GFWL

I have recently come across the need to use GFWL, and it's awful. I'm know I am about six years late to this shitfest, but I had to say something. It has a really crappy windows Vista overlay, a disaster of an installation process on Windows 10, and something about Micro$haft points. A few Xbox gaming friends of mine informed me that Microsoft points are the 'currency' used to purchase games on Xbox, but here in PC-land we use this thing called 'Dollars'. These dollars are in your bank account, and are used to buy literally everything these days, but Microsoft had to go and invent their own goddam currency, because that's who they are. Additionally, it's so laden with DRM that Linus Torvalds would curl up and die. "We've got to protect developers from piracy". That worked real well, now, didn't it? Look up any game, FUEL, for example, on The Pirate Bay and there are at least two pages of torrents. I'll bet most people haven't even heard of FUEL. Not only that, but Microsoft thought it would be appropriate to release an update to the Xbox voice codec that broke all cross-platform audio chat. And that was in 2010, and nothing has been done to fix it.

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Something that sketches me out about GFWL is the fact that the state of the servers is in limbo right now; Microsoft has never said what is going to happen with them, even though they shut down the service, the servers are still running. Even worse, Microsoft is doing it all over again, this time with the new 'Xbox' app and store. I don't know, it really smells fishy. They did it once, they failed miserably, and they're doing it again. I've been burned before (like set on fire burned), and I've gone out of my way to prevent that. Microsoft got burned with GFWL, and they're sticking their hand right back into the furnace so to speak.

Why people need to think, do research, and get off the hype train

This post is a reaction to this one.

The problem with that post is the man has no idea as to what he's talking about. The Pi Zero is not meant to be a desktop replacement for five dollars, that is literally impossible. The Zero is not being marketed to people that would have to buy all of that stuff just to set it up, it's being marketed to people like me who have years of spare parts and cords, with keyboards and mice and wireless dongles just lying around. My second point: the Pi Zero is not useless. Running it headless to do some mundane monitoring task is more than enough. My only gripe with the Zero is the marketing team. The people marketing the Raspberry Pi have done this time and time again: marketed a cheap computer for education. While it may be a lot cheaper than most Mac, Windows, or even Linux machines available, this machine was designed for makers and hackers, not students. Students want something that works out of the box or is easy to set up, and can be modded with little to no consequence. The Raspberry Pi is not that machine, and that's what Brian wants this machine to be. Unfortunately, so do a whole lot of people (including myself two years ago), and then they wind up all butthurt when they realize that the Pi is not for what it was advertised.

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Also, this is a thing.