60 MB at 1 Mbps takes 8 minutes. Let's say 10 minutes for overhead. Schedule it to run while you sleep.

The problem comes when licensing such libraries becomes cost prohibitive or requires the developer to give up the keys to his own kingdom.

Has there been news either way as to whether software from "unknown sources" can be installed on a Steam Machine?

Nobody knows how long the shutdown will last, which is why things are shut down to begin with.

And you can't just say "Oh, just mothball it for a few days, things will be fine" because not only is the money not there, the budget isn't there. Congress can constitutionally do whatever it wants with federal money (hence the shutdown), so even if Congress decides the overall shutdown is "over" it can still decide that particular agencies and departments get drastically reduced (or no) funds for '14. This is what budgets are all about.

They're protecting real, government-owned assets. They'd be doing the same regardless of whether the buildings, et al would be used again or sold off.

Funny you mentioned the Game Boy. Both the Nintendo DSi and the Nintendo 3DS, the successors to the Game Boy line, get operating system updates. I don't own one, so I can't tell you how frequent they are.

That's the point. Xbox One was supposed to refresh receipts every day. Steam does so every couple weeks. That and the Steam sales are apparently a big enough difference.

I thought it was the second, the first being OUYA. How does Steam's greenlight process compare to OUYA's sandbox process?

The problem with sharing is that you lend your entire library at once. When you log back in, the other user is kicked out even if playing a different game. Besides, what do you do if you want to play a multiplayer game with someone else living in or visiting your home?

Then what's a better platform for developers who want to reach users of Windows, OS X, desktop Linux, Android, iOS, Windows RT, Windows Phone, and the game consoles? Making a program work on more than one platform requires severe modifications, sometimes including translation of every line of code into a different programming language. Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games, for example, couldn't run anything but verifiably type-safe .NET CF CIL. And all except the first four require permission from the operating system publisher before your code will even run, and said permission is not guaranteed.

Or if your users happen to have chosen a platform that gives the operating system publisher veto power over apps, and the operating system publisher has chosen to exercise this power over your app. For example, see Bob's Game or any story about rejection from Apple's App Store.

Then that makes two open specs that must be implemented: POSIX and X11. But you have a point that right now the only notable environments that focus on implementing these specs are desktop Linux and the free *BSDs. OS X, while based in part on FreeBSD, is not a free *BSD and no longer includes XQuartz as a standard feature.

Any other? The Wii could be upgraded to run every GameCube game for about $30.* It printed money. The Game Boy Advance had every Game Boy and Game Boy Color game, and the DS had every Game Boy Advance game. They too printed money. On the other hand, the Atari 7800 had every Atari 2600 game. It bombed.

* Playing GameCube games on a Wii required a used controller and a used memory card.

Doc: Bye, Marty! Yaaa hoooo! It worked! It worked! I sent him out of the solar system!

Marty McVoyager in a different shirt runs up behind him: Doc! I'm back.

Doc: Guuuuuuuuuhhhhhh!!!!!

Marty: I'm back. I'm back from interstellar space!

Doc: Great Scott! It must be the interstellar flux transit event capacitor!

Why run Nesticle in DOSBox, an emulator in an emulator, when much better NES emulators such as FCEUX and Nestopia are ported to desktop Linux? It got to the point where some newly produced NES games have to detect Nesticle (which takes four lines of 6502 assembly language) and throw up a warning screen that Nesticle's inaccuracies may affect game performance.

You're thinking of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, which didn't come about until June 1998 (source). It was under a GPL-incompatible license until Qt/X11 was released sometime in 2000. (The archived press release appears to have vanished in the transition from Nokia to Digia.) GNOME began in August 1997, and this article from September 2000 states that it was explicitly to work around the non-free status of Qt at the time.