So that's what a working democracy looks like. For a Pirate Party to get any foothold in the UK, all their supporters would have to move into one small area.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a big difference is the way updates to Windows preserve all the ugly broken hacks that incompetent or unnecessarily creative driver writers used. A well-written 3rd-party Linux driver tied in with DKMS and you'll probably never have to worry about it. But a badly-written driver will probably break the moment some ugly bug it was exploiting is fixed.

This reminds me of the maxim I usually apply: all driving situations are at most 2 mistakes away from serious danger. Somebody stepping out and you not anticipating it, somebody lane changing without indicating and you not noticing the telltale signs, somebody braking excessively hard and you not keeping enough distance to start with. The best you can do is to make sure you don't make your half of the mistakes.

WPF requires 3.0 or above, and WPF is so very attractive because it's much less pain than Windows Forms (finally, autosizing of widgets and built-in themability). Problem is, MS has finally released a GUI toolkit worth using but the majority of Windows machines are still running XP and therefore the first WPF application you ever use will require this massive (relative to the size of the application) dependency.

Damn right. I think I'd kill myself if I had to do webdesign for a living.

Here are some nice example of IE7 failures I experienced recently while attempting to style a site:

http://iris.codescape.net/~alan/IE-rendering-fail-3.png
http://iris.codescape.net/~alan/IE-rendering-fail-2.png
http://iris.codescape.net/~alan/Rendering-odd-one-out.png

Indeed. Everybody has gotten so used to Windows "standing still" that many developers have got lazy and users are well into the comfort zone. Promoting familiarity and backwards compatibility has actually harmed Microsoft in the long run, since they now have trouble with uptake of their newer products.

Dare I mention that there are more than 2 parties in the UK? The sooner people get out of this 2-party mentality the sooner democracy will come closer to working again...

Just FYI, Windows Vista and onwards support keyboard layout changing at the login screen, and even setting the default keyboard layout at installation time (and probably later) that also applies to the login screen.

I actually did this once - just a simple case of tab-whoring and doing things too fast for my own good (it was rm -rf . in my case, in my home directory).

It was a good experience in that ever since that point I've actually been running daily incremental and weekly full backups of everything important to somewhere a normal user has no read/write access. And by 'important', I mean documents etc., not the 500GB of media. It's all about risk vs. cost, and I just don't have anywhere to backup that much data to, when most of it can be reacquired. In fact, I just back up a list of my media instead to make that process easier.

There's a lot of 'ideal solution' stuff being thrown around here, but the fact is that it's not practical for 99.9% of people. Most home user data is not worth the £10000 an ideal backup solution would cost.