I wonder what they did exactly to set the corgis so far back with all those penalties. ("We’ve made some back-end changes to help mitigate some of the snowball effects we’ve seen that have led to Team Corgi running away with the first two days of the races despite their tiny legs. // We’ve changed some code to help deal with the imbalanced team sizes across the board.")

Edit:
They probably shouldn't have made the event rely on team popularity to begin with. Not only was the choice of which team to join either purely arbitrary or a bandwagon of everyone jumping to join whoever was in the lead, but it sucks to leave a portion of your customers out of any real chance of taking part in your event meaningfully.

They could have made one's chances of receiving a free game based on individual contribution instead of team rankings (the more points you contribute to the race, the more entries you get in the draw, with a minimum of 1 per account per draw) and the race results would just have been fluff. Or the race itself could have been based on proportional team member involvement rather than absolute numbers. i.e. if team corgi had 10 times the points of every other team, but only 1% of its members had actually contributed to the event, they might be outranked by a team where 50% of people actively boosted throughout the event. Just off the top of my head.

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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Well its clearly not just me as Valve felt the need to come out and publically state they are fully committed to linux, I have worked at enough large companies for that statement to worry me. If everything was fine you wouldnt need to keep saying something it would be a given yeah why wouldnt it be.

I mean, some people had started to worry that Ubuntu would drive Valve out of supporting Linux. It is a given that Valve wouldn't pull out because of one distribution after all the work and investment of the past months, but since people were worried, it made sense to reiterate their commitment, and more importantly clarify the fact that although their current recommendation is Ubuntu, it's not an exclusive relationship and they don't depend on Canonical.

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They do seem to have reworded things a bit and updated the layout of the page. No announcement that I can see, though.

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Quoting: fabertaweEdit: Also, in regards to the peeps deleting whole wishlists in the wrong belief they need to have just three games in the list for a chance to win them - surely they'll just add back the ones they want after the sale.

I think there can be a valid concern that some indie games will be forgotten when that time comes, especially for people with large lists or for games that were wishlisted a while ago and somewhat forgotten. Even if those were games that were less likely to be bought to begin with, cprn raises a valid point when it comes to wishlist discount notifications acting as publicity.

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Quoting: Guest"Limits breed creativity."
Wonderful, true, never tought of it.

I've felt it since secondary school writing assignments. Tell me to "write something in 500 words" and my brain just runs in circles thinking of what I should do. Give me constraints and my imagination immediately shoots down a path and works it like a puzzle. So I can absolutely relate with Zapa on this :)

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Quoting: RanceJusticeI can understand some of the concerns here, but I have to ask - don't people just "reorder" their list? (...) I don't see the point of deletions really in regards to the Steam sale?

It's not that people have to prune their lists to get the (potential) free game they want, it's that they think they do. This sale event is needlessly complicated and most people aren't going to read the actual rules page. For something involving so many people from so many different backgrounds (including linguistically), Valve really should have embraced Keep It Simple Stupid.

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Quoting: Mountain ManAt this point, what is the best Ubuntu alternative?

Depends on what you're after. I left Ubuntu after they forced too many UI decisions I didn't like, so Mint was a natural choice for me. Similar look and feel to good old Ubuntu + Gnome.

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Quoting: vector

Quoting: Salvatos...Steam Machines . . . Sure they're not selling them anymore...

You are, of course, correct in general principle, but would it be the Internet if there were no one around to split hairs? :wink:

I'm only operating on hearsay, so I'm happy to be corrected :)

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Even Steam Machines isn't something I would quite consider a cancelled project. Sure they're not selling them anymore and they didn't meet the success they would have liked, but they are still updating the OS and nothing's stopping them from making a new generation of Steam Machines in the future with the experience and insight they've gained. In the meantime, as far as I'm aware, those who did buy one aren't left in the dark. They still have a working PC, an OS that receives updates (or whatever other OS they choose to install on it), and their Steam account isn't going anywhere.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe most compelling case I've seen for Esperanto was as an easily-learned sort of "middle layer" diplomats and translators could use, like at the UN or whatever. Computers are arguably making such middle layers obsolete, and I've noticed that manga translations that are two step kind of suck anyway. So even that niche is pretty iffy.

Any translation that needs to pass through intermediary translations is definitely going to lose something in the process. Translation is always a lossy conversion, so to speak, and while you can keep the gist of the meaning through several conversions, you inevitably lose and gain subtleties with every layer, which can end up making a significant difference. Despite that, it is very common for companies (and open source projects) to translate their source material to English first, and from English to all other languages, because it's easier and/or cheaper to find translators for a language pair that includes English.

I would also expect Esperanto to have the same problem as Latin, for instance, and lag behind neologisms (which, in many industries, originate from English or are popularized by it) as well as lack the cultural identity to adapt to idioms and cultural references without sounding stilted. Just look at how much English is seeping into other natural languages because they can't keep up with all the new terms and agree on local equivalents before the anglicisms take root. How many languages use "e-mail" as is although it would be rather trivial to translate the words "electronic mail"?

I feel like if you're going to pepper your speech with English words because they either don't exist in your intermediary language or you don't know them, you might as well just learn English.

That said, I don't exactly have anything against Esperanto or learning it. I've always wanted to learn Latin at some point, and God knows that would be useless.

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