I keep a rarely used Windows install around for Firmware update installs. There a reasonable number of usb etc devices around which work fine with Linux. But their firmware updates are only provided via a windows program. So it covers me for when I need to update those device's firmware to work around bugs/get new features. Thankfully. fwupd is covering a wider number of devices these days. So the cases where I need to update firmware via Windows are getting rarer.

I wonder if this relates to the the problem today with Crowdstrike releasing a bad update that caused Windows computes world wide to bluescreen? I have no idea if Microsoft makes any internal usage of crowdstrike. But the timing is close enough to make it plausible...

https://wiimmfi.de/ - you can play wii games online still but you need to patch them to support 3rd party servers.

That would have been true perhaps a year or two back. Now in New Zealand almost all isps started offering an uncapped plan, I've been one one for some time now.

That's the cheaper basic plans, for a little more you can get 1000/500 Mbps

From what I've read on the discussions on Firefox implementing Pepper the reason why they aren't isn't a simple case of them choosing not to. It's a case of google not actually having a published standard (as I've seen it described the Pepper 'API' is just the current head of the chrome source which changes with each chrome release) so it's not an easy thing for another vendor to support.

I'd be very careful with requiring an internet connection to use your product. If you must please at-least for the love of god make sure you handle less common connection types such as authenticated proxy servers (ideally depending on the OS you should be pulling all the network settings from the OS wide settings), I've seen so many developers that add in online activation support that don't take into account that not all internet connections are the same as theirs and don't allow how the app connects to be customised. (A little background for the curious - I work in a company that works with sensitive data and we have strong security requirements that include the only Internet access being via a authenticated proxy server. I've spent many a frustrated hour dealing the apps that require online activation but won't connect to their servers using the only connection type we are allowed to go out via (not my decision, it's mandated by clients and upper management many levels above my head), doesn't matter how awesome said app is if we can't get the drm to work we will be buying your competitor's product instead. One time activation atleast can be done by connecting a machine to a non secure network for a minute but if ongoing access is required we have no way to make use of the app...) As a software developer myself I understand concerns about limiting piracy (I often ponder the questions in this thread myself when thinking about potentially writing a commercial game in the future) but I think expecting it to phone home regularly is risking making it unusable for a subset of potential customers and might just hurt you more than it helps? (Depends just how many people will be stuck unable to use such drm, I don't have info on just how many networks are as locked down as the one I'm on so I can't really say). Only other thing I can say is that I've bought every single humble bundle (and paid well over the average price) barring one I missed but I make a point of never buying anything that has heavy drm in it (no I don't pirate it, I just don't use software that requires heavy drm to run).

I'm another happy TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND/openwrt user.

udf is the closest thing to a more modern universally supported fs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format The only big issue is that XP can't write to it. (Mac, Linux and many other OS's can read and write udf, atleast MS is finally coming to the party with read write in Vista.)