The problem, as I understand it, isn't that 3D hardware is difficult to handle in a VM (it's not, really, you simply paravirtualise calls to the 3D hardware and translate them into libGL calls in the VM host software). The problem is that doing so in Windows is practically impossible, because of MS's licensing terms for the DDKs you need. Smart move on their part, of course, if Paravirtual D3D was considered a first-order citizen of windows in the same way that NVidia or ATI D3D was, then nobody would have any really compelling reason to use windows as any sort of on-the-metal OS.

While this holds true for both directx lower-level drivers and ICDs to suit MS OpenGL, it's possible to simply REIMPLEMENT OpenGL, as everything (barring perhaps the "WGL" parts specific to windows, i'm honestly unsure about that) is nicely standardised. This doesn't help with DirectX, so the approach to date has been to replace d3d8.dll and d3d9.dll with mingw-compiled versions of the Wine D3D dlls, which simply wrap DX in OpenGL.

Fixed that for you. The end user owns the hardware and is legally entitled to run whatever the fuck they want on it.

You are woefully uninformed.

If you are using the (closed source, free) Citrix XenServer, the "Xenserver Guest Additions" ISO will install paravirtualised disk and network drivers, which handle IOs through a hypercall interface instead of qemu-dm's emulated devices (which, I'll grant, is hideously slow.)

If you're using GPL Xen, then the drivers at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv (that page points at source code, there are MSIs floating around, ask your distributor) accomplish the same ends. I've used them in the handful of cases I've needed to virtualise Windows at home. They're on par throughput-wise with the Citrix stuff I use at work.

Either way, such an approach gives IO performance on par with ESX, and the ability to mix and match this sort of VM with paravirtual Linux and Opensolaris guests on the same cluster of hosts buys you a shit ton in flexibility (IO performance in paravirtual guests exceeds anything that fully virtualised Xen or ESX will ever achieve, period, end of story.)

That's a complete load of crap and you know it.

You've purchased (i.e. now own) one copy of an OS, which is yours to do with as you see fit (copyright law notwithstanding.) You could run it on your toaster if your toaster had a 32-bit HAL.

This 'it's illegal to run OEM windows on anything but the CPU it was sold with' line of reasoning is something that microsoft haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage (and, in fact, their EULA says exactly that), but the force of EULAs is legally questionable at best in most jurisdictions, being trumped quite squarely by thousands of years worth of precedent for first-sale rights.

Conversely, of course, the OEM has no reason to include any given HAL, and is obviously not required to by any law or regulation. If you can't legally get your hands on the HAL you need, that's your concern. That said, a straight-down-the-line reinstall would most likely work; OEM install media isn't appreciably different (volume ID notwithstanding) from retail or volume media.

I own a Sony CD transport. I also own two Pioneer DVD-RWs which are good at reading red book CDs. My fiancee owns a portable CD player made by some yumcha brand or other, and we both have CD players (manufactured by different manufacturers) in our automobiles. If the fancy took me, I could trivially, using the technology on hand, assemble SOME device which could play red book PCM audio. Even if Sony and Philips both went bankrupt tomorrow.

Similarly, I have, lying around at home, about 15 devices which are capable of playing MP3s, manufactured by a large number of different entities (although quite possibly all made in the same dragons' breath factory in china.) Were every single MP3-player manufacturing entity in the world to disappear overnight, it would not impact my ability in the slightest to play MP3s. Worst case, i've got a copy of the mpg123 source code and the handful of technical data about the format I could find when I was writing a tool which needed to understand the format on some level. The various MPEG standards are quite well documented and implementable by anyone who gives a fuck. If the Fraunhoefer institute (or whoever claims to own those patents this week) goes broke, it impacts my life exactly 0.

I don't own anything that can (trivially) play an iTunes .m4p file, excepting the one iPod that was purchased several years ago and has since suffered chronic, irreversable headphone jack damage. If Apple go away, it doesn't matter how much effort I exert, I am not going to be in a position to play a .m4p file. This is the very DEFINITION of platform lock. Simply being tied to a format is NOT platform lock-in, because you're always going to have, at the very least, some way of reimplementing that format.

