ok , i will make it short ...

use dedicated gaming devices for gaming while everything else use only linux on a personal desktop pc ...

i'm guessing(i could be wrong) that linux gaming developers will be better off contributing on dedicated and hence , stricter(which is good) gaming devices ...

their efforts wont be too spread out into wastages of talents ...


.

I hope you're not saying linux should only be used on desktop pcs.

if thats possible for some people , why not ...

you can still have windows somewhere in your disk but thats for testing or developing purposes only , most probably because of whatever job related ...

i believe a linux gaming devices could be also use as a desktop pc if you want ...


.

Slantoflight I meant $600 for an upgrade not an entire PC. Take a 3 year old pc and get it a good video card and more memory and it should be able to render near PS3 quality, additionally you can continue to upgrade the pc with newer enhancements as the PS3 stays the same over the next few years. Sure the PS3 has 7 cores but that will soon be common place, look at intel and its performance numbers on its Quad-Core CPU comming out soon, its unbelievable. Now I like the PS3 compared to the other possible gaming machines but I won't buy it until the price drops to at least $300 for the More expensive version of the PS3 . It just doesn't seem worth it for $600, And I even heard people were getting nearly $8000 for a PS3 on Ebay (yeah thats right, its not a typo, eight thousand dollars). I have no idea who would pay that much for it, you could nearly make a small LAN with 4 high performance PCs for that much!!!

I too thought this could be done, because I'm in this situation now and that which you said is conventional wisdom; which used to be true as I just found out.

Here's my situation: I've got a 3 year old pc, amd 2500 oc'd to 3200 + speeds w/a gig of ram and a radeon 9600xt...

I've been hunting and hunting to get hold of a faster AGP card; and quite simply there are none to be found that are not at the same performance as what I already have, whether it be on the shelves at the local store or online.

OR, I can find a really fast AGP card, but they are 500 $ US online only, and still yield half the performance of the pci express video cards at 120$ US that you CAN find on the shelf.

It's a conspiracy! All I know is I woke up one day and there is no AGP 8x support anywhere anymore. If my present card goes, I'll have to spend 500$ to keep my pc and be slow, or spend $700 to build a new one and be really fast. Not to mention that with the new ones, I'll probably need a 1000 Watt powersupply now.

But that is for games, nothing in windows or linux really requires me to even change my cpu/hardware setup for my daily needs.... this stinks; hope my card holds up.

But when Epic finanlly decides what they will do with Unreal 200? I guess I'll have to decide then, Fogie likes his flack cannon

LOL I too like my flak cannon . With what you are talking about check out a site like newegg or tigerdirect, they have some great deals around the holidays. If you really want performance you may need a Motherboard swap to get PCI-express, but you might be able to use your older cpu. I know this because i did something similar to this 3 years ago. I got a $60 Nvidia graphics and a $40 memory upgrade and I got my pc to run at a better quality then a PS2(I was previously running on a integrated graphics chip...it sucked). I now dual boot Win2k pro, for games, and Debian, for everything else. As soon as there is a port of Unreal tournament 2007 for Linux I will throw my copy of windows in the Trash .

UT 2007 isn't even out yet. Why are you keeping windows for a game that does'nt even exist yet? And on top of that a game series that has a history of simultaneous linux/windows releases.

????

How does this even make sense?

Honestly I do the same. But I play in a league and all.

UT is very playable on linux, but it certainly is not ready for prime time if your in GGL league.

Unfortunately the game IS designed for Windows and ported over. Epic can't get their act together, let alone fix the few minor bugs that are in the linux port.

Here's why:
1. viewable spacialization is way off. the open-gl renders all items smaller than what they are and the field of view in Linux is like a 110 FOV in windows at 1024x768 which is what the designer's optimized the game for. Obviously the smaller a target the harder to hit.
2. the sound spacialiaztion too is way off. the game is highly optimized for windows direct3d. unfortunately in linux, you can hear foot prints of your opponents way on the other side of the map, yet you can't hear anyone spamming flack behind you. there's are some tweaks to rolloff , however if you go way out of range, utan thinks you are hacking your ini file and you get banned just becuase the entire match is SO LOUD you cannot hear yourself think.
3. shock balls curve to the right.
4. you cannot use ventrilo in linux (yeah wine claims to but it's not 100% perfect) they claim they're making a port, but I see no movement on it. competitive UT does not use teamspeak.
5. you do not see rocket's fire until they are on top of you, and in windows you can see them coming a mile away and dodge and be safe.

When I mess around and "pub it up" yeah I'll load and play in linux, but when I play for tournament's it has to be XP unfortunately.

