Sure...if there were any games worth buying for it. I've had my PS3 since four days after launch...you know how many PS3-exclusive games I have for it?
You buy a console at launch and then are surprised there are no games for it??? Tell me any console that gets more than handful of worthwhile games in the first 9 months of its life at least. The moral of what you are saying is that you shouldn't buy at launch unless you're prepared to wait for titles. That rules holds for any console.
Anyway I think of lots of excellent PS3 titles, some of which are exclusive, some of which are not - Resistance, Heavenly Sword, Oblivion, R6: Vegas, Super Stardust HD, Locoroco, Warhawk, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Virtual Fighter are all very good games. And there are something like 40-50 new titles coming between now and January.
Releasing a crippled device at a lower price is not a "price cut" in any dictionary.
Isn't it? Whereas the PS3 cost 599 at launch, you can now buy it for 399. If BC means so much to you, buy the 60Gb bundle or hang onto your PS2.
What is more, the compatibility was just a software emulator in the European consoles anyway!
No it wasn't. It was software assisted since it still contained a GS chip. And the BC was very good indeed.
but from a marketing point of view, Sony continues to baffle me.
I expect their reasoning is that for the sake of a few periphery features they can deliver a console at a price that makes it very attractive to a great number of people in time for Christmas. If lack of BC bothers you or any other consumer, then buy the 60Gb bundle which is also 100 cheaper.
There are lots of games for the PS3 with 40-50 more due between now and January. It would be interesting to compare how many games the 360 had 11 months into its life.
For a cut down version of the console this is still far too expensive - I suspect it will appeal to people who already own a PS2 and will just hang on to their old box for backwards compatibility.
It's about the same price as an XBox 360 Elite and in some ways still superior to it, such as having wifi, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, HDMI 1.3, blu-ray etc. The HDD is less, and it might be missing an HDMI cable but otherwise what's to separate them. Of course too network play is free on the PS3 and things like the HDD, headsets etc. use industry standards so those are potential savings too. Lack of BC sucks but then you can always buy the 60Gb model if you want.
I'd say the PS3 is getting pretty close to the 360 price wise and has enough to easily justify it.
No, the EU PAL PS3s emulated the Emotion Engine, but had a hardware graphics synthesizer. There was NEVER EVER ANY VERSION THAT HAD SOFTWARE ONLY EMULATION. Sorry for the all-caps but this particular misunderstanding keeps getting repeated. I assume Sony have chopped the GS from their new mainboard so there is no PS2 circuitry at all now. As such you don't get any emulation until / if they figure how to emulate the GS in software too. People more knowledgable than I say that this would be difficult because the GS has a very low latency and wide bandwidth. Hence the reason it wasn't removed even in the PAL version.
The 40Gb model is coming to the US at the end of October for $399. That's really a bargain when you're getting blu-ray + plus a kickass games console with free online gaming.
Because all backwards compatibility was not done in software. The PAL PS3 and the 80Gb US model (the so-called software BC models) still included a PS2 graphics synthesizer chip. I assume that has gone.
Anyway if you want BC, then the option is still there for the time being. Buy the 60Gb bundle. That has also had its price cut.
Or go for the cheaper version which is still a full PS3, blu-ray player and hang onto your PS2.
You'll be waiting a long time since the chances of studios selling non-DRM encumbered movie (or TV) content is close to zero. I expect you will see H264 HD capable DVD players though. So if you can find HD content somewhere you'll be able to encode and play it from a burned DVD.
I'd love an OLPC for myself. My kid can go to hell - I want one! He's two so I doubt he'll be too cut up about it. He can have mine after I've done with it.
I got a Compaq for $350 a few weeks ago. 15" widescreen, NVidia accelerated graphics. Just over 5 pounds, feels sturdy in my hands. I use it to cart numbers between work/school/home as I work on my PhD. The XO weighs over 3 pounds and is worse in every techinical respect (processor, memory, hard disk space, drives, etc). Does 2 pounds really make or break portability to you?
The whole point is that I don't want a hulking great laptop. It's not just the weight (which is lighter), but also the volume. I don't want something that requires a laptop case, or a power brick, or needs recharging all the time. I just want a very small, cheap laptop that lets me browse, check emails, write a document, play a few desktop games, run Skype and that's about it. At the moment I use an iPaq for holidays but the browsing is terrible and so is having tap on the keyboard to type.
