Avoiding the Microsoft tax, but bought a copy of Windows to run in a VM?<p>Most universities have full-duplex 100Mbit+, and at those speeds it's not your connection that's the bottleneck, it's the latency of getting your request to the server and the server's available bandwidth. I imagine most routers are smart enough not to completely saturate the pipe with a single user's connection.
I do not understand how these two quotes fit together logically:<p><i>"For my primary workstation, I’m using a built-from-parts box optimized for silence with a couple of graphics cards. That also allows me to evade the Microsoft Tax"</i><p><i>"Unfortunately, GNU/Linux can still not match Windows in the development department. I use an emulated Windows box with Visual Studio for that"</i><p>I am not trolling for RMS's affection. I'm thinking my understanding of MS Tax is not accurate/up-to-date?
What does he actually do on those machines?<p>I have no idea why somebody in the european parliament would want more than 8 GB of RAM. Apparently he runs Visual Studio inside a VM, but I'm not sure why he does a lot of software development.
<i>Ubuntu, a version of Linux, is used throughout as base operating system. ... some video production tools. (In the Pirate Party, we produce quite a bit of video.)</i><p>What are good video production tools for Linux?<p>[Aside: Strange how he slags Linux for development and uses Windows, but uses Linux for video production.]