Hardware floppy drives are indeed obsolete. Welcome to the wonderful era of virtualization where he can have as many windows 98 "boxes" as he likes, all with their very own virtual floppy disks.

I beg to differ. It is a matter of adjusting your expectations and your IDE layout - like we haven't done that before. In my case I have learned to like and prefer the advantages of wide over tall given a single screen limitation. On a 1920 wide screen it is easy to place two or three editor views side by side in eclipse - useful for example when dealing with multiple related classes like manager, entity and DAO classes for a given "object" in a typical enterprise app. (Just drag the document tab for a class sideways and off the main editor panel). It's not ideal - vertical space is still important - especially with the proliferation XML config files and chatty bean setters and getters, but getting used to using code folding and ouline views helps. In the end, enough that I prefer wide over tall.

(Disclaimer: my 'primary' desktop workstation has three widescreens with one oriented sideways for max vertical scrolling power - I never said I did not like vertical space).

Barring the difficulty of proving sincerity in interest, this sounds like a pragmatic solution to the patent trolling problem.