In the end that was the only reason that i went with one of the two machines i got, the gaming ability of MS designers as far as software goes is excellent. Their copyrighting various patents and what not are a different matter.

But that is half the reason no other competitor can get anywhere near MS, they just continously refuse to allow anyone to get near the generic intelectual property of gaming licences time and again.

Ditto for me. I've had no problems with Vista and most of the noise has come from people who don't use it.

The next thing I hear is, "Well, you must not be running anything on it..." - which is just nonsense.

I run adobe photoshop, estimating software, pc games, design software, modeling software, 3D blueprint software, excel, word, and download alot of stuff off the internet with zero problems for two years now.

My last laptop was identical to my new one, except it ran XP on it's system. I see no difference in performance or speed with no buggy behavior.

Gaming isn't really a big part of Microsoft's overall dominance - just its dominance of the standing home PC, which is going the way of the dinosaur anyway.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Well, you never know. I've been predicting, for a little while now, that Microsoft is going to start cozying up to the Open Source community. In fact, I can't remember off the top of my head, but Microsoft did distribute some source code to vendor partners for something or another. Not really a big deal, except that Microsoft is the poster child for proprietary obstructionism.

The other path they'd have is things like wine or ndiswrapper (I think that's the spelling). Wine is a linux app that "encapsulates" windows binary files and executes them on Linux. Ditto ndis, except it executes drivers. I was looking at it a little because I want to get some belkin networking stuff working on a few Linux computers at home. I don't really like it though - I'll probably poke around for something close and make my own drivers, if the existing ones don't work.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

No, not at all. (I think you're thinking of those Nintendo game emulators only). Pram is talking, I think, about OS emulation.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Virtual Machines?

__________________
"Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy." -fortune cookie

Seriously?


Wow.


I can't even fathom.

__________________

I meant gaming emulators in general, not just Nintendo.

But even for OS emulation doesn't it work on the same princple?

Yeah - VMWare is a good example of the concept. Broadly speaking, it would be any piece of software that inserts itself between the operating system and the physical hardware. The OS being emulated is tricked into thinking it's talking to the hardware like a normal OS.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

It's what I do for a living. Writing kernel/OS level code and device drivers is surprisingly non-complex, but it scares off the uninitiated for two reasons: it can be very tedious, and fuckups can mean completely frozen machines, unusable OS, and, if you're very lucky (and doing really low level stuff), sometimes even the smell of cooked circuitry.

And, this would probably be a shortcut anyway. Basically, I'd find some existing driver someone had written for it and make a few tweaks to get it working according to how I want it.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

No. A "game emulator" means you're jacking or reverse engineering the game's code and distributing it freely. An OS emulator just allows to you to run some OS on top of it. I might be butchering the terminology here, but the idea is substantially different. The OS 'emulator' is more like a translator. It talks to the hardware in its own language. It then talks to the OS the way the hardware would normally. If you want to run Linux or Windows or whatever on a virtual machine, you still need a copy of Linux or Windows or whatever. It isn't some knock off of windows (who the fuck would want to do that ).

The reason these exist is mainly for developers or system administrators. You might have a collection of servers, each doing some task. You might not want their software potentially interfering with one another or you might now want their users having access to the same file system. But, you also don't want to have four servers throwing off heat and burning through electricity. So, you get this emulation, and you can have four OS running on one computer. Users can't tell the difference. It's also good if, say, I want to see what would happen to a piece of software I've written if one of my users upgraded from XP to Vista. I don't have to install Vista and alter my own setup. Assuming I have a copy of Vista, I can install an emulated version, test it out, and then get rid of it, and go back to XP (actually applicable - my windows development machines are all XP Pro - we finally called end of life for customers running NT and 2000 ).

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

I have talked about this before...any of the geeks here remember "floppy firewall"?
Damn good firewall...it is a tiny linux kernel that only contains code that directly relates to firewall activity.
The entire OS fit on a floppy, you boot from the floppy which unloads the OS into RAM. The computer you use will have the hard drive removed so all memory is unwritable. Therefore you have a bullet proof firewall, that even if someone managed to break into - there are no commands known by the tiny kernel that was uploaded to the RAM - so it is umpossible to hack.
I protected a business that had about 30 PC's for years.

Sooo...you can spend $10,000 on a proprietary firewall server that is realitively easy to break into - or you can use a 10 yr. old computer for free.

I found this...don't know if it is the one I used...floppyfw

Well, get 'em while they're hot:

Welcome to Windows 7

They open for business this afternoon and only the first 2.5 million subscribers get a crack, so I wouldn't screw around if you want one. Apparently, there are some snafus with the DRM (predictable), but Windows 7 Beta allows a 30 day grace period without a product key while they iron out the wrinkles.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

All I know about Vista is that it has some kind of software for making panoramic pictures. Interesting OS commercial. I hear that same ad company is going to run a campaign for Toyota around the cool knobs on their radios.

Thanks, that all makes sense, sounds fairly simple if you know what you're doing but the point you made about cooked circuitry seems a worrying.

The problem for me was that i did need a few notebooks/laptops soon and even while knowing 7 was to be released i couldn't wait so long. Thankfully Vista doesn't have too many problems for me so far.