Bah. This sort of glamourising piracy is what is steppiing it up. Does Pacsteam allow you to join Steam servers (VAC), download updates, etc.?
updates maby, if not you can get the updates easly enought, and steam servers, again sometimes yes sometimes no, but that dosnt matter, there are tons of "free" servers out there, every singel game made has them, and in some cases i know people who buy the software then play only non official servers, not because they want to cheat but because they want to avoid cheaters and they find the smaller group of people on these "free" servers to be a better bunch.
good example, my buddy was huge into cs, but it became nothing but hacking cs kiddies, he quit, then he found an alternate network cs and cs:s and started again, because on the alternate server/network if you act like a cs kiddie you get a perma bann in no time flat.
^You are right in context of software such as CS, etc. But I was talking in context of smalltime developers and $100 operating systems when students can spend the same $100 on games and music. By smalltime I'm talking about the likes of WinRAR, all the shareware that need to be activated and the ones that they don't ask more than $30 for.
winrar was good for its day but its been years since they made any real improvement to it, 7-zip as stated above is 100% free and is faster then winrar, with the same compression levels, also i find that on 64bit windows 7z is even faster, its probbly a good 7-10% faster then winrar at the same tasks......
and rarsoft isnt hurting for $ they get payed by alot of larger companys for the rights to use rar compression in their installers for apps and games, tho thats slowly changing now that 7zip is going mainstream and is 100% free, guess rarsoft is gonna have to step up the game somehow
the problem with software prices tends to be that colleges want you to have MS products but most dont offer you cheap software prices unless your major is computer related, i have friends who can get any version of windows for 2-5$ at diffrent colleges across the country because they are mojoring in computer related things, on the other hand if your not in that field your paying 100-400 for a new os to take your classes on, including classes where the teacher requiers everything be sent in to them in ms office formats not open formats like openoffice uses.
its really a racket, i know plenty of people who cant afford to buy the software they need to take their classes if they want to eat that term, or if they want to not live in their car, its insain, books that are $120-150 each, software that is $300-6000, and on top of that they need a decent pc to run it.
in the end theres nothing but finding copys from friends or.....other sorces.
oh and im still snickering about your thinking steam couldnt becracked and was the ultimate anti-piracy tool....ROFL........
you want a good example of how great steam is
my buddy bought hl2 the day it came out, went home early from work(Comp time for overtime he works on weekends and such) well he installed hl2, but he had to wait neerly 14hrs inline to get it decryped due to server traffic, in the time he sat waiting sevral of us downloaded an already cracked version of the steam game, played thru most of the game or all of it.
i have had the same experiance with other steam games, since valve parted ways with vivindi i have bought their stuff(i hate vivindi for what they have done to some very good games and game dev companys they bought out) but i never buy them when they first come out, i try b4 i buy, if i like the game and see decent support comming from a game i buy it, if not, well i play and delete it, some games i play 2 levels and delete because dispite having liked the demo the real game sucked like a snowblower in winter in north dakota.
i personaly have zero problem with people pirating some companys wares(warez eheh) because those companys have screwed me and thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of people out of hard earned $ spent on games that they abandoned, or pached into oblivion(made them unplayable with patches)
but this isnt about piracy, its about ms not building a good os in the first place, ms made vista so it ASSumes its got everything installed, unlike XP vista dosnt cheak whats installed and needs updated, it just ASSumes it all needs updated.......
ms is effectivly warrning people that they made a flawed os with a flawed update system and that if they use a tool to make their os less bloated they may endup with problems when they run windows update.......nice!!!!
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pacsteam lol.:shadedshu
rg, instead of Office most of the time (sometimes I do have trouble in opening some files, especially people that accidentally save in .docx format from Office 07, and get out Office 07, but only when I must), and I find the Express Editions of the MS Visual Studio works well enough for me.
