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Jayel

Finally upgraded Windows

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Supreme Commander can be played on XP can't it?

From what I have heard Vista is a pile o' turd. Especially for online games where it lags the feck out of them.

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Yeah, I upgraded to XP. I'm surprised at how much I'm liking it. Internet Explorer 7 looks fancy and so does Media Player 11. Too bad I'm mostly gonna be using fugly Firefox and VLC player.

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Ok, my bad.

I get you're not playing a lot of recent stuff : all games released since 2005 needed WinXP, didn't they ?

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Yeah, I upgraded to XP. I'm surprised at how much I'm liking it. Internet Explorer 7 looks fancy and so does Media Player 11. Too bad I'm mostly gonna be using fugly Firefox and VLC player.

:campbell:

Mind = blown.

IE7 and Media Player 11 are fancy?

Firefox is fugly compared to IE7?

I... I don't know what to say.

And yes, VLC isn't exactly a masterpiece of user design, but it's also not a bloated DRM shitstorm.

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Hey I didn't know Firefox could do themes. I downloaded a few and they're great. I do think IE7 looks fancy. I especially love how it displays its contents. Text are antialiased by default, zooming actually zooms instead of simply resizing font...

Anyway, Supreme Commander is a big disappointment. I find myself wanting to play games that can run at more than 5fps on my pc.

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You can set that font smoothing system wide in desktop properties somewhere. Under effects, I think.

Why have you taken so long to move to XP? It's almost seven years old now! :fart:

As for Vista, I hear it's shit as fuck for gaming right now but that quite a lot of the issue is down to the graphics card drivers -- especially from Nvidia -- being a bit shit. XP game support got good fairly quickly after the initial teething problems though (leading to the "98/ME compatibility mode options being introduced), so hopefully it'll be all right before long.

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For the love of god please don't get vista!

Read these two articles and I hope you're convinced you don't want vista either:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows.html

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

“I propose that each copy of the OS should ship with an orange jumpsuit and sensory deprivation goggles, since all Vista users have been unilaterally declared 'enemy combatants' by the content apparatchiki ” — Daniel Nevin.

“Windows Vista? And what a vista! All you see as you look around your garden is a 60foot high brick wall” — Crosbie Fitch.

“When you download licenses for protected content, you agree that Microsoft may include a revocation list with the licenses [...] content owners may ask Microsoft to revoke the software's ability to use WMDRM to play or copy protected content” — Windows Vista EULA.

“[Microsoft researcher] England has a bold plan to improve the PC and make it a secure delivery system for audio and video. England's solution involves making minor modifications to the PC's hardware to allow Microsoft to make a secure version of the Windows Media Player. Essentially, this would turn the PC into a record player as far as music is concerned” — Microsoft Research News.

“This is obviously some strange use of the word 'improve' which I've previously been unaware of” — Arthur dent.

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I don't know, that seems like a lot of blogger FUD to me. I'd be interested in hearing from actual users of Windows Vista whether or not they're having actual real-world issues, because everyone I've spoken to thus far is fairly or very satisfied with the OS, and the OS ran like a dream when a family member was testing it.

It's not like copyright protection isn't all over the place. For example, on modern monitors and TVs you can't use the highest quality inputs (it's HDCP or some shit) unless whatever's sending the signal includes the protection algorithm. That means unless the DVD player or whatever supports the stuff, you'll be downgraded to a shit quality signal.

It's sadly a deep part of the modern electronics experience, whether the masses realise it or not. You could boycott anything that uses copyright protection that's more in the interests of copyright holders than consumers, but you'd be missing out on a hell of a lot.

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We've had the Vista Business upgrade kicking around the office for a good few weeks now and I'm really keen to try it. I've been playing Half-Life 2 on my workstation at lunchtimes, too, so I'd be able to give the OS a decent enough workout (development applications, audio, video, gaming, etc.).

Trouble is we've just taken on a new support company, so our in-house IT Manager is chicken shit when it comes to doing something substantial like "upgrading" (read: napalming) any workstation right now, until we're comfortable with the new support company. Amusingly, it might actually help determine whether or not we are in fact satisfied with the new support company. But I can't loose the machine for any length of time, and our redundant PC isn't in a fit state to be used as backup right now either. Pants.

