the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc
Lets take that as a given for the sake of the argument, and assume that we want just enough dpi on our screen that one pixel shows up at a visual angle of one minute of arc. So the screen can just match the resolution of the eye.
Lets also assume that the largest screen we might ever want is as wide as the viewing distance from our eyes to the center of the screen. Think a 32'' screen on your desk, at arms length away, or a 100'' screen 2-3 meters away in your living room.
Then the viewing angle at the left/right edge of the screen is arctan (0.5) = 26.6 degrees and the total viewing angle from left to right is 53.2Â.
The requirement of one pixel = one minute of arc translates to 60 pixel per degree and to a horizontal screen resolution of 3192 pixel. A bit less than the 4K resolution that is already on the market. I haven't watched 4K material yet, but I found that WQHD (2560x1440 pixels) on a good monitor is already pushing the limit of my eyesight.
So I guess 3840x2160 will end up being the "44.1kHz 16 bit of video". Most people won't really see the difference when the resolution is pushed higher.
Depending on how urgent the replacement is, waiting a few more weeks might make sense. The first manufacturer designs should soon appear, with a few improvements over the reference design.
And the answer is not buying a phone (or tablet) without root access.
Obviously that requires some research before buying, with questions such as: -Does the device have a locked boot loader? -If yes, can the customer unlock it? By an "officially" supported method?
I think private servers, where only a small population of people that know each other has access, would help here. Sadly, very few games these days offer such things. In the 90s and early 2000s, many games came with software that allowed to host your own multiplayer server, but today this seems to be the exception.
Blizzard in particular has a history of trying to prevent this kind of self-help, see the bnetd lawsuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd). Which makes them arguably part of the problem.
Pulling some processing to the server might be a necessary evil to make cheating more difficult. And you get a lot more processing power per dollar today than when Half-Life and Call Of Duty came out.
As a reasonable compromise, I think plausibility checks on health, movement speed and visibility would make sense, and then
- server-side, overriding characters whose client claims they have over 100% health or extra armor (yes that was once a hack on Day Of Defeat)
- not sending position data of invisible players
- punishing speed hacks somehow The visibility check might be the most challenging to program, but perhaps it would still be useful at reduced resolution.
If anything, the reason this seemed true in the past was that TVs were blurry enough that you couldn't tell the pixels apart, which worked as a kinda-sorta el cheapo anti aliasing effect. This isn't quite true anymore with HDTV.
I think we'll get something similar with HDTV and the limited resolution of the human eye. Unless you are sitting close to a really large screen, or have very good eyesight, pixels will blur together thanks to being too small to tell apart.
Of course, the consoles will need to fully support HDTV, which the current generation still has problems with. Upcoming consoles like Project Scorpio should solve that.
That USED to be the case with old school consoles where the cartridge was actually part of the machine to the point where code execution was partly done on the cartridge, i.e. you had nearly TOTAL control over the CPU in such a console. That hasn't been the case for well over a decade now. No console maker would be "stupid" enough to allow you to run arbitrary code on its machine, how long do you think any kind of DRM would hold in such an environment?
With Vulkan and DirectX12, developers can reportedly program "closer to the hardware" again. I doubt that things will go all the way to assembly again, but the overhead is likely to shrink on both console and PC.
Unless console makers are so worried about DRM breakage that they decline to allow Vulkan and DirectX12 on their machines, in which case the PC might actually gain an advantage over consoles.
Also, the numbers at Netmarketshare sometimes have weird fluctuations.
Windows XP, for instance, dipped to 13,57% in Nov. 2014, then recovered to 19.15% until Feb. 2015. After that it finally started losing market share again, as expected from an old system without support.
Considering that, I won't celebrate the Year Of Linux On The Desktop yet, even if it is tempting;-)
That would of course be nice, and IIRC the GPL V3 has some clauses to give the user protection against patent misuse.
But in general, I'm fairly content if you get the source code, the right to redistribute it and no overly onerous license clauses to limit how you use it.
In short, more cross-platform libraries for.NET while Java EE may be stagnating.
As some people have commented on ArsTechnica, if this goes on Oracle risks that more corporate users switch to the.NET ecosystem. Which will not make Java obsolete overnight, but such trends tend to be self-perpetuating.
No, that wasn't good trolling by GP at all. A skilled troll can get people riled up and provoke a bunch of heated answers. A really skilled troll does it in a controversial way that draws some supporters as well, creating a major flame war.
