Sagebrush posted:

I was betting on Blu-Ray becoming yet another one, but looks like Sony finally broke their streak there.

WebDog posted:

WebDog posted:

No, it's a special level of insanity where everyone wants their own slice of the pie. And it's going to get nasty as digital distribution really settles in.

GFWL was an attempt to bring up quality standards. The idea was that if you were a developer then by having that branding your game supported widescreen, subtitles, 5.1 and a few other features to keep quality in line.

However GFWL was a part of something bigger; to sell Windows Vista, featuring the new DirectX 10, needed for all of the next-gen games like Crysis.
However in 2007, not much existed that was ready, everything was delayed till 2008.
Hunting for a carrot Microsoft came up with Shadowrun and the much awaited PC port of Halo 2.

Halo 2 became a sticking point as it was questioned to why the hell did a DX 8.1 game needed to be "upgraded" to DX10 despite featuring no actual upgrades, short of perhaps a few more lights and better texture streaming.
Consumers were pretty pissed that you had to buy Vista (around $300) and a new graphic card that had DX10 for this reason.

Even more frustrating was despite Shadowrun's ability do multiplayer on console and PC, Halo 2 didn't offer this feature - no doubt in fear of the ease of hacking that was already rampant on the console.

Hacks were soon established to trick Shadowrun and Halo 2 into running on XP, complete with backported libraries.

Pretty much every other DX10 game released since had a DX9 fallback and ran on XP fine.
Microsoft's arrogance seemed to have stunted consumer confidence and there seemed to be a slower adoption of DX10 at the time vs DirectX 9 only a few years back, it ended up being more or less extravagant optional extra - or an elusive "Ultra" mode in settings.

Back to GFWL.
To begin with integration was pretty harmless, even going so far as to easily allow an offline account so there was very little checks in the way of it being an actual DRM.

However Microsoft must have noticed more people creating offline than online so hid this option.

Then stuff started getting complex as Steam integration often was clumsy or went the long way around as Microsoft just didn't want to play nice - ask anyone who brought DLC or tried to verify serials for GTA IV via Steam.

Where it really got poo poo was it's poor backwards compatibility as versions got updated, notably with Windows 8 where the new LIVE games infrastructure did not like the old to the point of failing to install games.

If you managed to bypass the GFWL installer it then some games failed to save game data or crash with some cryptic error resulting in hunting down obscure versions to make a hodgepodge of .dll swaps. In many cases there was little to no developer support in fixing this.

An infamous case is Arkham City where if you brought the regular game and perhaps the major DLC the game just shat itself and failed to save. However the GOTY didn't feature this bug.

Little surprise the whole service quietly ended last year and where possible games have been updated to remove it.

two forty posted:

I think there was some conversation a really long time ago about bank passbooks. Here's and old one I own.
Not really sure what the "Three C's Club" was, but they were serious enough to incorporate with the NC Secretary of State at one point. Sideways, sorry.



The bank would write all transactions in the book, and having it on your person was proof enough you were authorized to use the account.
This one began in early 1940 with a "Balance forth" amount, so it's not their first book. Here's the last pages from the book (pages 9 and 10.)



Interestingly, it has a transaction taking place on Saturday, December 6, 1941. Their banking activity seems to have slowed down significantly after that point. Also, it ends in 194? with an overdraft of $1.88.

pookel posted:

In America your debit card is almost always indistinguishable from a credit card - not just in the sense of "they work the same way" but as in "your bank issues you a Visa debit card that says VISA on it and looks and works just like a credit card on credit card machines, except the money comes directly out of your account instead of you paying it off later."

Or you can get an actual credit card through your bank, which does have a line of credit, but shows up as simply another account on your bank website, and you can set it to automatically pay it off in full every month ...

The point is, they're functionally identical.

Tunicate posted:

not an edit