I see the OLPC as a cheap and rugged device that I can toss into a backpack or carry case. I can take it out and use it on the beach, or a coffee shop, or an aircraft clip tray. It has a keyboard, microphone, camera, speakers, mousepad in a very small form factor. The Asus Eee PC is also attractive for the same reason, although I doubt it will be as rugged but it benefits from looking a lot nicer.
I'd possibly buy one for $400 but I wouldn't want the software that comes with it. I hope Bitfrost is disabled and you can flash an alternative OS onto it. Otherwise it's the Asus Eee PC for me. To be honest I really need something like these PCs. A normal laptop is too heavy, too expensive, too fragile to take on short breaks or travelling. These things fit the bill perfectly. I can see an enormous market for them.
Maybe they should even sell a proper commercial OLPC (in black perhaps) to consumers expressly for this purpose. Use the profits to subsidize the educational version.
I won't be playing any more MMOs without a free trial. I burnt out on them years ago, and nothing has changed considerably since then. WoW managed to intrigue me (not addict) for a couple months, but that's it. The rest didn't make it through a trial period.
My first experience of a pay MMO was Everquest (I played and even ran a Diku mud before that). I played EQ for close to two years. During the Shadows of Luclin expansion, Sony / Verant really shafted their customers by forcing a new client on people even if they didn't want the expansion. Understandable really from a support point of view, but the client was buggy as hell, as was the world in general. There was a full month or so where the game client or server would crash without warning. It was during this period I thought to myself that I just wasn't having any fun any more. Most of the time I was crafting to raise money, sitting in the tunnel west of Freeport/auc'ing my stuff, camping items I needed for crafting, or sitting on a boat waiting to get to or from those places.
It was boring as hell yet here I was paying to do this crap. All of the crashes gave me time to reflect. Sure I had invested a lot of time in the game, but was it fun? No. I cancelled my sub.
I've played lots of MMOs since, but I can spot the same tell tale signs of grind in virtually game I've played. Normally I'll play on a free trial or the first 30-days and realise that there is nothing new in the title. You advance beyond level 7 or 8 and you start grinding - to buy stuff, or repair stuff, or to speed travel or whatever. It concerns me how popular WoW is. I wonder how many of those people are actually having fun, and how many are stuck in the same situation I was with EQ and just don't realise it. WoW is certainly better than EQ in virtually every way but the it uses the same fundamental technique to keep people playing - grind.
A very decent MMO is Puzzle Pirates just for being like no other MMO at all. You can happily waste lots of time doing nothing but playing puzzles. If you want to grind, then the option is there to do it but its just so much fun to play the basic games if you feel like it. EVE online is also good but you really need a lot of time to play it.
I played the beta on a free weekend trial key and to be honest it didn't feel like I was playing anything new or interesting. It's a grungy space marine style game where you kill things with blasters instead of swords. Otherwise it's typical MMO fair - do quests, grind, buff etc. The difference of course is that the loot is enhanced armour, weapons and your character advances in weapons and other military skills with some with psychic abilities which are basically spells. It felt most like a cross between Anarchy Online and Star Wars Galaxies and that's not necessarily something to be happy about. I uninstalled it after 3 hours.
MMOs just seem to be stuck in a rut that they can't escape. Even games like Lord of the Rings online (one of the better MMOs at the moment) still can't escape from experience bars, skill points, menial quests and whatnot. I was hoping for more from Tabula Rasa and I really didn't feel there was much more.
This wouldn't stop them. The Flex Builder installer doesn't ask for your serial #. I think more it is more likely because the installer asks if you want to install the plugin into an existing Eclipse / WebSphere / whatever install, or install the standalone FlexBuilder IDE (also based on Eclipse). The standalone version appears to be more stable and is installed with its own JVM. You don't get asked for your serial # until you create a Flex project.
I miss refactoring, reformatting and other functionality that most other eclipse builders offer. The UI designer is excellent though and miles better than anything I've seen for Java. Slightly tangential but the web service support in Flex is HORRIBLE. They need a wizard that generates proper type checked stubs from the wsdl rather than the dynamic binding crap they have at the moment.
I burn H264 vids to a DVD. It stands to reason that some hardware device would eventually get around to doing the same. The more important question is where the hell does it record its HD content from.
