MS Office probably has more compatibility testing done than any other application. It's usually third-party software and old drivers that break upgrades.

It's still early days for Android. If Google doesn't make things easy for device makers and operators they will go right back to WinMo or Symbian or whatever and Google's investment will be wasted.

All of those unique PC machines are running the same OS: Microsoft Windows. If every PC maker was shipping their own OS the PC market would look like the Unix market circa 1990.

Only because there were no more resources to spare from the struggle to survive. War scales with the economic productivity of the societies involved.

The question is why the banks have a say in the matter. The obvious solution is for the government to mandate simple and free transfers. Most European governments did this long ago, and the Singe Euro Payments Area will do so for the EEA+Switzerland by the end of this year.

But GIMP and OOo are not designed or intended to be "basic" tools. They both aim to be full-featured, professional-level applications, and it is natural to compare them to their most important competitors. (This does not mean they have to be clones, of course. GIMP has quite a different UI than Photoshop, even though it tries to have roughly the same functionality.)

The Firefox UI is completely skinnable and there are skins on addons.mozilla.org that make Firefox 3.5 look like pretty much any previous version. Why should Mozilla bother to maintain two separate UIs when the community can do it for them?

China will trade with anyone, no matter how evil. China is the largest investor in nations like Sudan and Burma and block most attempts to censure them in the UN and other international organizations.

Secondly, the annoyance is in the fact that, in UAC, you ask to do something first, and then Windows asks you for authorization. sudo is less annoying because you authorize first (or at the same time, depending on how you look at it) and then ask to do something.

That's not the way it works. If you know a program will need elevation, set the "Always run as Administrator" option on the executable or use runas. If you don't know that the program will require authentication ahead of time the program can request elevation when needed, just like i.e. the Ubuntu update manager and other admin tools only request elevation when they need write access to the system. In fact, I'd say many more of the Windows admin tools use fine-grained permissions than on Ubuntu and Fedora.

Given that fission bombs can kill hundreds of thousands and dirty bombs can kill hundreds it seems politicians' priorities are in order on this issue.

But the population charts say that the population will peak at 9-10 billion and decline slowly thereafter. And the socioeconomic forces that drive declining fertility are the same increased access education and widening labor markets that drive global economic growth.

Your post is nonsense.

It's not really AMD's fault. I'm sure they are as concerned about missing the hoilday sales rush as you are. TSMC promised them lots of 40nm chips and failed to deliver. There is no one else who can do 40nm chips, so AMD is screwed until chip makers roll out 32nm production lines and AMD can finish designing a 32nm chip.

This is exactly what the Windows 7 installer does if you tell it to install to a partition with an existing Windows install. \Windows, \Users (or \Documents and Settings) and \Program Files are moved into a \Windows.OLD folder before the installation begins.

I don't see any general price win on Steam. It is quite common for me to see DVD editions available for a third or half the cost of a Steam game. The most recent example is Grand Theft Auto IV, which is €50 on Steam but €30 including shipping at several local (Finnish) web shops. I remember Mass Effect being €40 on Steam/€20 in stores for a long time as well. Pretty much any big title seems to drop much faster in local shops.

On the other hand, the Weekend Deals are great and I check them every week. (I picked up the Hitman Collection a few hours ago, in fact.) But Gamer's Gate, Impulse and D2D also have frequent sales.

That's a good point. Most developed countries didn't get seriously concerned with IP law until they started exporting IP themselves. Japanese companies made a lot of knock-offs in the 1950s and 60s; Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan followed in the 70s and 80s. Is it surprising then that China, India, Vietnam etc. do the same? The difference is perhaps that it is easier to spot in todays better informed market.