Wow, it's like a Microsoft powered troll - you mention the word and you go off for hours on end. You should invent some kind of powerplant powered by your idiocy and anti-Microsoft fanaticism, you could probably do something useful with it. Seriously, you make Apple fanbois look good in comparison.

Pretty simple really, a Linux file server, a Linux work machine, and a Windows home machine. Oh that's right, like a dumbass you assumed there were multiple Win boxes. I've probably been using Linux longer than you have, certainly long enough to know that each of the OS's have their place. Maybe one day if you get over yourself you will learn that.

Yeah, here is another clue - Virtualbox is from Sun not VMWare, but again you demonstrate your lack of intelligence. Perhaps you should do some research into virtualization, you don't seem to know much about it. And for the record, from a cold start the Virtualbox machine will boot faster than the physical hardware due primarily to a lack of BIOS wait screens and such. Since you are unaware of this it's quite apparent you haven't tried running it before.

Now go ahead and spew some more anti-Mircosoft BS, you know you can't help yourself.

Hah, what a troll. Here is a clue retard - get over your zealot fanaticism, your giving Linux users a bad name.

My method has consolidated three physical machines into one, yielding an actual power savings. It makes management easier, and has multiple nice side effects, including standardized hardware from the viewpoint of the Linux installs. If the setup could have worked in a reversed configuration (Win on Linux) I would have run it that way, but graphics performance goes to shit that way, so it didn't happen. So no, you are both wrong and a fucking retard because it is not "the only possible purpose of such setup".

Not exactly the parent's point, but in a similar way I've virtualized all my Linux machines on virtualbox running on Win7. Win7 can handle the games, and virtualbox supports graphic acceleration so even compiz and such work on the Linux machines. No more screwing around with VNC or NX or whatnot. It also yields somewhat faster boot times - no BIOS or peripheral card wait screens at startup.

There are side benefits - encryption is easier, just Truecrypt the Win7 system and data drives. No need to maintain dmcrypt setups or such on the Linux installs as the host is already encrypted. Further, partitioning the Linux setups into separate system/data virtual drives and maintaining decent backups makes a botched upgrade trivial to recover from. This has saved me a couple times recently when the ext4 system drive blew out on one of the Linux installs - just dropped a backup vdi in its place and was back and running in a few minutes. Similar thing just the other day, did an upgrade on one which swapped in a 3.0 kernel and killed the graphics, dropped in the system vdi from the previous days backup and was back and working. So much easier than having to swap in/out actual hard drives.

Overall backups are easier too - backup the encrypted Win7 data drive and in the process you end up backing up all the Linux machines. Can't complain about that. Only real penalty is you need a more powerful box (particularly as much memory as you can pack in the thing), but if it doubles as the game machine it's sort of a one stone, two birds thing.

I'm kind of curious why everyone is so up-in-arms wanting HL2:e3. HL2 was brilliant. HL2:e1 was a solid extension of that. HL2:e2 was a good game that started to feel a bit redundant. But neither of them reached the brilliance that was HL2.

People want EP3 because they want to know the rest of the story. These games are essentially interactive stories. You don't go to the movies and get up and walk out 2/3rds into it do you? It's not about how "brilliant" the game is, in the same way you don't generally judge a movie about how brilliant the middle of it is relative to the beginning and end.

The thing that irks me is the way they seem to delay working on the actual storyline and instead spend time upgrading the engine. Frankly I don't really care if the water or fog looks a little more realistic, I'm more interested in the content of the game (this is similar to the original Deus Ex, which had a lame graphic engine but fantastic storyline). I would have been fine with it had they developed the entire HL2 series using the original engine. Other titles seem to have no problem generating DLC material (Fallout3), so I really don't get why it takes Valve so long.

Unlikely, the gov't there is so corrupt and moves so slow it could never effectively shut all these operations. The real takeaway here is that Apple now gets to realize the true benefits of outsourcing all its manufacturing to China. Namely that they have little power to really control their inventory and supply chain.