Sometimes the best don't always win. I think Nintendo pulled a con job, launching a "next gen" console which was essentially a Gamecube 2.0 with a new controller. The public simply didn't know or care enough to realise what they're getting is woefully underpowered compared to either the 360 or PS3.
It's possible that some of the hype is beginning to wear off. The Wii is still the best seller by a mile, but its lead is diminishing month by month. It's possible that price drops on the 360 and PS3 will nullify its lead altogether.
To some perhaps. To others he's just an effective team leader who makes decisions to focus efforts. The alternative is usually a lot of people flapping around like headless chickens since they don't know which way to go. Worse yet if the thing is run by an ineffective person or committee where development slows to a glacial pace because no patches are accepted or bogged down in protracted politics and debate. If you want to see what the kernel development would look like in those circumstances, look up XFree86, Emacs, Hurd etc.
The PS3 is a year behind the 360 and probably has exactly the same number of games in its life as the 360 did this time last year. It is certainly well over the drought that traditionally accompanies new consoles. There are something like 30 or 40 titles being release in the US before the year end.
I think ultimately you will see them hung on walls, installed in aircraft seats or whatever. If the screen is ultralight then they could always split out screen from the technical gubbins and put them in a box that can be hidden somewhere.
I agree that this particular device is not that useful and very expensive. But it's undeniably sexy.
Assuming there are, or even the possibility that one could be crafted, it seems quite justifiable to call this a security fix. And aside from that, it's just dumb not to include it.
I fear that you are showing your utter ignorance of game development my friend. Yes, Half-Life 2 was written against Direct3D primarily, and now it will have to be ported to one of the PS3's graphics APIs; Either their OpenGL|ES + extensions or their (proprietary, by the way) lower-level API that nearly all boxed retail games have utilized. In all probability, its not porting D3D to OpenGL, but porting D3D to this low-level API.
Why do you assume games require lower level 3D APIs? What proof do you have for that? I acknowledge that hardware extensions such as shaders that may require lower level calls.
The portion of the graphics code which deals directly with the API is maybe half of the overall graphics code. Somehow you've managed to imply that porting 5-10 percent of the code requires a virtual re-write -- an implication that, frankly, falls on its face.
I haven't implied any such thing. DirectX encompasses more than just graphics. DirectX has APIs for sound, music, controllers, 3D & 2D graphics, texturing, multimedia, networking. Which is why I said "it might have something to do with the fact that the Source engine was written against DirectX. The PS3 uses OpenGL for graphics and has other APIs for things such as sound, controllers etc.". If I cared to look at the leaked source code for HL2 I expect it would call many different DirectX APIs and probably a bunch of Win32 APIs in addition. Furthermore I expect it hasn't bothered to abstract such calls in a way to aid porting. Hence why I said they should have made their code more portable. Making code more portable means anticipating other APIs or other platforms and using proper abstraction to allow just those sections to be reimplemented without re-writing the whole engine. Clearly Valve were faced with a virtual re-write or they wouldn't have punted the port over to EA.
Who says that the engine needs to be multi-threaded and use the SPUs? Its the PS3s system architecture that really demands it.
I didn't say anything about SPUs, but the architecture doesn't demand it all. Certainly you get better performance if you make the effort, but I'd be surprised if any 1st gen EA / Ubisoft / Activision games touched the SPUs at all. Sure, some of them suffered for not doing it, but not all of them. Additionally, EA / Ubisoft / Activision have the good sense to write their games over in-house middleware that abstracts most of the differences between PC, 360, PS3 & Mac. It means the game code is mostly platform neutral and that once the middleware does start to take advantage of a feature in a platform (e.g. SPUs in the PS3), it doesn't necessarily "infect" the game code. We're starting to see some EA sports titles run 60fps now, probably because the middleware is starting to use SPUs.
Valve is also on record for saying their engine was single threaded. Even if they have since added some multi-threaded functionality (e.g. streaming textures or whatever) this does not necessarily mean an SPU is required since the PPU still supports two threads in hardware. And even if an SPU were required, again proper abstraction in the game code should mean that the difference between SPU or thread is mostly irrelevant to the caller.
The PPU (the single PowerPC core in the PS3, and the same as the 3 in the Xbox 360) is very underpowered. Its the rough equivalent of a 1.5Ghz Pentium 3m despite the fact that its clocked at 3ghz.
