That's a pretty good idea, if you only want to detect corrupted files (and yes, I know that's what the OP said he wanted), but I can't believe no one's suggested par2, yet. It will not only detect corrupted files, but repair them, too. If he had used par2, he wouldn't have to delete them.

I almost want to ask you what industry you're in. Your business seems like the ideal candidate for a new application. Even if you aren't interested, other companies in your market might be.

Have you seen Qt Creator?

Yes. The latest version (4?) has certainly made significant improvements (and it could still use some work), but it would have had to be where it is now ten years ago, to have had enough adoption for a viable Linux desktop, today. It's not like VS is standing still, either. I guess we'll have to see what happens over the next 5 years, or so.

KDE, Gnome, XFCE etc are DEs, they are not frameworks - not APIs

Don't be pedantic. I'm pretty sure you know what I meant.

If what you say about running Qt under Gnome is true, that's an improvement, since the last time I played with it. I'll have to check it out.

1) Microsoft Office

I think you're overstating the importance of Office. My wife uses Ubuntu as her main desktop, and exchanges documents with people who use office every day. She claims she has very little trouble.

2) Games

I'll agree with you, that the PC games market isn't going anywhere soon. Linux could get into that market, if they were more programmer-friendly, which I'll go into in a minute.

3) Poor UI choices

Yeah, I think Unity's terrible, but my wife likes it.

4) Package installation/management

I honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about, here. If you want to install some software on Linux, you bring up the package manager, select the software you want, and it installs automatically. It doesn't even ask you for any money. What could be simpler than that? The only distribution that had problems with its package sources (that I'm aware of) was SuSE. The user could solve that by switching distributions. The computer manufacturer could fix that by selling units with Linux pre-installed.

5) Lack of standardization in configuration

Again, I think you're overstating this problem.

In my opinion, the biggest reason we don't have desktop Linux, is its programmer-friendliness when writing GUI programs. The first thing we need is a proper IDE. Linux and Windows programmers alike tell me nothing on Linux even comes close to Visual Studio.

The second thing we need is a single user-interface API. If you're going to write a native Linux application, do you write it in KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or something else, entirely? Yes, I know you can run KDE programs on Gnome, but you have to go to the trouble to make sure the KDE libraries are installed. Some KDE programs also require some services that Gnome doesn't run, and vice-versa. Having them both go to D-bus was a step in the right direction, but they need to go further. Desktop environment should be a user choice, not a programmer choice.

I find it kind of pathetic that in this day and age companies are rolling out laptops to their employees with something which is only modestly better than 1024x768, which I was running in '91.

The 16:9 aspect ratio doesn't thrill me, but it would be a big improvement if operating systems and more software worked better with the controls on the sides of the screen. Instead, the default is to have the controls at the top and/or bottom - shortening a display that's already too short. Granted, OSes seem to allow you to put controls on the side of the screen, but they don't always handle it well, and most applications don't do it at all. What's wrong with allowing the drop-down menus (for "File", "Edit", etc) to go on the side of an application's window, instead of on the top? How about, in your browser, having the address bar on the side and only visible when you hover over it? You could put the control buttons there, too.

Flip your screen 90 degrees.

On a laptop? How?

All that would be awesome, especially if they could make it something like a mail portal, where you can create your own folders for articles you want to save.

I'd also add to that: have a "brief listing" mode for articles, where there is just a single line with the article name, but there are many (hundreds?) of articles listed on each page. I sometimes can't read Slashdot every single day (like when I go on a business trip, or vacation) and something like that would make it much easier to catch up.

I've been on the Internet a long time and, when I named my first Internet-connected computers, I thought it would be cool to name them after Star Trek characters. (The guys a floor up from me decided to name their after planets.) It wasn't long before I discovered that, at that time, half the machines on the Internet were named after Star Trek characters, and the other half were named after planets. I decided that, in the future, I would choose the most original naming scheme I could think of. I've been naming my computers after onomatopoeic words for years - screech, kablamm, whirr, etc. There are plenty of words, so the chances of running out are small.

The only time I got into trouble is when I was putting together a server for a customer, and I called it "crash".

I'd be careful, if that's true. They may be trying to make use of that new law, where they can re-copyright books that are currently in the public domain.

As usual, XKCD to the rescue:

http://www.xkcd.com/936/

Possibly the best advice I've ever heard about passwords. The problem is that people are so concerned about following the rules you discussed, they're actually making their networks less secure.

typical 512kb which sucks

Don't feel bad. I've got 10Mb down but only about 250k up.

On the other hand, sea levels have not risen

You'll have to give us a reference for that, since my sources say otherwise:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/slideshow?id=9281281

The 2000 results have been the most studied in US history, and guess what the studies have shown Bush really did win.

I'm just some guy on the Internet, so I don't really expect you to believe me, but here's an interesting data point for you. Not long after the 2000 election, my parents went on a cruise. For dinner, they were seated with a Republican couple from Florida who, as it turns out, were two of the vote counters for the election. During dinner, they bragged about how they had saved the country from President Gore, and thank God the judge didn't make them count the votes again, that last time. If he had, they would have had to admit that Gore won.

Nor does anyone else.

Generally true, especially when it comes to mail sent over SMTP. However, I work for a health insurance company and any email that contains private information must be encrypted. To make that happen, we have a special "secure email" server, accessed via web browser, much like Gmail.

But what Unixes are still around? Tru64 is effectively dead, since HP bought Compaq; Solaris' future is questionable, since Oracle bought Sun; I've only even seen one HP/UX machine in the last decade, and we're only keeping that around for legal reasons. I'd like to say AIX is still going strong, but we just decommissioned our last AIX server a month ago, and we probably won't be going back to IBM.

Pretty much all of our Unix servers have been replaced with Linux, and the main reason is that it runs on commodity hardware. All the other Unixes, pretty much require vendor lock-in - one of the best ways to increase the cost of running your data center.