My experience in Germany is similar. I'm currently looking for a new job, and based on the (sparse) feedback I get from potential employers the €55k/year I'm asking for are a realistic market value. This is only marginally more than what one could expect ten years ago. Counting inflation, low as it is, this amounts to a decline in purchasing power.
The likely reason in case of Germany is that the trade associations have successfully lobbied our politicians to allow more immigration of qualified people from outside the EU. The immigration permit is called "Blue Card EU" and bound to 1) graduation from a university 2) a minimum wage of currently 48.400 €/year (or less for some occupations considered having a manpower shortage, especially MINT professions).
Obviously this is driving down wages, similar to H1B in the US. Because there are quite a few competent MINT graduates from the former Soviet Union, and they do (understandably) take the opportunity. I've worked with some of those guys, and they are by and large decent people, so i don't begrudge them the opportunity to make money here. But it still leads to rather meager increases in salary for us MINT graduates.
So Pimentel was unable to find a candidate who had a few years' experience with something like Scrum, coming from a related field in the industry?
Because that is what is immediately coming to my mind as a reasonable compromise. Said candidate might not be familiar with all agile methodologies, but he/she would already know at least one of those and hopefully bring some domain knowledge as well.
If Pimentel is insisting on someone with experience and certifications in several different ''Agile'' project management techniques, I can imagine that the search might be difficult. But that is also the point where expectations go from "high" to "unrealistic".
And then there are employers who only want to hire perfect candidates, even if there are a bunch of people with reasonably close skill sets, willing to work and asking for reasonable wages.
There are quite a few shades of grey between "trained" and "untrained", and often a candidate with related experience could bridge the gap with a bit of training on the job. I suspect Samuel Pimentel (or his client) has unrealistic expectations and is blaming everyone but his own lack of flexibility.
Genuine question from someone not living in the US:
If there was a court decision in the first instance and an aborted appeal, does that mean -the decision from the first instance stands, creating a precedent -or is the decision from the first instance somehow nullified?
For the potentially-vulnerable aspect extended support is sufficient. Extended support means that the OS still gets security patches, just no more functional updates.
For drivers it depends on the hardware vendors, some stop making drivers for old operating systems before those reach their end of extended support. Case in point: The PC I built in 2007, with a then fairly new Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. Windows 2000 was still in extended support, but Nvidia did not make any more drivers for Windows 2000. I ended up switching to XP because of that, otherwise I'd have kept Windows 2000 for a few more years.
BTW, the other way round (old hardware on new OSes) Nvidia are fairly good at long term support. Support for the 8600 GT lasted almost nine years after release. The final driver is version 341.95 from March 2016, supports Windows 10 and is still available for download.
In Germany, utilities are obliged by law to buy green energy from the producers. The price depends on the energy source and when the power plant went online.
That price is guaranteed for 20 years after the power plant goes online, but the compensation for new power plants is reduced every year and additional restraints are phased in, such as the utilities having the ability to throttle generation in times of high production.
The historical maximum was around 50 cents/kWh for photovoltaics installed up to 2001. For new plants installed today it is around 10 cents/kWh depending on the size of the plant. But the old plants still get their 50 cents/kWh until the 20 years are up. During the 2020s, we will see the first installations lose their guaranteed compensation.
For the home consumer and small businesses (but not large industry consumers), there is a cost allocation to pay for the green energy. Currently, the home consumer pays around 30 cents/kWh. And yes, that is a political topic.
Digital will tolerate some noise (as in, mediocre SNR) without flipped bits and thus seem to be perfectly without interference. Analog, the same SNR may already show up as audible distortion.
This said, analog cabling with decent contacts is quite OK for headphones and most other HiFi equipment. I've been a bit of a HiFi enthusiast myself in my youth, including some tinkering on the equipment, but I found the influence of the cabling to be very low. I'd still recommend decent wire cross sections for the speakers and gold-plated contacts for the RCA and headphone plugs, but IMHO Monster Cable for $30/meter is overkill.
My solution: A replica from aluminum and wood, much more sturdy. Cost me a few hours in the workshop (but almost no money), but will probably survive the car.
Not all products (I still like their headphones), but...
-For everything that has a processor and might eventually need a firmware upgrade Sony is right out. Because I think it would be an invitation to pull crap like with the PS3 (advertised with Linux support, then removed Linux support as a "security upgrade") again.