I know from experience that the performance of Linux on the PS3 is underwhelming, but then games consoles don't typically need to run dozens or hundreds of threads with prioritized context switching. So performance really depends on a lot of factors.
Next you have to consider that some of that PPU power is designated as reserved by the system software which runs in the background, and that, due to the design of the PPU you must have at least 2 active threads to reach anywhere near peak performance -- Its an in-order dual-threaded processor, meaning that when one th
It's not Valve's fault that Sony is going off and forcing developers to use their own library instead of using industry standard toolkits. That's purely Sony's fault.
Are you trolling or just stupid? Last time I looked, OpenGL *is* an open standard. Just one of many supported out of the box by the PS3 SDK.
As for being a "development nightmare", I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that even remotely supports that claim.
This isn't exactly anything new, Valve has been very transparent on the disaster that is developing for the PS3. Just try a simple Google search.
If there is a reason for the PS3 being delayed (and who says it is?), it might have something to do with the fact that the Source engine was written against DirectX. The PS3 uses OpenGL for graphics and has other APIs for things such as sound, controllers etc. Consequently the engine needs a virtual rewrite irrespective. And who says they need SPUs, or that even if they did that they'd be utilised significantly in a game engine which has been predominantly single threaded throughout most of its life?
Perhaps Valve should have the foresight to make their engine more portable to begin with rather than bitch that a system (be it Linux, Mac, PS3, Wii or whatever) DARES to not use Microsoft proprietary APIs.
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And what titles would those be?
You buy a console at launch and then are surprised there are no games for it??? Tell me any console that gets more than handful of worthwhile games in the first 9 months of its life at least. The moral of what you are saying is that you shouldn't buy at launch unless you're prepared to wait for titles. That rules holds for any console.
Anyway I think of lots of excellent PS3 titles, some of which are exclusive, some of which are not - Resistance, Heavenly Sword, Oblivion, R6: Vegas, Super Stardust HD, Locoroco, Warhawk, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Virtual Fighter are all very good games. And there are something like 40-50 new titles coming between now and January.
Isn't it? Whereas the PS3 cost 599 at launch, you can now buy it for 399. If BC means so much to you, buy the 60Gb bundle or hang onto your PS2.
What is more, the compatibility was just a software emulator in the European consoles anyway!
No it wasn't. It was software assisted since it still contained a GS chip. And the BC was very good indeed.
but from a marketing point of view, Sony continues to baffle me.
I expect their reasoning is that for the sake of a few periphery features they can deliver a console at a price that makes it very attractive to a great number of people in time for Christmas. If lack of BC bothers you or any other consumer, then buy the 60Gb bundle which is also 100 cheaper.
There are lots of games for the PS3 with 40-50 more due between now and January. It would be interesting to compare how many games the 360 had 11 months into its life.
It's about the same price as an XBox 360 Elite and in some ways still superior to it, such as having wifi, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, HDMI 1.3, blu-ray etc. The HDD is less, and it might be missing an HDMI cable but otherwise what's to separate them. Of course too network play is free on the PS3 and things like the HDD, headsets etc. use industry standards so those are potential savings too. Lack of BC sucks but then you can always buy the 60Gb model if you want.
I'd say the PS3 is getting pretty close to the 360 price wise and has enough to easily justify it.
No, the EU PAL PS3s emulated the Emotion Engine, but had a hardware graphics synthesizer. There was NEVER EVER ANY VERSION THAT HAD SOFTWARE ONLY EMULATION. Sorry for the all-caps but this particular misunderstanding keeps getting repeated. I assume Sony have chopped the GS from their new mainboard so there is no PS2 circuitry at all now. As such you don't get any emulation until / if they figure how to emulate the GS in software too. People more knowledgable than I say that this would be difficult because the GS has a very low latency and wide bandwidth. Hence the reason it wasn't removed even in the PAL version.
The 40Gb model is coming to the US at the end of October for $399. That's really a bargain when you're getting blu-ray + plus a kickass games console with free online gaming.
Anyway if you want BC, then the option is still there for the time being. Buy the 60Gb bundle. That has also had its price cut.
Or go for the cheaper version which is still a full PS3, blu-ray player and hang onto your PS2.
