We did 6" of exterior rockwool, triple pane windows with storms. GREATly reduces outside noise.

http://www.greenbuildingadviso...

It is not cost-effective immediately, however adding that much insulation on the house has about a 15-year payback on heating an cooling costs so it is cost-effective in the long run. Rockwool makes the house fireproof too.

Lyons was a huge company. It didn't just make tea, it had a massive bakery division and also ran a very successful line of high street tea and coffee shops (think Starbucks - they were that common). It also did almost everything in-house - from vehicle maintenance to manufacturing its own machinery.

Finally, the company was seen as a very progressive concern - from the way it treated its workers (many of whom were women), through to adopting the latest business techniques - often from the US.

One of the original tasks was payroll automation - a huge task in a massive company with hundreds of pay grades and pre-decimalised coinage. But LEO came into its own when it was to process orders from these shops.

At the end of each day's business, managers would telephone a summary of their day's trading and their next order to Lyons HQ where the information was put on to punch tape and sent to LEO. The computer could then produce a collation of the orders to go to the bakeries, print dispatch slips, even generate a packing order for the trucks so that fragile items were added last!

LEO was even used to predict buying patterns - which foods were most popular at certain times of the year or in certain regions and ensure that supplies were ready for timely manufacture.

LEO was so successful it was then put to work for the government determining tax information for the Chancellor's budget and timetabling British Railways. Naturally it was such an advanced computer that it had to be killed off by one of the Labour Party's periodic bouts of nationalisation. The spin-off LEO Computers Ltd. was folded into the larger English Electric to become English Electric LEO, which then became English Electric LEO Marconi and finally ICL who eventually disappeared into the maw of Fujitsu.

There's an excellent book about LEO: 'A Computer Called LEO' by Georgina Ferry, ISBN 1841151866, Harper Collins UK, 2004. Well worth anyone's time. And the LEO project is remembered at LEO Computers Society.

I work for Akamai; Akamai does offer a general-transport better-than-BGP service called Sure Route IP.

The idea is that we utilize the massive amounts of data about the Internet's health and the insanely scalable alogorithms for matching end-users to the HTTP server that can best serve them (called mapping) to create generalized IP tunnels that send traffic across "routes" that know more about the Internet then BGP does.

Think about it. . .BGP routes based on the least number of hops. . .there are many problems inherant in that. We route based on ping data, bandwidth, cost, reliability, etc, etc, etc.

Did I mention that we are hiring like crazy?

I tried Xandros 2.0 (a friends version). I thought it was really easy to use, as easy as windows to install, setup etc. HOWEVER - unfortuately for me - while browsing the net (mozilla) I still get the mouse pointer freezing (sometimes dissapearing altogether), sluggish thumnbail browsing and a sluggish interface in general. I'm not a windows pusher but I have to say XP on the same machine at least appears to have a much zippier GUI. This is not to slag of Xandros 2.0 - they've done great. It may just be linux in general? I don't mean to rant, but until I see a SMOOTH GUI I can't change. I hate sluggishness! Now as for that 'abomination that is windows' comment, you should at least give it credit for it's good points even though it's expensive as hell and made by the devil. FYI - I have fairly new hardware (gf4ti400, athlonxp 3000+) with 1 gig of ram.