I think it would be against Microsofts interests if Novell would fall victim to a corporate raider or stop their Linux business. Microsoft doesn’t not like Linux because it’s not Windows (that’s the reason many Linux users like Linux though), but because it makes them earn less money. I think Microsoft has given up on the “let’s kill Free Software” approach, but rather went to some kind of “if you cant kill it, join it”.

Linux is not threatening their desktop market right now, at least not as strong as Apple does. They constatntly improve interopability with the major Linux server players.
Novell would be a great buy for them I think. They’d even get some excellent .NET developers and a very permissively licensed .NET framework “for free”. Maybe they just didn’t buy them yet because they fear an anti trust lawsuit?

One last thing: Novell may be a big player in the Free Software ecosystem, but they still mainly are an infrastructure company. You don’t buy Tesco to make them stop selling vegetables, do you?
If Microsoft is behind this offer (which I highly doubt), then only to help Novell embrace their Open Source business.

For the most part, I prefer word sequences to be sentences, or at least semi-comprehensible thoughts that express an reasoned opinion.

One word epithets, while displaying one’s distaste for various actions, do not have the punch of a thought out, well reasoned argument.

The tools or writing and communication are there; the creativity is not.

Damn lazy kids…. get off my lawn!

I’m sorry about the Grammatical error. Unlike Shit Trains, I shall try and explain why I’ve got into a bad habit.

I spend rather a lot of my day, too much possibly, working on PCs and the Internet. As this has been the case for a considerable number of years, some “shorthand” and “workarounds” have become habitual for me. Some denizens of the web call it “muscle memory”. One of these habits is related to searching for Weston-super-Mare when using the internet. Often the “search” text boxes on websites will accept boolean arguments as part of the search criteria.

For instance asking Google to search for “Weston super” will mean Google will search for websites containing either Weston or super. Asking Google for “Weston+super” for websites containing both Weston and super.

So as you can see, searching for “Weston-super-Mare” may be grammatically correct, however it may cause an unexpected or incomplete search on the Internet. I have found that “weston super mare” gives good results in most searches. Hence it has become habitual for me to type the name in that format. Ironically “Weston+super+Mare” may very easily produce better results

On a lighter note, perhaps the train driver was confused, as “Weston Super Mare” isn’t a place.

Yes, I know I’m being pedantic, but I wouldn’t spell “Bristol” as “briS-tol” or “London” as “lon-Don”, adding capital letters and hyphens wherever I please. So why add amend capitals and hyphens in Weston-super-Mare – just for the sake of it? It’s just plain incorrect, and very much akin to the error the train driver made… i.e. it wasn’t correct and it irritated someone else.

BTW, just started reading your blog and am really enjoying it – it’s nice to see another Westonian who speaks common sense!

I’ll have a better time convincing my parents to use Linux when I can show them “It has tons of different games that you enjoy, built right in for free!” instead of things like “The EXT file system does not suffer from volume fragmentation like NTFS does, so you no longer have to defragment your file system periodically.”