Basically, you're saying that *all* games consoles make no sense compared to your smartphone. Tell that that to the massive number of households with game consoles that shell out a fortune for games. There's clearly a market for devices permanently hooked to the TV to play games. They don't need to be portable (though ironically the Ouya is probably the most portable of the lot).

What I'd really like to see is something like CyanogenMod 10 port to it to open up to Google Play. I think the Ouya won't fail because of the idea of it being hooked up to a TV with a controller. It'll fail if they keep it locked down to a proprietary store with no way of playing the games from Google Play (or Amazon App Store if you must). Devs aren't going to magically put all their games on Ouya's store when there's a much bigger market on Google Play.

One minor note - at least XBMC is being developed for the Ouya, but that's mainly because it's being ported to Android anyway and will no doubt officially turn up on Google Play at some point.

We use beefier PowerEdges at work and one major thing I like about them is that - like the t110-2 you linked to - you can order them with no OS! If you're intending to run Linux and don't need hand-holding, installing the OS yourself is a good idea. The only thing to be wary about PowerEdges is that I've never known any of them to be silent.

Now you might get lucky and the t110-2 is quiet or silent, but whenever I see "server" and "Dell" together, it's an excuse to have the noisiest system fans in the universe, since they're expecting you to put them in a server room and not in an office (open plan or otherwise).

I've got a couple of PCs with the Asus P8Z68-V LX running 64-bit CentOS 6.3 and/or Ubuntu 12.04 without any issues at all. Newegg has them for $80 and they support 32GB RAM, SATA 3, USB 3 and have decent onboard graphics (with plenty of slots for beefier cards). I don't see anything in this price range that a) works 100% with Linux and b) has good specs like this MB.

One nice thing - the BIOS is dead easy to upgrade - none of this Windows-only (or DOS-on-a-floppy!) rubbish: there's a built in filestore navigator in the BIOS and it picks up a .ROM file off a USB stick without any problems. And, yes, Asus do BIOS updates even for MBs like these which aren't that new or anywhere near the top of their range.

It should be noted that it's an LGA 1155/Z68 MB, which may or may not work with Ivy Bridge CPUs (I used a "lowly" i7 2600 Sandy Bridge in mine). I'm sure there must be an Asus equivalent to this MB that does.

I have many of the Gerry Anderson DVD box sets and I think the best two series he did were Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (easily the best puppet show he did - way better than Thunderbirds) and Space: 1999 (OK, you have to ignore most of Season 2 of that, but it did have Catherine Schell as eye candy to compensate).

He didn't do too well with Space Precinct (Gary Ewing as a non-drunk cop? :-) ) and the CGI version of Captain Scarlet was awful (and even stole a whole episode from another sci-fi series!), but at least he tried to keep the UK sci-fi light alive when we've all had in recent years is the truly cringeful Primeval, a less than stellar return of Red Dwarf and the highly variable Doctor Who reboot.

Automatic porn blocking is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it should be opt-in so "concerned parents" are probably the only ones using it. Secondly, it's very likely to block non-porn sites as false positives and yet there will never be a porn list you can check publicly check against (because a) it'll be a good source for your porn bookmarks and b) it's done in "secret" to avoid a rival org taking the list and putting it in their porn filter list for free). Thirdly, it *will* be use as stepping stone to block other types of non-porn material in the future.

To most of the general public, the obvious steps are:

1. Provide an easy way to opt-in (presumably there's a block password supplied) and, equally importantly (e.g. kids leave or reach adult age), opt back out again.
2. Once opted-in, you should be able to report blocked URLs as being false positives (i.e. the block page should simply have a button to report it, perhaps with your block password needed to stop kids trying to unblock it). Each reported false positive should be put on a checklist sorted in most reports per URL order and then manually checked in sorted order by whoever maintains the list and appropriately whitelisted if necessary (anything in a grey area should be put aside for discussion in regular meetings of an independent panel, so that guidelines on what consistutes porn - and those guidelines should absolutely be public - can be refined).
3. If they want to expand blocking categories in the future, those new categories (which I reckon will include gambling) should also be opt-in only.

The lift (UK speak for elevator) I have at work is reasonably sensible - there's only 4 floors in the building, so it tends to keep one lift on the ground floor and one on the 4th floor when idle. However, I had a few fun things happen:

* All the lights went out in the lift as I was travelling in it, but it did get to the right floor and open the door.
* The computerised voice announced "floor five" one day, which is creepy when I got off at the top (4th) floor!
* The lift voice frequently says "please mind the doors" and then does nothing for 5 seconds before repeating the phrase again and only then begins closing the doors! Other times, it'll start closing the doors as soon you press the button and half-way through the closing it then pipes up "please mind the doors".
* I've had the alarm test for the building go while I've been in the lift and the voice announced "fireman has taken control of the lift and it's returning to the ground floor", which at least it duly did.

