Just for the record, what you got is store credit, not the refund you were entitled to.

I'm Australian, and I think maybe the best thing about this place is the ACCC.

This time last year I was a super-hardcore valve fan, singing their praises and buying up pretty much every new game that came out for linux, including much of valve's catalog (which I had previously pirated). I was even thinking about trying to build a few steam boxes to sell on ebay.

One game I bought was Fez. It didn't work properly, making it unplayable. I emailled Fez support and recieved no response.

I emailled valve demanding the refund I am entitled to by law. I spent many, many emails back and forth explaining to them that I was entitled to my money back, since the thing being unplayable is clearly a major fault. They tried to tell me that the law doesn't apply to them and that I should write to their legal department and ignored my further emails... Rather than simply obeying the law and refunding the princely sum of $2.49.

The argument that our law doesn't apply to them is a joke - the law applies if you sell within australia. I was in Australia when I bought Fez. There are steam mirrors here. They are specifically marketing at Australians - If Australian laws don't apply to valve, where's my uncensored version of Left 4 Dead 2?

I complained to the ACCC and did a chargeback on my credit card - got my money back despite them. Interestingly, I still have Fez in my steam library, so it looks like i got it for free. I don't know whether the game-breaking bug has been fixed - I have no interest in playing it anymore.

I've not purchased anything through steam since, and Valve will never see another cent of my money - I don't support companies who think they're above the law.

The humble store and GOG have both made a killing off of me this year. I wonder if I can can get one or both to write Valve a nice thank-you note.

If you got a refund from valve without doing a chargeback, you were lucky. If you didn't get a refund, do a chargeback, then call the ACCC and tell them you love their work. And if you know somebody who works for the ACCC, hug them for me.

forgot to add obligatory link to Linux is not windows

Indeed - people are complaining simply because it's different to what they're used to. Mac users don't like windows. If you switch back you'll have the same problem to a certain extent.

I'd be very interested to see how the number of complaints about the open-source software stacks up against a huge MS-imposed change like the office ribbon. I'd expect the numbers to be similar. People will complain if you change the default colour or font of something - of course they're going to complain when you switch the software they're using.

This does scream fishy to me. We all know that Ballmer flew out to Munich to try to talk them out of switching in the first place. It would be naieve to think that MS has just given up on Munich - there's too much at stake - if it goes well for Munich, other cities will follow, and then open-source could spread into the corporate sector, and that would be BAD.

A lack of integrated email/contacts/calendar? That's not a complaint - try Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on. If that doesn't do what you need, look for another option - there are probably hundreds. Maybe you want something web-based? There are a bunch of those.

Another option would be to take e.g the cost of one license for a mid-sized MS exchange server and split it into bounties for the features you want - you'd probably have your features in a couple of days. $10k would buy A LOT of open-source development. And the rest of the world gets your features too, for free! Compared with the cost of Windows licenses it's small potatoes, and it's a community service. It's win-win for everybody. Except MS.

Define "Troll".

What you might call a Troll comment, I might consider an extremely insightful and positive contribution to human society.

If I put up an inflammmatory post on an astrology forum telling people that they're idiots for believing in astrology - a position borne out by science and IMHO entirely accurate - am I trolling, or trying to enlighten people?

Is it different if I "Troll" in the same way on an anti-abortion forum?
What if it's the westboro baptist church's website I'm "trolling"? What about the KKK or NAMBLA? At what point does trolling become noble?

How are you going to do away with the "Trolls" and maintain an open discussion where unpopular but correct points can be raised? I smell censorship.

So to answer your question, no - I wouldn't pay to read the same three safe opinions regurgitated over and over again.

If you feed trolls, you're an idiot. But to try to silence them would be even stupider.

What?
When?
Where?

Or did you mean "innovation" in the traditional microsoft sense ("borrowing" ideas)?

I'm still yet to see a single example of Microsoft innovating, ever. But then I stopped paying attention to what they were doing nearly 10 years ago now, so maybe I'm wrong.

I simply won't buy a phone without any real input methods - I drank that koolaid once and I'm not feeling particularly masochistic - I spent a year trying to type on a touchscreen, and I'd rather have my face torn off by ravenous wolves than try it again. Haptic feedback is essential as far as I'm concerned. There are the other usability issues, like a system which assumes that I didn't mean to type what I typed, but for me it's the sense of touch which makes all the difference. Your can feel the edge of a button and tell you when your finger is improperly positioned without looking at it. you know when it has been pressed because you feel it press down. And there are more than 26 buttons - ever tried to cat ~/file.sql.gz | pv | ssh user@host "gunzip | mysql db_name" on a touchscreen? You'll wish you had a gun.

