Actually, having spoken to a Doctor in a senior position in a large NHS Trust his conclusion wasn't too far from yours, but without the physical USB stick: Instead of a central massive do-everything system all that should have happened / be happening is to specify a set of formats and protocols and then each provider from giant hospital campus to small outreach surgery can use whatever system suits their needs, so long as it talks the language. Also the NHS already has its own secure backnet (fibre and the like, though I expect a good deal of it is VPN too) so it's not like there'd be web services ripe for the hacking hanging on public IPs.

I'm holding out this idealogical hope that when Google+ comes out of beta they'll announce that, "oh, by the way, it's federated, and here's Lars on his Yahoo+ account, and this is me adding him as a friend on my Google+"

Boom

Reminds me of an idea I had about 15 years ago, where you could install similar devices under the dancefloor of a club. Lots of people dancing to banging music = free electricity

It was a combination of having SP1 and a setting registry key, EnableBigLBA, that you needed. I don't know why it was so important to correct you, I'm a pedant, sorry.

There was one in 1983, too? Why did nobody tell me!? Does this one have a happy ending?

Brief Voyager moan : The setup was great, two rival (warring!) crews trying to get along on one ship. The payoff? Fuck all.

Believe me, they're shitting bricks about the interwebs, and not just because of the Copyright issues that their corporate donors have been harping on about. The past 50/60 years has been littered with minor revolutions that have been cracked down on because they were getting out of hand, specifically The Misuse of Drugs Act and The Criminal Justice Act. Both a cover, frankly, for bashing down hippies and other people who thought "Wouldn't it be great if we were all just nice to each other?" movements that they overlapped, who do you think rebranded "Anarchy" to mean "Riots" or "Hippy" to mean "Lazy, benefits claiming leecher"? They let us have Glastonbury Festival once a year, with a giant fucking fence around it, and we're supposed to be grateful, and we're supposed to believe that society can't function like that on a large scale, it just can't because, er, um, not screwing everyone else over 24/7 is not good for capitalism, and recycling and sustainability is not good for Oil Company profits. /rant (it's monday morning and I'm grouchy)

also works with 95 > 95B

(95C, "Windows 97" breaks the pattern though, but it's best to pretend that one never existed anyway)

I just pictured a Police Squad like moment where someone goes into a bar and attempts to order a drink, their task being made more difficult because of the surfaces being piled high with "lost" tablets, phones, laptops, gizmos, dongles and widgets

The thing is that unless you're installing professional development tools the "App" is most definitely the way of the future, and in my opinion its been far far far too long coming: No hunting through sites, no downloading from amongst 20 different versions which may or may not be up to date, stable or for your OS/CPU combo, no setup.exe, no installshield wizard with 25 next/back buttons and endless questions, no putting crap on your desktop, no ASK toolbar, no adding a firewall rule, no dependencies to resolve, no repositories to admin,

One place to search them, you click one button, maybe acknowledge some security/permissions with one more click. Done.

And no. APT is not on par with this in terms of user friendlyness, so don't be coming back with how Joe Smith can "just" use it. The closest we had before the App store was the Mac's App-Icon, which you just dragged from the disc/stick into your own apps folder.

Disclaimer: Android Fanboi, Ex Mac owner, Amiga Nostalgicist

From reading slashdot I thought the ribbon was afwul for about two years, until I moved jobs to a place where they had Office 2007 and frankly, after ACTUALLY USING IT I think it's fine. I don't get giddy over it, but I don't miss hunting in tabs of property dialogs launched from sub menus in the menu. Also this File Manager Ribbon actually has a dedicated New Folder button front and centre. I've only been waiting 15 years for that.

Before netbooks came along a couple of years ago I noticed that laptops never got cheaper. The manufacturers constantly upped the specs and kept the price point the same, which just seemed daft to me, which is why when netbooks did start to emerge I thought "it's about bloody time", it just seemed a really obvious thing to do to me

Portal? Really? Sorry, was distracted by the fit bird in the vest.

and it's too close, in the wide shot the walls are about 5/6 metres apart, but the view through the portals are as if they are closer, like only a couple of metres

You've clearly never heard of the Helicopter