Depends on the network. On Steam, yes they're fairly respectful about it. VAC only bans you from other VAC servers and that's mostly fine. Every other delivery platform I know of simply locks your account, so you can't even play solo games anymore. I would love to be educated otherwise on this, but it has been the major reason why I have a Steam account and nothing else.

Agreed 100%. In fact, I find the notion of banning an entire account absolutely vile. Banning users at all is vile. Protect the non-cheating population, sure, but cheaters paid for the damned game/app, let them use it. Cheating has been a part of gaming since the dawn of home computing. They should deal with it far more gracefully, like segregating cheaters to play against each other in a separate lobby (can't remember the company that did that). Even with MMOs, they could shift cheaters to a different server - that would nearly kill gold farming since they could only trade with other farmers.

To now mix in productivity applications, they're going to have to tread very lightly. The day someone gets locked out of their business records due to some draconian lockout, will be the day Valve gets sued into the ground, EULAs be damned. After all, where is the distinction between a game and an application ? At their core, they both move information in response to user input. The difference is, gamers don't tend to sue for lost wages or name publishers in tort cases.

I think what our ill-informed friend meant was: Crytek makes prettier games, but that is the result of brute force. They throw a lot of shader effects at everything, to give their visuals a strong wow-factor. That's why they use a lot of offshore labour, they pump an inordinate amount of man-hours into everything, so of course it looks shiny as fuck. iD is more of a "proof of concept' kind of shop. Carmack works smart, comes up with tricks that even Crytek would think impossible, solutions that cannot be reached by blindly throwing more money and resources at the problem. He's got more in common with demoscene coders of yore than any modern game developer. He just doesn't have the skill nor desire to make things pretty, that's not his job.

Dear Slashdot,

I've been doing exactly this for, oh, I dunno, 8 or 9 years. I even have several fellow /.ers as clients on my VPN/proxy/privacy service. Thank you, Soulskill, for this lovely little time capsule from 2004.

Stay tuned for our next story, where a young startup named Apple plans to change the world with a new kind of graphic calculator, tentatively called "Newton".

Sure, they have the extra cash to burn, but they can also dual-boot into Windows. It takes all of 30 seconds, runs all the games faster than native OSX ports, and well, I don't know about you, but when I'm playing a serious, full-screen game, I couldn't care less about which OS is running in the background. I actually like the separation, since when I'm booted into OSX or Linux, I'm in work mode with few distractions. It's a semi-conscious association that helps me focus.

Firefox itself seems pretty decent these days. The biggest and ugliest problem is the extreme sluggishness of its most popular add-ons. I don't think I'd want to live without Firebug and AdBlock, but these two are huge performance hogs and I almost think they should be absorbed into the main codebase, rather than being sandboxed and crippled in their current incarnation.

A clean install of Firefox loads instantly, just like Chrome and IE9. As soon as I load those two add-ons, it starts taking 2-3 seconds to launch, pages often freeze up due to the repetitive and redundant DOM swizzling. This over-reliance on Javascript-based functionality leads to really sloppy performance and sometimes massive memory leaks. Right this second, with only two tabs open, Firefox is guzzling 450mb of memory. Chrome uses 1/10th of that to display the same content, with the same add-on functionality.

I've been holding out for a long time, but Chrome is starting to lure me over. I don't like being at the mercy of Google's totalitarian whims, but Firefox' idealism is wearing thin unless some real programmers get in there and clean things up. For the average user, Chrome is a clear winner simply because it's faster.

Modern gamers aren't anything like that. Sure, they will buy the latest GPU and run the vendor-supplied overclocking tool, but that's about the extent of it.

The vast majority of gamers, the "butter zone" as far as marketing and profits are concerned, are not tweakers. They know how to double-click an icon, type in their password and right-click things until they die, but ask too much of them and they will flee to the nearest PS3 or X360. If Linux gaming catches on, these people will run Ubuntu. Even better: they will run a spinoff of Ubuntu that asks even less questions.

