I meant the question to be taken literally - that is, not as an assertion that it doesn't or shouldn't, but as a request for an explanation of why it does.

Perhaps the difference here is that Linux lets you put them in userspace, but this system (like the GEC 4000 series from the '70s) has them all like that?

Why does putting a driver in user space require a performance hit?

The rest of it rings true, but this is just too far fetched. Ethernet cables are like wire coat hangers - they breed. I try to keep them confined to my study/shed, but they have to be purged regularly to stop them taking over the house.

Presumably that can be calculated fairly easily from your ID?

Just taken a look at both, and apart from the fact that they both involve Python they appear to be totally different beasts. One is a web-based IDE and the other is a web application development framework. Where's the overlap?

I did much the same for my father. He was continually getting his Windows PC totally overloaded with malware (possibly assisted by grandsons from another branch of the family who liked to play on it).

After recovering it a couple of times I simply scrubbed it and installed Debian. It does everything he needs and has reduced the support calls to pretty much nothing.

He is quite unaware of what operating system he is using - he just needs to be able to access the web, read his e-mails and write some letters.

I didn't see any other nearby posts covering downloads and photocopiers.

Sorry - I can't find anywhere in my posting where I said anything about doing linear interpolation to determine battery life. (Perhaps it's you who is guilty of extrapolating from what I did say?)

Battery life is obviously more complex, and depends not just on how long the machine has been on, but also how hard it is working. It's intrinsically more speculative, because you don't know how heavy the future loading will be. Nonetheless, I suspect a better estimate than tends currently to be provided could be achieved by recording actual performance over a number of discharge cycles and then predicting from those.

Neither of these seems an obvious application for calculus. Both can be done very simply with a trivial calculation, but for some odd reason they very seldom are.

For the download one, the calculation simply is, "How much of the download is done? How long did it take? Assume the rest will happen at the same rate and extrapolate."

I itch to re-write the firmware in our photocopier at school, which estimates the time for a job right at the beginning (always a bit optimistically), and then simply counts down, ignoring the progress which it's made. This leads to it estimating, say, 25 mins for a job, and then counting down over the next 25 mins, with the result that when it has done 80% of the job its estimated time remaining reaches zero and stays there for the remaining 6 and a bit minutes. It would be trivial to re-write this code properly, and I hate the fact that I can't do it.

Kyocera - step forward in shame.

It appears by default as part of the installation process if you take all the default choices.

One of the options is "Desktop environment" (or words to that effect) and if you tick it you get (up until now) Gnome installed and running by default.

A more meaningful question would have been, "How do you avoid this software selection dialogue?"

The "Better email!" target is the one they need to work on first.

Every time I have to correspond with someone with a BT/Yahoo e-mail account I have to explain to them how to check their spam folders for lost messages. They always find other ones there too which Yahoo's dreadful spam filter has consigned there without consultation or good reason.

BT/Yahoo e-mail should come with a health warning.

Errr, well, yes... that's what you asked for. You can't have it both ways. If you specify that you want only bug-fixes and not new functionality, you can't then complain when you get just bug fixes and no new functionality.

The current Debian Stable (Squeeze) is a very capable distribution, and whilst it doesn't have the very latest versions of Gnome and KDE (as per your specification) they are more than modern enough for everyday use.

Please learn to read the thread - I made no claim about any centuries.

Clearly you don't remember it that well. People really did go out and buy such things and bring them in in their cars. And even if your contention were correct (as it was in some cases), it was still very much a case of BYOD.

You may be surprised to learn that many of today's "your own" devices are bought and paid for by employers - just the same as last time round.

Whether the item is actually the property of the company or the personal property of the individual isn't really relevant. In both cases, the individual suddenly has ownership of the device (in the sense of control). Hence the wisdom in noticing the similarity.

Gratuitous and silly insults snipped.

Doesn't follow at all. You'll notice I said "MS-DOS" and not "MS". There was a choice of three different operating systems to run on the IBM PC at launch, so you could have run any of them and still been buying IBM. What gave MS-DOS the edge was that early adopters wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3. MS-DOS was so badly written that Lotus had to work around it, particularly for driving the screen, which led to the position that it was difficult to use anything else.

Just because you're too young to remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen young padawan. We're talking about a time long before anything like NT4 (or even any kind of NT) existed.

Typically the PCs in question ran DOS, with first Visicalc and then Lotus 1-2-3 as the killer app which had to run (which, incidentally, is what tied the market in to MS-DOS).

I presume then that you weren't there at the time? Desktop computers when they first appeared were indeed a kind of BYOD, although obviously people didn't actually carry them around with them. What did happen though was individual departments/individuals made a business case to buy their own PCs, and then suddenly could do what they wanted, rather than what the high priests of the computer room told them they could do. It led to chaos in many cases, but it also greatly empowered end users (and stripped the high priests of much of their power). Obviously there was then a follow on as all the PCs were brought under computer control, but to deny that PCs were BYOD is just silly.