The Guardian Gamesblog kicked off a great discussion on their site, talking about games that just keep pulling you back in. Games that, even if you've played through them once, you just have to pick them up again. eToyChest and Kotaku both have related threads. So, what about you? What are some videogames that, even years later, you just have to play through one more time?

feranick writes "Wired and Ars Technica are both running articles comparing Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not for their business/technological achievements but for their humanitarian involvement. I am curious to see what you are thinking about the issue. What is more important, be a showmen technologist like Jobs or an humanitarian missionaire like Gates? And even more important: Is it important that donations from rich billionaires be public or should they remain private?"

Anonymous Reader writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly status report in 2006, covering the months July though December of 2005. Among many other things, this status report includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and NetBSD 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches."

An anonymous reader writes "The latest FreeBSD Status Report is available, covering updates for the last quarter of 2005. A quiet time, for the most part, but some interesting news on the TCP Optimization, and Xen, fronts."

Lord_Dweomer asks: "As a recent college grad, I took a job to pay the bills, but soon realized that it would end up sucking the life out of me. I work a lot of overtime in a high-stress, tight deadline job. Once you get into that kind of downward spiral, how do you find another job?"

TheIndifferentiate writes "In light of how CEOs are reacting to a possible court injunction which could shutdown their RIM BlackBerry service, what impact do you think this will have on the 'Software as a Service' business model? The conventional wisdom in some commercial software corners has it that the threat of patent litigation should stop Open Source Software development in its tracks. If my business depends on an OSS application, and it gets shut down, I can potentially go on about my business as I have the executables and wouldn't have to stop using them until someone came knocking at my door. If an SaaS application gets shut down and my business depends on it, I'm dead in the water. Seems like one of the prime arguments against OSS also takes out SaaS too. Rhetorically speaking, how could a commercial ISV in good faith talk any business out of an OSS application and into an SaaS application?"

willki wrote to mention an AP story stating that The United Nations has pledged support to the $100 Laptop. From the article: "Kemal Dervis, head of the U.N. Development Program, will sign a memorandum of understanding Saturday with Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop per Child, on the $100 laptop project, at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting. The program aims to ship 1 million units by the end of next year to sell to governments at cost for distribution to school children and teachers. UNDP will work with Negroponte's organization to deliver 'technology and resources to targeted schools in the least developed countries,' the U.N. agency said in a statement."

You posted a lot of great questions for Mike Nash last week, and he put a lot of time into answering them. As promised, his answers were not laundered by PR people, which is all too common with "executive" interviews with people from any company. Still, he boosts Microsoft, as you'd expect, since he's a VP there. And obviously, going along with that, he says he likes Microsoft products better than he likes competing ones. But this is still a great look into the way Microsoft views security problems with their products, and what the company is trying to do about them.

Next Generation is reporting that Konami is bringing Dance Dance Revolution to 765 state public schools in West Virginia. The move is intended to counteract the growing youth obesity problem facing the United States. From the article: "'Bringing the health benefits and enjoyment that DDR provides to school children is a great way to combat childhood obesity that is caused by the sedentary lifestyle of today's kids,' said Konami's Clara Gilbert, director of business partnerships. 'DDR has been a proven success in schools and this program with the State of West Virginia demonstrates the positive effects that can come from making DDR a part of one's daily routine. This first-of-its-kind partnership will help us continue to demonstrate the benefits of DDR to consumers around the country.'" On one hand, that's awesome. On the other, if I was still in middle school, I think DDRing in front of middle school girls would be a sure way to cause permanent psychic scarring. Update: 01/25 21:34 GMT by Z : HTML is hard. Fixed link.

segphault writes "Ars Technica examines the implications of Red Hat's recently announced plan to get Linux running on Intel Macs. 'Red Hat representative Gillian Farquhar announced last week that the company plans to add support for Apple's new Intel Macs to its popular distribution. Fedora and several other commonly used Linux distributions support the PowerPC architecture used by Apple in the past, and Red Hat wants to ensure that its software will continue to run on new Apple hardware in the future.'" The real question is will Windows or Linux be first?