuntu is just enough, (use programs that are cross-platform, so that you can easily migrate to MACOS or Linux)but if you want to use some specific programs, test them under WINE or keep a dual boot

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Awesome! I hadn't heard about this one. Very nice.

I use Linux personally, and I *despise* Microsoft. I haven't used anything Microsoft in many months. I use Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop, and RHEL on my web servers. My computers always seem to run so much better with Linux installed. Imagine that?

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Not everyone understands House music; it's a spiritual thing; a body thing; a soul thing.