The way it bodes for the organisation depends on Google's execution. But my point is that everyone assumes MS's corporate customers are going to stick with Windows come hell or high water, and this might not be so.

It isn't my organisation, by the way - I'd have wanted to do a LOT of user testing (and unless it was unusually polished wait for version 2) before making a decision of this magnitude.

We have a large local organisation that has been a rock-solid windows shop for ever. I've occasionally had dealings with their IT manager, and never got any interest in moving to linux. So I just about fell over when he told me he was planning to switch as many workstations as possible to ChromeOS and Google Docs as soon as it comes out.

This is just one sample of course. But if a conservative Windows-centric organisation is planning to switch so immediately, it doesn't bode well for MS's revenue backbone - all those corporate workstations running windows and office. A switch to ChromeOS would be disruptive, but not much more so than the Windows 7 upgrade that must be on 75% of IT managers' todo lists next year.

Don't get me wrong, MS will be around for years and years, but I think their Silverlight/HTML5 announcement shows they've recognised their supremacy is over and they can't assume everyone runs Windows any more. Interesting times ahead.

Hear hear. I moved to linux years ago, and one of the unintended benefits was that I could honestly say "I haven't used windows for ages - you'd be better off finding someone else."

Linux has given me days of my life back, and I don't miss that sick trapped feeling where you "just take a quick look" and end up doing a full reinstall and still have them coming back day after day because some other odd application they used to have has disappeared.

Oh yes, and virtualbox is an end run around all those "I can't move off windows cos I need to run X" excuses. (Where X is a given application, not Xwindows, ya geek!)

Does the 100 lifetimes/day figure include the waste of the TSA employees working lives? Add it all together, and it must be a severe drag on the world's productivity.

Imagine the US un-hampered by this lunacy. Remove the lawyers too, and the US would once again be the world-beater it once was.

In the education sector, the apps you will be developing will be probably be informational, and your clients will most likely have wifi network access. In which case I'd suggest you developing web apps, so you only need to develop a mobile and a standard interface. Then they'll be available to everyone, and you only have to learn one very well-understood platform.

Pi is so much more than the ratio of the radius and circumference of a circle - it infuses maths and physics to a remarkable degree.

But even so, you are right that there is no utility in calculating it's value beyond a few tens of digits. However, it is an elegant mathematical exercise, and has become the standard to show off your computational maths prowess. As you'll realise when you read the article...

More and more serious gamers are switching to Xbox or Playstation, mainly because of the reduction in hassles on those platforms. And the rest of us (a majority, despite what you may think!) are switching to Apple/Linux because... of the reduction in hassles on those platforms!

With the rate apps are moving to the web, and Virtualbox, compatibility is rapidly becoming a non-issue. And once you've tasted the freedom of any other OS, you'll never willingly go back to the expensive, uncomfortable straitjacket that is Windows.

All four people in my immediate family run Linux, and so do my parents-in-law. They all now use their computers MORE than before, with the in-laws getting wifi and a laptop so they can browse in the living room. And like the poster above, I spend WAAAAAY less time supporting them all. I seriously don't have time for Windows any more.

+1. I'm also at the stage of my career that I can choose my tools, and I too have settled on python. Someone took a shot at python for lacking clarity above: either D is incredible, or they're trolling. One of the best things about python is it's clarity - my code is far more maintainable, and understandable, while still being concise. And as you say, python is also FUN - you are far more productive, and get better results in less time. OK, it's a wee bit slower than compiled languages, but the cost of processing power (remember that CPU is doing thousands of millions of instructions each second!) is making the courses that you need those horses for less common.

Don't forget you need (at least) another server housed in another datacenter for redundancy, and a complex system to keep the redundant system data live and provide automatic failover. And you're merely hiding setup or maintenance labour costs by saying existing employees will handle all this - in fact you have to apportion a fair fraction of their total cost. Then there's the cost of the server rooms, climate control, UPS, electricity, etc.

If you bother to do the sums, you'll be appalled by the cost of providing webmail for your organisation. Now add in the cost of providing and supporting Word, Excel and Powerpoint. And the cost your websites and wikis. And even your custom web apps, and the other apps that could/should be rebuilt as web apps. Google will provide ALL this for $50/person - that's $60K p.a. for your entire organisation, assuming no discount for over 1000 people. Scared yet?

