IMEIs are not used at all in the call routing process, and are, ultimately, pretty easy to forge convincingly. Granted, this will stop everybody whose handsets have totally bogus IMEIs, but as long as the first 8 digits (type allocation code) and check digit are correct, then there's very little India can do without impacting legitimate customers.
GREAT idea.
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.
Despite what supporters of OSS believe Should or Should Not be allowed or done, Nintendo still has the right to decide what software is acceptable to link with their SDK.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"