It mentions that the scale of these things is 150nm, which sounds pretty large compared to modern cpu features. Still, it's a very interesting development.

Thank you for your sane, relevant post in this sea of thoughtless religion bashing. I'm a believer in God and a fan of technology, so while I like reading the information and *some* of the comments on this site, the bigoted stereotyping wears on me. I was going to mod you up, but you're already at 5.

I agree those are all advantages to Linux, but in practice I doubt they will make much difference to average frames per second (that's the performance metric I'm interested in). If you're running a graphics intensive game, the scheduler won't matter, because you probably aren't running much else. The amount of RAM won't matter (as long as you have enough that it isn't swapping to disk, I don't think performance scales much with available memory). The file system won't matter except when loading levels, and networking isn't generally a bottleneck. Faster level loads and better ping are a definite plus, but I suspect the difference is marginal. The main thing in software affecting FPS is the rendering code, and I *suspect* they're using the same direct3d to OpenGL library that they used for their OSX ports

The steam platform itself and Valve's source engine games will be available on Linux (I assume that means linux native ports), and no source engine games have DRM other than Steam, that I'm aware of. I imagine this will be like their ports for Mac in that only some titles run on mac, and I don't know how mac users can tell which titles they can play other than to read the system requirements. The nice thing is you just buy the game and it knows which version to download AND you then own it on whatever platform you want to use. You can download it onto multiple machines, you just can't be logged into the same steam account on multiple machines at once.

One thing *I'm* curious about - will the Linux games run as well in Linux as Windows on the same hardware? My guess would be no, since they've added a compatibility layer that translates direct3d calls to OpenGL, but I'm curious how close it is. When they ported the Games to Mac I looked for some performance comparisons between the mac and windows versions and couldn't find anything.

So Sturgeon was the first slashdotter?

Arguably, wind and tide are other forms of solar energy. You say of solar-thermal "just heat a working fluid so that it pushes a turbine". That's a good description of wind power.

Yes, if the cost of pushing the frontiers of science continues to increase, we'll hit a limit where we can't fund the next step. However, I don't think we're there yet. The world economy just isn't doing that well now. When the economy picks up again, the funding will probably come back.

Population growth is a great example. China decided regulation ("one child" policy) was necessary to slow population growth, but many countries have reached low or negative growth without any such measures.

There was an article a while back about a decline in conservatives' trust of science. This is an example of why, in my opinion. I'm not finding fault with this study, but the conclusion seems to have stepped outside the realm of science and into politics by assuming (at least this is the impression the article gives) that government policy is the only way to limit the growth of our ecological footprint.