I choosed Russound since it does one thing and does it fairly well. The biggest limitation is probably that it is limited to 6 amplified zones; another one beeing that the unit comes up front with a 12 channel amplifier and a corresponding power consumption. The future solution I see in a industry standard real-time bus for all AV equipment; think about the technology to replace HDMI but able to distribute AV to a number of room at distances up to some 100 meters. Biggest technical hurdle would be synchronization. Conventional networking technologies from the PC Lan space (Ethernet, Bluetooth) is not up for the task since they rely on buffering and for this application syncronization is an absolute must.

Software patents is pure nonsense. We have patents for one reason - to stimulate innovation. It is not about fairness or about protecting anyones interests in particular. Societies protect patents out of self interest, because it stimulate research in some areas. This would be the case in an area such as medical research where it cost billions to research a new drug. This is mostly not the case for software For most innovations in software research is dead cheap. You more or less need a PC and you have your own lab. Software patents do not stimulate innovation they curb innovation. No software patents please.

In fact I tend to use Word and word-processors very little nowadays. At work our work is organized to be self-documenting. For collective information we use Wikis. For exchanging information we use email. If we want to publish something we use PDF's or the web. The keyword is document management. The use of Word is dimishing and wherever possible we try to use media that enables easy sharing and distribution something that a desktop-bound application using it's own proprietary file format does not. Torbjorn Oesterdahl

I use solely Ubuntu for private computing since early 2005. As I bought a new laptop, accidentally an Lenovo it was sort of irritating not to be able to get it with my favorite operating system. Before opening the package I checked around on the internet for references to what to do with the Windows Vista Ultimate licence. It was clear to me that the EULA terms were inacceptable to me so according to the licence terms I needed to wipe the hard disk without ever booting into Vista. I called up the free Lenovo support and asked what to do. They asked to come back, half an hour later a support manager called and told me that I was going to be sent a form to be signed guaranteeing that I reformatted the hard drive wiping out the boot partition as well as the recovery partition. I also needed to hand in the Windows licence stickers and my bank account number to receive the equivalent of $40. By handing in the form I also accepted that I was not going to get any support on the computer any more and there was no way I could get a recovery CD. On my part I accept that computer makers does not have to sell non-windows hardware. I also equally much think they should give users the choice of buying hardware without the software. I am glad that Lenovo is giving us this option. TorbjÃrn Ã-sterdahl, Zürich. http://www.ultra-marine.org/

True. It is important for Linux to get to the point where web-site designers, product suppliers and other actors in the market can not just say 'Linux? Not a concern of ours'. It is important that web site designers do not test for IE only, which was probably the case for some time. It is important for Linux that makers of printers and graphics cards do provide drivers. To achieve this Linux do not need a 10% market share, but it need at least a tangible visibility in the market. In this sense also the 1%, although disappointing for a Linux fan, is an important milestone.

The market share is in it's own right is just a comparison number that can tell how the market develops. For the long term development of the Linux Desktop it probably cruisial WHO is running Linux. If school pupils, teachers, journalists, politicians and descisionmakers is running Linux then it is probably more important than having yet another dude install it on a left over computer to check out that it actually works.

I use Linux at home since five years and I find very little need to run Windows apps; but it is true that when you need to run that occasional app it would be helpful if it would run on Wine. I would have had two windows applications that I needed to run in the past couple of years. The first one was a piece of software that came with my sportswatch to evaluat trainings. This runs fine on Virtual Box with a Windows XP running on a virtual machine. The second occasion was when I wanted to run a bios upgrade utility for my laptop (Lenovo). This was designed to run on MSDOS or Windows and I hat neither of them. For the latter case I wonder why the hardware suppliers does not supply a bootable cd image with a Linux to install the new bios; it should be more reliable than the windows app they now use and it would work for everyone, not only those running Windows.

Instead of dwelving into the general dominance of English as a business language lets have a look at what this means to programmers. Is it more difficult for non native english speakers to read code than for native speakers? Would there be a better choice than english to use to derive a programming language?

Microsoft Excel would be the exception. The formula expressions there is localized which always confuses me a bit since my brain is usually not really register what the locale of my computer is.

MythTV is an as popular as unsuitable entry point for people to Linux. Lots of people seem to be trying Linux because of MythTV and just as many seem to be failing on it and leave Linux behind very frustrated. MythTV setup is probably allright if you work with databases and some system config on a daily basis, if you don't it is just to complicated. Unfortunately there is not so many good recording back-ends out there while there is plenty of good media-box apps. Best thing for the community would be if MythTV opened up to become the standard API for video recording and timeshifting. It definitely should do recording, timeshifting and playback. Perhaps it should do scheduling of new recordings. It does not need to do front-ends, tv-tables or managing channels. It might do also these things, but it would certainly do the rest of us a good favour if it openened up for using the backend with other front-ends.