-Software is right out because I don't trust them not to pull a rootkit again.
In short, I wouldn't buy anything but analog equipment from Sony. If digital stuff is 90% of their business (just guessing), it amounts to a 90% boycott.
Joking aside, trying to push around customers that have alternatives is a bad idea. And I think organizations that need high performance computing solutions also tend to have the expertise to use something else than Windows.
Damned if you don't change it for the reason you outlined, but even more damned if you do change it, because now you (or your users) have to rewrite lots of code to restore the old functionality of the code. Probably (way) more than if you "just" have to rewrite code that manipulates pointers with long arithmetic.
C allows a lot of implicit conversions, not all of them make sense. It is really easy to end up with a C program that does not do what the programmer intended. Hence my sig;-)
My wife needs microsoft office applications for compatibility with her students and colleagues. Can i point and click install that? Is it as easy to crack on linux as windows (autoKMS).
Libre Office may work for her. Perhaps not for every feature in MS Office, but it is worth a try. Besides, it is legitimately free, no crack required;-)
My wife uses quickbooks to do some accounting for some companies. Has linux started supporting quickbooks now?
Are you talking about Intuit QuickBooks? If yes, they are currently trying to convert their customers to Software As A Service. I could not even find a purchase option for a traditional application anymore, just for QuickBooks Online. Who knows how long the offline version is still supported. And I guess with QuickBooks Online the OS won't matter anymore.
And please don't say "just run wine". Number 1, it costs money and 2 is an emulator, so is bound to have issues.
Um, which version of "wine" are you talking about? The version on winehq.org is open source and free to download. There is also a commercial version by Codeweavers (https://www.codeweavers.com/), which is called CrossOver. I dimly remember that there was a time where "Wine" by Codeweavers was not so clearly distinct from the open source version, but these days even the name is different.
This said, I agree that Microsoft's attempts to push people to upgrade suck. I intend to keep my own copy of Windows 7 until 2020, when the supply of security patches runs out. After that, Windows MAY be allowed to remain on a gaming partition without Internet access.
Not only that, Windows Professional is also used in business a lot. Not every company has a volume license agreement and is running Windows Enterprise. Those businesses are not consumers by the usual definition.
You have a point about the network effects, but I think you're underestimating how many applications have compatible Open Source alternatives these days.
For instance, I have stopped using Microsoft Office entirely at home. Used to have an older pirated MS Office version, but even "free" does not cut it anymore for me when compared to a current version of Libre Office. Almost everyone accepts PDF these days, which I can easily export from Libre Office.
Browsers are freely available from various software vendors, and Internet Explorer is no longer the best. My only reason to fire it up these days is for looking something up in the MSDN, which has a rather rigid policy of requiring cookies. I have "session cookies only" allowed in Seamonkey and MSDN balks at that. Dunno how MS detects that, but it is my last reason to use IE on Microsoft websites. If I get rid of Windows one day, the need for looking up stuff in MSDN will also be gone and IE can follow it into/dev/null.
Which leaves games as the last reason for keeping Windows, and that obstacle is weakening too. Most of what I own in terms of games does already have a Linux version or will at least run in WINE.
So I, for one, intend to switch when Windows 7 support runs out unless MS does a U-turn on their current policy of abusing their users. In the meantime, all hardware and software purchases do require Linux compatibility or at least a demonstrated willingness to get there. Valve actually has earned some goodwill from me here, despite my normal dislike for DRM in any form:
They try to make their stuff run under Linux as well:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, lets do a bit of math then to figure it out.
According to https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/PenetrantTest/Introduction/visualacuity.htm, 20/20 vision is
the ability to resolve a spatial pattern separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc
Lets take that as a given for the sake of the argument, and assume that we want just enough dpi on our screen that one pixel shows up at a visual angle of one minute of arc. So the screen can just match the resolution of the eye.
Lets also assume that the largest screen we might ever want is as wide as the viewing distance from our eyes to the center of the screen. Think a 32'' screen on your desk, at arms length away, or a 100'' screen 2-3 meters away in your living room.
Then the viewing angle at the left/right edge of the screen is arctan (0.5) = 26.6 degrees and the total viewing angle from left to right is 53.2Â.
