Microsoft is not likely to bother with another Windows 7 service pack. They are getting ready to bring out a whole other operating system, and give it away for free to the customers who would have downloaded such a thing.

I've seen WL222, but I haven't heard of IR5.

You'd like to think so, but it seems to me like most video games are pretty bad on every platform.

I dunno, I haven't come up with a clear answer to that yet. But it's not going to happen now, absent a general recession to match, since video gaming is now a real thing.

root on ZFS is a thing now. ZFS has a lot of benefits that I'd like to be using, if it were easier. (It's not that big a deal overall, but I don't want to have to do a lot of extensive fiddling when something fails.)

Because when Windows platforms started to get 3d accelerators, the OpenGL implementation on Windows NT was incredibly primitive and performed poorly even for a software implementation, and only high-end corporate users had acceleration at all. It was as likely to use a private API for acceleration as to use OpenGL. Although Windows OpenGL accelerators did exist, they cost thousands of dollars and up. When the first consumer-level GPUs came out for PCs, they too used custom APIs rather than OpenGL. While 3dfx eventually supported a subset of OpenGL functionality under the name "MiniGL", and towards the end of their run actually produced nominally complete OpenGL drivers (for Voodoo x000 series cards) the damage was already done. Microsoft was able to appear to be a hero by implementing their own 3D API instead of OpenGL with vendor extensions, and the rest is history.

Direct3D is successful today because of inertia. If 3dfx and PowerVR had implemented OpenGL from the beginning, then we probably wouldn't have Direct3D at all today. Microsoft would have tried to control OpenGL through fancy-pants vendor-specific extensions, and probably failed because hey, others have also tried that and failed. So, aside from Microsoft of course, I blame 3dfx. MiniGL is what we needed from the beginning.

VMware works better than anything else I've seen. Most of the games I've tried to use in vmware actually still work, which is what keeps me on Linux. It's the best place to run vmware, and the only freely-available Unixlike on which it runs. Otherwise I might well have shifted to FreeBSD by now.

OTOH Linux runs on everything I own, and I mean everything. Routers, access points, desktops, pogoplugs, my Blu-Ray player. So there's not much sense in learning something that will only run on some of that stuff.

They can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks, but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated. For people who don't feel hampered by that, OK, great. But boy is that shit annoying. It's more annoying even than having to run Windows.

You can install a quite complete GNU userland on Android. You can also install an X or VNC client ... (searching google) ... ah yes, also a SPICE client, which is probably your best bet actually if it's at all reliable. And then you can run as much Linuxy goodness on your Android device as you like. So how is Android not Linux? It's not GNU/Linux, I guess. Ugh, it makes me feel dirty just to type that. Luckily, I'm typing it from Windows 7.

What people are talking about when they say this stuff is that they want to use them as input devices. When I play a game on the Wii, I pretty much always say "this would be much better with mouse and keyboard." Sure, the Wiimote is cool, and it makes some sense in living rooms*, and I occasionally still have fun playing Wii Sports Resort. But show me a game that makes me point at the screen a lot, and pointlessly waggle the Wiimote periodically, and I'll show you a game which would be better with keyboard and mouse.

Pretty much all consoles with USB ports will let you enter text into more or less all input boxes, even on the Wii. But almost no console games, even an FPS, will let you control the game with keyboard and mouse. We all know why, but that's a feature much needed to win over fence-sitters. Whether it's worth it is another discussion, although my guess is no. We will never be happy with consoles. That's why we have PCs. We occasionally flirt with consoles and then realize that they are lame if you don't have a bunch of gamers in your living room regularly.

* The Wiimote is a crap remote control. That may not be its primary design purpose, but as it turns out Netflix is probably what most Wiis are being used for today...

Steam has shown that it's possible to deliver mods to the console experience, with the workshop. I don't see why an even more curated model of modding wouldn't be palatable to the console developers. They could review the most popular mods for content and then give them a rating in order to give the slightest veneer of involvement.

Well, when I was that age I was installing Slackware on a 386... It's about access. When I was a kid, living in a town with a bunch of computer companies was mandatory in order to have cheap computer deals around. In Santa Cruz county we had Borland, Seagate, SCO, Parallel Computing, Sequoia Semiconductor, Plantronics, and piles of other techie or nominally-techie corporations attracted by the college town environment... and internet access brought in through the college. And $1/MB used hard disks for years and years! Ahh, Seizegate, the memories.

Today, hardware is just lying about everywhere.

I both agree and disagree. I agree that for users, OSS drivers for all would be the best. But I also think that making it difficult to have binary drivers has kept a lot of hardware off of Linux.

But they also make it easy. They provide a really convenient development system for little to no money, just like in Linux-land, and a lot of documentation, just like in Linux-land, except actually Microsoft's documentation seems to be pretty good. Shame about all the years it was full of dirty lies, since Microsoft was using different functions internally, but long gone are the days when that sort of trickery would fly with the public. Now, if performance is unacceptable, they can go somewhere else.

I think more manufacturers would release Linux drivers if they could release binary ones. Would we be grateful? I know some of us would use them.

If your challenge doesn't take into account consumer hardware support, it's not a very good challenge. Consumer hardware support is one of Linux's greatest strengths, especially as compared to BSD. The software support is pretty relevant, too. I'd probably have jumped ship by now (I have nVidia, they have an OK BSD driver I'm told) if I could have vmware. It's the only vm with good 3D support. So since I'm sticking with Linux, I just went ahead and adopted KVM as my VM strategy. Now I'm more or less married to it, although obviously I could migrate away again. I migrated my non-3D-using Windows VMs to KVM already, I could likely migrate them again given a reason. But what's OSS and better than KVM with SPICE? Virtualbox would be if 3D didn't make it asplode every time I tried it.

I've been running "more or less" the same Ubuntu install since Dapper Drake. There was a complete reinstall in there somewhere around Karmic Koala, but I kept my homedir, /opt, and /usr/local. Also, in the same time, I've had to reinstall Windows about a dozen times for one reason or another. And many of my peripherals showed up cheap (scanners, printers, etc) because Windows dropped support for them. Yeah, not Windows, the vendors, but same difference to the user. New windows, new scanner. Thanks, Obama^WHP. Man I can rant about scanner drivers all day, how sad

I can't imagine how that is even possible either, since everything else works. I can post to slashdot, stream video, or do anything else from both Windows and Linux. I even installed steam_latest.deb right before posting, including deleting my .steam directory. No good.

Possibly there is something wrong with my Ubuntu install, but I really can't fathom what that might be since everything else works fine. Until something other than Steam fails, though, I'm going to continue to blame Steam.

I'm not going to post my iptables ruleset or anything, heh heh, but:
All my firewall iptables chains are default ACCEPT, and I drop (or reject) at the end of the chain
All my firewall ebtables chains are default ACCEPT, and I have no drops or rejects
All my desktop chains are default ACCEPT with no other rules.
My only forwarding rules relate to SIP, and don't relate to the IP of this system at all
The IP remains the same when I dual boot, and is fixed.
The Windows firewall obviously knows about Steam.
I have no uPnP daemon running on my firewall.

Perhaps I have missed something obvious? But other stuff works fine.