On my laptop that has an ATI Radeon Mobility X-1800 chipset (R300 series) support by the open source driver is basically OK. Desktop Effects in Gnome/Compiz work well, although not all effects are available. The subjective performance is good. With recent linux kernels there also is support for power management of the graphics chipset.

BUT:

1.) VGA output does not work. The video signal is distorted.
2.) With KDE 3.5 this driver/chipset configuration is blacklisted for Desktop Effects.
3.) The machine freezes sometimes, but not too often to be annoying. Since I am a linux user since 1993 I have experienced much worse problems with X than that, y'know.

Just google for 'audi 5000 unintended acceleration' to find stories like this: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/in-defense-of-the-audi-5000/

Thats why I am looking at Scala right now. More flexible syntax, multi-paradigm, compiles to java or .net byte code.

*sigh* Brokat (disclaimer: I am a former employee), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokat, had a PKI based _mobile_ payment solution ready to market in 2000. With that framework the authorization would have been done on the users mobile phone via a pin and a nonrepudiation signature. The secret key would have been stored on the SIM card of the phone.

Too bad they folded in 2001.

Yes, AMD has produced chipsets for the original K7 Athlon. Just google for AMD750 Irongate. But this chipset had its own share of problems.

In financial software one often uses fixed point decimal numbers or rather an integer representation of monetary amounts in terms of the smallest unit of the currency, like euro cents. For securities usually tenths of cents are used.

This is due to the numerical instability of floating point numbers for certain values like 1.01 which can only be approximated in base 2 mantissa and exponent notation. Thus floating point is ruled out and fixed point decimal numbers are used. Lazyness and/or the unavailability of a native fixed point decimal type on some legacy platforms leads to the use of simple integer numbers.

To an inexperienced programmer, such currency values just look like integer amounts and the unit of the amounts is ignored, so the mistake mentioned in TFA actually happens a lot during development, but is usually found by unit and QA tests.

So the lesson to be learned from this is to thoroughly test your financial software. But we all do that, do we?

With VirtualBox 2.2.6, the guest shuts down cleanly and without aborting.

With 3.0.0 I have not noticed the problem you describe, but because of the other issues, I do not use it in my daily work.

I have been running the 2.2.X versions on Windows XP with Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 guests with compiz enabled and found that aside from some rendering glitches the VM were stable enough for daily work. I even found that the graphics performance was much better than running without desktop composition.

On the other hand, with 3.0.0 3D performance is much lower and unstable. For instance the gdm login screen is garbled, and I have experienced occasional freezes of the X server.

I would advise everyone who is running 2.2.6 to wait for a more stable release.