The requirement of one pixel = one minute of arc translates to 60 pixel per degree and to a horizontal screen resolution of 3192 pixel. A bit less than the 4K resolution that is already on the market. I haven't watched 4K material yet, but I found that WQHD (2560x1440 pixels) on a good monitor is already pushing the limit of my eyesight.
So I guess 3840x2160 will end up being the "44.1kHz 16 bit of video". Most people won't really see the difference when the resolution is pushed higher.
Depending on how urgent the replacement is, waiting a few more weeks might make sense. The first manufacturer designs should soon appear, with a few improvements over the reference design.
PC Games Hardware has a short hands-on test of the XFX Radeon RX 480 (http://www.pcgameshardware.de/AMD-Radeon-RX-4808G-Grafikkarte-264637/Videos/XFX-RX-480-Black-Edition-Test-1202095/) which shows better cooling and an 8-pin power connector that can officially handle 150W, thus solving the problem with the reference design violating the official power limit on the 6 pin connector.
And the answer is not buying a phone (or tablet) without root access.
Obviously that requires some research before buying, with questions such as:
-Does the device have a locked boot loader?
-If yes, can the customer unlock it? By an "officially" supported method?
I think private servers, where only a small population of people that know each other has access, would help here.
Sadly, very few games these days offer such things. In the 90s and early 2000s, many games came with software that allowed to host your own multiplayer server, but today this seems to be the exception.
Blizzard in particular has a history of trying to prevent this kind of self-help, see the bnetd lawsuit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd). Which makes them arguably part of the problem.
Pulling some processing to the server might be a necessary evil to make cheating more difficult. And you get a lot more processing power per dollar today than when Half-Life and Call Of Duty came out.
As a reasonable compromise, I think plausibility checks on health, movement speed and visibility would make sense, and then
- server-side, overriding characters whose client claims they have over 100% health or extra armor (yes that was once a hack on Day Of Defeat)
- not sending position data of invisible players
- punishing speed hacks somehow
The visibility check might be the most challenging to program, but perhaps it would still be useful at reduced resolution.
If anything, the reason this seemed true in the past was that TVs were blurry enough that you couldn't tell the pixels apart, which worked as a kinda-sorta el cheapo anti aliasing effect. This isn't quite true anymore with HDTV.
I think we'll get something similar with HDTV and the limited resolution of the human eye. Unless you are sitting close to a really large screen, or have very good eyesight, pixels will blur together thanks to being too small to tell apart.
Of course, the consoles will need to fully support HDTV, which the current generation still has problems with. Upcoming consoles like Project Scorpio should solve that.
That USED to be the case with old school consoles where the cartridge was actually part of the machine to the point where code execution was partly done on the cartridge, i.e. you had nearly TOTAL control over the CPU in such a console. That hasn't been the case for well over a decade now. No console maker would be "stupid" enough to allow you to run arbitrary code on its machine, how long do you think any kind of DRM would hold in such an environment?
With Vulkan and DirectX12, developers can reportedly program "closer to the hardware" again. I doubt that things will go all the way to assembly again, but the overhead is likely to shrink on both console and PC.
Unless console makers are so worried about DRM breakage that they decline to allow Vulkan and DirectX12 on their machines, in which case the PC might actually gain an advantage over consoles.
Also, the numbers at Netmarketshare sometimes have weird fluctuations.
Windows XP, for instance, dipped to 13,57% in Nov. 2014, then recovered to 19.15% until Feb. 2015. After that it finally started losing market share again, as expected from an old system without support.
Considering that, I won't celebrate the Year Of Linux On The Desktop yet, even if it is tempting ;-)
That would of course be nice, and IIRC the GPL V3 has some clauses to give the user protection against patent misuse.
But in general, I'm fairly content if you get the source code, the right to redistribute it and no overly onerous license clauses to limit how you use it.
See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/06/28/the-week-in-net-6282016/
In short, more cross-platform libraries for .NET while Java EE may be stagnating.
As some people have commented on ArsTechnica, if this goes on Oracle risks that more corporate users switch to the .NET ecosystem. Which will not make Java obsolete overnight, but such trends tend to be self-perpetuating.
No, that wasn't good trolling by GP at all.
A skilled troll can get people riled up and provoke a bunch of heated answers.
A really skilled troll does it in a controversial way that draws some supporters as well, creating a major flame war.
Just calling someone an idiot does not qualify.
