Wrong. If properly reverse-engineered, it is not at all questionable, it is legal. If it were not, all personal computers would be made by IBM, and they would have sued Compaq out of existence for reverse engineering their bios and making the first "PC Clone".

Is it just me or is it ironic that this article directly follows another article titled "Studies show people are biased against creative thinking"?

The parent's score of 5 is well-deserved... but it is not at all funny. What slashdot needs is a "+1 Disturbing" or better yet "+1 Tragic" mod for comments like this one.

The point of this is to turn programmers into even more of a commodity. The idea isn't to produce labor, the idea is to produce cheap domestic labor.

They also used rebates to make their products seem $20 less expensive. There's a new rebate every week, and the rebate expires after a week. So you must file for your rebate the day you purchase, or by the time to go to collect the rebate yours will have expired.Got burned by this once. Didn't turn me into a repeat customer.

the same thought occurred to me

You say Shit Can... I say Shift Plan!

Ouch. And probably true for most games, not just some of them. To be fair though, I think most game developers target intel chips and use intel compilers. I will bet that with both playstation and xbox going aggressively multi-core, developers will change that, and we'll begin to see it in benchmarks.

The slashdot home page, as it is, is clean and simple. I can read my news for nerds headlines quickly and browse through the stories that interest me. The Beta is not an improvement at all.

Given the way the author searched, the title of the article should be "Top 10 worst coded programming languages" or maybe "Top 10 worst Hacked Programming Languages". The article only measures what coders thing of other people's code, not the languages themselves.

But they could certainly install them automatically using a post-installation script

While it may well flop, this seems like a very credible challenge to Microsoft's dominance in gaming. Given a very specific subset of hardware like a steam box will represent, linux can run flawlessly and offer great performance. Valve can throw together tremendous functionality very cheaply by bundling existing applications like XBMC or VLC, not to mention WINE. As with linux in general, many of WINE's configuration problems and glitches go away when you start thinking about a very specific subset of hardware.

The question is, how does Microsoft respond to it? Do they start looking to pursue intellectual property claims against WINE, or against Valve for using it? (or is this the very reason that Valve is pushing for native ports of games?) What else can Microsoft to to put the brakes on Valve?

But Microsoft is unlikely to license any of its OS software to Valve for use on an XBOX competitor. So where does that leave Valve?

i.e. -- mom's basement.

REALITY CHECK: There is absolutely NO WAY it's coming to me. Cars compete with other models at certain price points. I believe this is a case where either Tesla makes an extra few percent profit or has to share that bit with a dealership -- which I may or may not be able to haggle with.