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^^The reason why the uptake of Linux has been slower than we might imagine?

No. And, conversely, yes. While Apple may insist on a minimum spec of 867 MHz G4, it's possible to hack the OpenFirmware, thus. However, I'd probably install Panther (10.3, so 10.3.9) on that machine (unless it has a fair bit of RAM, and a graphics card upgrade rather than the original one - Quicksilver Macs shipped with a 32Mb GeForce 2MX, and while Quartz is quite clever and only implements system graphics decorations if it thinks your systeem can handle it, Tiger will be slower on your system). Sorry, that was a slightly rambling point. Anyway, you can probably get away with Tiger on that system, but if you can get away with older software, you will find that Panther is just faster. Leopard will be quite slow, if you manage to hack it so it installs.

"Mike Love not war" is all I can say (essentially stolen from Trainerspotter's new collection...but, hey...)

Not true - see my post above.

I think the point is that SETI is really set up (I think there's the beginnings of a tongue-twister there) to detect deliberate intergalactic pings, which one would assume would be sent with enough intensity not to be drowned in the background in the vast interstellar void. TV/radio signals and the like simply don't need to be sent with anything like that amount of power, and so they aren't. There was an interesting article in NewScientist recently that made the suggestion that, like we are now, other intelligent creatures on other worlds with their own SETIs may simply be listening, rather than shouting "tonk'peh" or whatever. It's a bit of a dilemma: do we risk saying hello and invite massive deathrays, or say nothing and risk never meeting a planet of women with three breasts?

Sorry to inject the following factoid into what has become an interesting philosphical debate, but all of the names of the days of the week (and the order in which they fall) are named after the 7 moving celestial bodies known from ancient times, although the naming is much more obvious in the romance languages. If you list these in order of rate of movement, from slowest to fastest, you get: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon If you assign each hour in a 24 hour-day to an object in this list in the order they are written above, starting with Saturn on the first day (Saturday–the reason why Saturday is first will become clear, and is thanks to the Babylonians), by the 25th hour (the first hour of the next day) arrives on Sun: Sunday. Repeat the cycle again and you land on the Moon: Monday. From here on in, it becomes easier to pick a romance language, e.g. French, so we have Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, and Vendredi. Germanic languages (such as English) tend to have the German equivalents of the Roman Gods to which each each planet was ascribed, so we have Tue, the germanic god of war in place of Mars, Woden, who was akin to Mercury, and Thor, who replaces Jove in the Roman week. Venus is replaced by Freyja, the germanic goddess of fertility, beauty and love. All the romance languages (and in this case, German) replace the pagan Saturn with a name derived from the word sabbath, e.g. Samedi, Sábado, Samstag etc.; English is pretty much the only language that betrays the pagan (and, curiously, Roman) origin of this particular day. As for why the sabbath should historically be on Saturday–the first day in the cycle, this is likely to have been cemented by the Hebrews' exile in Babylon. The Babylonians used a lunar calendar, and marked quarter periods of the 28-day cycle (i.e., 7 days), as well as developing the sexagesimal (base 60) counting system that would give rise to the minute and hour, and could be easily converted into the duodecimal (base 12) counting system that would make up a day. Once in a 28-day period they would celebrate their new moon, which they called sabbota. A large part of the old testament was probably formulated during the period of Exile, and it would have made sense to fit the creation into quarter-lunar-month periods, given that the Hebrews were probably glad of any counting system that wasn't Egyptian. Eostre (being a goddess of fertility, again) was sometimes depicted as being part rabbit. This (it seems to me) links to the idea of the Easter bunny. Mmm... Jessica Rabbit. Actually, she wasn't a rabbit, although she was romantically involved with one. The pagan origin of the English word Easter is there for everyone to see, though.

He may or may not have enabled the root user at all, and my betting is he probably won't have done...but as Moonlight says, it's easy to reset even if he hadn't (you can select it by booting from the OS X install CD). For your purposes, you can probably disregard that and chose disk utility from the Utilities menu on the OS X install CD (boot from it by pressing C on restart–but make sure you have the CD in the drive!). Choose disk utility as soon as it boots, and ignore the installer window. You can do a full erase by zeroing out all the sectors on both disks (once should be fine, 7 times if you're ridiculously overparanoid, 35 times and you really will wish you hadn't), repartitioning if you like (classic and OS X will happily sit on the same partition, although I always have two partitions on my main disk, so leave it at two if you like...although, I'd probably shrink the second (classic) partition to about 10 Gig), then reinstalling. Voilà, should be fine and dandy...