Carmack's relevance is not overinflated. He is a brilliant programmer. He's just not a designer. That used to be Romero's job, back in the glory days. Romero would put out the cool ideas, and Carmack would bring them to reality.

A lot of programmers are like that. You can be a technical genius, a creative genius, or somewhere in between. You can even oscillate between the two poles, but I've never heard of anyone being a creative technical genius. They are fundamentally contrasting modes of thought.

Give the man a great, fleshed-out concept and he will turn it into a top-tier game. He has a gift for tackling complex, multi-faceted problems that seem insurmountable. He just needs someone to provide those challenges, otherwise he will continue to churn out the same tired old crap.

Rage was indeed a half-assed game, as are most recent iD games. Good code, terrible design. That doesn't mean the man isn't intelligent or insightful. It just means he's a terrible gameplay designer. He knows the fuck out of the technology side of it, he's a nuts and bolts kind of guy, and that's why his opinion matters here.

If he were bitching about how Call of Duty has a crappy UI, well then he'd be talking out of his ass. Just like you are.

MacOS gaming: still sucks in 2012.

Oh, sure, you have access to about 10% of PC titles, but performance is roughly halved on the same hardware. Only a handful of GPUs are supported in 3D accelerated mode at all. That sounds suspiciously like the Linux gaming experience, no ? Carmack is still quite relevant, and his points ring true because very little has been done on either platform to change the situation.

Me, I don't care. I have work machines, and I have gaming machines. I use whichever OS is most appropriate for the task at hand. I don't need Linux to be a great gaming platform, because that's what I use for work, not play.

Which UEFI does very little to prevent. Sure, it enforces boot signing, but that does not protect you from software vulnerabilities. It only closes one small loophole that has seen more legitimate use than abuse in the last, oh, 25 years or so.

I mean, really, the whole of UEFI is a joke. A non-solution to an imaginary problem. Classic BIOS code was considered archaic and dysfunctional, little more than a vestigial support system for the bootloader. UEFI simply moves more bloat into that pre-boot phase without actually offering any improvements that survive past the the boot hand-off.

Approach #4: ignore UEFI Secure Boot. It's a blunt solution to an obscure problem. More importantly, it's such a huge pain in the ass, not just for Linux but for ALL system integrators, that anyone actually preventing the user from disabling Secure Boot will end up limiting their own marketability. Two things will happen:

1. It will be relegated to tiny niches where security trumps usability
2. It will be cracked

This is not an either/or. Both things will happen. This whole fiasco is nothing but a huge waste of time for everyone involved.

And this would be 99% of the problem with most TV programming: it's a vessel for advertising. Shows targeting the 18-49 demo are thinly-veiled infomercials. It's no surprise that most of the shows I like are on premium, ad-free channels like HBO and Showtime. They're like mini-movies, which is how I like them. 48 to 55 minutes of uninterrupted entertainment. I would pay a fair price to watch those a-la-carte. Chances are, people all over the world would too, because these shows actually have universal appeal: they tell stories, they depict richly detailed characters, and they don't insult the viewer's intellect.

This is what needs to change. Make shows not just worth watching, but worth paying to see. Keep advertising separate from content. Sell the content, not the eyeballs.

Good points, but they come with a steep price. Updates now take a long time to trickle through the system, the same as IOS apps. Privacy is a thing of the past. This does absolutely nothing to curb piracy (nothing ever will). It creates a huge bottleneck since any downtime at Apple results in downtime for everyone.

Given the many hells I have suffered as an IOS developer, over the past year alone, I have a less than rosy view of Apple's reliability. I've lost several weeks to major blunders on their part, around only two pieces of software. I have absolutely no faith in their ability to oversee tens of thousands of third-party releases.

Wasn't my choice. I got it to do IOS app development for work. That said, I think the hardware is great, but the software is absolute rubbish.

Frankly, if I weren't developing mobile apps, I'd wipe the damned thing and put Linux on it like my previous laptop. If they keep backing users into a corner, I just might do that and run their nerfed OS in a virtual machine - far from ideal, but if that's the only way I can pay the bills without going postal, then so be it.