Thing is, this isn't even a joke, if we look at it as instead "Linux needed someone with major influence to make a point of it".

Combine with Microsoft having some missteps with Windows and cramming more invasive stuff into it, and it's little surprise people are switching. I expect it will remain a small market share since the Steam Survey is looking at *every* user of Steam, including people who only have it because it is where their one favorite game lives. However, I would not be surprised to see the 'core PC gamer' market - the people who buy oodles of games - shift more to Linux over time.

Clearly a lot of people here are unfamiliar with the retrocomputing scene; I'm most familiar with David Murray (The 8-bit guy) and his Commander X16 project which is essentially "what if we made a C64-era computer with modern ease of use?"

These aren't just nostalgia-bait, as those early 8-bit and 16-bit systems were a time when an interested hobbyist could pretty well understand *everything* going on with the system. Thus, there's a use as educational devices (much as a Raspberry Pi is a scaled down 'modern' system).

Plus, of course, the C64 *was* a pretty decent games machine for the time and there is still homebrew being made for it today, often with tricks that were never discovered during the production lifetime of the machine.

God forbid /. have anything but FOSS stuff and breathless takes about the new AI tool that will do something it won't actually do, in the end.

It's a fascinating confirmation of history; it is heavy evidence against many conspiracy theories that arose around her disappearance, suggesting what a reasonable person might have already guessed (flying a small plane of the time period across a very large ocean is dangerous). Much like scientific studies that confirm what "everybody already knew", nailing something down *for sure* is quite important.

I suppose the concern is that they *AREN'T* vanity universities, for some careers. Look at how often every politician happened to go to the same university, or other groups - even ones you wouldn't expect like creative fields.

Actually, one of the better "what viruses, trojans, etc. are and how to secure your computer against them" books I've read mentioned an early example of a compression virus - the program had virus-like delivery, but for the purpose of Stacker/DoubleSpace-style disk compression. When a new drive was detected, it would spread - AFTER asking, politely, if you wanted the new volume compressed. Main advantage of it over the more common systems was that it was user-invisible. Main disadvantages - it's difficult to get paid for a self-replicating program, and having to have the compression/decompression code on every disk made the gains less valuable on smaller disk sizes.

Actually, a viral virus scanner might be kinda neat... if only for the irony!