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I don't know, that seems like a lot of blogger FUD to me.

...

It's sadly a deep part of the modern electronics experience, whether the masses realise it or not. You could boycott anything that uses copyright protection that's more in the interests of copyright holders than consumers, but you'd be missing out on a hell of a lot.

It's more than FUD: Pirated content is demonstrably of higher quality than DRMed ass, and DRM often gets in the way of legitimate users while merely presenting an unwelcome but surmountable challenge for technical users. From an interesting article by the new DG of ELSPA:

The second reason, however, is that there is obvious demand for software to be available online, and to be easier for users to manipulate. The ability for users to download software, to install it without a CD, to store it on their hard drive (either in their PC or their next-gen console), to play it without load delays from a Memory Stick - these are things which users want to do, and which you can't do with legitimate software.

The awful truth is that using pirate software is often a better user experience than using legitimate software - and this is where the industry should focus its efforts. The tide of music piracy is being pushed back, little by little, by initiatives like iTunes and eMusic. These offer the same products as the pirate networks, but with better quality, more user-friendly interfaces, added bonuses and a low price which is enough to entice many users away from pirate products and back to legitimate goods.

The video games industry needs to learn from this, and fast - because the head-start which it has over music and movies due to the size and complexity of its products will not last long in the face of escalating network speeds.

Things like the Sony Rootkit and Starforce aren't FUD either: they're companies covertly attacking their own markets because they still equate "pirate" with "criminal", "gang", and illegal, rival businesses.

Vista is built entirely from the same philosophy. I can't see people bending over and taking it when their current "HD ready" hardware remains unsigned. Call me a zealot, but copyright laws weren't designed for this situation, they were put into place when publishers started exploiting each other. Pirate operations running stalls at car boot fairs are comparable, but consumers torrenting are not. Copyright, the way our societies have created it in the past few centuries, just can't scale down like that and wasn't designed to.

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Well, I'm not going to get into a lengthy argument about the subject as I don't know enough about it. What I do know, however, is that as a legitimate user (I banned myself from piracy a while ago) I can't recall running into problems once when making use of legitimate content, while when pirating I'd constantly be dicking around with serials, stripping anti-piracy protection, and basically going through a lot of shit.

This is why I said I'd rather hear from actual users of Vista whether or not its technologies are problematic, or whether it's just blogger speculation of potential/theoretical problems (that rarely come to fruition) and thoughts from people who most likely don't own Vista and/or have never used it. That's all.

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I'm using Vista to read your messages Nachimir, thus they are now corrupted. You are a part of it now! Mwahahahaha!:violin:

Vista is good, not great : all games that I've tried are running at least as fast as on XP providing they are DirectX; OpenGl is an issue and that sucks.

Triple Boot Unbuntu/Vista/Xp rules.

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You can set that font smoothing system wide in desktop properties somewhere. Under effects, I think.

1. Right-click an empty bit of desktop and choose Properties:

stage1tw3.th.jpg

2. Click on the Appearance tab along the top of the resultant dialogue box and then the Effects... button in the bottom-right:

stage2ka5.th.jpg

3. Tick Use the following method[...] and select ClearType from the drop-down, then keep clicking OK buttons until you're back on the desktop:

stage3ky1.th.jpg

It's certainly not a patch on Apple's sublime font smoothing, but it's a fuck of a lot more pleasant than that jagged shit Microsoft idiotically gives you by default.

Apologies if that's fucking patronising; I hate Microsoft's total lack of design consistency and common sense when it comes to their interfaces, so I habitually illustrate stuff like this because, although it's obscure, it's still very useful for pretty much everyone.

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Hee, superb.

Weirdly, XP's font smoothing looks really shit to me and a bit blurry, like I'm using glasses or something. Despite this, I'm using an LCD monitor on its native resolution with the digital cable. The font smoothing in Vista looks great though, despite just being an updated version of the same stuff (and not Apple's supposedly patented thing).

It's meant to work pretty badly on CRTs too though, which might be why it's not enabled by default.

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It's meant to work pretty badly on CRTs too though, which might be why it's not enabled by default.

