Multics was amazing for its time. Then Honeywell took it on as a commercial product and didn't know how to sell it, or more like their sales people were clueless and didn't want it competing against their own home-grown crappy operating system and hardware. So Multics died.

In the minicomputer era, Prime Computers (a competitor to DEC) built an operating system that they called a "mini" Multics, because it used the same security ring idea, but it wasn't a tenth as good.

And I do myself remember Project MAC as I was a student at MIT in those days.

I do a lot of book reviews, and the biggest difference by far between publisher-published books and self-published books is the quality of the editing. Self-published books often (too often) are not well edited if they are edited at all.

"... file format portability ..."

Is that a joke? MS file formats have changed a lot over the years. Remember the introduction of docx?

OpenOffice reads more MS formats than MS does.

Microsoft has become largely irrelevant and they're trying to get back to their glory days. The same happened with IBM some years back. Both companies expected their users to go where /they/ were going, instead of the other way around. Then, to no one's surprise but their own, they lost their edge in the market. "We're so big and we're so important our users have to follow us wherever we go." Windows 8, anyone? Sic transit gloria mundi.

I'll go one better, paper tape readers and I think 110 baud timesharing service.

Can't say that this is recommended (i.e. don't do it!), but given the "diligence" of some medical practitioners who are more interested in maximum billing than patient care, the results could be similar :)

p>In my case, more like 15% before taxes, and with the new 10% floor for deduction of medical expenses, the deductible portion comes out less than the standard deduction. So the effective amount is 15% of gross and 20% of net. That is a lot of money. Medical insurance is my largest budget item. And this is for retiree's insurance, with my former employer paying about a third of the cost!

Not saying that heartbleed wasn't / isn't a huge problem, but I think most analysts would agree that by far the biggest security problem is (collectively) bad corporate or bad individual security practices. I realize that heartbleed is not the same in that it is not within the control of the end user, but still, things like poor passwords, clicking on every email attachment, etc., are much bigger aggregate problems.

" Everyone has to be hardcore willing to tinker, which means a lot of lost productivity."

That depends. If you do everything in your browser, and you were using Firefox before, you have little or no problem. I switched my wife from XP to Linux Mint with about five minutes of retraining under such circumstances. All she uses is the browser and her experience is better in that she likes to click on, well, everything, and the malware risk is much reduced.

Of course, I do the maintenance, but I did that before.

Now, if you're used to MS Office, photoshop, Exchange, etc. etc., I agree, it can be a much different story, at least for a while. But it all depends on willingness to learn something new and accept change.

Is the Linux learning curve more difficult than the Windows learning curve? If you start from scratch, will one be much harder than the other? There was a time when I would have said Linux was much harder but is that still true?

"If you're really old you can tell them stories about toggling in boot sequences or using punch cards"

I remember doing that stuff ... it was kind of fun in its own way. I guess I'm "really old" ... :)

This whole thing reminds me of riding on a bus way back in the days when the US actually was sending people to the moon. There was this lady, who was saying, "It just ain't right, sending all these people to the moon. It's messing everything up. Look how much it's been raining lately!" Can we PLEASE just do good science and let the science speak for itself?

After some experience (something more than three months and less than 20 years) the keystrokes come naturally, without much need to think about them.

Grant money or Al Gore.

Hmm ... my carrier (Hawaiian Telcom) uses 192.168... addresses in the router portion of the DSL modem. Supposedly you control NAT by settings made in the admin panel. Fortunately though you can set it to pure passthrough mode and run it into my nice Tomato router.

That's the essence of the problem. People like Al Gore act like they are the "experts" and there are similar loonies on the other side of the question. Can't we just do unbiased scientific work and rely on that?