OpenSolaris was still Solaris... not too different from Solaris 10 with a GNU userland. Comparisons are still valid as far as administration goes.

You still need hot water in the summer. My current electric heater can't do folding@home while heating up my water so they may be on to something there.

They took a lesson learned from iOS and brought the app store to the Mac, including the policy that allows installation on multiple devices. Then they dramatically slashed prices for their own software that they sell through the app store. What's so bad about that?

Why do you feel that the game has to guide the player? I've played many pen&paper RPG sessions where another player guided the group and the actual game was only used as a framework that provided the rules and colourful sketches of monsters you could encounter in dungeons.

The same used to be true for MUDs and MUSHes and so on where you could likewise reconfigure the environment. Minecraft reminds me a lot of the MUSHes of old except the graphical interface is easier to use.

Ironically, you can craft books and bookshelves in Minecraft. The books' only purpose is being an ingredient in the bookshelf recipe, and the bookshelf is full of coloured rectangles that you can't take out.

Minecraft has rules. They limit how you move around in the world, what blocks you can mine/dig and how, what items you can create and how, when the sun goes up on the virtual sky and what happens then, how often you have to hit a pig with a shovel to get bacon and so on. It also has goals, although the ones that the game sets (achievements like "build a better pickaxe") are not particularly interesting; it does however have the potential for players to come up with their own goals ("build a huge castle") that supplement those the game provides. What it doesn't have is an end, but I would disagree with the notion that games are characterised by having a definite end. Many board games only end when all players agree they have nothing to do (consecutive passes clauses or similar), but if that is enough to satisfy your end constraint, it also works for Minecraft.

Note, if you don't pay, you will not see most of this, so you might wrongfully classify Minecraft as a toy based on the free "classic" version which is indeed closer to a box of legos than a game.

If you put it in numbers, about a year ago or so CCP announced that they'd probably not spend a lot of time for the following 18 months. Around one hundred cancelled subscriptions were counted on the official forums. The number of subs EVE actually lost at that time, according to mmodata: 40.000.

This time the forum count is above 2000.

My bank just force upgraded me to a card reader. I didn't expect banks elsewhere to actively try and avoid security...

That must be it. Every modern computer can map RAM and IO anywhere in your address space but you normally don't work with this directly. TSRs are nothing more than daemons; there's only a tiny difference that the daemon is visible as a process when it's there - but that's better than hiding. There are many ways to make unixoid OSes pipe command output to a pager automatically, either when you press enter or maybe some separate key combo, but we no longer need it because we can scroll back. Many editors have modes for binary files or executables. And so on.

They just don't know these things anymore because it's just tiny things in a vast sea of knowledge they would need to acquire in order to understand a modern computer as well as you could grok a C64 after spending a year on learning it.

Depends. I need to write code that works on SPARC so it would make sense for me :P