Most of it is personal to me, but in all honesty the ATA driver is rather funky: a ring 0 multi-threaded driver. If you ignore the completely insane stuff for handling various horrifically broken ATA hardware implementations, then the actual implementation itself is rather elegant.

I also wrote a rather interesting multi-stage asynchronous media pipeline that emulated Java/C# interfaces in C++, but that never made it past the prototype stage.

I love writing code and working on hard problems, but do I feel like working on them for 80 hours a week, every week? No, I enjoy having a life outside of work and a separation of work and home life is necessary.

So much this. I enjoy solving difficult problems, but I also enjoy a not using a computer.

Nor do I currently have any active open source projects on my Github account; because you know, I spent over ten years working on Syllable and frankly that was more than most people do in a lifetime, so I'm O.K with that.

Happily the sorts of companies I work for are O.K with that too, and prefer to judge me on my experience and work I produce professionally, rather than an irrelevant body of work that I produced in my spare time.

That sounds like a lot of work. Can we at least wait until after second breakfast?

The aliens are just here to protect us from the terrible secrets of space.

This has to be done.

Finally, the team point out that since the technique makes few assumptions about the languages themselves, it can be used on argots that are entirely unrelated.

Once again, Star Trek is ahead of the curve.

How odd. I remember Chernobyl (and Challenger) and no one panicked. A lot of Welsh sheep farmers were pissed off, but that was about it.

Basic Edgucation (litteracy)

The irony.

System admins don't need and generally aren't capable of making C-langauge source changes for using software in normal configs.

That's news to me. I think you might underestimate sysadmins.

How does forcing developers into not making use of Free software help anyone?

The nations of the world had just spent the past ten years shipping large, delicate items around the world, in a war zone no less. Even if that was a real issue, the obvious solution would have been to build a factory in North America. That is after all how American companies solved the problem of selling tabulators, calculators and computers in Europe.

The problem with a lot of British computer companies was, as usual, lack of vision. LEO Computers was an offshoot from a bakers; the engineers themselves always thought that they would be "found out" by the "real" computer companies before too long, and it would all be over for them. They were proud of their work, but had a small-world, almost cottage industry attitude. It's no wonder that the Americans wiped the floor with the British and European companies.

In retrospect it turns out that the work on the Colossus wasn't really lost; the guys who had built the Colossus still retained the knowledge, even if they couldn't tell others about it directly, but they cross-pollinated places like Manchester and Cambridge with early knowledge and ideas. That in turn gave us machines such as the LEO, was was really a phenomenally successful line of machines and broke new ground in establishing computers are useful machines for "trivial" tasks, rather than something only a scientist would ever need.

Computing in the UK really had a head start on the US in many ways, but in usual form it was underfunded and lacked vision; in many ways it suffered from the 50's post-war glow that "Britain Will Always Be Great". Once the Americans got in on the act they of course wiped the floor with everyone, and then socialist government meddling in the 60's just about finished off any hope of the UK compan[y|ies] being able to fight back.

The Z3 and Z4 are great accomplishments, and Konrad Zuse is poorly remembered, but that's nothing to do with the Baby being the first machine to run an internally stored program. It was one of the first Von Neumann architecture machines, which is why it's significant.

An article for the Daily Mail is not the same thing as a public declaration of Government policy.