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This insanely inefficient state of modern software and operating systems is what keeps me casting around for a better way. It's what keeps me excited about projects, that, logically, I know are unlikely to come to anything, but I cross my fingers for them anyway. It's what makes my heart flutter just a little bit when I discover the likes of the Haiku project, which itself is the product of my second-favourite operating system ever, BeOS (my favourite being Acorn's RISC OS, natch).

The irony is the CPU power of modern systems lets you try Haiku with near-zero hassle. You can download a complete Haiku virtual machine via the project website www.haiku-os.org and then start it up in a free VMware client. On the very same desktop PC that takes seven-and-a-half minutes to start, Haiku in a virtual machine takes 17 seconds.

It doesn't have a nice beep, though. I think they should work on that.