Is Valve’s dominant digital platform the future? Or does it herald the end of PC gaming as we know it? Steam. Publishers and rival digital distributors want to be it. Gamers and developers want to be with it. And animals lacking opposable thumbs want to learn how to use computers just to use it… or so Valve would have you believe. But all isn’t as rosy in the land of PC gaming as all that, and as Valve’s digital gaming platform has picked up more and more, well, steam, it’s garnered its fair share of backlash as well. With Valve’s recent tiffs with EA over their upstart Origin distribution platform, never before has the community been so polarized by Steam. Will Steam continue to dominate the PC gaming landscape? And if so, what does this mean for gamers? First off, let’s dispel the myth that Origin is a rival to Steam. Perhaps it will be in time, but as it stands now, EA’s digital marketplace is just that – a digital store front for EA published titles. For the moment EA is content in simply bypassing Steam, in order to sell their products directly without losing revenue to a rival distributor. So, no, Origin is NOT in direct competition with Steam, but neither are any of the other PC digital distributors. And I don’t mean ‘no competition’ in the ‘we’re kicking your ass in marketshare’ kind of way. No, I mean they’re literally not selling competing products—they simply lack the depth and breadth of what Steam has to offer. Whereas Origin, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GoG, GamersGate and others are all perfectly valid online stores and distributors, they aren’t what Steam is: a unified, managed gaming platform for the PC.
Posts Tagged ‘windows’
OS X Lion Server’s Directory Service Can’t Host Windows Clients
August 5th, 2011
admin As we mentioned in our review of Mac OS X Lion , Apple either chose to or was forced to make changes to how the SMB file sharing protocol was implemented in OS X. This had few implications for file sharing between OS X and Windows, but one casualty of the switch has been the ability for OS X Lion Server to run as a primary domain controller (or a backup domain controller) for Windows clients: basically, if you're hosting a directory with users and groups using Mac OS X Server, Windows clients won't be able to connect to your server and take advantage of these services. You can read more about directory services, Lion Server, and its ability to serve Windows clients in our in-depth piece on Lion Server .
Ballmer Mocks Rivals as Windows 7 Sales Exceed 400 Million
July 12th, 2011
admin Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference got underway in Los Angeles earlier today with a keynote by Steve Ballmer, who took the opportunity to thank the software leviathan’s partners for making Windows 7 the fastest-selling operating system in history and to apprise them of the record-shattering OS’s latest feat. According to Ballmer, the company has now sold more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses. Windows 7 has reached this milestone well within two years of its October 2009 launch. Despite the sustained sales momentum, the latest version of Windows could not prevent Apple Mac shipments from growing at a much faster rate than the PC market during this period. But Ballmer is satisfied with the fact that Windows-based PCs still account for most of the PC market. Comparing the sale of Windows-based machines with that of non-Windows PCs over the past twelve months , Ballmer said: “350 million, 350 million new PCs sold. That might compare with numbers from other guys that are in the 20 million range… now, 20 is too much, but 350 the last time I checked is a lot more than 20.” The company revealed that Windows XP can still be found on 200 million PCs . Both Ballmer and Tami Reller, corporate vice president and chief financial officer of Windows and Windows Live, called on partners to persuade Windows XP holdouts to finally move to Windows 7. An upgrade now, Reller feels, will “set them up for the future [read Windows 8].” Even as the company no longer wants Windows 7 to co-exist with its 10-year-old granddad, it sees “a future with a heterogeneous enterprise environment of Windows 8 devices and apps alongside Windows 7 PCs and apps.” Images Credit: iSmashphones
Video of Nokia’s first Windows Phone device "leaks" onto the Internet
July 1st, 2011
admin Videos of the first Nokia handset to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system have hit the Internet after Nokia CEO demonstrated the phone to staff earlier this week. Codenamed “Sea Ray,” the device is a Windows Phone-powered version of the Maemo/MeeGo-driven N9 that was announced earlier this week. The N9 looked great, and so does Sea Ray. A deep black, featureless glass front, single piece polycarbonate body, and a 8 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss-branded lens; the only obvious differences are the tell-tale camera button and slightly different placement of the LED flash. No mention was made of the release date—though we know it will be no earlier than fall, since the phone will ship with Windows Phone “Mango”—nor do we know if the phone will come in the same range of colors as the N9. The Sea Ray demonstration unit was black; N9s will be available in black, magenta, and cyan. (Magenta is my pick, recapturing the spirit of the hot pink RAZR.) The video, made yesterday, doesn’t show off the phone too much; most of it is a look at Mango itself, rather than the hardware. But the mere existence of the video is something of an oddity. Before showing off the phone, Elop said, several times, that those present should stop taking videos and pictures, and that he didn’t want to see the phone showing up on the blogosphere. The video that leaked, however, is clearly professional; filmed by a fixed camera on a tripod (not a handheld cellphone), with clean cuts between different video feeds. This strongly suggests that the stream was intended for internal distribution. As such, there’s more than a hint of this being an “official unofficial” leak. Many of the responses to the N9 were along the lines of “Wow, if only I could get that with Mango!”—this could be Nokia’s way of saying “You can!” Read the comments on this post
Mango goodness: Windows Phone developer firmware invitations roll out
July 1st, 2011
admin Registered Windows Phone developers now have access to a beta build of Windows Phone Mango, the major upgrade to the smartphone operating system that’s due in fall. The beta build doesn’t include everything that Mango will eventually include, but does have major features like multitasking, background tasks, programmatic access to the camera, network sockets, and more. The Windows Phone Developer Tools have also been updated to bring them in-line with the beta firmware. Read the comments on this post
Nokia N9 and N950 Officially Announced – MeeGo Running on OMAP 3630
July 1st, 2011
admin Back when we reviewed the Nokia N900 we really only wanted a few major improvements. A faster SoC, slightly thinner and more compact hardware, and more of Maemo Linux. It's been a long wait since then, and Nokia has changed its lineup, canceled the original N900 successor, taken on a new CEO, and rebooted itself under the Windows Phone 7 umbrella. Those of us that wanted a smartphone running real bona-fide linux seemed destined to be waiting forever. Today however, Nokia officially announced the Nokia N9 and N950 at its Nokia Connection event in Singapore.
New Trojan Targets Bitcoin Wallets
June 19th, 2011
admin Privacy advocates and seedy characters on the edge of Internet legality alike use Bitcoins as their virtual currency of choice. The anonymous, decentralized P2P nature of Bitcoins lets you transfer money without ever having to contact a bank or even know the true identity of the person on the other end of the transaction. Recent events have dragged the shadowy currency into the light of public scrutiny, and now its squirming users have another headache to deal with: a trojan designed specifically to pilfer your Bitcoin wallet. The malware goes by the name Infostealer.Coinbit. Once it works its way onto a Windows PC, the program checks the default location for Bitcoin’s wallet.dat file. Your wallet contains the encryption keys that are essential to Bitcoin transactions. If the trojan finds a wallet, it sends the data file to the attackers. “If you use Bitcoins, you have the option to encrypt your wallet and we recommend that you choose a strong password for this in the event that an attacker is attempting to brute-force your wallet open,” Symantec’s Stephen Doherty said on the company’s blog . Sounds like a smart move to us, especially since there are sure to be even more attempts to swindle Bitcoins out from under your nose in the future. Earlier this week, a man claimed to have $500,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen from his e-wallet. One of the currency’s selling points is its non-centralized structure, but remember that lack of oversight that seems so awesome in theory means that you have nobody to turn to when some jerk steals your encryption keys.



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