The problem with that is finding an OS that will run the old games. I've had numerous problems with VMware and Wine when running old DX and DOS games.

I agree though that "remaking" is such a lame, Hollywood type thing. I'd hope that they would simply refresh the games, upgrading the graphics but leaving the same sounds, pacing, etc.. Or perhaps at least refresh the old version and make it playable while they do their own remake.

Is there a distro of Linux that is designed specifically for multi-touch tablet interfacing?

One of the greatest points of the iOS devices is that their apps are designed for multi-touch input from the ground up. It would be great to see this idea put onto Linux... multi-touch interfaces built on the same libraries as the keyboard/mouse interfacing apps.

I guess the underlying questions are are there any GUIs that are being developed for linux with multi-touch for the primary input? And are there any libraries that developers can use to port their interfaces to be primarily multi-touch?

Since you can boot Android on iOS devices, and there are alternative hardwares like this, it seems like something that would quickly gain a large following. Without something like that I fear that the open alternatives to iOS will drag on and on in half-baked form, never successfully challenging the consistent experience you get on iOS.

That is an interesting point concerning licensing. Compare it with Steam, where you can enter in the serial number for your old copy of Half-life and tada, it's like you had bought it from Steam. You can download it and play it through their service. Too bad we never got a serial number with our original Beatles purchases, like those boxed sets they released last decade.

This is really not much different than Justin.tv, right? I mean... sure, the Prof is getting pierced, and it faces backwards, but the idea is the same. Is Justin.tv in a Museum?

How long until the ZFS features are ported to BSD? THAT is something I'd be seriously interested in, since I run a production environment on a tight budget and thus cannot use this version of Solaris.

There was a long software project that involved us testing and refining a child safety filter, which included many months on end of surfing pornographic websites and filtering about 80,000 domain names. Not strictly gay sex, but extremely sexual none-the-less...

You can't google the solution to that one! Sure, they'll give you the instructions, but unless you have experience you don't really know the ins and outs, if you known what I mean, and there are no console error messages to lead you in the right direction either.

How ironic that morass is what Google is doing, yet they live on the eastern side of 101, the muddy wetlands by the salt percolators of the South San Francisco Bay, next to the landfill.

I worked in Colorado for a company headquartered in Sunnyvale. They used to fly us out from CO and we'd work in silicon valley for Colorado wages, staying in corporate housing. I loved it because I sublet my apartment in CO out so I was essentially staying for free. Top that off with all the overtime I was working in a place that I didn't technically live (yet) and thus didn't have many friends to go out partying with.

Then they wanted to bring some of us out to CA to live permanently, but didn't want to give us the cost of living adjustments. In order to pacify us they let us stay in the company housing with less than cost-of-living raises, making less than we should but compensating the low pay by covering the housing cost. It worked out really well for a while and was a great start. I had to quit the company when I wanted to move out though because they wouldn't budge on giving any of us raises if we moved out.

The living wasn't bad, I had some interesting room mates that were smart people, but some were crazy or just odd characters. They were bringing in Taiwanese engineers that couldn't speak just about any english and urinated all over the bathroom in the middle of the night. Thankfully we had housekeeping three times a week. I also had these two drunk party-crazy room mates that would tear the place apart. One of them came home drunk and drank a half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went blind for like a day or two. Another one would get drunk and go steal fruit off the trees in people's yards. One time they got in a flour fight and when I woke up it was like a ghost had walked all over my apartment. Another one went crazy on drugs, lost a rental car, got sent back to CO but never made it because he got arrested on his Phoenix layover for trying to disassemble a metal detector or something (though he wasn't technically my room mate.)

Ah, the good old days of technology, per diem, overtime cash and partying with other nerds in Man Jose. Can't say they weren't interesting, but I'm glad they're over.

Hah! Poverty in Google Town, that's a good one!

Difference for the sake of difference is not progress. Unless you're improving something, don't force your users to waste time learning a new system. If you've already paid for software that people are getting use out of, just leave it alone. This is one thing that frustrates me with a lot of technology companies, they just innovate in circles, recreating existing features and rebranding the same old services, merely making things different and forcing their users to adapt to a new system that offers no significant benefit.

Employee productivity should be a major goal of any good corporate IT force. Not all problems have technological solutions, many have human solutions. You need to include the human factor in your problem solving, and if this means sending out an e-mail asking for feedback or walking around the office talking to folks about what problems they encounter and what features they don't understand, then do it.

This is a main difference between an IT department that people hate, and an IT department that people love.

They could photograph your house keys and create a duplicate key from the photo.

With that in mind, it would be awesome if you could sign up for a monthly subscription to steam. After all, it's almost exactly like a hosted game, right? You have to auth with their servers, you download the content and its updates... now (FINALLY) it's even storing your save points on the server. It would make sense, then, that it was all just a rental service, like WoW, and you paid a lower price more frequently.

Honestly though, that sounds terrible to me... I think I'd get more value if I paid once and had the freedom to play the game again over the years as I saw fit, even if I couldn't resell the games that I didn't want anymore.

I guess it really boils down to transferability of the software license. Just like you can buy a laptop with an OEM version of Windows which is not legally transferrable to another computer, these licenses are not transferrable to other end users. It's just that there are technological hurdles instead of only legal hurdles.

Last winter I was trying to buy the Super Mario Wii game for my nieces, but after waiting in line for like 15 minutes I found out it was sold out even though they had like 50 boxes on the shelf.

Just as I was expressing my frustration at having waited in line expecting them to sell me a game for the box I was holding in my hand a woman came in trying to sell her disc. It didn't have a cover because the dog had eaten it. Not only did Gamestop allow us to do the sale inside their store instead of outside in the icy cold, they also gave me one of their empty boxes off the shelf since they were unable to sell me the game even though I'd waited in line.

It was surely not the kind of thing that corporate would recommend them to do, I'm sure, but it was a great gesture on their part and definitely placated all of my complaint that they would advertise the availability of a game on their shelf when they actually had no copies in stock.

I guess they don't put the same effort into their data centers as they do into their Apple stores, at least concerning the outside. And why did they build it so wide instead of up?