“Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PCs, and OEMs who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.” Valve's CEO Gabe Newell stated this back in July and only two months later we have the confirmation that they are testing Steam for Linux. An internal beta will start next week, and afterwards, sometime in October, Valve will invite (only) 1,000 people to test it.

The rumor mill is all a flutter today with the discovery of a job posting on Valve’s website looking for an industrial designer. This posting has fueled the speculation that Valve will official enter the hardware business in the near future. Earlier this year Gabe Newell made the statement that “If we have to sell hardware we will”. This comment combined with Newell’s dislike of Windows 8 (he called it a catastrophe), Valve’s work on porting Steam and Valve games to Linus, and a few other clues could mean that Valve is considering the fabled Valve Box or even a full gaming “PC” of their own.

As of late Valve has been running experiments with their successful source engine on Linux. Although it runs well in a Windows environment a relatively large gain has been seen using Linux. Valve used a system with an i7 3930k CPU, a beefy Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 and a healthy dose of 32gb RAM to top off the test rig. The two operating systems of choice were Windows 7 64 bit (SP 1) against Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit. Valve mentions in their new Linux Blog that although they did use a 32 bit version of Ubuntu they will switch to a 64 bit version for future testing.

When Microsoft announced their Windows RT and Windows 8 based Surface tablets the world was shocked; Microsoft making a tablet for the consumer market? The media went nuts talking about the slim design, the new materials and well everything. We saw multiple “reviews” of the Surface all of which were based on the same Press Demo model and all of which did not really cover what the product could do (how much can you tell in 10 minutes?). Underneath the excitement by the press there was a less enthusiastic response by the people that have actually made Microsoft what they are; the OEM partners. We contacted quite a few right after the launch and while most would not comment publicly on the launch the tone was obvious.

It seems that Gabe Newell formerly from Microsoft and also of Valve fame is not a fan of the direction that Microsoft is taking. In a recent interview he was quoted as saying; “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” This is something that we have been saying for a while now and for apparently some of the same reasons that Newell has; Microsoft’s recent moves to the cloud (forcing the use of Microsoft services) and also with locking out and competing with OEMs and partners. These decisions on the part of Steve Ballmer are the way to ruin the open platform that the PC was for gamers.

Does anyone remember the format wars for video tapes? How about Blu-ray? In both of these there were two competing technologies each with their own pros and cons.  In the end both of these were settled by one industry. In the “PC” industry there we have competing operating systems that are all vying for your attention and support. Although we have more than two in competition for your business the winner (believe it or not) is also still picked by one industry. Here that industry is gaming.

Google (and ARM as a whole) is finding out the hard way that building an OS is not that easy and without proper and full support you are going to have problems across your entire platform. Today and Google I/O 12 Google announced and showed off Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Now this sounds great but there are still a ton of devices that are waiting for ICS (Android 4.0) that was announced last year.

There is a nice news story going around showing Linus Torvalds giving nVidia the finger over their support (or lack of support) for Linux. After watching the video and reading a few of the articles we have to say this about the whole story…. It is spot on, but it was not always that way. I can remember in the early days of the Opteron and Athlon 64 when nVidia (and AMD) had a pretty healthy Linux driver program.

There is a new security warning for some people running virtualized systems on Intel CPUs. According to researchers at US CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) the issue exists with some 64-bit operating systems when running on a hyper visor style host machine (also if the host OS is 64-bit). The vulnerability includes a method for escalation of privileges and a potential guest to host escape.

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPV6) has officially launched in certain areas of the globe. The replacement for the aging Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPV4) is said to have built in security, Encryption capabilities and a ridiculous number of address combinations making it sustainable for a very long time. The downside is that, as with many core technology updates, there are not many products that use it and the average home user is facing a pretty steep learning curve in getting things going.