Because it ships with a gamepad and has a case designed to fit in next to a television. Your average PC has a massive case by consumer electronics standards: it makes Microsoft's infamously "XBOX HUEG" consoles look like a Wii or a PC Engine. It also ships with a mouse and keyboard and is marketed for use at a desk with a 19-24" desktop monitor. This is not the best fit for the sorts of games traditionally played on televisions, especially games that allow offline multiplayer using multiple gamepads. SteamOS and Steam Machine appear to be efforts to get more controller-friendly, Big Picture-ready games onto Steam.

Unless the game gets an update, and the update has increased the game's system requirements. Didn't this happen when Valve upgraded the Source engine not to run on older machines anymore, breaking existing copies of Half-Life 2? I know Sony did it with an EverQuest update back in 2001. Or is Valve going to do something like what Apple recently introduced, allowing users to download a previous version compatible with a given machine?

The TiVo DVR was tivoized and couldn't run anything but TiVo's own software. Did the TiVo DVR have games? And is there any evidence one way or the other as to whether these SteamOS devices will allow running X11/Linux games obtained from unknown sources?

Isn't that the one where the whole top of the plastic is a button, and you click by pressing down? Oh wait, that's the Apple Mouse (2006-2009).

Whatever window manager shipped as the default in Puppy as of early 2008.

I looked but failed to find it. In the past five years, has the default window manager of Puppy added such an option to its control center, or has Puppy switched to one that has such an option in its control center? I'd download and try it myself, but at the moment, I don't happen to have a spare machine handy on which to evaluate the latest Puppy.

So would you rather have to pay twelve independent teams to create versions of your application for Windows, Windows RT, OS X, X11/Linux, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Nintendo 3DS, Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita, and somehow ensure that all twelve applications behave identically?

Because Slashdot limits the length of story titles.

I installed Xubuntu after Canonical started pushing Unity hard in Ubuntu 11.10. It doesn't move the window when I Alt+drag it, but it does when I Super+drag it. Perhaps that's because I managed to find the switch in Settings > Settings Manager > Window Manager Tweaks > Accessibility > Key used to grab and move windows. It seems logical: hold the windows key to move windows.

The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?

Why the hate for paid applications? Not everything can be developed as 100% free software and free cultural works. Games, movie rental streaming, and annually updated tax preparation software are the biggies.

From the end user's point of view, it's the operating system publisher's fault for failing to negotiate with hardware manufacturers. If Microsoft can for Windows, and if Samsung and Amazon can for Android, why can't Canonical?

Last time I tried Puppy, its window manager stole Alt+drag as move window, and I had trouble finding how to change it through GUI. This interfered with GIMP gestures that use Alt.

Paint chat, or virtual whiteboard, is the multi-user evolution of oekaki. If the web is not for long-distance visual collaboration, then what is?

Expecting the current version of a computer program to be no larger in scope than the first version is a form of the appeal to tradition fallacy.

What's wrong is the difficulty of getting your application approved by Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.