According to the French campaign group No More Racketware,  Stéphane Petrus's four year court battle could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want,

Petrus bought a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop from French retailer Cybertek in December 2007. The PC had Microsoft Windows Vista and other software installed on it, none of which Petrus wanted.

He applied for a refund from Lenovo under a French law forbidding the sale of one product to be tied to the sale of another. However in November 2008, the court rejected his request, telling him that if he didn't want to pay for the copy of Windows, he should have returned the PC.

But this was overturned by the Court of Cassation two years later on appeal, and sent back to the court in Aix en Provence for retrial, on the grounds that the lower court had not considered whether the case was covered by the provisions of the 2005 European Union directive on unfair commercial practices.

Judge Jean-Marie Dubouloz ordered Lenovo to pay Petrus legal costs of €1,000 (around US$1,300), damages of €800 and to refund the cost of the Windows license.

Petrus thought the cost of the software was €404.81, but the court found that excessive, given that he had paid €597 for the PC and software.

No More Racketware welcomed the ruling, saying it symbolised the crumbling of the bundling of hardware and software in France.

However it pointed out that since the case was won using an European directive regulating unfair commercial practices, it meant that it could set a legal precedent in other EU countries too.

Writing in his bog Frédéric Cuif, attorney for Petrus, said that the the ruling was a step in the right direction. 

Microsoft was telling the world about C++ AMP in June last year and says that it wants to make the AMP specification open.

AMP is something that Microsoft has hatched out with AMD and Nvidia. It allows AMP programs to use both the main CPU and Direct3D video cards and the plan is to make the specification permit OpenGL/OpenCL too.

According to Microsoft, the plan is to encourage other compiler developers to implement the technology.

Looking at the spec it seems that Microsoft will not assert claims on any patents that Microsoft may hold that are relevant to AMP unless the implementing party is daft enough to sue Microsoft.

AMP programmes are written in C++ and send blocks of code to be dealt with in parallel either on a CPU or the video card. These blocks are controled so that they can be kept inline with the rest of the C++ program.

So far the only thing that has been seen like it is OpenCL, but this is not linked to any specific video card manufacturer. OpenCL is based on C rather than C++, with the GPU functions written in a restricted form of C99 rather than a restricted C++.

An Oklahoma state representative with the ironic name of Will Fourkiller wants to get a bit of cash from the gaming industry while at the same time sending a message that violent games are bad for you.

Unfortunately for Mr Fourkiller, the US has this thing called Freedom of Speech so he can't ban violent games, so he shows that he learned a thing or two from the way the state handled the cigarette industry. There, the State made shedloads of cash while at the same time discouraging people from smoking. It worked, right? Well, the State had access to a lot more money it didn't have before.

Fourkiller told Kfor that he has seen first hand how video games can lead to obesity, and says research shows they can lead to bullying. Of course if you followed the same logic you would tax fast food and High Schools which also do that.

Fourkiller also shows that he is ahead of the game with his knowledge of violent video games. He cited a game called "Bully" claiming that "bullying is often what happens when kids play these games". Bully came out in 2006 and has not been seen since 2008. It's for the Playstation 2.

Fourkiller also trotted out the line a that a man who shot a police officer only did so because he played Grand Theft Auto. Generally, if you are the sort who is going to kill someone, you will do it even if you play badminton.

Fourkiller said that he believes that after hours of watching the screen, playing the video game, being that person and taking on that role, people get desensitised.

Anyway, he has introduced HB 2696, which would place an excise tax of one percent on violent games that carry a software rating of Teen, Mature, or Adult Only.

The money collected will fund the state's Childhood Outdoor Education Revolving Fund to fight obesity and the Bullying Prevention Revolving Fund. 

Presumably this would not apply to the free to play videogame developed by the US government, America's Army, in which soldiers carry guns and generally use them to shoot at other people.

Hyper-V is considered by some as broken and unmaintained and fairly pointless. Thierry Carrez, a developer handling release management for OpenStack, has called for the code supporting Hyper-V to be removed from the version of OpenStack Compute under development.

