If companies take patents in multiple countries, usually they don't take patents in NZ. There are no patents here on h264 for example. The market is too small to bother. So it won't make much of a different to multinational corps etc.

Raytracing is moving to programmable gpus

Clicked on the Dell ad at the top of this page. Searched "Linux laptop" and surprised to find Dell is now selling a linux laptop in New Zealand. When I searched a few months I couldn't find any. Anyone know about the touch screen with ubuntu?

Slackware is the one distro where I can grab the source for something, eg. the kernel or games, compile it and it will work. I put ubuntu on my laptop because I cant be bothered to fiddle with the settings to get it to work and I dont compile anything. My desktop is slackware for the opposite reasons.