My experience in Germany is similar. I'm currently looking for a new job, and based on the (sparse) feedback I get from potential employers the €55k/year I'm asking for are a realistic market value.
This is only marginally more than what one could expect ten years ago. Counting inflation, low as it is, this amounts to a decline in purchasing power.
The likely reason in case of Germany is that the trade associations have successfully lobbied our politicians to allow more immigration of qualified people from outside the EU.
The immigration permit is called "Blue Card EU" and bound to
1) graduation from a university
2) a minimum wage of currently 48.400 €/year (or less for some occupations considered having a manpower shortage, especially MINT professions).
Obviously this is driving down wages, similar to H1B in the US. Because there are quite a few competent MINT graduates from the former Soviet Union, and they do (understandably) take the opportunity. I've worked with some of those guys, and they are by and large decent people, so i don't begrudge them the opportunity to make money here. But it still leads to rather meager increases in salary for us MINT graduates.
So Pimentel was unable to find a candidate who had a few years' experience with something like Scrum, coming from a related field in the industry?
Because that is what is immediately coming to my mind as a reasonable compromise. Said candidate might not be familiar with all agile methodologies, but he/she would already know at least one of those and hopefully bring some domain knowledge as well.
If Pimentel is insisting on someone with experience and certifications in several different ''Agile'' project management techniques, I can imagine that the search might be difficult.
But that is also the point where expectations go from "high" to "unrealistic".
And then there are employers who only want to hire perfect candidates, even if there are a bunch of people with reasonably close skill sets, willing to work and asking for reasonable wages.
There are quite a few shades of grey between "trained" and "untrained", and often a candidate with related experience could bridge the gap with a bit of training on the job. I suspect Samuel Pimentel (or his client) has unrealistic expectations and is blaming everyone but his own lack of flexibility.
Genuine question from someone not living in the US:
If there was a court decision in the first instance and an aborted appeal, does that mean
-the decision from the first instance stands, creating a precedent
-or is the decision from the first instance somehow nullified?
Any lawyers willing to answer?
For the potentially-vulnerable aspect extended support is sufficient. Extended support means that the OS still gets security patches, just no more functional updates.
For drivers it depends on the hardware vendors, some stop making drivers for old operating systems before those reach their end of extended support. Case in point:
The PC I built in 2007, with a then fairly new Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT. Windows 2000 was still in extended support, but Nvidia did not make any more drivers for Windows 2000. I ended up switching to XP because of that, otherwise I'd have kept Windows 2000 for a few more years.
BTW, the other way round (old hardware on new OSes) Nvidia are fairly good at long term support. Support for the 8600 GT lasted almost nine years after release. The final driver is version 341.95 from March 2016, supports Windows 10 and is still available for download.
In Germany, utilities are obliged by law to buy green energy from the producers. The price depends on the energy source and when the power plant went online.
That price is guaranteed for 20 years after the power plant goes online, but the compensation for new power plants is reduced every year and additional restraints are phased in, such as the utilities having the ability to throttle generation in times of high production.
The historical maximum was around 50 cents/kWh for photovoltaics installed up to 2001. For new plants installed today it is around 10 cents/kWh depending on the size of the plant. But the old plants still get their 50 cents/kWh until the 20 years are up. During the 2020s, we will see the first installations lose their guaranteed compensation.
For the home consumer and small businesses (but not large industry consumers), there is a cost allocation to pay for the green energy. Currently, the home consumer pays around 30 cents/kWh.
And yes, that is a political topic.
Digital will tolerate some noise (as in, mediocre SNR) without flipped bits and thus seem to be perfectly without interference. Analog, the same SNR may already show up as audible distortion.
This said, analog cabling with decent contacts is quite OK for headphones and most other HiFi equipment. I've been a bit of a HiFi enthusiast myself in my youth, including some tinkering on the equipment, but I found the influence of the cabling to be very low.
I'd still recommend decent wire cross sections for the speakers and gold-plated contacts for the RCA and headphone plugs, but IMHO Monster Cable for $30/meter is overkill.
Like the opener for the glove box on my Audi A4. Price for the original part on Amazon:
Approx. 35 Euro. Link: https://www.amazon.de/Original-Audi-Verschluss-Handschuhfach-Swing/dp/B00J2WHB3G/ref=sr_1_4?s=automotive&ie=UTF8&qid=1465668691&sr=1-4&keywords=handschuhfach+audi+a4
Note that the stupid thing has a tendency for breaking, I already had fixed it two times with glue. So it was not even very good for 35 Euros.