Go home, and write "Itunes tracks are platform locked. MP3s are not platform locked. Red book audio is not platform locked." 1000 times. I want it on my desk first thing in the morning.

Hope not.

Yep. With an onboard computer that eats 5-10 percent of your engine power, and is needlessly prone to causing random things to fail in your car. And might, some day, some of the time, stop you from robbing a bank. Maybe.

If Ford did this, they'd be run out of town.

It's not the DRM that'd piss me off (none of my users are paid to care about audio, period) but the dodginess with Adobe (and presumably others). What nobody seems to have noted yet is that in order for Windows 7 to pick up that you've warezed your CS4, one of two things needs to be occuring:

  - Windows 7 ships with a secret blacklist of known warez MD5s/SHA1s. Make it a rolling hash a-la rsync for maximal anti-warezing.

or, worse again

  - Microsoft have a secret API (not a huge surprise here) that they've shared with a few 'trusted' software OEMs such as Adobe. CS4 and friends register the MD5s (or whatever) of their more likely warez vectors, and an expanded version of WFP (in a 'protected' process a-la PVP-OPM in vista) makes sure you don't fuck with those files.

If this is even half true, then Microsoft just quit the game. For keeps.

Copyright infringement is theft from the copyright holder, not the consumer. And it IS theft.

No. It isn't.

Copyright, as a concept, was invented to ensure that there was some degree of incentive for creative works to be produced, by allowing the creator (or her assignees) a temporary monopoly in order to make bank off their effort. Copyright infringement, as a concept, exists solely due to the fact that copyright, regardless of its intentions, is a fiction due to the very nature of information propagation.

You want to talk about theft? Fine. Talk about how 99% of western culture has been branded, monetized, and is now owned by some corporation or other. Talk about how Sonny Bono and Cher stole Mickey Mouse off the American people in 1997. Talk about what the various WIPO and Free Trade treaties do to perpetuate this (Australia's high court ruled that the DMCA-style law of the day only applied if you were ALREADY breaking the law, then we signed USAFTA and are now obligated to introduce a NEW DMCA-style law, for instance [1].) Talk about how much money the IFPI have spent bribing officials in the Swedish judicial system. Talk about Fritz Hollings and the SSSSCA/CBDTPA. Talk about what these fuckers have stolen off society at large and YOU in particular.

But don't tell me that I owe the fuckers who sue daycare centres for singing 'happy birthday' a brass razoo. I don't. If you believe otherwise, then you've already lost the game.


[1] Sony v. Stevens, http://www.out-law.com/page-6200

Accounting: I'm surprised that there are no real FOSS contenders in this space; at least on the low end, such packages are perfectly suited to a subscription model (hey, those tax tables don't update themselves.) This is a niche, however, where people probably feel better paying for a bit of piece of mind (nobody ever expects an audit...)

Photoshop/Illustrator: GIMP is 90% there for 90% of people. Opens PSD files, so it would seem to fit into most folks' workflow. I'm honestly not sure where Inkscape is at, but it's only going to get better.

Access/etc: If your business depends on Access or something similar, you're almost better off running it on Windows. When you scale it, you can scale it onto a better platform.

SQL Server: I think you'll find that Postgres can 'do the job' significantly better than SQL server under almost all workloads. Mysql is, of course, a running joke amongst anyone who knows what they're talking about. Obviously, if you're going to migrate to a new DBMS, there's going to be pain. SQL 2005 to Postgres is no more or less painful than Oracle 9i to SQL 2005.

Exchange: There are umpteen trillion unix-based (OSS, free beer, AND payware) 'groupware' suites. Most of the better ones have an Outlook plugin if you're still using Office.

