Learn how modern tape catalogs work then - you can seek with a tape to any position you want you know and then you start reading. you dont have to read the first file before you can read the end...

LTO3 is 57 seconds to pony up and find the data from a cold start, and in my library that includes the time for the robot to find the tape, and load the drive. 15 minute seeks just don't occur anymore with LTO drives.

The police could find someone standing over a dead body spattered in blood holding the hammer that fits the divot marks in the victims head, freely confessing to it and they would *still* be a suspect and no more.

They don't become a culprit, or rather a convict until the courts have had their say. Sadly there are too many coppers in the UK who think they are the law. They are the police - it's the magistrates and judges who are the law.

Since I never use my phone's data connection, and am so quaint that all I have on it is my phonebook there is mischeif to be had. Easily possible to build a 300V flyback converter inside the case of an extended battery, and use that to provide +/- 300V on alternate output pins on the data connector. I defy the machine to cope with that.

When asked I'll tell them it's a security feature, and knowing the woodentops if you tell them before it won't work that'll make them more determined than ever yo pulg it in and extract the data....at which point you've divulged your legal responsibility to warn them.

Sympathetic to whom? The police or the public?

Over here we have something called the Levenson enquiry into press standards and next up the entirely nasty world of the police tipping off and getting too cozy with the media. I'd much rather the two didn;t cooperate - we see enough perp-walks here already, but you never seem to see them when the police realise they made a mistake and quietly let them out the side door so the police don't get embarrassed.

Wireless Telegrapy acts from 1949 on and the successive Communcations Acts have made the mere possession of devices for wireless telegraphy illegal unless you have a licence.

Some licences are held by the Govt on behalf of the people, like CB radio licences, and a broadcast receiver licence, others like amateur radio licences you have to get yourself after paying the fee/exams etc. There is no licence that you can get to allow you have communcations equipment for TETRA, unless you happen to be a licencend amateur and they are using some of the amateur allocations (as will happen for the Olympics)

Already been done...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8249792.stm

"Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay."

Someone who is skilled in multiple different disciplines like Leonardo da Vinci, (Painting, sculpture, engineer, physicist, astronomer, anatomist, geologist, architect) or perhaps Jefferson, (author, lawyer, musician, botanist, diplomat)

I always wonder what more he would have gone on to if he hadn't been branded a pervert - one of the UK Govt's more shameful episodes.

As it was, the Turing machine remains an excellent means of terrorising computing undergraduates. I've never seen such confusion when we saw the concept for the first time in class.

"We also have Al Qaida supporters in the US, but they are not in any position to influence the country." - yes because they so spectacularly failed to influence anything before in the US didn't they? I presume you have heard that there is a big hole in Lower Manhattan?

You must have missed the part where I said I preferred Linux in the datacentre back end.

I never said pretty beats functionality - in fact I kind of said the opposite. For some usages Linux beats Windows, and also the converse holds true. Yet you choose to pick one situation and compare it against another - I'm sorry but the comparison simply doesnt hold true. If you had wanted a solid stable backend system then you should have researched and picked a better one than persevere with a broken one.

This, is essentially the problem that people seem to have when the do the comparisons. Would you write a CV/resume on a CLI only server using LaTeX? Yes you could, of course you could but it would probably be easier to write it using Word, or Openoffice if you prefer in a GUI.

You could write a scientific anaylsis tool on a large dataset using something like Python or Fortran - many people do of course. A spectacularly bad language to choose would be Intercal which wouold do it - it's Turing complete, but you wouldnt want to use it?

The point I am making is that computer is not and never has nor will be a one size fits all solution. For some tasks people will prefer to use *nix, for other tasks people will using Windows, for yet others they will use an embedded system like SCADA or whatever. Withint those worlds, change is bad *if* it stops you doing what you did before.

We have people coming from the US to our offices and they simply cannot get on with driving a manual rental car. The combination of the other side of the road and gear management is beyond them. It's the same task but it's sufficiently different that it causes too big a problem for them - so they just don't use it and get a taxi. For when I go to the USA I cope fine - because I have had plenty of exposure to other side driving in France, and I own both manual and autobox vehicles. If you make a sufficiently sudden change in a familiar environment, people will stop using it. This is why a rapidly changing environment such as Linux puts people off, and whan they pace of change introduces errors it makes it even more so. This is not a superficial issue as you so disparagingly try and make out with silly "oooh pretty" soundbites - it's a real problem that has good reasons for existing and it affects most everyone because that's how human nature works.

Oh I've had my fair share of suckyness from Fedora as well - although that's fair enough as it's meant to be a place for trying out new idea's. I couldnt comment on SuSE as I've hardly used it to be honest. For desktop/laptop usage i've jumped to the new Debian - it's by far the best in terms of stability and consistency. The contrast between that and Ubuntu is amazing. I'm almost hoping that Squeeze is going to be good enough to use for a proper desktop - so far it is actually looking fairly promising.

That describes how I have installed every Windows PC I've ever used, from the days of 3.0 onwards.

I'm not talking about installing, that's relatively simple although Windows is still easier to get installed than Linux, if only because of better driver support. I'm talking about wanton breakage like when you upgrade a package for a security issue and find it borks all the other stuff it talks to in a majorly problematical way - eg Pulseaudio, or when someone decides to implement a better power saving scheme and Ubuntu parks the drive heads every 2 seconds and wears the load ramp out...

However the article is about useability, and I'll maintain that Windows is still more usable than Linux on the desktop (not in teh datahall) and a big reason for that is the stability of the UI and codebase compared to a six month moving target like Fedora or Ubuntu.

I use both Linux and Windows at home and the office. The reason is simple - for back end stuff where I need to write custom stuff, hack data about and get it to do stuff then Linux or occassionally *BSD is king. For front end usage where I want a clean slick and above all consistent interface I'll often use Windows. Partly because I need to interoperate with other people, but mainly because it offers a better and easier working environment. Linux on the desktop is good if you are doing teechnical stuff, like writing an encoding system for digital amateur radio (my current pet project). For using the computer more as a commodity tool for email/word processing/video watching etc Windows still is better presented and more importantly doesnt break grotesquely with every new update that appears like Ubuntu does (and yes I'm looking at 9.10) Until Linux, or more strictly I suppose GNOME/KDE etc get over this then I suspect that further adoption of linux on the desktop will stall.