Err no! you are thinking of early PC's and their single tasking equivalents. Passwords to access multitasking computing systems have been around from at least the 1960's. The Unix OS was designed and enhanced with user names and appropriate passwords going back to at least the early 1970's.

Actually even today a good password is quite hard to break even with so called "man in the middle" attacks providing you are using something like ssh and possible one time passwords (I used this type of access back in the mid 1990's) to access machines.

In many ways as long as you have a good remembered password to access your PC you should only have to worry about your PC being compromised by Viruses, Trojans and social engineering attacks. As long as you are aware and know how to recover from an attack (most people don't) then you are pretty safe from mall-wear. Even if you are compromised then you should have some idea on who to contact such as Banks , Web site etc to report and hopefully resolve the issue.

There are plenty of apps that allow you to store your passwords in a database. Do a lookup on "password manager" and you should get over 250,000,000 hits. The problem is that you need to make sure that the passwords you use are not trivial and should be preferably over 8 alpha-numeric characters in length as well as having at least one special character (ie. !,@$# ... etc). A password generator is actually very good for this however the more complex a password the more you need to rely on a password database or at least the sites you are connecting to being able to save your password such as in your browser.

That is not really a problem if you generate appropriate passwords and have a password manager.

Of course at some stage you really must remember at least one or two passwords. One to log you into your PC, Workstation, Mainframe etc and the other to access your password database if you have one. Oh yes you also have to have a contingency plan in case you are compromised such as knowing who to contact and it does not hurt knowing how to restore your data as well, assuming you do backups.

The problem with software documentation is exactly the same as it was over 30 years ago. This is not to say that software documentation is bad, in fact most are surprisingly well documented with the main problem being the user (oh dear!). Now let me explain why I said this.

When an application is designed (hopefully), written and documented there is a percentage of time that is allocated to all three attributes and usually the smallest percentage is (you guessed it) the documentation although the initial design should be the groundwork for the documentation in the first place. However no matter how well documented a software product is, you are always going to have detractors saying thing like "The documentation is obscure" or "There is not enough documentation" or "The documentation is too long". Usually the detractors fall into attitude of "The application should be so good I don't have to think or do any reading anyway".

The author of the article gives an example of LightDM which has fairly meagre documentation if you go to the web site. Oh the horror (sigh!). Well the application is a "Desktop" which can be likened to Gnome, KDE, Xfce and even Microsoft Windows. In this particular case you normally have a system setting GUI or you can go to the web for more information. If you do a Google search on LightDM you get something like 472,000 hits so there really is no excuse for saying that there is not enough documentation and information.

Personally I don't blame the so called technical elitists from saying RTFM (coined well over 30 years ago) and then come to me if you can't find what you want. The last bit is what I normally say as well and many users seem to have selective deafness. With the Web and decent search engines getting information could never be easier, the problem is that many users who complain don't seem to want to use their brain.

You could run a GUI on VMS as far back as 1992 if you had a Graphics Workstation. It pre-dates Win NT by about a year.

For budding Necromancers and magic users in general, did you know that by incrementing the letters of VMS by one you get the following:

V --> W
M --> N
S --> T

The original letters summoned and bound the Old Ones in clusters to do your bidding. Unfortunately the incremented symbols have not bound the Old Ones properly so take care not to summon up something that could bind you into the darkest depths were there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ;)

Actually you can get OCR applications for Android and iPhone. Of course the better ones you do have to pay for but there are quite a few which are free.

Actually KDE "can" be configured to look like MS Windows, but why would you when it can do so much more.

You mentioned the word "commercial" by that I assume it is going to cost. Since most window managers for Linux are free I can't see this being a big selling point.

The link is to a book published in 1994. Actually Unix was developed in 1970 and it's name was a pun on the Multex OS which was available in the mid 1960's. So basically Unix has been around for almost 43 years. As for Linux which began in 1991 it has been around for 23 years and definitely does not look at going away any-time soon.

With regard to the article different UI's such as KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc are consistent for a given UI across all Linux distributions and even support touch screens. Of course having the same UI across multiple screen sizes is IMHO stupid and even more so if the user cannot configure the display to their liking.

You do know that the missile used has a flight altitude of 14,000 m or 46,000 ft so I don't think that 35,000 ft or even 33,000 ft would make much of a difference on a missile system that has a 95% plus chance of hitting especially if that aircraft that is sub sonic and has no countermeasures. As to who is to blame "I don't know" but a weapon is pretty much useless unless there is a human pulling the trigger or pressing the button.

Does this help . Look for IFF (Identification Friend or Foe).

In what way does PC gaming make more sense? I have a gaming PC that actually runs Linux (ie. Fedora) as my primary and only OS although I do have virtual machines which I hardly every run. Normally a Linux distribution will not run "Games for Windows" without an emulator which in my case I could not be bothered to do, however if the game is web based I normally can run it. I can even run EMU games such as NES, SNES, Megadrive etc. Having said that I actually prefer console games over PC games.

IMHO the gamer has to make the choice of which gaming system they prefer. If you like PC gaming then fine, if you prefer consoles then that is fine also and if you like both then that is fine as well.

Flame wars here we come. :)

Actually the best way to get console fanboys (yes there are girls as well), who are normally at each others throats to actually agree together is when PC fanboys criticize consoles. Still a high end (and more expensive) PC will always beat a console in terms of performance, however most PC's are not high end (as per the article) so the so called elitist criticism is rather childish.

Providing the source code for Microsoft software to governments, sounds like a PR exercise. You would need the appropriate government representatives to be able to understand the source code for starters as well as being able to test it and to certify that a specific build and updates are actually from that source code. Personally I can't see that actually happening especially if said representatives have to sign a None Disclosure Contract.

Still I am quite sure Microsoft PR will state that this is our source code and "Trust Us" this compiles to make the binaries you are using and I am quite sure many government representatives will will be quite satisfied with this since they are effectively "locked in" to using Microsoft products anyway and it (to them) is a better alternative to using that "Communist" Linux thingy :)

When considering solar power, wind farming is quite practical for large scale production (not for the residential home) however you still need some sort of storage or alternative power generation to offset the hours or even days when there is little or no wind (hence a survey).

Actually no matter what methods are used for large scale energy production it will always be "consumer pays", so if you as a home owner want to offset your electricity bill then solar panels are the way to go, but only after you have done your homework and by that you need to work out the initial costs verses the longs term benefits. Unfortunately it is so easy for so called "experts" to rip people off since most people have no idea how to work out what really is best for themselves in regard to energy utilisation.