I sucked at it for the longest time, but every now and then, I'd have an incredible run of luck. A 10-year-old Gordon Gekko, I crushed it on Wall Street, bought the boat, the houses, and even the family castle (why I bought the castle from my own family trust, I'm not really sure; in retrospect, I assume it was some sort of complex inheritance-tax-evasion mechanism).
Lots of fun! Unfortunately, I grew up to be considerably less successful and, at least for now, castleless. :)
a new gang of people who usually went to school together, that we choose (usually... diebold ... die bold ... risk it all take everything) every 4 years. supposedly we do this every 4 years to balance the power they wield from veering too far left or right and sticking to the countries interest.
> Is anyone else skeptical that they can motivate publishers to spend time/money porting their games to the Linux platform?
no.
porting and refactoring tools are so good now you can even port a direct3d app to opengl in 2 days or less, you could use a d3d>opengl wrapper in a day of work.
libraries are also so good at dual platform it requires minimal changes (usually just a new build system).. afaik the biggest change is handling input (theres no directInput on linux - most games use directInput for mouse/kb).
theres also numerous benefits to a closed system economy like an app store - for example even if nobody uses it you are practically exclusive and will get more buys than other places you can sell your app.
I would merely make the point that if porting was as painfully simple as you suggest here, non-first-party publishers would be making their games available for every platform (in most cases) without a second thought.
Even though multi-plat development is infinitely easier today than it was even 5 years ago, I still think getting titles onto multiple platforms is much harder and time consuming than you are giving it credit.
Turns out I did about as well in the real stock market. gg.
The game was really fun though