I lived in Vermont for a while. Everyone up there has some sort of Saab story.

He's not talking about Microsoft's antivirus/antimalware, he's talking about the 'malicious software removal' that's part of Windows Update even if you don't have MS's AV installed.

It removes a very few specific things that can be difficult to get rid of.

Don't these theoretical people own printers? Just about every cheapo multifunction printer I've seen in the last decade can fax.

And before you say 'no one has a land line any more, lol' while it's true there are plenty of people without one, more homes have a landline than don't.

And even in the example you give, why on earth wouldn't they just sign it and fax it back immediately, rather than waiting a day and making another trip to the store?

The reason they don't tell you to scan and email it is that email is not considered a secure or verifiable method of communication.

The difference between fax's point-to-point nature and email's going over the public internet aside...

It's a lot easier to mistype an email address than misdial a fax machine (and actually get another fax machine). I get confidential real estate info in my email all the time. Usually headed with 'I know this said fax, but I'm emailing it instead!'

Yeah, and it's not for me. There's a real estate agent who has the same username at a different domain. So I wind up with all these legal forms from morons who not only decided to email what it says 'fax' on it - they emailed it to the wrong address.

I've never gotten a mis-sent fax to my personal fax machine. At the office once in a while, but even then it's for someone else in the company.

I thought the need to hold it back for last-gen consoles explained the trailer.

But if there's no 360/PS3 version, why does the trailer look like ass?

It's a trailer. It should be the prettiest the game can be, rendered on high-end hardware, with their best bullshots.

The dog looks good, I'll admit, but in general in-game footage from The Witcher 3 looks better than the FO4 trailer.

Perhaps they started to build assets before giving up on the old consoles? The Vault Dweller is especially unimpressive.

Either console could do 1080p/60fps if the developers really wanted to hit that.

But they don't. They cram in bigger textures and more effects, because that makes for pretty screenshots and demo videos, and it sells games.

Nintendo first-party titles run at 1080p/60fps on the WiiU, and that's a much weaker system than the PS4/XBone from a straight 'power' standpoint. But they design their games to play to the hardware's strengths. The games are usually quite pretty, but not at all photorealistic. Splatoon is a blast, and the ink effects in liquid are amazing, but it's not at all 'realistic'.

So what the PS4/XBone devs are doing is like having a PC game and turning the settings up past what your PC can really handle.

Except that on consoles, there is no option to turn them back down again.

Money saving. DVD playback software has to be licensed, and that's an extra cost.

Since not many people used the built in software for it, MS stopped including it in 8. Most PCs that ship with DVD players come with PowerDVD or some other third party DVD player tool anyway.

Solitaire is now part of a free download from the Windows store, and has been since Windows 8. Putting it there gets people to create a Windows account and check out the store.

I'll be updating to 10 just to get DirectX 12. Games aren't using it yet, but they will be.

Pricing OSes is hard to do. There simply aren't very many commercial OSes out there to get a price on.

AmigaOS 4 had a price drop from 125 euro to 30 euro not long ago. Solaris is about $1000. I can't easily find the price for AIX, but several years ago it was up in Solaris territory. Apple doesn't sell OSX on its own (the price is baked into the hardware.) eComStation is $290.

Operating system prices seem to be either 'free' or 'who the hell knows'.

If you're offline, how are you adding new entries to your calendar?

They're too expensive and inconvenient to back up any serious amount of data to.

If you have some personal data, photos, whatever you want to save, they're fine for that, but it just takes too many discs to back up a goodly chunk of things.

(I use plain BD-R, not M-disc, but when I wanted to back up some things just-in-case before working on my backup drive, it took me all day to write about 30 discs. If I wasn't doing something else at the time and just swapping as needed, it would have been horribly frustrating.)

There are some serious stinkers on GOG.

Daikatana, for instance.

Someone actually put forth the effort to repackage Daikatana.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

You know, if you unplug the ethernet cable from the PS3, you can just play the game without updating it.

(Or disable the wifi, I guess. My PS3 is one of the wired-only ones.)

Granted, that won't work for online play, but people playing online generally don't gripe about needing to download updates.

The only time I ever put my consoles online is when I want to buy something from one of the download shops.

Some engines do have a distinct feel. There are a lot of games using Bioware's Aurora engine (that debuted in Neverwinter Nights), and to me they all have a NWN-ish feel, even if the perspective is very different.

Knights of the Old Republic is, to me, very visibly an Aurora Engine game. The Witcher is less so, but it still 'feels' like one.

They can't enforce it until Congress mandates it.

My experience with CyanogenMod is pretty negative, both on a Tmobile G2 (Desire Z) and Galaxy SII.

It wasn't too bad on the G2, though I had random app closes, but on the SII it's horrible. The dialer can't even make calls reliably. I switched that phone back to the stock ROM last week.