And yet here they are *TIGHTLY* integrating the browser into the OS (you know, just like Chrome does) which was what the whole antitrust case forbid Microsoft to do until last year. Seems interesting that when you look at it, a lot of the progress that Microsoft could have been making in this direction wasn't allowed up until recently.

I'm pretty sure that is NOT what McCain voters would have wanted. I thing that is why you are seeing the Tea Party movement where people are voicing that neither of te major parties represent their will. As a whole, they want less government and fiscal responsibility. The real trick is to see how much their ideas get warped by the Republicans and the media.

Umm... what? Why the namecalling?

There's CUDA and FireStream which are programming the shaders w/o going through DirectX/OpenGL.

As far as D3D11 -- I think the only support there which is similar is the compute shaders which I'm unsure if it will apply. There's also the Apple OpenCL initiative which aims to accomplish a similar thing. AFAIK, none of the GPGPU bare-to-the metal APIs allow you to render to a texture so I think it might not be possible to accomplish a pure Stream based rendering engine (yet).

In any case, I think his original point stands -- that the monolithic SGI based APIs are going to still be used (OpenGL/DirectX), but the hardware under the covers will be more exposed to allow programmers to be more creative with how they want to utilize the highly parallel processing that the new chips provide. Thus allowing programmers to do things in software that were previously done with dedicated hardware.