Now that you have tenure, you're going to put all the dirt on the dept you've been accumulating for years on your blog?
ROFL! Try reading the post again, Tejas man.

Just to spite "Ivan Tribble"?
"Professor Big Britches was different animal entirely. We interviewed him for a senior position. Upon reading his LiveJournal, however, we found that he associates with entire coven of people who act out sundry personae of Middle-earth, from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. One of his personal friends was a "wizard", one of the blue-robed ones mentioned in the obscure Unfinished Tales; another, a yellow dragon; still another believed that he was a Dwarf, despite the fact that he is over six feet tall and only recently acquired a beard. Several of these people even seemed to be students in Dr. Britches' own discipline! As for Dr. Britches himself, he and seemed to delight in making deliberate typographical errors and inscrutable oblique references to ever popular culture, film, and television phenomenon we could think of. Upon painstaking perusal of several of his blog entries, we learned he fancied himself a hobbit. How he ever got tenure is quite beyond us."

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Banazir

I read it fine the first time. You're backing it up as insurance in case of preemptive strikes by the League of Shadows.
I am not!
I'm interested in putting Longhorn beta (or Release Candidate Umpteen Quijillion or Public Preview or whatever they want to call it) on Hirilonde, aka the New Dell (Inspiron 6000). Excelsior!

Sounds to me like Microsoft trying to come up with a file system that is unusable in other OSes (unlike FAT/FAT32) and that will result in the creation of files that are unusable in other file systems.
It's intended to subsume FAT16/FAT32 and NTFS. The question is how the downward compatibility (file allocation, addressing) will work. It's said to be journalling, and about time. If it "supports" conversion of modern Linux file systems (ReiserFS and ext3 especially), I'm all for it, but I am (as you may know) very big on shareable file systems, hence my big FAT32 scratch drives on almost every machine, even before I decide whether to dual-boot and what to dual-boot.

"...each photo could include additional information, so that it could be searched by, for instance, who is in the picture; a set of folder-like views could then be created automatically with sorted photos by person."

Information that would not be accessible and that would actually be a hindrance on anything other than WinFS.
Content-based indexing is the wave of the future!
Content-based indexing is coming!

(Old zurich31/alpenglow in-joke: our former boss used to make proclamations such as "LVD is coming!")

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Banazir

it's actually a pretty cool concept that a bunch of people have tried to get working (I'm not sure how the gnome VFS guys are coming along) and it's a really interesting way of approaching the filesystem problem, especially on large disk volumes.

I'm mainly concerned about stability and ease-of-use, as usual. To me, the small incremental gains in functionality through nifty or innovative features (even if they are things that other OSes have had for some time) are worth the small pain of upgrading.

OTOH, I hate bloat, and features are my bane, because banazir's user personality is to suck the marrow out of OSes by pushing functionality, new features, and most especially system resources to the utter limits of the hardware and kernel. More on this tendency later.

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Banazir

For the record, I don't think Windows is more stable than most other operating systems. I think that the application availability balances out its (considerable) instability, and that the slight edge it has in ease-of-use (commonality of interface, transparency) tips the scales slightly in its favor over other operating systems.

Right now, as much as I regret to say it: if I could run only one operating system, it would be Windows XP Pro. Fortunately, I am not limited to a single choice.

There's a lot to be said for simplicity, as you rightly point out, and a lot to be said against zhi₂ zhuo₂ cong₁ ming₂ (self-subposed intelligence) on the part of the OS, or of its designers, for that matter. "cong₁ ming₂ fan₃ bei₄ cong₁ ming₂ wu₄", as we Chinese say (intelligence opposes itself, i.e., smart is as smart does).

Most Linux advocates point out, again rightly, that if you want to trust your OS, you should in principle know what it does, and be able to tell. More practically: you should not have to turn off things or constantly have to deny your OS the right to "spy" upon you or to report your doings, cookies, data, etc. without your explicit authorization.

And so I agree with your Aragorn analogy: "Long have you installed spyware; long have I endured it - no more."

Win2K Pro was indeed an apogee of Windows stability. I've actually gone back to it on two out of three of my working notebook computers because of this. As far as I can tell, WinXP's designers put a lot of thought and effort into security, but its feature bloat has opened up a commensurate number of holes. The frequency of updates serves only as demonstration of this. It has a smaller memory footprint, it is less of a power hog (very important on notebooks!), and it has a comparable response time. Some of my hardware (e.g., my Winnov Videumcam) doesn't even work on WinXP! To these, I will add that what scottharmon calls the "Playskool theme" is a minor incremental interface improvement (IMO; some such as zurich31 consider it a step backward).

Essentially, my only reason for using WinXP is to keep up with drivers and developer tools: I don't trust the Legacy Effect insofar as Visual Studio 2005, .NET framework, and server/Active Directory/WinFS features go. This is a big deal, a dealbreaker when it comes down to brass tacks. Eventually, I expect Win2K to be left behind. It probably will, deliberately if not because of genuine obsolescence. Long before that, I and many others will have despaired of maintaining three versions of Windows: Longhorn, XP, and 2000 (four if you count WinXP Home). Call it part of Microsoft's successful psychological warfare. And perhaps this reason, cynical as it is, rings truest.

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Banazir

"...each photo could include additional information, so that it could be searched by, for instance, who is in the picture; a set of folder-like views could then be created automatically with sorted photos by person."

And how the heck is this information going to get there? Am I supposed to enter it all---heck no, if I don't do it now, why would I do it then?