Flame on: Gnome is unbearable...

Actually the beaking bread was in Gothic2 maybe also in Risen but I am not sure. The Gothic series and later Risen definitely is a successor to Ultima 7 also add Arx Fatalis to the list of Ultima successors using similar ideas.

If you hire a guy like this one, then you have more than a little bit of shit up your sleeves.

Actually the voice search in google works like that, call bla bla, drive me to bla bla... just the way siri works. So google had it before Apple even filed the patent.

So what the search itself was done in that manner way before apple brought Siri out.
There is a video from i think 2010 or so, where the search feature was demonstrated in conjunction with the routing websearching adress book search.

Except that all of the mentioned patents are bull**** it is even worse that Android had voice search 1-2 years before Apple. Same goes for slide to unlock, a dutch court just threw apple out of the court after Samsung showed prior art regarding slide to unlock. What apple here simply does is landgrabbing and then suing people left and right and sometimes even people who have contracts with the original landowners.

given that Android has had voice search for more than two years now (introduced i think in 2.0 or so) and Winmobile had it also for 7 or more years.
When will this patent madness finally end?

I have been running flawlessly now for a year on a non intel drive.

Well there are some things in WinMo of the old and also in old Nokia Phones which no smartphone yet has matched.
The Nokia phones had excellent cameras with Carl Zeiss objective lenses and could make an alarm from the alarm clock even if the phone was turned off (sort of super standby)

In case of Winmo, Android comes closest with its configurability, but WinMos downfall simply was its bugs. I once had a phone with version 6.1 or so, and that one had the shoddiest browser I have ever seen in my life (about five years into ie6) and could not even trigger an alarm correctly, by suddenly buzzing off at midnight although the alarm was set to 7. Add to that the ghastly usability and you have a stinker despite being very flexible under the hood.
Over the years there were lots of excellent mobile osses (I once had a Zaurus), but in the late 90s Microsoft killed all of them with their market dominance. I am not to unhappy that Microsoft does not get too much foothold currently into the mobile space. They still have the shoddiest browser standardswise.

Yes that can be a real problem for people with lots of files. Years ago I did programming on Windows (thank god anymore) there were literally thousands of files in my home dir.
The problem was there was this threshold of number of files which if you crossed it brought the FS to a crawl. I could notice that by deleting a few files then suddenly performance was back (except for the defragmentation induced one) once you crossed this boundary performance were back to a crawl.
Add to that the windows inherent pessimistic locking and worse fragmentation than on most unix filesystems and you are in for hell.

Now I am on a mac, no matter how crappy HFS+ is in many aspects from a users point of view it scales way better than NTFS with lots of files.

Why? The last time I had a look at BTRFs it was at least in a VM significantly slower than EXT4.
This was noticable at every corner of the OS.
I would not use it for production, at least not in a scenario where I/O performance matters, but the features are neat. I love
the snapshotting. But my personal guess is it is at least a year away from being a viable EXT4 replacement.

Actually the last org I worked for, basically asked me why I was using Chrome for development althought the company policy was IE. I just told them if you wanna make the site save for the future and wana minimize development costs then let it do it my way...
We had to develop with IE6 btw.... no tools supported.

Actually I never praised IE9 by the lack of HTML features and smaller annoyances they added in Javascript/Dom it was clear that IE9 was outdated about a year before it even came out.

Sheesh the last time I had a table layout I was literally screaming. Why? The simple reason was that it was a legacy layout and it should have been pressed into another layout stylewise. With css no problem, with tables impossible.
CSS has other annoyances like the lack of variables or macros which frameworks deliver on top of css. But the existence of CSS is heavens sent.

Add to that that dumb phones slowly will be replaced with bottom end android phones within the next 2-3 years and that most of the dumb phones do not even have a data contract, and you can see that JavaME is getting nowhere. And that was about time, btw I am a big fan of java. But JavaME should die a sooner than later.