Source engine has been ported so they are very likely to eventually port all the games that use it.

ZFS is perfectly capable of being distributed with the kernel, and in fact is distributed with the Solaris and FreeBSD kernels.

The only thing stopping it being distributed with the Linux kernel is the Linux kernel's licence choice which is not the fault of the ZFS team.

Hard to say definitively without knowing much details about who was behind it, but if it is some nut job as these things often are, then better mental health care would be a good step in the right direction.

Java is slow*, don't go that route if you are planning a large userbase. There is a reason huge traffic site's don't use it. Facebook, Yahoo, and wikipedia use php, Google/Youtube use python (and strait C).

If you actually want something that will scale well to huge numbers of concurrent visitors the answer really is you're going to have to go with php, Perl (and slashdot's page load times don't give me much confidence in Perl), Ruby (has had serious scaling issues, but I think they may be largely fixed now), or python.

Here is a high performance well coded php mvc framework if you do decide to go that route: http://www.yiiframework.com/

For database MySQL/MariaDB can be an option, but it's quality has been going down in recent years (don't know how much MariaDB has fixed that) and it's not very feature rich in terms of things like stored procedures, custom datatypes, views, etc. If you want something more powerful like you may be used to with Oracle go with Postgresql.

You are also going to want to keep in mind when designing the structure that you will want to make use of something like memcache in the future to increase performance and reduce server load.

Disclosure: I run a high traffic website that get's millions of page views a day. Uses Yii php framework and Postgresql as the database backend. There are about 1,250 people browsing it at this moment (based on active tcp connection count to port 80)

* Yes, I know *in theory* in a certain very limited set of circumstances Java can be faster than compiled code, but the theory doesn't actually match the practical reality of the situation.

Too expensive in lost sales.

"I want to return this device. I plugged it in and it doesn't work"

It sounds to me like they are looking into changing the rules so it will be taxable in the future.

I gambled on buying it because Blizzard has a history of being good to gamers so I figured it would be ok. (Ya, wow has issues, but their other stuff used to be good)

They have now lost that good faith with me.

Not many companies left I am still willing to gamble on like that. Valve is one of them, and I expect them to retain that as long as they remain privately owned.

Also API documentation is often only useful if you know the name of the API you are looking for.

If what you want to know is "How do I do X?" or "What API do I need to use to accomplish X?" and most importantly, "What is the best/most efficient way to do X?"

The rest of valve's source engine games like portal2 and left4dead 1&2 are bound to be ported before long.

Now that they have the engine working with HL:Source and TF2, it can't be too hard to get the others over, it's just a matter of applying the necessary patches and doing time consuming tweaks to make it run well, instead of just run.

This.

I can get 250Mbps internet where I am. But there is no reason for me to pay $115/month, when I can get 25Mbps (fast enough for all my needs) for half that price.

The 250Mbps is far cheaper on a Mbps basis, but at 25 I can already easily steam 1080p video and a 10GB game on steam downloads in less than an hour. 3 minutes to download a half hour episode of something.

Who said anything about return?

Why would the server render images? That is a piece of client-side functionality.

You can brute force a key to....it just takes much, much, much, much longer....

A update that requires the previous version to install reliably should refuse to install unless you have that version.

Just don't bother checking for errors.