You'll be waiting a long time since the chances of studios selling non-DRM encumbered movie (or TV) content is close to zero. I expect you will see H264 HD capable DVD players though. So if you can find HD content somewhere you'll be able to encode and play it from a burned DVD.
I'd love an OLPC for myself. My kid can go to hell - I want one! He's two so I doubt he'll be too cut up about it. He can have mine after I've done with it.
The whole point is that I don't want a hulking great laptop. It's not just the weight (which is lighter), but also the volume. I don't want something that requires a laptop case, or a power brick, or needs recharging all the time. I just want a very small, cheap laptop that lets me browse, check emails, write a document, play a few desktop games, run Skype and that's about it. At the moment I use an iPaq for holidays but the browsing is terrible and so is having tap on the keyboard to type.
I see the OLPC as a cheap and rugged device that I can toss into a backpack or carry case. I can take it out and use it on the beach, or a coffee shop, or an aircraft clip tray. It has a keyboard, microphone, camera, speakers, mousepad in a very small form factor. The Asus Eee PC is also attractive for the same reason, although I doubt it will be as rugged but it benefits from looking a lot nicer.
Maybe they should even sell a proper commercial OLPC (in black perhaps) to consumers expressly for this purpose. Use the profits to subsidize the educational version.
My first experience of a pay MMO was Everquest (I played and even ran a Diku mud before that). I played EQ for close to two years. During the Shadows of Luclin expansion, Sony / Verant really shafted their customers by forcing a new client on people even if they didn't want the expansion. Understandable really from a support point of view, but the client was buggy as hell, as was the world in general. There was a full month or so where the game client or server would crash without warning. It was during this period I thought to myself that I just wasn't having any fun any more. Most of the time I was crafting to raise money, sitting in the tunnel west of Freeport /auc'ing my stuff, camping items I needed for crafting, or sitting on a boat waiting to get to or from those places.
It was boring as hell yet here I was paying to do this crap. All of the crashes gave me time to reflect. Sure I had invested a lot of time in the game, but was it fun? No. I cancelled my sub.
I've played lots of MMOs since, but I can spot the same tell tale signs of grind in virtually game I've played. Normally I'll play on a free trial or the first 30-days and realise that there is nothing new in the title. You advance beyond level 7 or 8 and you start grinding - to buy stuff, or repair stuff, or to speed travel or whatever. It concerns me how popular WoW is. I wonder how many of those people are actually having fun, and how many are stuck in the same situation I was with EQ and just don't realise it. WoW is certainly better than EQ in virtually every way but the it uses the same fundamental technique to keep people playing - grind.
A very decent MMO is Puzzle Pirates just for being like no other MMO at all. You can happily waste lots of time doing nothing but playing puzzles. If you want to grind, then the option is there to do it but its just so much fun to play the basic games if you feel like it. EVE online is also good but you really need a lot of time to play it.
MMOs just seem to be stuck in a rut that they can't escape. Even games like Lord of the Rings online (one of the better MMOs at the moment) still can't escape from experience bars, skill points, menial quests and whatnot. I was hoping for more from Tabula Rasa and I really didn't feel there was much more.
This wouldn't stop them. The Flex Builder installer doesn't ask for your serial #. I think more it is more likely because the installer asks if you want to install the plugin into an existing Eclipse / WebSphere / whatever install, or install the standalone FlexBuilder IDE (also based on Eclipse). The standalone version appears to be more stable and is installed with its own JVM. You don't get asked for your serial # until you create a Flex project.
I miss refactoring, reformatting and other functionality that most other eclipse builders offer. The UI designer is excellent though and miles better than anything I've seen for Java. Slightly tangential but the web service support in Flex is HORRIBLE. They need a wizard that generates proper type checked stubs from the wsdl rather than the dynamic binding crap they have at the moment.
I burn H264 vids to a DVD. It stands to reason that some hardware device would eventually get around to doing the same. The more important question is where the hell does it record its HD content from.
It's possible that some of the hype is beginning to wear off. The Wii is still the best seller by a mile, but its lead is diminishing month by month. It's possible that price drops on the 360 and PS3 will nullify its lead altogether.
To some perhaps. To others he's just an effective team leader who makes decisions to focus efforts. The alternative is usually a lot of people flapping around like headless chickens since they don't know which way to go. Worse yet if the thing is run by an ineffective person or committee where development slows to a glacial pace because no patches are accepted or bogged down in protracted politics and debate. If you want to see what the kernel development would look like in those circumstances, look up XFree86, Emacs, Hurd etc.
