Yes, Notch got his money. :)

So is apparently cosmic rays. ;)

Actually it was partially from his guilt of what his invention could be used for that got the whole Nobel prize thing started.

I nearly bought Starcraft 2. I saw all kind of fun things done with it, mods etc, and gameplay videos and all that. I was avoiding it for the same reasons as you, but at some point I wondered if I could try to oversee those things.

Then I found out Starcraft have a region restriction in it's multiplayer. As a European with a lot of American friends... it's a no buy for me.

Supposedly Microsoft had interest in acquiring Nintendo but Hiroshi Yamauchi former president of Nintendo and also the largest shareholder of Nintendo refused any offers. This could just been a rumor of course, but judging a few old news articles Microsoft seemed to have the interest.

I think it's unlikely Nintendo gets bought up by anyone. Judging by the last few years successes (even if they had it a little slow lately), it's more likely they buy someone else up.

As much using acronyms in situations like this annoys me, the acronym is more known than the full name.

Or you insist calling it "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"? ;)

http://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/27283945396

And indeed. The best way for the blog to prove itself would be to post something that would only be known in Valve internally. Now the blog could have made by someone who had a dispute with Icefrog in the past, but I doubt it's by someone in Valve.

Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).

Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.

On the left there is a ranged attack command. If you click on it, you can see the range that your unit can do. Yes, I didn't realize this right away either, but it helped a lot as soon I found out about it.

There is also an promotion that makes you able to shoot over otherwise blocking targets, which helps a lot. :)

Some micromanagement before Civ IV was quite annoying. There was no overflow mechanics, so if you had a building that had 78 out of 80 production done, and you gain ten hammers, you lose eight of them. And to get around this, players micromanaged out of the wazoo. Same was true for income and beakers (science progress). Thankfully Freeciv added the Civ IV style overflow to at least production, which is why i tend to prefer Freeciv when I want to go for Civ II gameplay style. :)

Civ IV and V also keeps track of "cents" in the money system I believe, just isn't shown to the player.

And not to even mention, the "trade" system in Civ II. Which was removed cause of excessive (unfun) micromanagement. Moving those caravans all over the place wasn't fun. It's in Freeciv too annoyingly, but at least they removed the supply/demand system (which lead to even more micro).

Civ IV and Civ V have their micromanagment, but they feel honestly more productive in terms of tradeoffs. While in the older games, you would lose anything that overflowed or didn't round off right.

Civilization II is like Simcity 2000. Both games are heralded as being the best in the series by many people, but most fans I meet (that have tried out the newer games, and learned them) seems to prefer the fourth game in the series.

Simultaneous turns are pretty much obligatory if you're playing multiplayer, especially with more than two players involved, FreeCiv always been biased towards multiplayer, unlike the commercial games which all mostly focused on singleplayer (and I play both Freeciv, Civ IV, and Civ V :) ) which is why it's on default too. I think infact Freeciv was orginally meant to clone CivNet, which apparently introduced simultaneous turns.

The Freeciv AI seems to move all their units immediately too, so Freeciv feels turnbased when only AI opponents are involved.

Simultaneous turns are used on Civ IV and V multiplayer as well. Making it wholly turnbased can make the games take awhile, but on the other hand, it's perfect for play by e-mail games. See Freeciv longturn games.

Freeciv gameplay is pretty much Civ I/II, expect more balanced for multiplayer but I honestly prefer Civ IV/V for their depth.

There is also a registry value you can change to fix a drive (CD or HD, usually CD drives) that is stuck in PIO mode. Didn't even require a restart! This is just some "override" bitmask that Windows sets after enough reading errors, which can only be changed back with regedit (idiotic).

Loose cables or a bad disc, and Windows insists on using the slow reading/writing mode.

Reinstalling the disk controller helps too since you're basically removing the troubling registry values and let Windows recreate them from scratch. Probably the easier way out for most people too. :)

Atari made the orginal Marble Madness, I think Rare ported it over to NES.

I suspect the Marble Madness engine was either reused (very uncommon back in those days), or experience from it was reused in the Snake Rattle n Roll game later on.

If it's even meant to backfire, if there was a group I wanted to discredit I would spread a virus in the name of said group instead of the group I take part.

I don't believe it's the case in the situation though. Experience tells me that most people don't realize that protesting through destructive means rarely works well...

Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.

Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.