A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

[Kristian Joensen]

What did they say?

[curaga]

That was another rumor that got debunked by Valve.

It is pretty obvious that this is their skunkworks goal, eventually. Maybe it's "Steambox Light" that will run your games but not your windows apps. Maybe it's a threat to MS to get cheaper licenses.

In any case, it's a lot of positive PR and a million or some more users.

[meklu]

What did they say?

Here it goes:

Hello!

I couldn't help but notice Phoronix's recent coverage on the Steam for Linux matter and I thought I'd drop you a line.

For a game porter/Linux expert I would suggest Frank Earl, whose resume is at http://www.earlconsult.com/frank_resume.html .

Another thing that I laid my eyes upon was this post: http://steamforlinux.com/?q=node/23
> "2. Good tools to track down OpenGL performance and help debug rendering issues just don’t exist."
I've heard of a couple of tools for this very job:
1. gDEBugger is a commercial solution now owned by AMD and is nowadays a Visual Studio plugin. Old standalone versions are still available though ( http://www.gremedy.com/download.php ) and best of all, free of charge.
2. apitrace is an open source tool available at https://github.com/apitrace/apitrace .
I've heard good things about both of these tools, but since I haven't done any graphics programming, I don't know how these compare to e.g. D3D debugging tools.

I hope reading this message was worth your while and I wish you all the best in getting out a polished product or two as soon as possible, so I can spend some more money on your company's services :)

Best regards,
Melker Narikka.

Hi Melker.

We're currently fighting some license issues with gDEBugger and minor build issue with apitrace. But hopefully they'll prove useful once we get past those things. And I'm gone next week but will send Frank an e-mail when I get back. Thank you for the reference - useful and very much appreciated!


-Mike

Please don't sue me now, Valve.

[yogi_berra]

There are no reasons to not trust Michael.

There is no reason to trust Michael. He's just a random guy on the internet that happens to have a blog.

Could you imagine how big impact such lie would have on Phoronix?

I imagine it would result in a huge thread on his forum with two distinct groups arguing over whether or not he is lying. Kinda like this huge thread that has two distinct groups of people arguing about whether or not he is lying.

Michael started talking about Steam long ago and know we have some proofs. If I remember correctly he also said there will be another proofs too.

What proof? A picture of an email that could easily be faked with vim and gimp? That's all it takes for you to believe anything? How does your credit survive all of the phishing attempts on the web?

Seriously, without a public beta from Valve it's just a bad joke.

[kraftman]

There is no reason to trust Michael. He's just a random guy on the internet that happens to have a blog.

I imagine it would result in a huge thread on his forum with two distinct groups arguing over whether or not he is lying. Kinda like this huge thread that has two distinct groups of people arguing about whether or not he is lying.

What proof? A picture of an email that could easily be faked with vim and gimp? That's all it takes for you to believe anything? How does your credit survive all of the phishing attempts on the web?

Seriously, without a public beta from Valve it's just a bad joke.

Michael is making money on this site. If he was lying he will loose a lot of money, because many people would just turn adblock on or even leave Phoronix. Let's hope we'll get something more official.

[Kristian Joensen]

The burden of proof is very much on those claiming someone is a liar. That is a very serious accusation to make. Notice though, just because you aren't a liar you can still be mistaken or lied to. Lying implies an attention to deceive and as such excludes mere mistakes or humor and other forms of speech.

[Naib]

The burden of proof is very much on those claiming someone is a liar. That is a very serious accusation to make. Notice though, just because you aren't a liar you can still be mistaken or lied to. Lying implies an attention to deceive and as such excludes mere mistakes or humor and other forms of speech.

I have posted evidence the last time this got really hyped here. After how Phoronix behaved the last time when asked for proof of such a claim Phoronix belittled those requesting it.
Phoronix was shown to be over-hyping (over many,many months..) an in-passing,non-substanciated throwaway remark made in a sunday tabloid, hype that ONLY stopped once Valve came out with a press statement to contradict it

Essencially Phoronix have form for spinning shit like this.
Likewise noone has actually called Phoronix/Michael a Liar, we are asking for independent citable evidence, remember it is Phoronix/Michael that are making these claims, the onus is on them to back them up, NOT on us to prove he is right - we never made the claims that Valve are actively searching for game coders for linux

The burden of proof is on Phoronix here not anyone else

[yogi_berra]

Michael is making money on this site. If he was lying he will loose a lot of money, because many people would just turn adblock on or even leave Phoronix. Let's hope we'll get something more official.

Do you really believe that he loses money with these blog posts that guarantee massive page views from people arguing about it in his forums?

[yogi_berra]

The burden of proof is very much on those claiming someone is a liar. That is a very serious accusation to make. Notice though, just because you aren't a liar you can still be mistaken or lied to. Lying implies an attention to deceive and as such excludes mere mistakes or humor and other forms of speech.

The burden of proof is always on the person making the outrageous claims, in this case the claim is Steam coming to Linux.

[susikala]

The burden of proof is very much on those claiming someone is a liar. That is a very serious accusation to make. Notice though, just because you aren't a liar you can still be mistaken or lied to. Lying implies an attention to deceive and as such excludes mere mistakes or humor and other forms of speech.

I don't think you get the issue at hand here. Everyone can claim something will happen in the distant future and get away with it since there's no way to refute it. Why hasn't phoronix stated any _concrete_ dates if it's so certain there will be a client? The fact those claims are lying about (ha, ha) so long and haven't materialised _is_ already proof enough that this is some form of lie, intended or not. Even if it turns out true it doesn't make it better. I mean if you go about following this logic then I can claim blue aliens will land here in the future or anything else I want. In dubio pro reo is only relevant when you accuse someone of doing something wrong, not when you look at someone completely random who's making completely random speculations.