Visual Studio: The choice of an IDE is INCREDIBLY subjective. I have /never/ liked Visual Studio, although that's not to say that others aren't more productive using it than using any other IDE. Developers, ultimately, need to be able to choose their own IDE; as long as it integrates with the higher level workflow and speaks the same language dialect as the rest of the team, who really cares? I know some people who swear by Eclipse (which I tried at the start of last year and didn't like much,) and some people who won't code using anything except nvi. For what it's worth, I find that Code::Blocks has a great feature:heft ratio.

You're right about one thing, though: games. At home, the ONLY use I have for windows of any stripe is the (sadly, more than) occasional reboot into XP64 to play Farcry 2 or Fallout 3 or the depressingly bad port of Saints Row 2. This will change, however, and not in the direction that most people are hoping. Consoles are already in the process of murdering PC gaming to the point where all we'll get given to us are bad console ports (Saints Row 2 was the most egregious example, on a 4-way 3.2GHz machine with a GTX260 the framerate fluctuates between 3 and 85fps) loaded up with DRM and other nonsense. Of the three games I mentioned, only Fallout 3 considered the PC to be a first-tier platform, and that's most likely because of Bethesda's history as a PC development shop and the fact that the Fallout 3 engine is a direct descendant of the Morrowind engine.

After the next generation of consoles, I'd expect gaming on Windows and Linux to be roughly at parity, and I'm not expecting anyone to port too many more games to Linux. Wine will run the bad ports well enough, and there will be a thriving third party aftermarket for keyboard/mouse connectivity kits for consoles.
 

You are not 'we the linux users'.

As nice as Free Software is (and as much as I'm working on a free OpenGL/DX video game engine under LGPL), not everyone's as much of a foaming-at-the-mouth dickweed as you are.

It's mouthbreathing fucks like you who give linux users a bad name. Shouldn't you be in school?

However, if you're shooting up guard posts, you're doing it wrong.

To each their own. I actually quite enjoyed Grand Theft Africa (played through it 3 times, so it must have been doing something right as far as my tastes in such things go,) but found that the 'stealth' play style was considerably undercooked compared to the 'rambo' play style. Even on 'insane', by the time you've managed to acquire an automatic sidearm and some form of LMG, shooting the crap out of guardposts is a reasonably trivial endeavour if you use your head (set some grass on fire for area denial, blow up an ammo dump/barrels if they're there, etc etc). By way of comparison, taking a more stealthy approach seemed difficult as hell, if for no other reason than despite how lovely Dunia's grass looks it doesn't occlude the PC when the enemy AI does an eye raycast. This was something that CRYSIS got right ffs.

On the other hand, don't get me started on some of the artificial restrictions put in for the sake of gameplay (spend what's meant to be 5-10 days in the African outback and the only civilians you see are hanging out in an underground railroad? Can't fire guns indoors? WTF NOT!? Oh. It's so we don't need to deal with the potentially game-breaking ramifications of shooting somebody who was going to give you a mission...)

Grand Theft Africa could have been an awful lot better if they'd just taken one or two clues from FO3 (which is a great tactical FPS and a terrible RPG IMO).

No wonder Chrysler is going broke, wasting their money on sponsorships that are rarely noticed.

The Hemi engine might be a bit hard to notice (although it's rammed down your throat every time you repair an assault truck,) but how could you miss the various models of Chrysler Jeep (which are mentioned by name in a few places in the game)?

I'd say this is far from a hard-to-notice sponsorship, although I have to admit that it was a total wtf moment when I realised that Chrysler had paid for it.

There are jobs, and there are jobs. One of the things I heard is that MS are going to sack the entire team that produces Flight Simulator. Now, are you going to tell me that those guys could replace Prasad and Thusita over in Windows?

Last time I checked, dealing with large sets of vectors and rendering a realistic looking terrain had little in common with SMP locking code in a microkernel.

Horses for courses. This idiot senator would do well to realise that.

If a foreign national loses his job and goes back to his country, then his country will take care of him.

Unlike the American government, who have steadfastly refused to implement any sort of welfare safety net and currently have a higher population of homeless veterans than most countries have unemployed citizens (a touch under 500 thousand at last count, if google is to be believed.)