err... yep. Made this concession on that same thread over two years ago, when similarly challenged: I concede to your *proper* definition (although the Oxford dictionary definition also allows for meat cooked on a spit as well as a skewer, as in the vertical case of a rotating donner trunk). I just think that 'kebab' should by default refer to a donner, for reasons I can't quite explain. Fish kebabs, too, are lovely. Incidentally, Jannath off West Street do what they term a "mix kebab". Their wares differ from those offered by Elif (Turkish in orgin) or other kebab houses (which might be Greek or otherwise balkan) in that they originate from Northern India and Pakistan. The "mix kebab" dish consists of a highly spicy sheekh kebab (a spicy sausage made of lamb), a shami kebab (a burger-like patty, which doesn't look like it has ever been on a skewer or spit) and an onion bhaji. Keep up. There are also ethical reasons why lamb is better than chicken, namely that it's pretty hard to mistreat lamb. I'd happily pay extra for free range chicken, but I understand that takeaways have to take the position that enough customers would pay the extra to make this a viable option. Anyway, I digress... I think it's obvious that you basically weren't in Elif! I've been going to Elif for many, many years, and they've always made the turkish flatbread while I was there. Are you sure you've got the right place? I've never known anyone be served a kebab in a pitta bread from Elif, so that's the only conclusion I can draw from your frankly bizarre assertion!

Many sandwich shops prepare sandwiches "in a clean open way" without being part of a massive corporate chain, the likes of which are basically killing our towns. There are loads of independent sandwich shops in Sheffield that are far better than Subway. Why not support those?

You'd be able to do this on a suite of out-of-the-box Macs with iChat Theatre (which would work with any browser, or pretty much any media file or document). However, this may not be an option... I think you could do this by VNC, if you're using Windows, e.g. TightVNC, although things will slow down the more viewing clients you have. Otherwise, have you looked into BeamYourScreen.com? There's a 7-day free trial, although the subscription is pretty hefty.

WRONG! 0/10

From Wikipedia: My Grandma, who is working class and from West Yorks, says /skɒn/, as do I. My mum uses either interchangeably but always subsequently looks embarrassed, as though she's used the wrong pronunciation. On for me.

I can't believe I'm about to do this but... RUBBISH! Having recently read Brian Bagnall's "On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore", the book basically cements what I've long held true: That Commodore have been unfairly written out of the history books, and really deserve recognition as a pioneering company, without which modern computing would be vastly different. The Commodore PET was the first personal computer (preceeding the Apple ][ by over a year), they were the first manufacturer to sell over a million machines (the VIC-20) and they still hold the record for the most popular computer of all time (your beloved C64, Rich). Not to mention that in the mid-1980s, they had a machine far superior to any of Apple's or IBM's offerings: The Amiga, pioneering pre-emptive multitasking, 16-bit stereo, and 4096 colours on screen at once. With the later AGA chipset, the Amiga was one of the first cheap comuters to allow millions of colours, and was much beloved of television and graphics studios across the globe. While their computers were groundbreaking, development and sales slowed as Irving Gould (the CEO) spent all his money on women and lavish parties, while engineers went unpaid for months. In that sense the company probably encapsulates the insanity of the 1980s. The book "Fire in the Valley", upon which the film "Pirates of Silicon Valley" was based, features Commodore as much as Apple and Microsoft, but the latter largely ignores their role in history. Probably because the story of Mac vs. PC seems more relevant today. The Sinclair machines were also good, affordable first computers, though Rich, so not knocking them (although I'll happily enter a playground argument mode if you like). I have Speccy and C64 and Amiga emulators, and appreciate them all. btw, Linus Torvalds learnt assembly on a VIC-20, fact-fans.

I'm confident using Windows, and can readily help out colleagues and friends who use Windows but aren't very technically-minded. The market share is over 7% btw (7.31% for December 2007 Source). So 12-13 times as many machines, although as many Windows machines are used in banks etc., they are most likely maintained by IT support, rather than users who you might ask for help. The market share hasn't been as low as 3% for years.

...I should add, actually, that cron scripts run when you install many system updates - that's what the "optimizing system" bit is towards the end of the installer progress bar. For some strange reason, though, I've met quite a few people who rarely (or never) install system updates. I mean, I can understand people who hold off installing for a while: Like Windows' SPs, these can cause some (though usually fewer) problems. But to never install updates? I do take issue with the statement that they are "no simpler" to use though, because if you were experiencing problems with your Mac, it wouldn't take very long Googling to figure out things that I've mentioned, such as cron scripts, and other maintenance ideas. Most have freeware solutions, with nice GUI front ends to make it easy to customize. On the other hand, it's "common knowledge" that you need to install anti-spyware software on a Windows machine, defrag every now and then, and do a full system re-install every couple of years at least. But it's only common knowledge because there are about 9 times as many Windows users to tell you this if you couldn't be arsed looking it up yourself. Of course, you don't need to do any of these things on a Mac, and typing <sudo periodic daily weekly monthly> in the terminal, or clicking <Run All Tasks> in a freeware application takes far less time than defragging or doing a system reinstallation.