My solution:
A replica from aluminum and wood, much more sturdy. Cost me a few hours in the workshop (but almost no money), but will probably survive the car.
Not all products (I still like their headphones), but...
-For everything that has a processor and might eventually need a firmware upgrade Sony is right out. Because I think it would be an invitation to pull crap like with the PS3 (advertised with Linux support, then removed Linux support as a "security upgrade") again.
-Software is right out because I don't trust them not to pull a rootkit again.
In short, I wouldn't buy anything but analog equipment from Sony. If digital stuff is 90% of their business (just guessing), it amounts to a 90% boycott.
If so, it might be self-defeating. Microsoft is not alone in the world, and if they let high performance computing die on Windows, it might silently migrate to Linux. ;-)
More so that it already has. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Architecture_and_operating_systems
Joking aside, trying to push around customers that have alternatives is a bad idea. And I think organizations that need high performance computing solutions also tend to have the expertise to use something else than Windows.
Backward compatibility. For instance, a quick search brings up this:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050131-00/?p=36563:
Header data for a bitmap file that would become incompatible and need rewriting if the size of a long changes.
Damned if you don't change it for the reason you outlined, but even more damned if you do change it, because now you (or your users) have to rewrite lots of code to restore the old functionality of the code. Probably (way) more than if you "just" have to rewrite code that manipulates pointers with long arithmetic.
C allows a lot of implicit conversions, not all of them make sense. It is really easy to end up with a C program that does not do what the programmer intended. Hence my sig ;-)
My wife needs microsoft office applications for compatibility with her students and colleagues. Can i point and click install that? Is it as easy to crack on linux as windows (autoKMS).
Libre Office may work for her. Perhaps not for every feature in MS Office, but it is worth a try. Besides, it is legitimately free, no crack required ;-)
My wife uses quickbooks to do some accounting for some companies. Has linux started supporting quickbooks now?
Are you talking about Intuit QuickBooks? If yes, they are currently trying to convert their customers to Software As A Service. I could not even find a purchase option for a traditional application anymore, just for QuickBooks Online. Who knows how long the offline version is still supported. And I guess with QuickBooks Online the OS won't matter anymore.
And please don't say "just run wine". Number 1, it costs money and 2 is an emulator, so is bound to have issues.
Um, which version of "wine" are you talking about?
The version on winehq.org is open source and free to download.
There is also a commercial version by Codeweavers (https://www.codeweavers.com/), which is called CrossOver.
I dimly remember that there was a time where "Wine" by Codeweavers was not so clearly distinct from the open source version, but these days even the name is different.
This said, I agree that Microsoft's attempts to push people to upgrade suck. I intend to keep my own copy of Windows 7 until 2020, when the supply of security patches runs out. After that, Windows MAY be allowed to remain on a gaming partition without Internet access.
Not only that, Windows Professional is also used in business a lot. Not every company has a volume license agreement and is running Windows Enterprise. Those businesses are not consumers by the usual definition.
You have a point about the network effects, but I think you're underestimating how many applications have compatible Open Source alternatives these days.
For instance, I have stopped using Microsoft Office entirely at home. Used to have an older pirated MS Office version, but even "free" does not cut it anymore for me when compared to a current version of Libre Office. Almost everyone accepts PDF these days, which I can easily export from Libre Office.
Browsers are freely available from various software vendors, and Internet Explorer is no longer the best. My only reason to fire it up these days is for looking something up in the MSDN, which has a rather rigid policy of requiring cookies. I have "session cookies only" allowed in Seamonkey and MSDN balks at that. Dunno how MS detects that, but it is my last reason to use IE on Microsoft websites. If I get rid of Windows one day, the need for looking up stuff in MSDN will also be gone and IE can follow it into /dev/null.
Which leaves games as the last reason for keeping Windows, and that obstacle is weakening too. Most of what I own in terms of games does already have a Linux version or will at least run in WINE.
So I, for one, intend to switch when Windows 7 support runs out unless MS does a U-turn on their current policy of abusing their users. In the meantime, all hardware and software purchases do require Linux compatibility or at least a demonstrated willingness to get there. Valve actually has earned some goodwill from me here, despite my normal dislike for DRM in any form: :-)
They try to make their stuff run under Linux as well