I think the only thing I would say is regularly unpleasant is that the lifts we have are quite small and I suspect several of our staff avoid them because of claustrophobia (it's easy to avoid them if there's only 4 floors of course).

Here in the UK, we dropped the one pound note in 1984, a year after introducing a rather stubby (small, but thick and heavy) one pound coin. We even brought in a 2 pound coin in 1998 too. It shoiuld also be noted that UK ATMs have had a policy for a while of not stocking 5 pound notes (so the amounts you are offered by default are in multiples of 10 pounds), so the 5 pound notes in circulation are quite tatty now (I can't remember the last time I saw a new-ish 5 pound note!), though some banks have decided to reverse that decision recently.

The UK coin situation in terms of diameter is very inconsistent now - here's the order from smallest to largest diameter:

5p, 1p, 20p , 1 pound, 10p, 2p (!), 50p, 2 pounds

I guess that's what you get when you redesign coins at random times like the Royal Mint seems to do. As for notes, they too seem to get random redesign (and on rare occasions such as the 5 pound note, even the dimensions can change!), which is either because the Governor of the Bank of England has become bored with which 19th century celebs are on the designs or because the latest colour photocopiers have beaten their design security.

So to sum it up, UK coins are inconsistently sized and, like notes, are occasionally redesigned too. Must be a nightmare having to reprogram automatic vending machines every few years!

I've always thought laptops were a poor buy really - the cost and compromises you have to make never seem to give you as good a deal as you can with a desktop. For example, it's hard to get a lot of RAM in them (2 SODIMM slots seem to be the limit), many of them still come with HDDs when the cost of SSDs has been dropping like a stone, you can't change the screen (plugging into an external one is the only way around the often poor screens), the screen resolutions are often low (a $1549 laptop has only 1366x768 res?), trackpads are often awful (external mouse usually needed), the keyboards are cramped and they're often too heavy to do much more than move them around the house.

When I bought my last laptop, I actually just made it a desktop replacement for a year - wired mouse, keyboard and external screen stuck on one desk. If I could have switched it on with the lid closed, I'd have never even had to open the lid to use it :-)

I've got to question how much coding work the average Linux developer does on the move to justify a $1549 laptop rather than a much higher spec'ed desktop. I spent the same here in the UK (which has prices about 20% higher than the US typically) on a whitebox i7 machine with 32GB RAM, 256GB SATA 3 SSD, 3TB HDD and a 24" 1920x1080 monitor with 64-bit CentOS 6.3. A spec that handily beats almost all of the laptop's specs by a wide margin in a much more comfortable environment (full sized keyboard, mouse and screen) for development. I've got various portable devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets) and I've *never* developed on any of them whilst on the move. Also note that I bet either that dev laptop doesn't get a UK release or when it does it won't be much short of 1549 *pounds* in the UK :-(

If I were going to buy a laptop nowadays, I'd probably go for a touchscreen one and use it as a games playing/media consumption/Web surfing device. And if it needs to go out of the house, that'll be a tablet instead (Nexus 7 for high portability or Nexus 10 just for the screen :-) ). I really can't see how you can do serious development on anything other than either a desktop or a laptop attached to external superior devices like I said I did for a year.

On my Nexus 7 tablet, I *never* want the mobile version of a Web site. Best solution to this is to use Firefox and the Phony extension (set to be the desktop Firefox agent string) and your surfing will be exactly like your desktop browsing is.

Mobile data plans in the UK have always been a running joke with me (too little data for far too much), but Everything Everywhere in the UK have taken this to a new art form recently. They have a monopoly on 4G/LTE for a while and have decided to *start* their data plans at 36 pounds ($57) for 500 MB (yes, that's megabytes folks) per month. Yep, that's lower data and a much higher price than most 3G data plans.

So let me see, if say I get a 10Mbits/sec connection on 4G (and that's pretty conservative) and use it for a large download or a continuous stream at that rate, I will exhaust my expensive monthly 4G plan in under 7 minutes. Way to go, EE - let's make 4G utterly useless in the UK by underquotaing and overpricing it. Geniuses!

