Already been done...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8249792.stm

"Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay."

Someone who is skilled in multiple different disciplines like Leonardo da Vinci, (Painting, sculpture, engineer, physicist, astronomer, anatomist, geologist, architect) or perhaps Jefferson, (author, lawyer, musician, botanist, diplomat)

I always wonder what more he would have gone on to if he hadn't been branded a pervert - one of the UK Govt's more shameful episodes.

As it was, the Turing machine remains an excellent means of terrorising computing undergraduates. I've never seen such confusion when we saw the concept for the first time in class.

"We also have Al Qaida supporters in the US, but they are not in any position to influence the country." - yes because they so spectacularly failed to influence anything before in the US didn't they? I presume you have heard that there is a big hole in Lower Manhattan?

You must have missed the part where I said I preferred Linux in the datacentre back end.

I never said pretty beats functionality - in fact I kind of said the opposite. For some usages Linux beats Windows, and also the converse holds true. Yet you choose to pick one situation and compare it against another - I'm sorry but the comparison simply doesnt hold true. If you had wanted a solid stable backend system then you should have researched and picked a better one than persevere with a broken one.

This, is essentially the problem that people seem to have when the do the comparisons. Would you write a CV/resume on a CLI only server using LaTeX? Yes you could, of course you could but it would probably be easier to write it using Word, or Openoffice if you prefer in a GUI.

You could write a scientific anaylsis tool on a large dataset using something like Python or Fortran - many people do of course. A spectacularly bad language to choose would be Intercal which wouold do it - it's Turing complete, but you wouldnt want to use it?

The point I am making is that computer is not and never has nor will be a one size fits all solution. For some tasks people will prefer to use *nix, for other tasks people will using Windows, for yet others they will use an embedded system like SCADA or whatever. Withint those worlds, change is bad *if* it stops you doing what you did before.

We have people coming from the US to our offices and they simply cannot get on with driving a manual rental car. The combination of the other side of the road and gear management is beyond them. It's the same task but it's sufficiently different that it causes too big a problem for them - so they just don't use it and get a taxi. For when I go to the USA I cope fine - because I have had plenty of exposure to other side driving in France, and I own both manual and autobox vehicles. If you make a sufficiently sudden change in a familiar environment, people will stop using it. This is why a rapidly changing environment such as Linux puts people off, and whan they pace of change introduces errors it makes it even more so. This is not a superficial issue as you so disparagingly try and make out with silly "oooh pretty" soundbites - it's a real problem that has good reasons for existing and it affects most everyone because that's how human nature works.

Oh I've had my fair share of suckyness from Fedora as well - although that's fair enough as it's meant to be a place for trying out new idea's. I couldnt comment on SuSE as I've hardly used it to be honest. For desktop/laptop usage i've jumped to the new Debian - it's by far the best in terms of stability and consistency. The contrast between that and Ubuntu is amazing. I'm almost hoping that Squeeze is going to be good enough to use for a proper desktop - so far it is actually looking fairly promising.

That describes how I have installed every Windows PC I've ever used, from the days of 3.0 onwards.

I'm not talking about installing, that's relatively simple although Windows is still easier to get installed than Linux, if only because of better driver support. I'm talking about wanton breakage like when you upgrade a package for a security issue and find it borks all the other stuff it talks to in a majorly problematical way - eg Pulseaudio, or when someone decides to implement a better power saving scheme and Ubuntu parks the drive heads every 2 seconds and wears the load ramp out...

However the article is about useability, and I'll maintain that Windows is still more usable than Linux on the desktop (not in teh datahall) and a big reason for that is the stability of the UI and codebase compared to a six month moving target like Fedora or Ubuntu.

I use both Linux and Windows at home and the office. The reason is simple - for back end stuff where I need to write custom stuff, hack data about and get it to do stuff then Linux or occassionally *BSD is king. For front end usage where I want a clean slick and above all consistent interface I'll often use Windows. Partly because I need to interoperate with other people, but mainly because it offers a better and easier working environment. Linux on the desktop is good if you are doing teechnical stuff, like writing an encoding system for digital amateur radio (my current pet project). For using the computer more as a commodity tool for email/word processing/video watching etc Windows still is better presented and more importantly doesnt break grotesquely with every new update that appears like Ubuntu does (and yes I'm looking at 9.10) Until Linux, or more strictly I suppose GNOME/KDE etc get over this then I suspect that further adoption of linux on the desktop will stall.

My personal storage which is how I read it has to be HDD - somewhere around 8-12 TB spread over everything at home. I'd have to look to be sure. Next would be DVD - although there is a lot it's comforetably less than the HDD - 400 DVD's even 9GB ones comes in well below that. At work though, whcih isn't *mine* per se although I look after it I have online right now.. 25Pb of old fashion tape which easily creams the SAN for storage size at work.

You see this is where I come from... Windows does do what I want 100% of the time. It has a nice desktop, it is after XP SP3 stable, secure (enough if you use common sense) and has all the software I need. Linux does it about 98% of the time. But I run things in Wine and use Linux - the reason being that I've gotten burnt by vendors ceasing to trade. Ceasing to offer support. In particular, one vendor who is now defunct stopped providing updates for their software. That's when we found that there was a timebomb in the application and it became unusable, meaning all out historical data and build methods was just that. History. With Liunx at the very least if it is easter egged or timebombed, I'll have the source, and if I don't have the ability or time, I can pay someone to have it to fix my stuff. I'll have open format data structures so I can slap a bit of glue code together to port it to the new pacakge I use. That sort of freedom is worth real money and is something that a lot of Windows only people simply don't seem to appreciate. Most do "get" it but many don't - until it burns them. This is why open source solutions are always going to be around as an alternative. It's not about price, but the other sort of freedom.

Imagine if when developing the jet engine, Whittle had to make it backwards compatible with the piston engine. You know - it still needed to use the same fuel, it still only had the same bearings specifications, same exhaust temperatures, couldn't use different lube oil, and so forth... Yes it's a pain but if you want to advance sometimes you have to toss something that has reached the end of it's life and take a large jump forwards. Python 2 will probably go for a lot longer, just like prop-engines do now, but most people have switched to jet for a good reason.

I just enter SW1A 1AA (Buckingham Palace) It's amazing how often a gentleman named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni living at that address has made purchases in the UK.

Well it will according to John Titor anyway.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

Could we not try vapour phase deposition? I dunno, I've not looked at the numbers but I think that may help if we cannot zone refine. Alternatively for a thin layer you could lay it down by sputtering a coat on with a mass spectrograph to precisely select the ions you wanted - slow and doesnt make a very thick layer but that seems to be a bonus from what I read..