In 1983, store shelves had become filled with me-too shovelware for the Atari 2600, and people stopped buying video games altogether after having dropped upwards of $60 (inflation adjusted) on something that's no fun. After a recession in the North American video game market through 1983 and 1984, Nintendo elbowed its way into the market by using lockdown to reassure retailers that the NES wouldn't have the same sort of me-too shovelware that the Atari 2600 had. Valve is doing the exact opposite.

Except for games designed around couch multiplayer. Several other Slashdot users have repeatedly reminded me that the majority aren't willing to connect a PC to a living room TV. Nor do people already own gamepads. This leaves people having to buy gamepads and having to crowd around a comparatively tiny PC monitor in order to play a game together. The Steam Machine avoids this by shipping with a Steam Controller and coming in a consumer-electronics-style case.

In order to run on a Steam Machine without also hogging a Windows PC for the duration, a game has to be ported to desktop Linux. I was under the impression that less than 10 percent of the Steam library was ported to desktop Linux, though I'd appreciate links to sources that correct this.

I don't see how this thwarts government spying. A catalog must be online somewhere, and anything the government is interested in, well, bonus, set up a cam opposite and write down whoever visits. Hell, it makes foreign spying even easier -- just another tourist visiting your country.

What makes you think that? The biggest monitor in the typical household is in the living room, and I gather from other users' comments like those linked here that the majority of people are unwilling to move the gaming PC into the living room. Living room PCs are beyond the lowest common denominator.

I thought we already established in the thread about Slashdot's new layout that most people maximize one window to fill the screen and don't use tiling window managers. For example: "Low-level creatures like us can only read one webpage at a time. It makes a lot more sense for us to have one window open and some of us prefer that window to be fullscreen." I mentioned that people could keep two web pages side by side, and people reacted as if Steve Jobs had told them they were "holding it wrong".

Not if your computer doesn't use a paging file. (It's common for handheld devices not to use one because of NAND flash wear considerations.) And not if the old X11 cruft happens to have been placed in the same 4 KiB page as a heavily used part of the code.

Not even a product with a strict deadline, like an annual budget for the national government?

Or, just as likely, the upstream patent holders who prohibit the hardware vendors from providing open drivers.

I didn't see that misbehavior when I switched from Unity to Xfce by typing sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop back in the 11.10 days.

Have them block the social recommendation crap from resolving using a hosts file, and they'll realize when they see how much faster pages load. I think APK is on to something.

Unless the cartel bundles what you don't like with what you like, such as the cooking channels with a cable channel that shows film adaptations of Tom Clancy novels.

First off, as has been noted elsewhere, the traffic appears to be rerouted to a single "We're closed" server rather than each organization hosting their own.

Secondly, these organizations, as public servants, still have an obligation to inform the public of the situation (i.e. "It's us, not you. And don't bother faxing, calling or driving in, either.").

The federal government spent the past few days and weeks preparing. The mothballs were prepared, all that was left was to commit.