LosOjos

Read your post back and you describe the problem yourself - another Mario, another Zelda... they're no longer enough to sell consoles on the back of. There are so many great games now on so many platforms that only your die-hard Nintendo fans will bother with their consoles to play those games. It's not enough! Selling the older titles on mobile/alternative platforms would bring them a lot of revenue I reckon, there are tons of people who'd love to play through some of those games again but aren't going to buy a WiiU or a 3DS for the privilege. That's not to say they couldn't continue to have exclusives, I'm not saying that from now on all their games must be released on all platforms, just that (as you said last week) they'd do well to monetize their back catalogue more effectively and to a wider market. Of course, this all just opinion and speculation...

I don't think it's the same as Rare though - that was painful for thm because they lost a lot of big exclusives. What they could do though is actually make some of their back catalogue available on other platforms. Yes, it means giving a cut to MS/Sony/Valve/Google/Apple/etc. but it also opens up a huge market for them to make some serious cash. Cash reserves or not, if their stock holders feel that Nintendo aren't doing enough to increase their profits then they could get the rug pulled from under them pretty quickly...

The news of their loss in operating profit has already had quite a hit on their share price: BBC News - Nintendo shares plunge 18% on loss warning 18% drop over the weekend! Business analysts seem to agree with the general consensus here - they need to start licensing their IP to be played on other devices. Now, where do we go to start the Smash Bros Steam campaign?

Irritatingly, it seems it is now just called ID had to open up one of my reports that uses it to find it. How annoying! So, write off what I said - there is no consistency! EDIT: the more useful answer would be - try a couple of ID options and find which works best for you. I use the ID formerly known as Person_ID because it's short, simple and numeric; there is also External_ID (at least, there was! Not sure what they call it now) which is an alphanumeric string, roughly 15 characters long. Still usable but harder to lookup manually if the need arises.

Careful with that load, some of those forum posts are pretty volatile...

Hard to say, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much consistency as to exactly what the ID field you mentioned is, that's why I use Person_ID - it's always available and always called Person_ID so you can be sure to get a match. You have to be in Third Party Reporting group to see it, but it's not always under the CESThirdPartyFields node (helpful!), sometimes it's at the root node

For people (students/contacts/teachers) I tend to use Person_ID as it's consistently available across all relevant report focuses, plus it's a fairly short number (easier to do manual lookups by ID if necessary)

I was reading with interest about Valve's plans to implement something very similar in SteamOS. Whether the performance will be any better than this or not is anyone's guess but it's a great way to easily hook up another room with your Steam library

Reviving this topic a little, Humble Bundle has everything you need to start playing DayZ right now for $6 (about £3.70) https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly I'll finally get to play this now everyone else seems to have stopped lol

Yeah you'll get a Steam key, redeem that in Steam (Games > Activate a product on Steam) then it'll be added to your library like any other Steam game

Anyone looking for a bargain on this game, Bundle Stars selling it for £3.75 until 10am Monday morning Euro Truck Simulator 2

I think we're actually agreeing with each other in a roundabout way I can't get actual figures at work, but there is a stats page on Steam that will show how many current Linux users there are with Steam installed (not sure how accurate it is, but probably the most accurate we'll get). My point was though that Steam has a huge user base (not SteamOS or Steam for Linux, just Steam in general). The problem is, like you said, Linux/SteamOS. It's just too lacking in terms of games right now, that's why I'm saying it needs at least one big name to make the leap and start releasing all their titles on Linux as well as Windows. Again, I agree with you, I don't think Valve are doing enough to make this a success and they're actually being quite hypocritical (SteamOS is meant to be two fingers up to closed platforms but is in itself an almost closed platform...) but then again, somebody needs to take the first step and I don't think anyone is in a better position than Valve to do so... EDIT: should have said, SteamOS in it's current form appears to be quite closed, whether or not they'll open it up on release for other distributors is anyone's guess, though I suspect not...

True, but the Wii and the Wii U were very different consoles. The Wii was a stroke of genius from Nintendo, drawing people in with it's simplicity and (at the time) innovative control system. The Wii U felt to me at least as an attempt to push the Wii at the more hard core gamers, which failed massively because it simply doesn't have the games to do that and it was released at a time when those very gamers were waiting for next gen consoles to be released. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting SteamOS to take off (much as I'd love it to) but what I'm saying is that you have to look at it differently to a console launch. If SteamOS takes off, then it'll be a huge step towards the open hardware platform I'm talking of. Steam has an enormous user base already, but there just aren't enough games for Linux yet and the biggest titles available are either Valve's own (which are all getting on a bit now) or indie titles which, great as some of them are, aren't going to convince your hardened console gamers to make the leap. If just one AAA publisher takes a leap of faith though, it could seriously change the future of gaming, and all on a device (a PC!) that is already capable of delivering the entire home entertainment package that Microsoft and Sony are so desperate to make their consoles.

Not necessarily - Nintendo are notoriously difficult to please, Valve seem to be happy for publishers to do their own thing; there's no reason to believe your statement is true IMO...

