Nice point. Amateur means "one who loves" (literally), it should never be disparaging to be called an amateur. Hobbyists are "amateurs" by definition. All the great Renaissance thinkers were amateurs across a wide range of fields, but often to great depth. Hence we owe much of modern thinking to amateurs.

We regularly demonize many classes of people and demote to non-human. Pedophiles. terrorists, monsters-du-jour, you name it. Before those is was gays, blacks, various ethnicities, you name it. Fashions come, fashions go.

You got it. It's designer-driven change for change's sake. The same problem as Gnome with Gnome3 and the same problem that MS have with Windows 8. Changes that nobody wants or needs - except bored designers.

Until they feel like not making that available, and want to force feed their shit down everyones' throats.

That's right, the 2ic of the Linux kernel, Andrew Morton, flatly refuses to work with patches and still sends his revisions to Mr Torvalds in massive tarballs, a cause of merciless jibes from the latter. Linus laughs it off and puts it down to Mr Morton's eccentricities (but he also puts up with it).

Does this anachronistic obstinacy make Andrew Morton a "bad" programmer?

And to follow up: then install the free Classic Shell [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Shell] and there's your Win 7 start menu and desktop back from the dead. These are the first two things to do when lumbered with a Windows 8 machine.

Windows 8 already has one, it's just that nobody seems to know about it. All you do is move the desktop card to the top left hand side of Metro. Whichever card is in that position will be launched after booting.

Wow. They really stick real people on a curve like that? And there always must be "average" and "poor" workers in every unit? That sucks. It's medieval. And stupid if it's true.

Now that's a low blow! You were watching me have sex with my ex, weren't you!

And I don't no better either. I don't yes very well, too.

Is the duck hot?

Better yet: one product for keyboard devices and yet another for touchscreen devices. As God intended. It's what Apple did with astonishing success, just incidentally. MS deserve to take a dive for this debacle.

Oh yes! I know that after I stop banging my head with a large hammer, it feels good, so I'll look back at banging my head with a hammer as much better than I remembered it to be. Oh yes, it's logical!

Just what is a *Vista* computer? If she likes Windows 8, it's because she doesn't no better. And I call you an MS shill.

Naively, I bought a new Lenovo i7/6GB/1TB because it was cheap *and* it was one of the few laptops in the entire store that would still boot Linux from a usb drive without jumping through unknown hoops. All the others I tried with similar specs (many better laptops and all also with uefi boot) had some problem booting from usb - usually no 'legacy' boot setting or equivalent in the boot screen (no longer called BIOS settings). It came with Windows 8, which I assumed could not possibly be as bad as what it was said to be. Boy was I wrong.

Windows 8 is absolutely, abysmally, shockingly awful on a keyboard laptop. I have installed Classic Shell to give me back a start menu. I have learned to use ctl-alt-tab to get between the awful rubbish 'apps' and a quasi-desktop experience. I worked out how to get a command prompt. It's still only just bearable. I want this shit gone. Dead. Buried.

I had a talk to a guy in a small pc service shop - he says he gets at least two requests a day from customers begging him to remove Windows 8 and install Windows 7, but he tells me it seems it isn't possible on some new laptops to do this. He took a hard drive out of one machine, wiped Windiows 8 and installed Windows 7. When he put the hard drive back in the laptop, the motherboard would no longer recognize the drive. Perhaps he doesn't understand UEFI boot, I dunno. I am just tempted to send this shit back to Lenovo and say: give me my money back or give me Windows 7 on this machine.