Eurogamer is running an opinion piece suggesting that innovation and creativity have been on the decline for years within the games industry. Now, with the threat of the economic crisis looming, game publishers are shying further from new projects and ideas, instead choosing to rehash popular IP in order to minimize the risk of failure. The upside is that their reluctance, along with technological improvements that make game distribution easier, is allowing independent developers to gain exposure like never before. "This revolution will give us a new wave of developers who see games through very different eyes to those of their studio-bound compatriots. Forced to consider the financial bottom line, the technological bleeding edge and the whims of Metacritic at each turn, big studio development is by no means uncreative, but certainly has to follow certain set patterns. ... The studio system couldn't have created a game like Flower, the utterly beautiful PSN title which came out earlier this month; but more than that, it couldn't have created a persona like Jenova Chen, the mind behind Flower, who happily talks in interviews about evoking emotions, moving past primal feelings and 'maturing' the industry in ways that don't involve sex, blood and swearing. He talks about making games that don't empower gamers, but instead make them experience other things, other emotions. It's spine-tingling stuff. It's also commercial suicide — or would be, to a studio working in the traditional development context."

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard Weird Al Yankovic's 'Don't Download This Song,' which came out a couple years ago, but did you know that MTV is apparently so afraid that kids listening to the song will discover for the first time that file sharing offerings exist that in its video of the song, MTV bleeps out their names? There's a line in the song that lists out Morpheus, Grokster, Kazaa and Limewire (most of whom don't really exist any more), but for some reason MTV considers those names to be bleep worthy." Unless this is all one grand inside joke from Weird Al.

jgoguen writes "Nagios, originally known as Netsaint, has been a long-time favourite for network and device monitoring due to its flexibility, ease of use, and efficiency. Nagios provided, and still provides today, a low-cost, versatile alternative to commercial network monitoring applications. Nagios 3 takes a huge step forward compared to Nagios 2, providing improved flexibility, ease of use and extensibility, all while also making significant performance enhancements. Due to its extensibility and ease of use, no device or situation has yet been found that cannot be monitored using Nagios and a pre-made or custom script, plug-in or enhancement." Read on for the rest of jgoguen's review.

Many readers are sending the news that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released. Download options include mirrors and torrents. Wired has a review based on the release candidate: "Gamers and hardcore media hounds may still feel left out... but we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows... Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation — no drivers or other software required... I did have to install additional codecs to get MP3 and Windows Media Audio support."