In a newsgroup item called "Essex dead wood cutting," he said Hyper-V could be removed from Essex, the version of OpenStack Compute which should be released in the middle of the year.

That comment sparked a swift retort from Microsoft that it was committed to working with the community to resolve the current issues with Hyper-V and OpenStack.

According to PC Advisor, if it is removed no one would miss it.

In fact Microsoft has been very quiet about it for ages, and has focused on its own Azure platform for use in public and private cloud deployments.

Hyper-V is included with the Windows Enterprise server licence and a lack of interest in Hyper-V in the OpenStack community means cloud service providers don't want Windows server in their OpenStack deployments because they would rather go licence free.

But there are cloud service providers who want commercial products that are used in enterprises and thus might be more appealing to enterprise customers. This is the role that Vmware has and Microsoft wants and could explain why the latter is not keen to abandon it yet.

Microsoft could be looking for another partner to help with the development of Hyper-V support in future versions of OpenStack, but the question is why it would do it.

It does not seem that with cloud vendors not really committed to building OpenStack on Hyper-V, there's no point doing the engineering work to get it up to scratch. 

Redmond.mag  claims that Microsoft has been quietly working behind the scenes to come up with a Cloud platform that can knock the socks off IBM, Amazon and Google.

The difficulty for hacks covering Vole's cloud plans is that it is not actually telling any one anything  and there is no publishable roadmap.

But it turns out that Microsoft has been sticking to a cunning plan that it drew up in 2007. Then Microsoft wanted to recreate Windows so that Redmond could run peoples' applications and store their data across multiple Windows Server machines located in Microsoft's own data centres.

But to do that, Microsoft had to walk away from Microsoft System Center and .NET-centric worlds. At the time, none of us thought that Vole was that willing to kill off these golden geese, nor did we think it would hack off the developers who supported them.

However, since 2007, we have seen that happen,  but we have not seen a large number of people sign up for Windows Azure.

Redmond.mag claims that some of the big Azure wins that Microsoft trumpeted ended up trying Windows Azure for one project and then quietly slinking away from it. Microsoft knows that it needs to make some improvements if its cloud strategy is going to pay off.

And it looks like that started last year. Quietly, Microsoft started making a few customer- and partner-requested tweaks to Windows Azure pricing. Then it started to provide support for non-Microsoft development tools and frameworks for Windows Azure.

Then the .NET Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie moved to work on the Windows Azure application platform.

Now it looks like Microsoft will make some big changes to Azure in March. Punters will be able to test Vole's persistent virtual machine that will allow users to run Windows Server, Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server on Windows Azure.

This is following in Amazon's footsteps and adding more infrastructure as a Service components to a platform that Microsoft has been touting as pure PaaS.

We should also see support for developing Windows Azure apps on Macs and Linux systems. 

Since the PC arrived we have had multi-function software suites which are geared to doing lots of things. But now the thought is that the pendulum is swinging the other way towards lightweight, single-purpose, touch-based apps such as those found on smartphones and tablets.

The thinking is that the new Windows, particularly its Metro interface, allows people to use super light software which does not need bloat and bigger install images. Instead they will use increases in disk capacities and processing.

Microsoft can make this move because when it moves to ARM versions it will not have any of its legacy applications to hold it to the past.

Patrick Moorhead, at Moor Insight & Strategy, said that it will take some time for the move to take place. It took ages before people moved from DOS to Windows and some enterprises still use DOS-based apps in a shell today.

He thinks that people will move slowly from Desktop to Metro. But those who use Windows on ARM will only get Metro as a choice.

Since there is not a way to make a dense software layout work on Metro, there will have to be a move to lighter apps.

Metro apps will also be available for x86 hardware, and users will have the choice of traditional 'rich' apps, or simplified Metro apps.

But he seems to think that Metro apps will appeal to users more because they are cheaper and will be simple to use.

While he did not think that rich apps would die, many outfits will start to think how they can tailor desktops specifically for each user based around Metro apps.

If you are a corporate then each PC will have a series of light apps which do the task asigned to the user and no more.

ZDNet thinks that will represent a massive shakeup of the PC industry. 

