F-spot *is* an adequate replacement for an image manipulation program; since most people don't want an image manipulation program, it makes sense to replace it with something that people *do* want. Like an image management application.

It's still in the repos, it's just not installed by default.

This is basically what I perceive my job (general IT Techy) to be - to keep the computers in a state where they're useful tools, so that everyone else can just get on with their job without having to do any of mine. Sort-of relevant to the OP, though, we have a hilarious policy here whereby our 'mac operators' (our studio is full of macs) must be able to build a mac themselves, and are then mostly left to their own devices. If they break it beyond repair, they have to find time to rebuild it. I don't know how it works, but it appears to not get too much in the way of getting work done, and for whatever reason the MCSE that heads up the IT department has worked out that macs are not part of our remit... The thing about complaining about the workstation user I understand fully, I see it as the same as when I was working in a shop and we routinely complained about the customers and how much easier it would be to get work done if they weren't involved.

Hell yes. We're still buying XP...

More people using Google's other products.

Over the past year, while I've had my Android handset, I've become a massive user of Google stuff. Google Docs, Maps, Picasa and Mail integrate pretty badly into it, but better than anything else, and so that's what I use from my phone. Since everything's already there, I do the same from a real PC.

I've tried a couple of times, and only really half-arsedly, to change this, but it's not that easy. The bundled non-gmail mail client is atrocious, there's no good Flickr clients and I've not found any real alternative to crippled-google-docs for my G1.

Google might get no money from me using the phone, but they get loads more ad views than they otherwise would when I carry on using what's on my phone on a proper screen.

Wants multitasking *really* badly?

I can't tell the difference between HL2 in Windows and in WINE on my system. It does require the non-free drivers, but if I'm playing Steam games I'm not likely to be that bothered.

I thought this was generally common knowledge.

Not the details, perhaps, but the tone of the summary and the bits of the article I read appear to imply this is some new discovery - that companies use tax havens as tax havens.

Or maybe it's just that British business is more tax-averse than those over the pond...

Here, in the UK, it's not people telling funny jokes. It's people pulling practical jokes on other people.

Perhaps this is another of the US/UK differences (or maybe US/everywhere else). All my other (UK-based) news sources took the opportunity for some reasonably clever and subtle jokes but otherwise carried on as normal, Slashdot just spends the day 'telling silly jokes' as you put it. Having an entire site dedicated to neither believable nor particularly funny jokes kinda ruins the idea in my mind, but it's nice to see that someone enjoys it.

What about censorship of political, religious, and controversial viewpoints? This is about Freedom of expression and Freedom of communication more than it is about any single issue.

I don't know. It's still Google turning round to a country and saying "Your laws are wrong". If Google tomorrow decided that actually they were fully in favor of something we see as universally despicable (child porn, say), we'd be all up in arms about Google being immoral and acting counter to the rules of our country, I don't think anyone would be claiming that actually Google are fighting the good fight for internet freedom, and child porn images should be allowed to be distributed freely. It just depends where you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable. Google's line is pretty far from Australia's, and far closer to that of most of the rest of the west.

I don't really want to learn any more of the above, but I'd like to have already learned more of several of them.

My crapness at pure maths is probably most irritating, so I went with that.

If you really want to be sure you avoid being part of a botnet, then yes, Windows is not one of the choices you have. It cant be secured, its like going down the rapids in a colander while trying to plug the holes with cabbage.

Thing is, though, *everyone* running Windows treats it as holey, exploitable and generally unsafe. So they apply every security mechanism they can, they bother to audit things, and generally treat it as a dangerous thing that needs attention.

Too many Linux/OSX users sit there thinking "I use Unix. I have no need for security software". Especially the ones who were sold the idea on the grounds that 'there are no viruses for this'.

Yeah, I thought that.

This was on Monday that I went through the IE preferences windows to get at the browser choice screen, though, and that was one from an update.

During the latest (or a recent) Windows Update it presents itself, but only if you have no browsers other than IE installed. It also appears to do it pre-update on new (XP) builds since then, too.

Amusingly, it's presented by IE, so you still have to click though the three or four pages of setting your IE8 preferences, and it doesn't replace. I'd understood IE was to be removed, but I wasn't really listening.

They are mostly aspartame based glass these days, I think.