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Comment Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score 1) 495

Sorry, but there's no such thing as "DRM done right".

What if that DRM results in vastly lower prices?

Here, I'll give you an option. Steam DRM + $3.33 for the game, or NO DRM + $20 for it.

Unrealistic? Nope. Steam is a market, where games easily get 20x the sales as other places. Because of that, sale discounts are extreme, and anyone willing to deal with the DRM (which only ever seems to have issues with Offline Mode - nothing else) can reap the benefits.

If you really hate DRM that much, go to GOG. They have excellent support. I buy stuff off both sites.

Comment Re:PC gaming never went away. (Score 1) 495

a good run-of-the-mill PC, for Office, internet, HTPC... can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price. You've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that.

Only if you're buying pre-built.

If you build it yourself, and know where to look for deals, $500 will get you a fast quad-core(or six-core), 4GB of RAM, a motherboard, case, PSU, and a Radeon 4870. You can reuse your HDD/DVD drive from your last PC, and pirate Windows if you aren't a student ($20 licenses) or can't afford it. (I'm being realistic here)

Comment Re:Zero to botched in 60 nanoseconds? (Score 1) 265

Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there. One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.

I'd be fine with things like superfetch if there was a way to signal apps to dump non-essential memory when it's needed. And also a way to signal them to STOP HOGGING I/O.

But as is, slimmed down XP feels faster than Win7.

Not using resources may be a waste, but the algorithms aren't perfected yet, so that's what I choose.

Comment Re:Why should they care now? (Score 1) 204

What does this prove? Different versions of IE's can obviously provide the system and application wide libraries too, but there has to be at least one of them installed for it to work.

Microsoft claimed in the past that they couldn't remove IE because so many applications depended on it. (The trident rendering engine is used in many programs - although now webkit is taking over)

They made similar excuses for WMP.

Of course, it's quite possible to upgrade to IE8 without disrupting applications depending on IE6's embedded controls.

And nLite proved years ago that you can remove IE/WMP without removing trident/WMP-codecs - but acknowledging that would be heresy.

Comment Re:Mod parent up (Score 1) 207

Disagree, if you've ever competitively gamed, you're wired. Minimal signal interference, no loss of signal due to dead or dying battery.

One of my friends uses a wireless trackball. It's hilarious listening to him when his batteries start to die. We don't competitively game - but we do stomp newbies and teams into the ground.

I myself use a 3500DPI Razer mouse. Before I begin playing, I blow the dust off my mousepad and dampen it, because it affects my accuracy. I play games like TF2 at sensitivity 20.

Comment Re:Takes me back (Score 1) 277

When I was in college one of my physics professors told us he doubted programs would ever get bigger than a few hundred kilobytes because cosmic rays would cause the larger programs to fail too frequently.

To be fair to him, a lot of modern programs aren't all that large. Oh sure, there's icons and text and tons of data - but executable code is usually a couple megabytes or less, even for large games. And usually those megabytes can be stripped away by turning off optimizations like inlining, or using one of those strip tools that removes duplicate code or debugging data.

Even though modern OS's are very complex, and guzzle down memory, it's still a whole bunch of tiny programs running, and surprisingly little of that memory used is executable code.

And that's good, because big programs inevitably crash. :P

Comment Re:What competition do they have? (Score 1) 112

Google's is probably better than Yahoo or Hotmail because it does search and pattern matching better.

This.

My hotmail gets endless amounts of spam. Yahoo, all I get is spam. Both of these also nuke forum registrations and stuff. Gmail? Thousands of spam messages get filtered out per week, and I've never had a false positive.

Comment Re:Hmmm... (Score 1) 218

I agreed with everything up until this:

Vorbis and Theora are comparable to their best closed counterparts. VP8/WebM has totally closed the gap with H.264, for those who like to split hairs about Theora.

Vorbis is awesome. It's on par with the best AAC encoders, and better than the average ones.

Ogg as a container is quite lackluster - it's not really suitable for video; tons of people have seek lag with it, which other containers like mkv don't have.

Theora is laughable compared to H.264, but it is decent compared to MPEG2.

VP8 is rather close to H.264 Baseline, but for PC-streaming, you should be enabling all the advanced stuff in the High profile. x264 tweaked properly can halve the bitrate over again, with no perceived quality loss.

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