I've never had any issues with it, across a variety of CRTs, so I hereby decree:

:hitler:"It was shoe-horned in*!"

* in Microsoft's typically non-joined-up, consumately half-arsed approach to software improvement

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That's downright strange then. Perhaps different eyes see it differently? I seriously see a blurry mess both on LCDs and CRTs when looking at ClearType on XP, almost as if seeing double vision (but with a lot of overlap) -- it's on the verge of being unusable. It's this way both on my home and work installations of XP, on completely different monitors and brands, and basically with no common ground between the two set-ups.

As a side note, my left eye is fairly weak and I've been told it's subtly lazy by an optician.

Most odd.

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Conversely, I was told by an optician years ago that I was fortunate enough to have perfect vision. So I reckon this is a case-by-case thing.

Fortunately, MS appear to have recognised this by providing a ClearType Tuner PowerToy for Windows XP. It might be worth having a fiddle with that to see if you can improve your displays.

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I don't know, that seems like a lot of blogger FUD to me.

Directly from the mini-faq from my second link:

This is all a pile of FUD.

The process that leads to comments like this tends to be (1) Quickly skim through this document, (2) Decide that it sounds a bit implausible (possibly even before performing step 1), (3) Post a rant saying it's FUD. To pick one particular example, a Digg reader's reaction to the section of text that states there isn't sufficient CPU power available for both decompression and encryption was:

I'm sorry, where does this come from? You do realize that this is completely uncited, and very likely wrong? Entire paragraphs that follow are based on this magical detail pulled out of thin air. [...] I'm no fan of this asinine DRM bullshit, but the scenarios and postulates put forth in this article are complete rubbish.

Referring to the very first source listed in the Sources section shows that this is picked not from thin air but from Microsoft's own documentation:

The problem with regular AES is that it takes about 20 CPU clocks to encrypt each byte. This is OK for compressed or semi-compressed video, but for the multiple HD uncompressed case, it is too much even for a 2006 processor [referring to the fastest CPU available at the time the document was written].

and then again:

In the case of premium content, whether video can play back smoothly when using regular AES with uncompressed video will be a function of the resolution of the uncompressed video and the power of the processor. It is unlikely to work well in 2006 for uncompressed HD premium content

If you don't believe what you've read here, go back to Microsoft's own documentation and read that (in fact read the Microsoft documents no matter what you believe, because they're quite scary). If you still think it's FUD then you can at least post informed comments about it.

Please, read the whole article. it's very interesting to read.

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I couldn't read the second article when you posted it as the link wasn't loading (it looked like it was being slashdotted or something). I should have clarified this, but I was only referring to your first link. ;(

I still maintain my desire to see complaints from real-world users of Vista though, because until then all the technical analysis and speculation in the world means nothing. I'm not denouncing your evidence, I just want to hear from people who I can relate to.

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It took so long for me to upgrade to XP because all the games and stuff ran fine under 2000 until recent games like Supreme Commander demo and Company of Heroes came along. Oh and also Myst 2 (Riven) - who the hell knows why.

I'm also concerned about the whole Vista's DRM thing. Not so much on downgrading signals or revoking my licenses to playback protected contents (that's not happening yet, and by the time that's implemented I'd be using Linux or OSX or something),

but the fact that it might increase the cost of hardware by forcing all the videocard manufacturers to adhere to the strict DRM standards (unhackable signals etc) set by the movie industry. Why should WE have to pay for the stuff we dont want/need just to satisfy rich movie producers' crazy paranoia? Most of us won't even be watching movies on our PCs anyway.

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I'm also concerned about the whole Vista's DRM thing. Not so much on downgrading signals or revoking my licenses to playback protected contents (that's not happening yet, and by the time that's implemented I'd be using Linux or OSX or something),

but the fact that it might increase the cost of hardware by forcing all the videocard manufacturers to adhere to the strict DRM standards (unhackable signals etc) set by the movie industry.

They won't, as long as Microsoft continues to push the PC buying public away.

I'm adamant that all Vista will acheive in the mid- to long-term is catalyze development and uptake of alternative operating systems amongst the wider masses -- along with forcing MS to put all their applications online for free, and independent of the platform running them.

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