At the moment I'm using a shitty nokia because I needed a new phone immediately and that was the only one in the entire shopping centre with actual buttons.

If my choice next time is a phone with touchscreen only or no phone at all, it'll be a tough decision - no phone at all has its advantages.

I blame Tom Cruise - this notion that touchscreens aren't a horrible idea all started with Minority Report.

There's your problem right there: you expect people who are demonstrably untrustworthy to do the right thing.

One thing that I can say is that if you're running a modern distro you'll likely run into problems with Unreal Tournament's sound support - it only supports OSS, and it expects that /dev/dsp exists.

On my Ubuntu 12.04 box, I have to use padsp when launching UT to get any audio, and when I do use padsp I get a ~500ms delay on the audio - it's unplayable. A real pity.

I think that this could probably be fixed by ripping out pulseaudio and installing the real OSS, but I don't know for sure and didn't want to get that drastic on my everyday machine. Also, you might find that the UT binary has old OSS libs compiled in statically, so it might not work even then.

I'd be really interested to hear anybody's solutions to this dilemma - I miss UT!

I was against this whole surveilance state thing until you pointed out that it could be used to find freaky girls...

I bought one in January. It's absolutely spectacular. It's quite possibly the best computer I have ever owned.

No. Calling it a MAME device is not even beginning to do it justice. Sure, I have something like 40,000 MAME ROMS loaded on mine, but that's just one SD card. Another SD card is a truecrypt volume. Another contains 40 years worth of X-Men comics. Another has all the SCUMM games, a ridiculous number of C64 games, and a bunch of Playstation games. I've just started playing with some of the audio production apps - soon I'll figure out how to use the pandora as a MIDI controller, that'll be cool. Chromium runs well for web browsing as long as you limit the number of tabs you have open. Office apps like Libreoffice and dia run well. But for me, I think that the terminal, scite, and ssh are the killer apps - some things aren't available on the pandora (which actually means "I haven't bothered trying to compile them yet"), sometimes I want to offload processing to a faster machine. And sometimes I need to restart my webserver... actually, the real killer "app" is the hardware keyboard.

The range of software available in the repos is staggering given the system specs (it runs blender! :O), and the quality generally high. The native games available should not be trivialised, either - special mentions go to asciiportal, boson-x, audiorace, pewpew2, and the arkanoid remake. Some of these are huge time sinks.

$600?!? pah! In AU, where we try to stay at least 10 years behind the rest of the world, it's nearly AU$800 once you throw in some accessories and shipping, but I really think it was worth every penny.

Yes, it's not as impressive in specs today as it was when it was designed. They got screwed and they had production problems, so it took a lot longer to get built than it should have. But they did manage to bring it to market eventually and they've done as much as they can to get units to the people who preordered. And they've been fairly transparent about all this, so I think that they're credible. On the other hand, I would have been really annoyed if I'd preordered and I'm glad I didn't.

People ask me what it is, and I describe it as a full computer which can do most things their laptop can do - it's the best way I've found to describe it. Flexibility is the key - I was running the JACK audio framework and a couple of software synthesizers last night and started to run out of memory, so I switched to my terminal and enabled the swap partition on my SD card. Problem solved.

It's not just a MAME machine!

I like some of the changes you 've made, but I disagree with your philosophy of standing for things. Due to this, I'm starting up a new WaylandX-ex ((https://github.com/waylandx) project on github to avoid these political issues. Join me instead!

I tried this on my bosses mac but couldn't wind the 'win' key - can you help?

Um, yes, It *WILL* happen sooner or later.

I was being conservative, and they don't say what they're using. Based on my experience with people (they're often incompetent morons), CRC16 wouldn't suprise me.

Well, technically, after enough time somebody *will* eventually try to upload a perfectly legitimate file which just happens by coincidence to have the same hash as something that was taken down, and that uploader will get an erroneous error message blocking them from sharing their own work.

So you don't have to be distributing copyrighted material for this to be a problem, but probability is on your side - it's probably not likely to happen for decades or centuries, depending on the hashing algorithm used. But it just might happen to you tomorrow.