Steam titles still run natively, all steam does is provide an additional overlay - which a lot of other software (voice-com especially) also does. Performance difference is essentially ignorable when theres nothing to show, it won't have anything to show unless you explicitly trigger the correct hotkey - or on special events like LOW BATTERY or MESSAGE RECEIVED.

It still undergoes a P/E cycle however. The erase process is very time consuming, and SSD performance is severely impacted if it has to do those on the fly. SE on drives with Encryption still has the role to reset the drive so that it performs at peak capacity afterwards, which means draining all the cells. Skipping the P/E cycle would mean that drive performance would be severely reduced.

That said, for SSDs - would not a Secure Erase take care of even remapped sectors? Seeing as its just a blind 'flush all cells' operation.

Well no, considering most gaming machines today are happily downgrading capacity for SSDs. And these machines very often have a HDD as well for bulk storage.

Both IE9 and IE10. IE9 is still the latest on Windows Vista and 7, but Windows 8 (which is released for MSDN and others) uses IE10.

And even then, the free-to-play model has been gaining popularity in recent years.

Mac OS lacks a bit in the OpenGL implementation though. Windows gains 4.2 support through drivers, but Mac OS cannot in any way run anything but 3.x (assuming you have lion, else its 2.x). This of course also ignoring the drastic optimization advantage Windows has. Ever taken a look at driver release notes? Half the time, you get a long list of "Game improved by 25% (AMD + Skyrim, 12.7 beta), game improved by 7%, game improved by 14%, game improved by 9%, game improved by 40% (COD: Black Ops in an older AMD driver)" - on and on and on... and the same game sometimes appears multiple times. This optimization competition between AMD and NVIDIA just outright does not exist on Mac OS. At all.

Answered this by capacity used: About 340gb of solid state and ~200 stored on traditional HDDs. (The latter is prone to growing much larger on occasion)

The PC game market which out revenues the PS3 and Xbox360 together? Before taking into consideration MMOs?

Light for Tractor beams, Sound for 'Screwdrivers'. Okay.

International calls, group chat, though its also frequently used in place of TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Ventrilo for smaller gaming groups. Which of course also makes that an important way to get in contact with your peers.

Its userbase is quite diverse, as such.

The same issue was present in the Beta. Unfortunately yes, the client goes completely inactive when its in the background.

One day, our TVs shall be hacked, and they shall show nothing but that damned purple Dinosaur.

Google Music is not available outside the US though. Which probably means over 2/3rds of the Android users cannot utilize this solution.

MS are still perfectly entitles to ship updates, yes. And they might continue to do so for issues not exclusive to XP. But whether they do, well thats anyones guess. But what Microsoft ultimately does end up doing will be quite telling; and could be important when choosing an OS for 'today' that itself needs to be around for 10+ years. (As you'll certainly be facing this issue again by then)