Loved the dead parents joke above....

When the Old Man was alive, I set him up with SuSE Linux and locked it (mostly) down. He ran it for 5-6 years. It never crashed, got a virus or had any known breaches.

With the release of WIndows 8.1/8.2 which demands and tracks huge amounts of personal information, Microsoft's offering is contra-indicated.

I'll let better people than I argue about the details of which distro/browser combination to use...

When I was a kid in the 60s, we had an African student stay with us. He was studying climatology. He was also fascinated by space. After graduation he returned to his home country. Using the information he had acquired, he collected satellite data on weather conditions (which was very advanced thinking for that time). He went into the country-side and advised local farmers of impending droubts, locust infestations and floods. The first year he did it, they were, at best, dismissive. When he went back to them after his forecasts has proved correct, they eagerly listened to him and it changed the agrarian economy. He also advised fishermen of temperature changes off-shore indicating optimal times to fish. This allowed local fishermen to get out to the fish before the huge Japanese trawlers came and took everything.

He went on to have his own department at the local University.

Of course, because of his good work, his nation rewarded him with threats to the lives of himself, his wife and his family so I won't state his name or other information about him here.

We cannot be getting smarter. One quick scan of the spelling and grammar on facebook, Twitter and in many other online posts indicates a frightening drop in the most basic ability to communicate let alone convey a concept or idea.

This is sexism at its very worst. Funding one gender over another only serves to create animosity between them and suppress the gender that is not given preferential treatment. Why don't we put the funding towards researching how each gender takes up information and teach to those pedagogic methodologies? Education is one of the few areas where we have made minimal progress in the last 100 years. Students are NOT getting noticeably smarter. If we achieve the ability to learn more, faster, we all will win.

4.0 should consist of the following: The ability to decipher the hardware that it is installed into and then an automated optimization and re-compiling process for that hardware à la Gentoo with a bloated fall-back option in case of failure. Realistically, how often have ANY of you ever changed a bus, processor, network card, drive controllers and other hardware - especially on boards with much of that built in?

There is such a great contrast between the slow, steady, improvement-laden release of Linux and the article that precedes this on on Windows 8.1 which can't even get its mouse to work. You'd think that Microsoft is trying to push out Windows 95!

Overall, it speaks to the simple fact that, if the agenda is to improve things vs make money, improvements are the things that make money in the long run.

FYI: I run a bunch of different OSs: Apple, Linux - 4 or 5 distros, Win 8x, 7x, Vista, 2003 (server)

It's been a long, long time since I've had Linux crash or become unconfigurable - whether I upgrade from a previous version or do a clean install. Way to go, Linus!!

In the Great White North, there are two daylight zones: Mosquitoes and Winter. It's completely in tune with the environment and no one has to adjust a clock when the changeover comes.

Time to switch to BlackBerry!

They's a bunch of commies across the Pacific whore hackin our computers n such and youse is worried 'cause da Gov't is lookin at yer emails? Wese have gotta keep 'em commies in check. Da FBI 'n CIA 'n such r ther to protect r intrests an we gotta let 'em do ther job. Dats why we have 'em - 't pertect us, ya dummies!

The Undestroy button is not working. The fix is to re-establish the chat rooms, clear the clutter from Yahoo! Messenger, make mail actually function at a reasonable speed and eliminate the mindless Hollywood crap from the main page. I'd like my $$$ now, please.

For over 12 years, I have supported RIM/BlackBerry. However, over that time, my frustration has grown and grown. Products like the 9700 were offered with all sorts of feature like GPS navigation. Sadly, they barely functioned to the point where they were unusable in the real world.

Over time, I also discovered that calendar items were being automatically deleted as they aged - this, without any warning or prior information. Looking up past business meetings which had disappeared was pretty frightening.

The BlackBerry World App Store has never worked properly. Rather than a one-click install, most apps crash during install while leaving partial files in the system.

The 9700 routinely locks up due to lack of space - but there is never a warning or option to move software and data onto the MicroSD card (for example).

All of the above is extremely frustrating to the point where I don't want to continue (let alone upgrade) with the brand but I just love the keyboard.

April Fool's is actually celebrated August 18th in Canada.

" 'tis a silly thing."

Apart from the fact that, at the very basis of the concept, non latin alphabet words pose a problem, there is no relevance whatsoever to the words used.

That said, I live at:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.Antidisestablishmentarianism

which also proves that the concept has no merit.

God, it brings back memories: an 8086 with 256k of RAM, 8 1/2" floppies....

Using / as the main way of navigating spreadsheets...

1-2-3 you gave me my start, not just in spreadsheets, but in computers. Thank you and goodbye, old friend.

Sniff.