His chum and popular beat combo artist Neil Young is currently campaigning to get a return to the days when the sound quality of a record was a hell of a lot better than it is now. Young is fed up with the standard of compressed music and wants to get the world back into hi-fi again.

According to AP, taking his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound to the stage of a technology conference, Young invoked the ghost of Steve Jobs to back him up.

Young said the Apple co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn't use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home.

Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music and his legacy was tremendous, Young said. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.

Young told the "D: Dive Into Media" conference that he got Jobs interested in creating a format that has 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital format.

His aim was to create a format which could contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to five percent in compressed formats including Apple's AAC.

Young admits that each song would be huge, and a new storage and playback device might only hold 30 albums. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download, which is fine if you leave your device on overnight.

However, Young said he did not have have a cunning plan for developing such a format, it was up to rich people to come up with. He said that Jobs was on board with the idea before he died.

If Jobs really did want to improve the quality of sound in Apple products then why did he tell punters that the Apple boom box, which was selling for a couple of hundred dollars, was better than his stereo at home which was worth a three figured sum?

News Corp hack Walt Mossberg confirmed Young's story and said that Jobs in the past expressed surprise that people traded quality, to the extent they had, for convenience or price.

The answer to that is that Jobs lowered the standards of everything, and the price of all things and then was surprised that everyone followed him. 

According to RF designline,  "Sir" Joe Macri, said that if it can find a way to make parallel computing easier to program, his software engineers will be able to let their imaginations run wild.

Macri is the corporate vice president and CTO of the firm's Client Division. Speaking at a round table discussion at DesignCon,  he said that AMD engineers were working towards making the processing capability of the company's accelerated processing units (APUs) as accessible to programmers as the CPU is today.

The key is heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA), which Macri claims will combine scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the GPU, while offering high bandwidth access to memory at lower power.

But the hardware needed to be easier to program, easier to optimise and easier to load balance and this is all proving a little tricky.

By rethinking the approach to hardware, software developers can act more freely, using the hardware as a canvas. "Software engineers are the Michelangelo's of today," he said, adding that AMD's goal with HSA architecture was to let the software developers focus on their vision.

He said that the APU, AMD's fusion of the CPU and GPU on a single chip, is just the beginning. HSA is the APU's future, and he hoped it would become an industry standard. 

The technology is supposed to be scalable so it could end up on the cloud, or in smartphones.

Al Wegener, founder and CTO of Samplify, said that sustained performance of these multi-core processors reaches only a fraction of their potential because of memory and I/O bandwidth constraints.

He claims that APAX can reduce the bandwidth requirements in a lot of memory-bound numerical, graphical, and imaging applications.

It does this by speeding up the distribution of numerical data as graphics and images. It can be run as software on Intel x84/x64 CPUs or on GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.

Wegener said that APAX can also accelerate memory subsystems, storage subsystems, I/O, and network interfaces by integrating it as hardware IP into the memory controller, storage controller, Southbridge, and network interface card, respectively.

Currently the technology is available as software for Intel x86/x64 CPUs on both Linux and Windows 7 for HPC and cloud computing applications.

It should also appear as Verilog RTL for SoCs and FPGAs in Q3 2012. The company did not mention price. 

According to Amateur Photographer magazine, Judge Birss QC has made an interesting ruling which should put the fear of god in a lot of photoshoppers out there.

The judge concluded that  Justin Fielder had created an original image by taking a black and white picture of a double decker bus going across the Thames in front of Big Ben. Fielder then coloured the bus red.

New English Teas apparently used a similar image on its products. It was a different bus, and taken from a different angle but it used a black and white background with a photoshopped red bus. You can see the snaps here .

Judge Birss said that the person responsible for the New English Teas image was aware of Mr Fielder's image, as the two sides had met in court before.

But what is interesting from a legal perspective is that Birss has ruled that if a photograph uses the same ideas as another it can be in breach of copyright. The photograph itself does not have to be the same.

Jane Lambert, a barrister specialising in intellectual property law, wrote in her bog that she feels uneasy at Judge Birss's decision as it comes close to protecting copyright in an idea as opposed to expression.