Weekend tech reading: Should Valve be trusted with its Steam service?

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Matthew DeCarlo

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Randy Pitchford talks Borderlands, piracy, and why he doesn't trust Valve "It would be much better if Steam was its own business. There's so much conflict of interest there that it's horrid. It's actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win. I love Valve games, and I do business with the company. But, I'm just saying, Steam isn't the answer. Steam helps us as customers, but it's also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that's not totally fair." Maximum PC

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Google: Computer memory flakier than expected Wondering why your computer just crashed again? Its memory might be to blame, according to real-world Google research that finds error rates higher than what earlier work showed. With hundreds of thousands of computers in its data centers, Google can collect an abundance of real-world data about how those machines actually work. That's exactly what the company did for a research paper that found error rates are surprisingly high. CNET

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I second the RAM failure numbers
I see much more failed RAM nowdays than I did some years ago, actually some years ago it was extremely rare for RAM to die (in my experience)
 
Well Valve is helping cut down piracy. They have some pretty sweet deals on a regular basis. Are they to be trusted? Better answer this one...Is your pirated copy of *insert favorite game here* to be trusted?
 
I have zero problem with Valve and what they're doing with Steam. If Mr. Pitchford has a better idea of getting games to gamers at discount prices and immediately via secure downloads that allows me to play that game on any PC as long as I have a Steam account, I'm all ears.
 
The reason people are getting pissy with Valve is because they can offer their games for a better price so we buy them and they make more money, ok, steam may not be the anti-copyright system that'll fix the world, but who cares? the fact at the end of the day is, as a consumer you can happliy buy a really good game (HL-2 for example) for a tenner and they make the whole profit. It will be stupid if other companys don't follow suite.
 
Pitchford is an ******* and an *****. Borderlands is even selling on Steam. If he doesn't 'like' Steam then he should take his game elsewhere.
 
You gotta read the whole article to get the full context of the conversation - nice choice of excerpt to provoke drama, really...

Pitchford likes Steam, he just doesn't like having a competitor in charge of it - you are putting your product, your reputation, your livelihood in the hands of your competition, then trusting them to be completely on the up and up. He'd like to see Steam split off as its own entity, independent of a particular gaming company. I'm sure Stardock and the like would also fall under the same wish list.

It's really kind of funny, first Pitchford says he doesn't trust Valve, then next says they've worked with Valve a lot and he personally trusts them. Sounds like the poor guy is conflicted.
 
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