Those awful pop-up ads render this pretty much unplayable.

Wow. It used to be 10k for referring. I knew their turnover rate in Dev was pretty astronomical, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

Actually, our turnover is very low. We have a team of 53 engineers and over 40 are less than two years old in the company. Only 2 engineers have left in the past year pursuing different options. A few others hired in the past two years that left because of performance issues, but very small. I can tell you more if you are interested.

My brain first parsed 'TPB' as 'Trade Paperback.' SimCity: The Novel sounds like a horrible idea, but I wouldn't put it past EA to try and milk the franchise that way.

Christopher Nolan is only producing this film. Wally Pfister, Nolan's longtime cinematographer, is directing.

This should go at the top. I was really annoyed to read this.

His career as a producer seems fairly limited, but it's worth considering that Steven Spielberg was a producer on Transformers.

I didn't see much of a Spielberg touch on that movie.

It will certainly be interesting to see how much of the "Nolan" aesthetic is present in this film. I'm definitely excited.

Support: Your salesperson told you WHAT?! FIZZBUZZ isn't really capable of that, I'm sorry. No. No. I'm sorry, no. No, again, I apologize, I can't change that for you right now. If you'd like, I can put in a feature request for you. No, I can't give you an ETA...

This is spot on. It's exactly what happened at HubSpot with their support team.

People will try to game whatever metric you use to evaluate them by. This does not mean metrics are bad or useless. It just means you need mechanisms to detect and account for gaming attempts.

I'm confused. What was the point of posting this link? This is just the Steam group for the beta. It doesn't include any new information (or a way to get in the beta) that I can see.

An official group is yet another milestone to having Steam on Linux. Also, there's a prominent `Join' button for them early adopters :-)

Right, but this doesn't guarantee beta access, nor does it confirm anything we didn't already know. I'm not trying to be prickly, I just don't see the point of this submission as it stands. If anything, the title should have been, "Join the Steam for Linux Beta Group" or something along those lines.

And if a million people join the group, they'll know they're onto something.

They already know they're on to something. If Gabe's worst nightmares about Windows come true, Linux will be his only refuge.

Yes, but unless they can convince large publishers that writing games for Linux is a good idea, it's not much of a refuge, is it?

Having a hundred thousand people sign up for his Steam group might be enough to get the ball rolling that way, though.

Interesting. I'm still not going to install it on my gaming machine, though.

At least until the latest DirectX is W8 only...

Doesn't matter, it usually takes quite a while before there's enough justification to update Windows for the latest version DirectX to run whatever game requires it. Right now there's only a handful of games that require Win7 for that version of DirectX, I believe DX11?

Mind telling us why?

I haven't read any reviews or stats which suggest it will degragate gaming performance.

Sure. I've tested W8 in a VM and had a horrible experience. The OS is optimized for tablets and touch-based devices, not desktops.

Also, Windows 7 is perfectly fine at the moment.

I'm using Windows 8 in a VM, and I'm liking it just fine. I just think of it as: instead of a Start menu, we now have a start screen - that's it. Most of the time (ie. when you don't need to access the Start menu), you never see the Metro side of it at all, so it just looks like W7 to me. But, yes, that means there's no reason to upgrade to W8.

I'm in the same boat. I really like W8, and I think it's a shame it's getting a bad rap because it's different. I'd give it a shot with an open mind for a day or two.

It's fantastic on a multi-monitor setup; the start screen and full screen apps can be anchored to one screen. So if you want to read a PDF full screen, for example, while doing desktop work on another, it works very well.

Also, you can have multiple task bars on multiple screens if you want. And you can do almost everything with the keyboard that I used to use the mouse for.

If you miss the start menu, try this: hit the windows key and start typing the name of the program you want to open.

I would have to say that everything you described as a positive for Win8 can be done now in Win7. Well, unless they introduced new keyboard shortcuts. Not to discredit your opinion on Win8 though, if you like it then that's cool.

It can be done, but it's much faster in Win8, for example. The start menu search in Win7 is noticably slower.

And there are new shortcuts, like "Windows-x." It's the closest I've come in a while to feeling as productive as in my old FVWM setup.

Can't speak for the original commenter, but even if there is no degradation I personally don't see enough advantages to justify upgrading my gaming PC.

Same for me, I just recently built a new gaming rig with Win7 and my past machine was WinXP. I have no reason whatsoever to go to Win8 anytime soon. They could probably give me an update license for free and I probably wouldn't bother.

I build my Windows boxes, which I use for gaming and productivity, and I will be skipping Windows 8 because the interface is much, much more poorly designed than Windows 7. The Start screen is a pain, Metro apps are less useful than their non-Metro equivalents on a large monitor, and they spilled ribbon all over my Explorer windows. I'm happy to use Windows 7 until MS comes to their senses and releases Windows 9 Classic Desktop Edition.