"The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there"

Until, of course, your two kids each want to play a game that is tied to your account and you realise they can't be logged into Steam at the same time even if they want to play entirely different games.

That shit never happened in the olden days.

Well, maybe not Ballmer.

Please don't tell me that Gates is dumber than Monkey Boy, I don't think I could cope.

I'd go into some sort of "does not compute" meltdown like "vger" did on that Star Trek episode I'm sure.

Well, that is not necessarily an indication that the driver is crashing. The card could be faulty in one of its 3D rendering pipelines or some part only engaged in 3D mode. By using the vesa (2D) driver that faulty part is not engaged therefore the PC doesn't crash.

Ummm, I purchased Nero for Linux just a few weeks back.

Meet bullet

What a bunch of numpties

Sad but true.

For anyone who wants more details regarding the true story of the Evilness of Gates & MS see;

http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

Golly, if someone had written something like that regarding Linux I'm sure we would have seen a torrent of "See, this is why people don't use Linux blah blah blah" posts following it.

Come to think of it, that already happened in this thread!

Right click what? The 1970's era "C: Drive" in My Computer? I think not.

Try again caveman.

If you are unable to browse the Synaptic package manager to install a program then you must be the worlds biggest fucking idiot.

Years in tech support and you still can't use a point and drool interface.

What a maroon.

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure the Jaunty install I did last week included that option.

As for wanting to format your primary hard drive, isn't that what Windows does?

At least Linux will configure your boot sector so that you can boot either OS. Windows just FUBARs everything to suit it's own agenda.

"I think they're pretty satisfied with how things have gone so far on the Blu-Ray front."

Yes, user adoption has been going through the roof. I myself am struggling to find stores that have more than a dozen or so old DVDs on a shelf and those are usually pushed into a dark corner to make room for the huge numbers of Blueray Discs that they rent/sell.

Well, those and all the PSP Movie Discs that is.

Yes, I'm sure they are well chuffed with how Blue Ray is going.

"This is the first concrete deployment of "trusted computing" type system, and the reality is that it is working"

OK, that may be true in a purely technical sense.

"The content industry has won this round"

Ummm, if by winning you mean "Blue Ray is a successful platform that has been widely adopted by a large number of paying customers" then you would be totally wrong. They may have won the battle, but the have not won the war.
 
", and will continue to win with ever more secure encryption and a legion of untrusting, internet connected players in peoples living rooms."

Only if they manage to force people to buy that stuff. or somehow manage to make stuff that does what you say and somehow manage to provide value for money and user satisfaction as well, which would be no mean feat I assure you.

P.S. Why is it that I now have to manually put in HTML break codes to insert blank lines between paragraphs now?

"Your program that uses JNI won't run on a machine with a different instruction set or a different operating system."

Ummm, doesn't that also apply to C/C++?

just askin'

"Are Zune sales that good? "

Hey, as long as nVidia gets a contract to sell X million units to Microsoft they couldn't care less about how well Zune sells.

"It has no doubt happened several times this year which we will probably never know about, but to dismiss every pro-Microsoft article out-of-hand just because they say Android isn't technically mature enough yet is either naive or unfairly biased."

Not true. Considering that Microsoft have proven themselves to be fluent and prolific liars over the years then any prudent person would rightly suspect any future articles and claims regarding the greatness of their products as being equally likely to be disingenuous or exaggerated.