Seriously, only in an environment where the gov't was complicit or completely corrupt and lazy could you have enough grey and black market goods to supply not only a single store, but an entire chain of retail stores.

No, you can't. Companies have at most one year from release to market. The prior art status could even predate the actual release to market as described here regarding the term "on-sale".

It shouldn't matter if they spun it off, the Newton itself constitutes prior art. According to the timeline it was out in 1993. You can't patent something 3 years after it hits the market.

Ah, well get back to us in 18 months.

Meh, occasionally companies could use some shoving to get them to move their lethargic ass. As an example, our workstations migrated from HPUX to RHEL only when our main app vendor EOL'd their support on HPUX. On the face of it that doesn't sound too bad, but it was actually many years after pretty much everyone else had dropped support (at one point we were sourcing workstations off eBay, essentially everyone else's old useless computers). Had that vendor not dropped support I would probably still be using a C3700 to this day. Of course now we are perpetually stuck on RHEL4 presumably until the app vendor EOL's that (but at least the hardware is better).

Similarly one of our corporate websites just recently started rendering properly in Firefox. Why, because it was designed for some ancient version of IE which I'm guessing just recently became unavailable on whatever Windows version they provide to management's desktops, thereby necessitating a more standards compliant upgrade to the site (it was quite a surprise after 10 years of incorrect rendering to actually see it working).

Yeah, I have no sympathy for IT or their severely myopic BS testing cycles. I don't think FF5 vs FF4 even shows up on their radar.

Actually when I read the title my first thought was that they were building a simcity-esque Launch Arco, but unfortunately it's nothing like that.

I've got a feeling that 2011 is the year of Linux on the desktop.

Yes, on Oct 21st the worthy Mac and Windows users will be raptured to a place where their old machines will be discarded and instead they will use Eee Books running Ubuntu. This will be a time of Unity.

The unworthy will be stuck using their Mac and Windows machines, or for the truly unworthy BSD.

Also, perhaps Sony's "R&D" costs wouldn't be so high, if they weren't in the habit of paying off an entire industry in order to get their format accepted instead of their competitors. Maybe they should try not doing that as a cost cutting measure.

Oh indeed, I was quite an Ubuntu fan at one time also, but now I can say I never would have discovered Arch's rolling-release model if it weren't for Ubuntu. I bailed on the KDE4 disaster. IMO the problem with Ubuntu is compound - they force a 6month cycle, they rake in experimental development projects as their release base, they use point releases instead of rolling, and they encourage everyone to upgrade as soon as possible. Intelligent people should jump only on the LTS releases, but in practice that's not what happens.

I've heard this story so often it should just be called Ubuntu Story #1 - Install Ubuntu for the first time, everything is great, very point-and-click install. Setup your account, get running and customized, everything is cake for 6 months. On the next release, a couple things are off here and there, nothing major, a week or two and you get it tweaked back into working order. Next point release, something major changed - maybe the audio, the video, some GUI element, who knows. Cursing ensues, but a month later you get things patched in a way, maybe it involves a reinstall, maybe not. Then comes the next release, 1.5 - 2 years post your first Ubuntu moment, and WTF, all your custom compiled stuff is broken, audio is stuttering, X thinks your suddenly on a VGA monitor, and it looks like someone took everything you knew about the GUI and tossed it. Another ex-Ubuntu user is born.

I'm really not sure what user experience they are going after with this cycle they go through. They seem to vastly under estimate the importance of stability and consistent experience in order to roll in these new features. LTS doesn't really help either, they will roll in last minute broken crap just the same as on a non-LTS, it just gives more tweaking time between major breakage.

Well, with Ubuntu becoming more and more mainstream, I wonder how this will affect other Linux distributions.

The other distros will probably be happy to get all those new users. By the time Ubuntu 14.x rolls out they should have alienated almost all of their userbase. Their half baked releases combined with the 6 month release cycle give everyone just enough time to get things stable right before they break it all again. From swapping audio subsystems to experimental unconfigurable GUIs, they make sure to cover all their bases.