Don't underestimate the power of Linux users to delude themselves into thinking that "If everyone did..." is the same as "any day now everyone will..." Ask yourself this...what would compel any, let alone every gamer to switch to Linux? It's not the games, as they don't exist. It's not the access to high performance video drivers, as they don't exist. It's not the access to ubiquitous and non-finicky audio systems, as they don't exist. The gamers need something better than what they have if they are going to move away from their current situation and negate their library of games. With regards to Linux that doesn't and probably will never exist. The majority of game companies won't make games on Linux until there is a market, which doesn't exist. Catch-22. For this to ever even have a possibility of happening there needs to be a killer-game-app on Linux and a Linux distribution that is as easy to setup and configure, along with always offering access to current quality video card drivers, as Windows offers. So where is the killer game and perfect gaming Linux distro? Instead of wishing for ponies and utopian group-think you might want to dig in and get to work.

Linux gaming is a niche idea for a niche OS (-Linux on desktops for the masses. I know Linux in the enterprise is big). Microsoft isn't losing any sleep over the idea of Linux gaming going mainstream.

Right, so you can't very well put the cost of making GPL v3 on the shoulders of Tivo as you tried to do with the statement, "Once Tivo Inc. showed GNU just how evil a corporation can be, they had to spend time and money creating GPLv3, time and money that could have been spent actually doing something, instead had to be spent on lawyering." Tivo did what was allowed. The FSF got upset. The FSF then spent money and time drafting a license that covers the problem they didn't foresee. Like the original respondent to your post said, If the FSF wants to limit the way software using their license is used it is their responsibility to review and update their license to disallow the things they want to restrict. "Spirit of the law" is a nice sounding term but it has no bearing on a license. If the license does not stipulate what cannot be done with whatever it covers then it is perfectly legal to do that thing. Tivo had better lawyers than the FSF, end of story.

Your friend was getting AOL tech support and you told her about SMTP? You totally misunderstood your audience.

You totally discount (well, outright ignore) the fact that Bill Gates is the head of the largest foundation on earth that has an aim of vaccinating every child on the planet. He has hundreds, if not thousands, of expert physicians working for him around the globe. When he says something public related to vaccinations he probably knows what he is talking about. Yes, I agree that listening to Jenny McCarthy, et. al about vaccinations was stupid. But that was because they didn't have any knowledge of the problem, just hearsay. But, dismissing Bill Gates for the same reason is exhibiting the same ignorance as the people who listened to the celebrities.

If and when "the best experience of the web" includes needing support for a little known and poorly named video codec than maybe the parent comment would be reasonable. With the small percentage of wanted content on the Web that is encoded with Ogg the post comes off as both trollish and ignorant. Ignorant of the minuscule demand for Ogg Theora and ignorant of the fact that a PR quote can't reasonably be held as factual relative to the opinions of everyone.

That's bad asset creation or bad collision detection code. Again, Bethesda/Obsidian would be to blame.

Gamebryo is the graphics rendering engine. The problems with Fallout:New Vegas are almost entirely AI logic and mission scripting bugs. While the graphics are dull and lackluster the graphics rendering engine is not causing the problems.

Put blame where blame is due. It's the code Bethesda/Obsidian wrote, not the code that they purchased from Emergent.

Where are you located? I've had UVerse for over a year and have a completely different opinion. It can definately pause/rewind live TV. I'm pretty sure it buffers so that recording does not start right at the moment you hit the button, and, above all else, it's contractless. I can kill the service at any time and not have to worry about an ETF. Compared to the other options here, Comcast, DTV, or Dish, UVerse is the best thing going.

Why would a newspaper call the submitter of an article to fact check the article? Your phone number should have been considered off limits because it was submitted with the article. That you never got a call does nothing to disprove the existence of fact checkers. If anything it bolsters the argument that there was real fact checking happening.

I doubt if there is anyone left who thinks that offers of v1gra and riches from Nigerian princes are real opportunities.

Do you just have a feeling that people stopped being stupid or can you cite a specific date and time you saw the majority of humanity show some shred of intellect over greed?

If you read the linked article about the publisher lock-in you'll see that is kind of their thought process. Hollenshead states that they view 5 as a competitive advantage Bethesda holds over other publishers/middleware creators. Developers can only have access to that advantage if the publisher through Bethesda.

Now, one way this may work is if they sell the engine much cheaper than Unreal (currently around $1m/sku). If you can get 5 for a lot less than that and give Bethesda the going publisher take on a shipped title (50% of revenue...thats probably a bit conservative). Then the engine choice might start to make sense for some 3rd party studios. But at $1m/sku *AND* giving Bethesda a % of revenue?....no way, no how.

I think the adoption of 5 will be very similar to that of idtech 4. Id games will use it, naturally, and those studios that exist by making id IP games, Raven, Grey Matter, Splash Damage, and Human Head, will use it as they make more id IP games. Some other independent studios may try it. But, for the most part, it will be an internal Bethesda technology.

Megatexturing was backported into idtech4 for Quake Wars. While idtech5 looks sexy id made an announcement that will make many developers wary of the engine. Idtech5 can only be licensed if a developer publishes through Bethesda (http://www.geek.com/articles/games/id-tech-5-will-only-be-used-for-bethesda-published-games-20100812/.

Bethesda doesn't have a partner publishing program like EA and THQ do. That implies it will be a more traditional, "We own the IP" publisher/developer relationship. That's especially worrisome for smaller independent studios. Larger studios can possibly have the clout to maintain their IP. But, most large studios are not independent, they're owned by publishers that compete with Bethesda.. There's no way an EA, Activision, THQ, TakeTwo, or Ubisoft studio will use idtech5. Along with that liability on the engine there are no shipped games to prove the engine is viable, it's not known what the dev support will be like, and there is no one outside of Id that has experience with it.

Unreal rules the roost right now. There's no publisher lock-in, there are hundreds of games to prove it's viability, the dev support is all online, easily referenced, and complete, and the widespread use of it means that it is easy to find programmers, designers, and artists that have experience on the toolset. idtech5 has to not only be as good as unreal in all of those areas, it arguably has to be better. A studio that knows how to make games with Unreal would have to dump all of their institutional knowledge if they went with idtech5. That's a huge loss of competitive advantage.

Idtech5 might do amazingly well. Given the long timespan since choosing an id engine to make a game was commonplace, the explosion of Unreal as the defacto engine middleware, a decent number of other competing engine middleware packages (Gamebryo, Crytek, Unity, etc...), and the Bethesda lockin I am not expecting idtech5 to be a disrupting force in the game development industry.

Look at their title list. If all they have to show for nine years of work is less than two dozen second rate PC titles then it's not surprising they've gone out of business. Nine years ago it might have made sense to have a Linux game porting company. Unfortunately the gaming landscape has changed quite a bit since then; the XBox 360, PS3, and Wii all came out and sold huge, pushing gaming back into the living room; Macintosh hardware changed to be identical to PCs, at least in terms of motherboards, graphic cards, and processors; releases of PC games, excepting MMOs, declined; and major publishers, like EA, started to (tentatively) use CodeWeavers' CrossOver tech to make non-Windows releases of their PC games. The need for a company like LGP is insignificant at this point. The gaming world has changed dramatically in the past nine years. The PS3, 360, and Wii all came out and have each sold large quantities of units, PC gaming itself declined rapidly, and for what little PC gaming has remained major publishers have started to use CodeWeavers' CrossOver tech for their Mac and Linux clients.

I'm unclear as to how a defunct and destroyed cut-rate '70's era NASA space station that was built out of Atlas rocket parts would have either a web server or the ability to annihilate humanity.