Of course they're going to do it for the linux desktop, at least for source engine games (provided DRM continues to function), they are in a position to out compete the entire market, PC, console, engines, development tools.

IMO current and past games are not the big win for Valve. The Source Engine will quickly become THE most attractive engine for future development. It's easily the most disruptive idea to the video game market in a generation. As if digital distribution via Steam wasn't already disruptive, I think this is on the order of...I don't know of a good analog...optical disc vs cartrige? Microsoft's game SDK thing?

• Easy cross platform PC
• easy distribution
• easy drm
• Nice SDK with all the trimmings that come with it
• easy community
• big market
• digital distribution
• (as yet unreleased) steambox console
• and STILL have potential or physical distribution on box or other console platforms

It's a masterstroke IMO.

Woah, hang on. Lets not get crazy now. At least try Chromiumo or Opera before going back to IE and stick with something that tries to embrace modern web standards as well as new proposed standards. Or Safari, as that is also based on Webkit. Or try webkit itself.

Please. Anything except IE. While the IE team is getting better, they are still holding back from widespread adoption of great new developments in web development.

Or if you like Chrome but do not like their privacy policy, consider SRWare Iron (a.k.a. Iron) - a modified version of Chromium with many (all?) of the privacy violating pieces removed. Or just go into Chrome itself and check out the "under the hood" privacy settings).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chromium - does not have the RLZ tracking enabled

Of course you have a choice. You chose to use facebook, despite the fact that it screws you over daily.

It's not exactly the same logic. The last service pack for XP was released April 21, 2008; it has been updated since with security patches. The last release for the 2.6 kernel was May 30, 2011, it has been updated with security and features. (yes, I know 3.0 is just a number change. It's a feature!) Guess it depends what you consider noteworthy. Security is noteworthy (and XP is supported through 2014), but generally users think of features as noteworthy updates.

Agreed. This is just a matter of engineering the reaction, not engineering the disposal of waste. Same goes for any waste - how do you solve the waste problem? Produce less waste!

They moved the buttons to the left so that per-window indicators can be used on the right. The keyboard window menu still work (Alt + whatever). The "why we did this" seems to change but AFAIK aptana + Apple OS are the reasons for the button change.

Even better would be if you could be turned into an npc that could do a little harassment but not enough damage to hinder the game. Kind of like the bob-omb in Mario Kart 64, but less of a threat to the game outcome.

Any good ideas about how much the gap could be closed if energy consumption was reduced through efficiency, policy, and awareness?

And James Earl Jones, who should have been in the credits (for SW 1 and 2) (and who should have been advised to take percentage vs flat fee).

Yes, that is the best solution, fall back to local if the CDN fails.

~272kB is with EVERY jQueryUI plugin, which few sane people would ever need. That is also a non-gzipped figure.

Using your example with all the bells and whistles, both (jQuery + jQueryUI) total only ~73kB gzipped.

jQuery 1.4.2 itself weighs in at ~24kB gzipped, and with just a few plugins enabled, jQueryUI is much smaller.

You're right. Big company services never go down...except those times they did and it was a huge problem. Remember the Amazon S3 outage? EC2 botnet attacks? Google GMail and document services going down? This month Google's jQuery libs on their CDN went down 2-3 times.

Stuff going down for a few hours is a lot of money lost.

I disagree. Libraries have greatly improved the usability of many websites. I also doubt that many people are pulling down 300kb of libraries every time, since most are minified and gzipped. Even with a ton of bells and whistles it's hard to hit 100kb of .js, The ever popular jQuery + jQuery UI is only ~30kb (with reasonably useful plugins like tabs, dialog, etc, not all the crazy and expensive FX).

I'm OK with users having to pull even 100kb one time to have a nicer browsing experience all around.

I really wish I could get over my paranoia and link to the libraries on google's code CDN. Slim chance, but if they go down and my sites are still up, there be problems!

It could be our fault if you wanted it to be:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/

This still requires an iTunes account. I had been hoping to avoid that.