Rant: Hardware and virtualization vs software compatibility

Hardware technology and virtualization have progressed to the point that we can now brute force software incompatibility annoyances.

As an example, you can't install IE6 and IE7 on the same machine, but you can install and run two separate complete virtualized copies of Windows XP, each with a different version of IE. This is like asking, "Can I swap out the radio in my car for another radio?" and being told, "No, but we can install a number of precise miniature duplicates of your car in cages on the back seat, each of which can then have a different radio."

I love virtualization, and think it's very powerful tool, but in cases like this I feel the software industry has lost a battle against its own complexity.

I decided to add a few bits of code that I have lying around to github. Feel free to check them out: https://github.com/fluffysquirrels