Now lets look at the risk side of the equation. There are huge amounts of FUD around this issue, but does anyone have any reliable evidence of significant privacy or data loss from Google? I can't recall hearing about a single case, despite posing this question on Slashdot before. But I have heard innumerable cases of the same thing happening from in-house systems.

Your problem is that one day someone will explain all this to your bean-counters. The opportunity to make this level of savings comes once in a lifetime for these guys, and if you are lucky they may hesitate long enough to confirm the risk-return equation before your world comes crashing down around your ears.

My advice would be to start learning about Appengine, or EC2 or Azure, and figure out how you could migrate your existing systems. Then you have a choice - if you prefer your boss and co-workers over career advancement, keep quiet until the day comes. Otherwise sit down next to a bean-counter at lunch, and start talking about clouds. You'll be head of IT within six months.

All this geek-fu and their website still stands? OK, it's built on Centos, but surely we can do better than that!

Server Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) X-Powered-By PHP/5.1.6 Vary Accept-Encoding,User-Agent Content-Encoding gzip Content-Length 6960 Keep-Alive timeout=5, max=500 Connection Keep-Alive

I agree with you about the importance of legacy support, and ironically this is one of the major reasons I've switched to Python. One of Python's design goals was to be readable and unambiguous (the opposite of Perl!), and it has achieved this well enough that I find I need a fraction of the comments I used in c.

It's not quite self-documenting, but it's close, and I'm sure documentation would be one of the disciplines you value. Certainly it's far easier to revisit my python code than my old c projects.

Innocent question - by "molten salt" do you mean NaCl or sodium/potassium nitrate?

When you get over your headache, the answers are...

• Yes, you can run KDE apps on Gnome. The first time your package manager will have to install the KDE libraries, but this done under the covers.
• Yes, you can run Gnome apps on KDE. Again, the Gnome libraries will be installed for you the first time.
• The difference between Gnome and KDE is more than cosmetic. Think back to DOS, where you could run either Windows 3.1 or GEM graphical desktops on it. But in this case they are built to play nicely together, allowing you to run the other's apps for instance.
• A particular piece of software will depend on various things, such as the directory layout, sound system, etc. If these dependencies are limited, it will probably work on most distributions; if not, you'll see problems if you try installing from source. BUT you rarely end up doing this - I'm a power user (Ubuntu), and I haven't installed a single thing from source this time round - that means no dropping to the shell to type cryptic commands. One of the great advantages of Ubuntu is that when you want some (say) mind-mapping software, you simply open the Ubuntu Software Center, search for "mind map", click on the one(s) you want (there are currently three to choose from), and it downloads and installs. These packages have been configured for Ubuntu, so they "just work".

As for your problems with dual monitors, how long ago did you try this? I use dual monitors, and haven't had to hack config files for a couple of years now - in particular the latest Ubuntu is very polished, and automatically detects my monitors. Clicking System|Preferences|Monitors lets me arrange monitors where I want them, and to set the resolutions of course. I can say without fear of contradiction that Ubuntu is far easier to install than Windows now. Even those with very esoteric hardware will have more difficulty getting it working under Windows.

I'm a Kiwi, made a submission to the select committee, and have just sent an email to Simon Power suggesting he tread carefully.

Before you all get too het up, I would emphasise that this is New Zealand. We have pretty transparent politics here, even to the level of releasing MP's expense claims (aside: we just had a great little storm in a teacup because one MP booked several porn movies to his hotel bill). Another really healthy thing about our tiny country is how directly you are connected to your representatives - you can usually pop in and have a chat face to face on Saturday mornings.

I remember when our motorways didn't have median barriers, and we kept getting horrendous head-head collisions. After one such, the government came out and said they couldn't afford median barriers at that time. The reaction was pretty obvious - how much is a human life worth? People phoned or visited their MP, and within a week the government had announced funding for median barriers. It's great to live in a country with a government that is small enough that you know you can affect them.

So I know my email will be read by someone who will talk directly to Mr. Power, if not by him. And assuming several other people do the same, he's going to realise he's stirred up a hornet's nest. Watch this space...