The PS3 is a year behind the 360 and probably has exactly the same number of games in its life as the 360 did this time last year. It is certainly well over the drought that traditionally accompanies new consoles. There are something like 30 or 40 titles being release in the US before the year end.
I agree that this particular device is not that useful and very expensive. But it's undeniably sexy.
Assuming there are, or even the possibility that one could be crafted, it seems quite justifiable to call this a security fix. And aside from that, it's just dumb not to include it.
Why do you assume games require lower level 3D APIs? What proof do you have for that? I acknowledge that hardware extensions such as shaders that may require lower level calls.
The portion of the graphics code which deals directly with the API is maybe half of the overall graphics code. Somehow you've managed to imply that porting 5-10 percent of the code requires a virtual re-write -- an implication that, frankly, falls on its face.
I haven't implied any such thing. DirectX encompasses more than just graphics. DirectX has APIs for sound, music, controllers, 3D & 2D graphics, texturing, multimedia, networking. Which is why I said "it might have something to do with the fact that the Source engine was written against DirectX. The PS3 uses OpenGL for graphics and has other APIs for things such as sound, controllers etc.". If I cared to look at the leaked source code for HL2 I expect it would call many different DirectX APIs and probably a bunch of Win32 APIs in addition. Furthermore I expect it hasn't bothered to abstract such calls in a way to aid porting. Hence why I said they should have made their code more portable. Making code more portable means anticipating other APIs or other platforms and using proper abstraction to allow just those sections to be reimplemented without re-writing the whole engine. Clearly Valve were faced with a virtual re-write or they wouldn't have punted the port over to EA.
Who says that the engine needs to be multi-threaded and use the SPUs? Its the PS3s system architecture that really demands it.
I didn't say anything about SPUs, but the architecture doesn't demand it all. Certainly you get better performance if you make the effort, but I'd be surprised if any 1st gen EA / Ubisoft / Activision games touched the SPUs at all. Sure, some of them suffered for not doing it, but not all of them. Additionally, EA / Ubisoft / Activision have the good sense to write their games over in-house middleware that abstracts most of the differences between PC, 360, PS3 & Mac. It means the game code is mostly platform neutral and that once the middleware does start to take advantage of a feature in a platform (e.g. SPUs in the PS3), it doesn't necessarily "infect" the game code. We're starting to see some EA sports titles run 60fps now, probably because the middleware is starting to use SPUs.
Valve is also on record for saying their engine was single threaded. Even if they have since added some multi-threaded functionality (e.g. streaming textures or whatever) this does not necessarily mean an SPU is required since the PPU still supports two threads in hardware. And even if an SPU were required, again proper abstraction in the game code should mean that the difference between SPU or thread is mostly irrelevant to the caller.
The PPU (the single PowerPC core in the PS3, and the same as the 3 in the Xbox 360) is very underpowered. Its the rough equivalent of a 1.5Ghz Pentium 3m despite the fact that its clocked at 3ghz.
I know from experience that the performance of Linux on the PS3 is underwhelming, but then games consoles don't typically need to run dozens or hundreds of threads with prioritized context switching. So performance really depends on a lot of factors.
Next you have to consider that some of that PPU power is designated as reserved by the system software which runs in the background, and that, due to the design of the PPU you must have at least 2 active threads to reach anywhere near peak performance -- Its an in-order dual-threaded processor, meaning that when one th
Are you trolling or just stupid? Last time I looked, OpenGL *is* an open standard. Just one of many supported out of the box by the PS3 SDK.
As for being a "development nightmare", I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that even remotely supports that claim.
If there is a reason for the PS3 being delayed (and who says it is?), it might have something to do with the fact that the Source engine was written against DirectX. The PS3 uses OpenGL for graphics and has other APIs for things such as sound, controllers etc. Consequently the engine needs a virtual rewrite irrespective. And who says they need SPUs, or that even if they did that they'd be utilised significantly in a game engine which has been predominantly single threaded throughout most of its life?
Perhaps Valve should have the foresight to make their engine more portable to begin with rather than bitch that a system (be it Linux, Mac, PS3, Wii or whatever) DARES to not use Microsoft proprietary APIs.