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.

Civ 4 was a great game, and part of it was his narrations. He really had a way of saying things beautifully. Maybe my tribute will be playing out a game this weekend.

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.