I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.

I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.

Well said, it's the software that the issue, hardware is nothing without it.

The way I figure it, users are like mice, you have to have them otherwise, like the windmill cat, you have no job. Companies pay for infrastructure and we get to play with and make it sing, or at least hum :)

It's a good life, all things considered, computers have always been good to me.

Au Contriare.

OpenSolaris is Fedora Core to RHEL, It may not have made much of an inroad onto the desktop, but it'll do as a replacement for x86 on the server, I'm sure they'll move Crossbow and the ZFS updates into x86 eventually, but then it'll cost to 8% plus of the purchase price of the Sun hardware you have to run it on. OpenSolaris may not work well on retail hardware but it's OK on PC server hardware, and it's free, great for server appliances and the like, especially if you're a Solaris shop anyway.

There are products you can buy that are normally used in businesses, that allow you to do key stroke logging, remote snooping the screen, etc. If you're as paranoid as the business that use these tactics on their workers then I'm you can find them with the Google. I don't expect they will be cheap, and they will require a lot of setup, you'd also have to do this away from home for obvious reasons. But if you mistrust your kids that much already I'm sure you're prepared for that.

This sort of thing sounds like it's right up your alley: http://www.softactivity.com/

Of course as pointed out above they can be circumvented with the Google too, often by the simple expedient of going to a library, or a friends house. You could of course spy on them there to, by bugging their phone, though of course if you follow down this route you'll work out that locking in their room, and home schooling them under armed guard is the only rational choice. What you're going to do in a few years once they leave home and become adults, (so called) is a different matter.

You could of course just lock them in the basement.

For the most part most people on slashdot are not the target audience, and most people who will ever touch Windows 7 will get it the same way they got XP, etc. with a new machine. Given the current economic environment, I doubt very many "consumers" will be part with hard earned cash for a PC they don't need at present.

it will be interesting to see what the conversion stats are once we're beyond the initial release though.

Actually I've never had a problem with Symantec AV, but then I've always used the corporate edition without all the consumer crud.

My first Sparc was an IPC, with a huge 20" monitor, fantastic. Good way to go I figure. Sorry for your loss, but thanks for sharing.

I think if people are coming from an existing application they generally have expectations, provided they can do the same things in the same way they usually stay. If users have to change their workflow however, then the novelty wears of really fast. Which brings me to my second point, if user have support, then they'll stay longer, and wont mind doing stuff like tcpdumps, etc. provided somebody else is telling them what to type or tweak. If people know they can just ask somebody and get results in a day they usually stay. At least in my experience of familial & work tech support anyway.

Trying to have kids at the moment, funnily enough the first two things that occurred to me once I began to think about that was that I needed to get rid of the TV and windows. The way I figure it they both teach bad habits, and I'll be dammed if any kid of mine is going to grow up a windows user :) But seriously, who the hell cares about about the native interface? The fact that it looks like it was designed in the 90's is because it was, like the rump of XP, it's "good enough" and compared to anything else they've ever put out it's fairly bullet proof, provided you don't try to get clever with the underlying hardware. I don't know about you, but XP will be my last windows OS.

I've been a sysadmin for years too, and for those that love tech & the life it's still the only job worth doing IMO, or perhaps more to the point the only one I do for less/free. The job, and the challenges that come with it, is it's own reward.