Is it Intel that paid NVidia or the other way around? Having support for SLI is defo good thing for NVidia and for Intel, the question is who should care more.

The whole idea of playing Half Life is not to go outside with real guns and kill aliens, but to sit in front of your laptop and killing them with mouse clicks.

If I wanted to kill aliens with real guns, I could do that without starting my PC... right?

This link looks funny, but I'm full of respect, man.

Did you get smart enough to patent it? ;)

Well yes, pro-business government is in power in Canada. But as far as I can tell, patenting business methods is anti-business and anti-competition, so current government shouldn't allow them if they really are what you say they are.

Do you know if anyone of Palm Pre owners had asked Palm for sources of their modified versions of GPL software they use?

If yes, where did you publish it? ;)

As a software developer and small player in this market i must agree. I don't use Microsoft's products, nor I make living from selling/using them, but that doesn't change the fact you can't criticize Microsoft for playing the rules of the game.

However, what you can blame Microsoft for is not trying to change the rules. They seem to be happy with things the way they are. I won't bring quotes from Bill Gates from past saying software patents is stupid, just go and google it.

The same applies to IBM and other big vendors, possibly with the exception of Sun and Novell (but go and figure out how these two ended up...).

These companies lobby very successfully in favor of software patents. They act together, as a team. They profit from their actions and other companies suffer. I can't think of different way of naming it than a CARTEL.

They are doing this different way than other cartels do. They are not fixing prices, but use law system to enforce their privileged positions and make life of other companies much more difficult and - most important - expensive. This means their products are also more expensive, and here is real intention of having software patents system in place - not to allow new players to enter the game. This is a cartel, but I don't know if EU/US governments will ever realize it.

From images on Roman coins and walls, you could get an idea how original version of the instrument looked like. What these guys re-created is version from Bach's time, and after watching the video, I admit it matches character of music :). (I love Bach BTW)

I would like to see original version, though.

We must have even worse climate here in Poland as they seem to be repairing roads for last 20 years with little success...

Ok. They probably won't deliver me slick laptops...

Yeah, I know that. Running 9.04 now with experimental drivers because I couldn't stand:

- poor performance
- system freezes (sic!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_hardware_in_Soviet_Bloc_countries#Bulgarian_computers

go learn about computing in Soviet block. I won't mention Polish "Odra" computer and it's top-of-the-art memory of that time.

I never been to Bulgaria (want to go there), but I guess it can be possible to buy some cheap Acer laptops with Linux there from_a_shelf in cheap computer stores.

hey, what's the crap about swallowing you sick bastard! ;)

It's more about getting "clean" laptop without any OS (or proprietary one) installed and hardware compatibility with free OSes.

I'd love to see some vendor shipping laptops "Tested with Ubuntu, Fedora, NetBSD and OpenSolaris".

From my experience (had 3 laptops with Linux pre-installed so far - 2 with Linpus and one with Xandros!), I always had to switch to something else than what came with laptop. With Acer laptops it was easy - hardware was fairly standard. Other thing was with early version of Eee PC, that had all sorts of problems with drivers for almost a year until I could install "stock" Debian on it.

If I even got a laptop from Dell with Ubuntu, I would:
- re-partition and encrypt hard drive
- upgrade to something more recent than 8.04

That means I don't need a laptop with Linux pre-installed, but one without Windows, with fairly standard hardware. I think most of you here would agree with me.

Yeah, realised that when I typed in. But left there ;)

No way. He hasn't played a Cylon so you're screwed!