Monkey, great sage, the equal of heaven.

The 'real' GB includes England, Wales and Scotland. But politically, 'UK' is the correct term when including the region around Belfast.

And because it has that pesky locked bootloader, enterprising young Russian students (see yesterday) can't even port ReactOS for ARM to the cursed thing! :)

I thought your Carribean neighbours had a great climate for sugar cane?? :-)

Drop the embargo and you'll reboot the Cuban economy, most of whose sugar mills have turned to rust since the Soviets checked out. Keeping the blockade only entrenches the Castro brothers' reign and condemns the great-grandchildren of the revolution (50+ years of embargo and counting) to poverty and the whims of Venezuela's Chavez.

Well I've never had the fortune of visiting the USA but here's an anecdote...

In Australia, our sugar comes from Queensland-grown cane. When I tried Coca-Cola in Germany/Austria/Norway/Spain/Portugal etc it had a 'sicklier' sweeter and less subtle taste. Aussie Coke tends to have more body, somehow. So unless they've tweaked the secret formula across continents, whatever they sweeten Euro-Coke with does indeed make it taste different. Whereas in Argentina/Chile it tasted like back home - I guess that's from Brazilian sugar cane.

Coke Zero tastes the same everywhere. :-)

On the other hand, just the other day we read that Linux is incorporating elements of user-space (dbus) into the kernel, because dbus is otherwise too slow. In that sense, isn't it monolithic?

Missing my point. People don't like change and for many, Windows is a pleasant enough shell for daily use. Switch to, say, Unity and things are different. If they wanted something more akin to Windows they'd chose lxde or similar. Plus, Windows explorer craps all over nautilus in terms of usability, IMHO.

One goal of ReactOS is to be binary compatible with Windows (emulating a baseline of XP/2003 server NT 5.2) - including at the driver level. So if you have an old piece of hardware like a scanner or a printer that has a driver for XP, that same driver will (eventually) run with ReactOS.

That same piece of hardware might not have a driver for Linux nor Windows 8.

As for 'completion' well probably never simply because it doesn't have the manpower. But if these guys are having fun, who are we to criticise?

The effort invested into Reactos would make much more sense if invested into Wine instead.

Perhaps, but ReactOS does borrow code from Wine. There's cross-pollination of ideas/code(license permitting) between the developers of each project. Wine benefits by having their implementation battle-hardened on a non unix-like foundation.

Anyway, some folks prefer the Windows XP paradigm to, say, Unity or Gnome 3. Each to their own...

Because Aleksey is a clever young fella who was offered a teaching gig. Naturally he'd pick an area of interest that he's expert in.

I'm sure there are plenty of other OS theory courses worldwide that use Linux, Minix, Hurd, L4, FreeBSD etc - this is one unique course, so why the hate?

Nevertheless, idealism doesn't match reality - a lot of content still requires a flash plugin. Even a story posted on Slashdot yesterday had embedded flash video. :(

So although I use chromium or firefox for most things, I keep Chrome handy for news services etc.

Ubuntu phone - security updates are as easy as syncing with your local distro mirror. An LTS release would provide security updates for 3 years.

It's 2013 and we're on Slashdot. I have to fire up a malware-bait browser because the article submission doesn't embed HTML video? :(

[/Angry nerd rant]

emacs key-bindings ??? :)