OK, well let's not call it an HTPC then, instead let's say I want a decent media centre app for my Windows PC (has to be Windows for Steam, not enough games for me to make the jump to Linux). Would you still recommend XBMC for my not-HTPC?

Yeah so you said but it's irrelevant really, whether I install XBMC on a tiny NUC or a full E-ATX tower, it'll do the same job, not really sure why you're taking offence at it? I've used Plex on my home machine for a while as a library manager to stream to other devices, but does it have a decent front end? The browser interface won't cut it...

Guessing that was a reply to me? Yes, basically a PC but with the difference being that more people go Valve's route of making living room friendly PCs for the non-techs, but nobody has a monopoly on any platform; everyone just focuses on developing games. Yes you would get more services like Origin, Steam etc. popping up but the underlying hardware would be the same. Upgrades would be cheaper and only as frequent as you want (even a £50 GPU can play the latest games, albeit on low settings, the point being you don't have to upgrade to play) and the fact that devs wouldn't be tied in to proprietary SDKs and platforms should open the market up to being more interesting and ultimately make it more competitive. Of course this would work best on a Linux platform (not necessarily SteamOS) otherwise you're back to Microsoft taking a cut of all the hardware sales. I think SteamOS is a good step in this direction, however I do feel it's premature; Valve and indie titles alone are not going to change the market so drastically. This is why I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a AAA studio to make a leap of faith sometime in the next 6 months... As for piracy - that's an entirely different issue that's in no way exclusive to PC and will continue to be a problem, well, forever. Some people pirate because they can't afford to buy new games, some because they won't pay and others because they like the challenge. I honestly believe cutting costs will reduce piracy on all media massively. But, that's another topic...

OK, continuing my series of posts about my new HTPC/Steam Build (Budget HTPC/Steam Box Spec, Best HTPC Remote?) my next question is: What is the best front end for an HTPC these days? The obvious choice of course is XBMC, however I'm open to trying others. I remember Boxee being very good for streaming but a bit naff for local files (this was over 2 years ago mind you). Whichever I use will need to be customisable, as I'll be using this box for local files, streaming (YouTube, various On Demand services, Netflix, Lovefilm, Sky Go if at all possible) and it'll be doubling up as a basic SteamBox (will just need a link to Steam Big Picture Mode) Any recommendations?

Why? I'd personally like for consoles to become a thing of the past and for everyone to work on distribution platforms on open hardware (similar to how PC gaming works). Would mean that gaming isn't held back by the weakest common denominator, games should cost less (less waste due to publishing various versions of the same game, plus the cost of porting to each platform), indie devs would have a more level playing field effectively putting paid to the AAA studios churning out franchise after franchise (they'd still do it, but they'd have to at least try to be more innovative when people have the choice to play a wider variety of titles).

Yeah I have to be honest, I haven't been "into" Pokémon since Red/Blue but even I want to play that game!

It would be amazing, but Nintendo and Valve are about as far apart as you can get in the gaming world... completely different approaches. Nintendo is all closed platform, sworn secrecy agreements, restrictive publishing and licensing fees. Valve are "all" open (not as much as they make out, but a lot more than most), anything goes and yes, of course you can use our engine/platform/market! If they were to do a tie-in, it would be a huge leap for Nintendo, though it could be insanely profitable for both parties...

Well using the script I posted, it should charge staff user prints to the "Year Leaders" account during the hours you specified. What I don't know is whether you have to specify default actions... @EJWill - do you have to do anything to charge the user or will that happen by default after the ptinJobHook function completes if the job hasn't been charged elsewhere?

Are you certain it's working? Have you tried with a non-staff account? I don't use PaperCut, but general scripting experience leads me to believe your IF statement has no effect - usually any actions to be carried out must be contained within the statement, which would make the above script (with the already found fix): /* * Members of the staff get free printing to IT printers * during lab time (9:00am to 4:00pm weekdays). */ function printJobHook(inputs, actions) { var MONDAY = 1; // 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday var FRIDAY = 5; var day = inputs.job.date.getDay(); var hour = inputs.job.date.getHours(); if (day >= MONDAY && day <= FRIDAY && (hour >= 9 && hour < 16) && inputs.user.isInGroup("STAFF")) { // Charge the job to the "Year Leaders" shared account. actions.job.chargeToSharedAccount("Year Leaders"); } } That is assuming that the intention is for staff printing to be charged to year leaders between 9 and 4, Monday to Friday.

First thing I'd do is take the drive out of it's caddy and try it inside a machine or in a known-working dock/caddy, it could just be that the SATA->USB controller in the caddy has gone kaput. Admittedly, it's much more likely to be the drive but it's worth a try and won't cost you anything!

There's certainly a huge potential for profit there but I can't see Nintendo doing that, not until they're at their last straw - it's just not the way they work! I think if they do that, we'll know they've gotten as bad as Sega did post Dreamcast - although that culture change I said they needed earlier could take them down this route sooner, who knows...