However, due to the way that linux treats the internet...OMG the netcode just rocks in linux. You aim at something you hit it. I like 40-60 ping tops for servers, but wow even 120 ping in UT on linux plays like 40 ping in Windows. The netcode / linux is the real promise I believe for gaming on linux. Linux is just so un-bloated I wish the games were more targeted for it by design.

That kind of reminds me of a NIC card I saw in Game Informer. The thing is a couple hundred bucks. Total rip-off IMHO. The thing that is supposed to be so special about it, is that it allegedly helps minimize latency by having it's own processor, and also circumventing Window's networking code.

I think the whole thing is kind of funny -- you definitely know your networking code is pathetic when there is a hardware device, designed and marketted, to make up for it.

If you mean Linux, yeah, Linux is definitely better than Windows. With windows, even when I loaded a small file I could freeze the system. In Linux, the system rarely freezes, and if it does, there's always the command line!

What controlls the processor in the NIC card? it could have little penguins living in it to do the job properly
I'm still reading through this tread (page 36), so not quite up to speed yet but have a quick question to pose: With all the thousands of developers involved in linux, why did microsoft pick someone from gentoo who was heavily involved in portage to wave the check book in front of? They obviously want to run *nix apps on vista somehow, do they want a point and click optimized software compiler for it too?

Windows is dead, long live Linux.

Why?
DOS was the right thing at the right time and got the ball rolling, then windows came along, copied a lot of good ideas, rolled them together and provided a product which was good enough to eventually bring the PC into the home. Considering the amount of work needed for a company to make and market a product like that, it was worth the price.
From the first versions of windows right up to today the price in relation to the product has not been excessive. Check the price of autoCAD or photoshop and consider how much more development is needed for an OS.
So windows did its job and made Bill a very wealthy man in the process. There was only Apple for competition, and they cost more, so business boomed.
Then along came a worldwide 'mob of hippie hacker terrorists' with no idea about business models or market planning and a thing called GNU/Linux. Why would anyone want something cobbled together by people who don't even wear suits?
Installation:
98 was the first version of windows I installed, and I must say it wasn't bad. Quite easy to understand, only let down by Microsoft's idea of how long 25 minutes takes. 2000 and XP's installers with there blue screen of birth startup interfaces are not nearly as good.
Red hat 8 was my first attempt with Linux. First impression? 'ooh, that's nice'. And it was. I didn't know a partitioning scheme from an elephants bum so it did it for me. 'Whats a lilo do?, "if your not sure, use the default option", that's me. next'. "Select packages for installation". And I was expecting wordpad and minesweeper. It wanted 6.5GB for my greed, and i only had 6GB. All in all the only problem I, a complete novice, had was deciding which of the hundreds of applications I didn't want to install.
Setting it up:
Drivers. "Please insert disk marked windows 98 in drive D". OK, Disk.....drive....close....click OK......"Please insert disk marked Voodoo 4500 in drive D" OK, Disk.....drive....close....click OK......"Please insert disk marked windows 98 in drive D" Aaaaagggghhhhhh. And when it did install the sound card stopped working. Thing are better now, but not much. Windows update (if you have the net and its working, XP SP1 to SP2 anyone?) finds a driver about 80% of the time, but its usually outdated, so then its time to trawl the net for drivers, and then trawl the net again for the right version drivers... The wizards are sometimes nice though.
RedHat 8. Everything worked. Everything. Thing's I didn't know I had worked, 4 USB ports I didn't know about, plugged in a header and they worked. Screen resolution was at 1024x768 and 24 bit color immediately. Configuration was a pain sometimes (Please don't ever mention ATZ commands) but when i had the net working, folks told me exactly what I needed to do. Thank you to everyone who helps out on forums, especially the folks who have patience for a newbies mistakes. No, it wasn't all click...click...click...working application/indecipherable error message, but it was far more satisfying getting things set up and to know how. And nearly all the error messages made sense.
There seems to be a standard reply when Linux is mentioned to windows 'experts'. "blah blah blah...drivers". Stick a knoppix CD in a PC (with or without the net) and you have to have some pretty esoteric hardware if something isn't working, and its all there on one little CD. Better yet, if something doesn't work then there is a 90% chance it can be got to work with less effort that it takes to trawl the net for alternative drivers and patches for a windows box. And with 100% less bugs and spy-ware.
Applications:
Here things change. Once you get past the agreements, agreeing to the agreements, entering the serial number, deselecting the 'extra features', installing, registering, filling in the registration form, re-completing the registration form because Elvis already has a copy, re-booting, double-clicking on the icon, finding the missing DLLs, re-booting again, double-clicking on the icon again and starting the application, there really are some great apps for windows. Fortunately most of them will run on wine.
RedHat 8. RPMs are a great idea but (rant. in caps.) why the hell did red hat, and now fedora not include synaptic??? (OK, rant over). I downloaded over 200 dependencies one by one on a 56k connection just to install doom. Then i got to learn all about DRI and tdfx. OK, so i did it wrong, I did it all wrong, picked the wrong distro, was afraid to ask questions and just got of to a bad start. I still had a copy of windows on a partition (for games and to find out about ATX commands) and it was tempting me back. If it wasn't for that best loved windows application, the blue screen of death, it might have claimed me. I switched to debian (long live debian), discovered apt and synaptic and have never looked back.
Native Linux applications may not have all the specialist software covered yet, but for the essentials its rock solid. The applications in the stable tree are STABLE, they have been tested by millions of people worldwide who used them when they where in the testing tree. Those applications have already been tested by millions when they where in the unstable tree. All along the line users have been sending in bug reports and suggestions for improvement. A closed-doors company CANNOT compete with that

