You may have heard that Valve is hard at work porting its Steam client to the Linux platform, but it's not because the company has developed a sudden affinity towards the open source space. The real reason is because Valve views Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 release as a "catastrophe" in the making for the PC industry at large, or at least that's the viewpoint held by Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director at Valve.
The kick ass Summer Sale isn't the only thing the Steam team has up their collective sleeves this week. Yesterday, Valve launched a brand-spanking-new Valve Linux blog to chronicle the company's forays into open source, and the initial post was a doozy: it confirmed all those earlier reports that Valve is working hard to get Steam up and running on everybody's favorite open source operating system. Actually, scratch that; the 11 person Valve Linux team already has the Steam client up and running.
I can't tell you the number of times I came down with dysentery, one of the many diseases that stopped me dead in my tracks on the Oregon Trail. But I plodded on, a banker from Boston who developed a skill for shooting bison and fast moving critters. And then it would be time for recess. Today's generation may never known of the awesomeness that was playing Oregon Trail on an Apple computer, but thanks to Valve, a good many will experience Portal 2 in the classroom as part of a "Steams for School" initiative.
Last year, Valve teased gamers around the world with the promise of eventually releasing a level editor for Portal 2. The company's been frustratingly close-lipped about details since then -- until yesterday, that is. Valve announced that the level editor is shipping as a DLC offering called the Perpetual Testing Initiative, coming to PC and Macs on May 8th for the low, low price of absolutely free.
Love gaming on Linux but don't have a taste for Wine? Look for a nice hot helping of Steam-brewed titles to come to the rescue sometime in the future. After a couple of years of rumors -- and denials -- that Valve was working on a Linux port of its blockbuster Steam service, it looks like the project is actually happening. Valve recently invited Mike Larabel, the man behind the Phoronix website for Linux lovers, out to the company's offices to give him a glimpse of the Steam for Linux in action.
Have you ever wondered what everyday life is like for the average worker at Valve? As a privately held company they tend to be a bit overly secretive, and as such we know surprisingly little about what they do all day. Aside from tormenting us with silence over Half-Life 3, it turns out new employees actually get issued a handbook on what to do 
Valve has been attempting to be very outwardly complimentary of EA over the last several months, perhaps in the misguided hope that the publisher will quit it with the Origin exclusives, and start bringing some of its titles back into compliance with Steams terms of service. You’d be hard pressed to find any bad blood between the two companies, at least on the Valve side, but yet the stalemate remains. On the most recent 
Valve is one of those companies you just can’t help but admire. They are consumer first (almost to a fault), and course they also haven’t sold themselves to EA and Activision. Anytime they set out to do something ambitious, they gather a lot of media attention. Rumors of a Steam hardware console have been circling for several weeks now, but it turns out their hardware ambitions are much more bizarre. Valve developer Michael Abrash admitted the company is looking to hire hardware designers to help advance a prototype in the field of
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