I agree - if we must have software patents, they should only be granted when pseudo code or real code is supplied with the patent. Anything with less than a few hundred lines of code (excluding comments) gets instantly discarded as obvious.

Speak for yourself, but while I hoped it would change with Blair, but I have no delusions about Cameron.

You do realise this is HP we are talking about here?

Ummmm... no, they've cheated in that screen shot by removing the (admittedly pointless) header above the list of files to compensate for the extra space taken up by the ribbon bar. We don't know whether the header is gone completely or if they changed a configuration option, but either way this is not a like-for-like comparison: there is less available space for the application.

I used the bloody ribbon in Outlook until I just couldn't stand it any more. Its the Exchange web interface for me now, which has the added advantage, in chrome at least, of using *much* less memory than Outlook.

That's as maybe, but we should be replacing that old Qt3 code anyway - and its something we can do now on the KDE4 frameworks. Do so may even give benefits and improvements to KDE4 beyond removing dependencies on obsolete libraries - the obvious one being less packages (think small form factor) once QT3Support is removed completely.

As far as I am aware, there is some activity to gradually work through the remaining QT3 dependencies and remove them.

The EU Parliament has had a right wing majority since 1999 and right wing president since 2004, so in this context the second Irish election was imposed by conservatives. You could argue that European Conservatives are somewhat to the left of US Democrats, I suppose...

In any case, I'm not sure I would equate a referendum with a scientific study.

Sorry, but we *do* have software patents again as far as I can tell. There was a brief spell between 2006 and 2008 when we didn't, but they are back and in full effect.

Quoting from

I am not a lawyer, but to me that means pretty much any software patent will be accepted provided the language of the patent is suitably constructed. This is similar, as far as I can tell, to the way that software patents became allowable in the U.S.

Sadly the software I'm talking does a lot of bit-packing to compress in-memory data. I've not analysed this code in detail, but I'm pretty sure that it makes too many assumptions. Annoyingly, in these days of giga-bytes of memory the whole memory packing stuff is probably completely unnecessary.

Oh well, I've moved on and it is someone else's problem now!

While this isn't only Microsoft's fault I think the Microsoft and Microsoft third parties have been complacent about the supremacy of the Intel architecture. Open source, conversely, has a complete software stack for many architectures - and most of that is written in C or C++! Why can't closed source achieve the same?

In any case, this article is about Intel scaring people away from ARM, and not really about Microsoft or its ecosystem at all.

Some of the legacy projects I've worked on would have a hard time supporting 64bit x86, never mind an architecture that changes the endienness. Yeah, yeah... you can say what you like - this software was written in the 90s for DOS and went through various 'upgrades' to get it working on Windows. People were 100% confident that the code would only ever have to compile for an x86 machine, so they simply didn't worry about it - even if they were aware that things like byte order or number of registers are not guaranteed. At this point the only sensible solution is to bin it and start again, but that's hard to sell to the management and customers in terms of cost and lead time.

Conversely, open source has a great history of supporting multiple architectures - that's why there is a complete software stack for ARM (and MIPS and PowerPC and...) more or less as soon as the hardware products hit the shelves.

tl;dr Yes, there are plenty of old but never the less very useful and actively used Windows applications that can't simply be recompiled for ARM.

What's wrong with Betamax? It was an excellent system used by the BBC and probably other broadcasting organizations during the 80s and early 90s. The picture quality was light years ahead of VHS. As I recall, they got screwed over with patents so the sound quality was poorer - they couldn't use Dobly noise reduction or some such. Sony only started going downhill in the 2000s as far as I can tell, before then they had excellent, reliable products.

When KDE is built for mobiles (or tablets) lots of stuff can be compiled out because its not necessary for the mobile platform. So, yes, in a sense there is such a switch...

*Wooosh!*

"95% of users can't tell the difference"

I bet you 100% of users will tell the difference between the noise from a SSD and a HDD. This and a suitable (ARM?) passively cooled box would make an ideal media center/general browsing PC. I know that my laptop is eerily quiet now, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Ok, maybe I'm very sensitive, but I find the noise from HDDs incredibly annoying.

I'd also note that my old Dell laptop is pretty ancient - must be nearly 10 years old now. When I swapped the 60G HDD for a 60G SDD two years ago there was a noticeable jump in performance to the extent that I no longer anticipate replacing it until such a time as it breaks.