Why is that the article jumps from "Linux for Steam" to "Valve will design and maybe license a Linux-based games console"? Surely the obvious step inbetween is a customised Linux distro for a live bootable USB stick (with a decent capacity to hold a few games) that can do the following:

* Check the PC meets the minimum hardware specs that Valve require. Anything below the specs is highlighted and suitable upgrade alternatives listed (Valve could have sponsored links here to hardware sites). No games can be played until the minimum specs are met.

* Login into a Valve steam account and downloads any updates to the live USB setup.

* Download any new games to the USB stick.

* Play the downloaded games.

* Shutdown and reboot back to their normal Windows/Linux setup.

This way a user doesn't have to worry about partitioning, dual boot etc. and can just take their USB stick to a friend's house and play it on whatever PCs they have that meet the minimum spec (which could even include a Mac machine?!). The only issue might trying to prevent cloing of the stick and letting it be run on two machines at once - not sure if that's doable (and some games might have more liberal licensing to let you do that anyway).

Once the whole live USB experience is refined, only *then* do Valve commission a gaming console with the (upgradeable) live image shipped in flash storage - they'll want to optimise boot times too so that it's not 1 min+ to start up.

Whilst I can see that Valve will port their games natively to Linux, how many other big dev houses will do the same by the time Steam goes gold on Linux? Without other houses involved, Steam surely will fail on Linux, so could some sort of WINE layer help matters? Valve devs would be ideally placed to fix issues with non-Valve games under WINE and once a game passes testing under Linux+WINE+Windows version of game, it could be added to the Steam store on Linux (though each game update would have to be re-tested too of course).

I'm also a little surprised about how only one exact version of one exact Linux distro (OK, Ubuntu 12.10 too when that's out next month) is supported, yet Windows Steam supports three (about to be four) different versions of Windows. No love for Fedora or openSuSE then? Perhaps providing a statically linked .tar.bz2 binary package for non-Ubuntu distros as well would be a nice thing to provide?

I used to use every Fedora release (multi-boot between the "stable" version and the next alpha or beta), but the last time I did that was Fedora 14. Once GNOME 3 came out with F15, I clung onto F14 as long as I could and then did the jump to CentOS 6 (aka F12/13-like).

CentOS 6 gives you these advantages:

* System V Init rather than upstart or systemd.
* GNOME 2 - massively better than GNOME 3.
* 10 years of updates - more than any other Linux distro anywhere.
* Ability to run the exactly same distro (no special server edition) at home and work on servers and desktops.
* If I don't want to wait 10 years for a major upgrade, CentOS 7 will be out within the next year or so, though you'll lose the first two advantages with 7 I suspect.

The disadvantages:

* Most packages never get a major upgrade - tends to be minor upgrades and some backported fixes. Means you may have to manually version chase some stuff (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice).
* Pre-built binaries don't ever care about CentOS - Firefox hasn't worked on CentOS 5 for quite a while despite it still having more than 5 years of updates to go! Firefox OS is also guilty about ignoring even CentOS 6 - the pre-built stuff doesn't work on it either.

If you want a stable desktop to do serious work on Linux, CentOS 6 is a clear winner for me. If I need to see how stuff like Fedora 18 Alpha is going, I just fire up VirtualBox and test it out (turns out it's utter rubbish at the moment - they've even made the Anaconda installer less useful and more dumbed down). As for Ubuntu, I've got 12.04 on a few Acer Revos purely to run XBMC, but the Unity interface is so awful, I just have it auto-booting straight into XBMC to avoid it!

The game uses Adobe AIR, which is a bad cross-platform choice because Adobe discontinued it in June 2011 on the Linux platform. They also ludicrously never released a Linux 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, so trying to install a dead 32-bit package on a 64-bit clean Linux system is such a nightmare that I gave up and never got to see the game on Linux after all. Even the instructions to do so mention Fedora Core 11, which is a 3-year-old distro 6 releases out of date, ho hum.

I'm not convinced about external worknotes at all, because they're probably stored completely separately from the code itself. What's wrong with saying "Further details in the'"Main Menu design' section of README.txt in this directory" in a comment if you don't want to include a large swathe of comments in a source file?

If worknotes.scripting.com goes down for any period of time or goes bust, then this guy's links to external worknotes aren't going to look too clever. Never mind that the example he did use has just 5 bullet points that could easily have gone into a comment surely?

I suspect one of the few useful things an editor or IDE could warn you about is if you've gone more than a screenful of code (or perhaps let the warning level be set in terms of lines of code) without a comment, though no doubt some programmers would turn this feature off anyway :-)