So windows has had its day. DOS came at the right time, windows came at the right time, and now in an age when PCs are competing with games consoles, mobile phones, DVDs, TVs , PDAs and god only knows what else (toasters?) for the personal entertainment, multimedia, communications, internet access and home computing market, its the day for Linux. It can run on any kind of platform from wrist watches to mainframes (and selected toasters), be adapted to just about every kind of processor, be given any kind of interface and its free.
Some guy somewhere in Korea could be putting the finishing touches to the latest do-it-all super gadget as you read this. Will he wait 18 months for a team of software engineers to build a proprietary system from the ground up? Will he call up Microsoft looking for a version of CE to run on a kamaguchi heavy industries and bicycle company processor? Or will he have in in the shops within 3 months running on Linux?
Think the PC as we know it will be around forever? The nails are going in the coffin lid for the home PC already. Most home users use the PC for games, web browsing, email, text editing, document storage, image editing, nothing that can make a modern PC break into a sweat. You can do all that on a PlayStation 2 for a lot less cash than a beige box from PC world.
Monitors used to rule for high definition, HDTV is changing that plus games consoles are usually cheaper than a PC built with high end hardware for games.
This is already showing up, Microsoft started expanding their market with the xbox. This was Sony's big thing so the PS3 "has Linux installed". Turns out it doesn't, but yellow dog have a distro for it less than a month after launch. This has the best processor that money can buy, the fastest ram and some of the best graphics hardware, and you can securely run firefox, openoffice and countless other applications that have been through the most intense development and test cycles in the world.
When Joe public can walk into a shop and see things like this on display then an xbox for the kids plus a bug ridden beige box in the house stops making sense.
"But not in the office". True, there is nothing (yet) to replace the PC in the office, but what runs on them is a different matter. With governments and army's switching thousands of PC to Linux, a lot of, if not most companies will be taking an interest. The biggest reason for them not to switch (in my opinion) is the empty threats of 'legal proceedings' against Linux. That was always a 'we have more lawyers than you do' threat. Now countries are involved, and the 'we have more lawyers than you do' style of business does not work against France or Germany or China.
Linux looks more than just interesting to a company with 200, 6 year old PCs to upgrade, and that is before anyone has mentioned leaving them where they are, running them in a cluster and having more power than individual replacements can offer for at least 6 years.
Microsoft needs a new DOS or a new windows, something that fills a gap that we didn't really know existed. But now it is to late, if Linux isn't already there then a year after the release of a new 'wonder product', Linux will be there and it will be doing it better.

That's my 2 cents. Sorry it was so long, more like $1.50 really

My guess, for why they picked that guy/gal, is because they probably couldn't get anyone involved in apt development to join the dark side.

My guess is that maybe MS wants to have Vista have something like a good package management and repo system like how some of the Linux distros have. Not necessarily a packaging system per say, but perhaps a system that can actually install/remove/upgrade software in a manageable and reliable way. We all know how terrible all Windows are about that -- installing/removing/upgrading software on windows tends to slowly errode it's stability and performance (probably mainly due to how terrible most of the installers are about cleaning up the mess they leave behind the registry). I used to have saying with Windows -- 'This OS will self-destruct in 10 uninstalls.'

I agree with you stan.distortion. But I would like to point out that there is a second way to install win98, i remember because i had to do it recently. It involved first using fdisk, then copying the install files to the harddrive. Not only is it alot faster, but it no longer requires you to find your win98 cd when a new device is installed. You are Correct...Windows is dead, surprisingly i think google is becoming the next microsoft, but with better policies. With all of their new online office apps, large data storage (is planned for next year or so), and Google OS (yes they are making their own OS!!!!). It will basically make the OS completely virtualized. Microsoft is going to have a difficult time with their next OS after Vista. But soon the OS wars will become a more equal battlefield with Linux ruling All .

Whatever comes after Vista is going to have to struggle very hard not to be the last Windows version.