I'm still not a lawyer, so I don't guarantee the accuracy of any of this.

The GPL explicitly states that running a program is not within the scope of the licence. The FSF believes that combining code to run in the same address space makes them a single program but starting another program doesn't make your program a derivative work of that program. The FSF is not likely to say that something non-free is allowed unless it is.

One important distinction is whether the program uses any of the library's implementation; for example, CutePDF contains nothing of the innards of Ghostscript (which is distributed separately) and can use any other PostScript to PDF converter that can be called as a separate program in a similar fashion. If there is nothing of Ghostscript (or whatever) in your program, there is no copyright case either. Whether including a header file from a library (and linking dynamically to a user-provided copy of the actual library) actually includes anything copyrighted in your program is ultimately a matter for the courts, but it is more likely to make your program a derivative work if it contains descriptions of data structures used by the library.

The trick is to wrap the library in a separate program. CutePDF can use a GPL Ghostscript without being GPL itself by starting it as a separate process and passing files, standard input and command-line arguments to it and getting files and standard output/error back out. That way, CutePDF doesn't need to include any part of Ghostscript.

The I-War series is one of the few space combat games I've seen that adheres to Newtonian physics (apart from having two different forms of FTL drive). It also averts the usual silliness of having a high-tech spaceship and requiring pilots to manually aim at distant targets; automatic targeting is standard on most weapons.

I think you mean "Sjálfgefið". HTML entities seem to work.

Assuming we're talking about the noun "default", it translates very differently to different languages. For example, Finnish uses constructions based on "oletus-" ("assumed"), such as "oletusarvo" (default value) or "oletusselain" (default browser). In Swedish, "förvald" ("preselected") is used for default somethings (e.g. "förvalt värde" for default value) and a default in general is a "förval" ("preselection").

Spend enough time using a translated computer system or studying or practising CS in a language and you'll pick up the terminology. The problems start when translators have decided to translate things differently. For example, both Windows and Mac OS have "File" menus, but Finnish Windows calls them "Tiedosto" ("File") and Finnish Mac OS (IIRC) calls them "Arkisto" ("Archive").

Using the criteria specified by Mannila & de Raadt [1], the answer is: NO! As far as I can tell, Fortran is just as bad as C by their criteria.

[1] L. Mannila & M. de Raadt: An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming, Proceedings of the 6th Baltic Sea conference on Computing education research: Koli Calling 2006

By pressing AltGr-Q to get an @ symbol, at least on XP. European keyboards often move characters that are seldom used (in whatever country the layout corresponds to) around to strange places to make room for extra alphabetic characters and dead keys with accents that can be combined with letter keys to produce accented characters. To compensate, the AltGr key (which replaces Right Alt) is added as an extra shift key. Apple keyboard layouts are, naturally, completely different, so one of the quickest ways to reduce a Finnish hacker to tears is to make him code on a Mac; for example, braces are hidden behind Alt-Shift-8 and Alt-Shift-9 (instead of the normal AltGr-7 and AltGr-0) and more often than not are not shown on the key tops!

Part of the problem is programmers who don't care about international use (often Americans) and start using symbols that are easy for them to type but uncommon in other countries. That said, lots of European layouts feature gratuitous layout changes; for example, the German keyboard swaps Y and Z for no apparent reason.

In conclusion, I'd say using an unusual keyboard layout is more likely to drive the technically-minded bonkers than the artistic. Unless it's Dvorak.

Have you tried The Ur-Quan Masters?

However, I'd hesitate to call Starflight or Rogue "simple". Many of these games have quite a lot of depth compared to the FPS of the week.

Surprisingly many: X.org and XFree86 seem to include a font called "MUTT ClearlyU PUA" that includes the Klingon alphabet and numerals according to the ConScript Unicode Registry encoding for Klingon.

Try this Klingon Unicode test page. Despite many browsers (e.g. Firefox) substituting glyphs from whatever font happens to support a character, if necessary, you may have to specify the exact font name to avoid getting the proper Klingon overridden by another font that uses the same code points for other things (for example, GhostScript adds "Standard Symbols L" that, annoyingly, overrides some of the Klingon characters), since the Unicode Consortium declined to standardise Klingon.

Qapla'!

Graphics cards don't implement APIs, software does (although the graphics card's feature set does affect strongly how much work the main CPU has to do). Wine implements the DirectX API using OpenGL, so the features supported by your OpenGL implementation are going to be the limiting factor.

For good performance, though, you will need a card that supports the features added in DX10, but as OpenGL extensions. In practice, this means that you need a "DX10 card" to get all features running well, but some may work well on cards that do not support all DirectX 10 features.

Not at all. In many cases, the game logic uses negligible processing time compared to the graphics. This allows the game itself to run at a fixed speed (which is great for simplicity and consistency) and skip drawing frames to catch up.

I agree. Users removing system components at random will almost certainly cause denial of service, so they're certainly a threat vector.

There are two possible reasons for this:

• The application explicitly requests a 60 Hz refresh rate; for many applications it makes sense to match the refresh rate to the frame rate, which may be fixed either to have a consistent frame rate over all systems (and 60 Hz is more or less universal for PCs) or because you have content with a specific frame rate (e.g. 60 fields/s M ("NTSC") video).
• The operating system or video driver defaults to 60 Hz or overrides the selected value.

OpenGL does not even support switching screen modes and often relies on OS-specific mechanisms. DirectX often suffers in my experience (and based on some web searches, in many others') from similar problems and the most common X11 implementations provide screen mode switching mechanisms that are clearly independent of OpenGL and easily (in the "just write lots of numbers into a text file" sense) configured for specific monitor timings.

In conclusion, I can probably make some of the resident Linux zealots happy by saying your problems are probably with Windows, not OpenGL.

With Wine under the LGPL (making much of CrossOver LGPL) and CodeWeavers supporting Wine development, this will probably result in standard Wine also supporting DirectX 10 soon. I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP. Both of these would be nice.

This sort of discussion is meaningless without a decent definition of "influential". I suggest "introduced central ideas to gaming that are well known", which can then be quantified based on e.g. number of players. Games that introduce important ideas can be said to create their own genres.

So, for example, taking modern genres to start off with, for the real-time strategy genre, the most influential game could be Dune II, from which the Command & Conquer, WarCraft and StarCraft series derive. For first-person shooters, most of the ideas were introduced in either Wolfenstein 3D (basic FPS concept) or Doom (up/down movement, many interactions with the environment such as triggering doors and lifts). The platform game gets much of its ideas from Space Panic (platforms) and Donkey Kong (jumping).