Is it possible (atleast in the forseeable) future the IT giant Microsoft (or similar bigwig) is likely to buy any of the CFD companies ? My possible reasons: (i) As the dollars from gaming industry is being seen by MS as too important, the need to include real life flow simulations as part of gaming could be at a high premium (ii) Many of the simulation packages will be part of the Microsoft suite. What do you think ?

Unfortunately windows cannot be used and are not mostly used for simulations. You dont want to restartyour computer 10 times when you are meshing.

H

very true, windows is also less efficient, has only just implemented 64 bit architecture and is pretty much designed to not be able to run distributed parallel.

Other than that its great for writting letters and playing games (until the flimsy secruity falls to bits and you get hacked)

u r correct more or less, i wrote a navier stokes solver, and i am stuck with one thing that winXP does not allow me to allocate more than 2 gb, so more or less i am not able to work with meshes more than 3 million cells. i will be forced to convert my code to linux (since this code is MFC based it will take little time).

Compare the market for a specialized field like CFD relative to the far broader market of general business applications that Microsoft is dominant in, and there, in my opinion, is a good bulk of your answer.

Does anyone think that Bill Gate$ would even understand what CFD stands for?

The value of the CFD market is less than a drop in the ocean compared to his business target market.

diaw...

What does a shark care or know about a tiny fish in some remote pond...?

But apart from that...

How significant do you think CFD is (or will be) for the gaming and film industries? Sure, it's used sometimes, and whenever that happens, some CFD enthusiast is quick to point it out with a proud article in some CFD journal. But how useful is it, really? For games and movies, you don't need the animations to be accurate. They just have to >look< realistic. How difficult do you think it is to make fluid flow look real for audiences and gamers 99.99% of which have very little knowledge of fluid dynamics? Especially in some fantasy world where physics could be different, and 'unrealistic' is tantamount to 'weird!' and 'cool!'? Do you think you need CFD for that? It's a cool thing to use it and claim you're all high tech, but is it really necessary, really significant compared to other parts of these projects, and will it really make much money? I don't see that coming.

A CFD software cannot be strictly limited to one O/S . And the linux clusters are just too stable

I agree with Harish. Even while running own codes, windows hangs after sometime. It will be harmful to CFD community if Microsoft takes any such step. If MS buys anyone of these companies, then we'll have beautiful ways to postprocess but we won't have anything to post process

Hrm,

Of Topic.

There seems to be a tradition to complain about how crappy MS Win is. However, for the majority of users Linux is not always a good alternative. Reasons are obvious and are similar to the reason we do not perform DNS.

All OSs have benefits/drawbacks, as with most things. For instance, ask which programing language is the best.... Pointless question? Yes!

Finally the original post addressed games.... What do I mean? Well Linux is not aimed at the gaming market!

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On Topic.

At the present I see no reason to buy a CFD company to implement CFD code in games. As mentioned before, the prime goal should be to make it look realistic. However the massive growth of the gaming industry makes any "trick" a viable option.

I agree with you, so I guess the point is that windows is good for writing letters, playing games and checking your e-mail but useless for high performance computing apps (such as CFD).

So you should stick to what you need!

This would be doom's day for the company....

This would be a disaster for the cfd company. Nobody would want to work in this company.

Windows is not the environment for scientific calculation, it is for Office work...

C