To play Devil's Advocate, choosing a DE makes no statement about the capabilities of the designer. My company chooses to pay me for other work I do that results in profits, and pay Red Hat for the support for DE's. I've been coding a very long time, and if I thought that coding my own DE and supporting it forevermore was the way to go, I would do it.

And while I know you work on Fedora and aren't personally responsible for all RHEL / Fedora issues, you need to understand that some of us are your RHEL / RHEV customers. When we're talking about silly things not working -- such as the System Monitor in Fedora and RHEL not showing all 16 cores (it's way too wide for the screen and can't be made narrower), which should have been vetted in Fedora before shipping in RHEL -- we can become frustrated. We were told by Red Hat that Activity Monitor was broken and they were aware of the issue, and we should use KSysGuard with all its KDE dependencies instead. The point is, sometimes a usable value isn't set as default, and common configurations don't work as expected. That's GNOME 3. The key to using a system is to provide reliable features with little surprise and even less irritation wherever possible. When you're buying expensive licenses you expect the built-in tools to work as expected, barring inevitable bugs. When a bug is brought up through the normal support channels and after an unsatisfactory support response you include your VAR, assigned Red Hat sales staff, as well as Red Hat technical support, you expect real answers.

GUI KVM settings don't save if you use the command-line kvm tools? Well then, don't use the GUI, we were told. It will be fixed soon.

Windows 2008 R2 timing settings result in CPU spikes on Nehalem, while idling, under RHEV 3? *No one* at Red Hat support -- and I had more than 4 reps involved with that one over a couple of months -- could solve it. I solved it and reported the solution so it could be incorporated into a bugfix.

And don't get me started on what we were promised with RHEV 3 vs what was delivered either, or the fact that I was told our problems would be fixed "in a couple months" all the way through October, then told it was ready but there was no upgrade path yet, and finally when there's a semi- sort-of upgrade path, it's too risky to justify. Companies like the one I work for don't like the risk and it was embarrassing to be kept waiting when Red Hat sales said a bugfix was imminent.

I second your views on Xfce. I can put someone in front of it and they don't need UI training. Things just work as expected.

It's never -- not even once -- been a problem for me. I have a Liteon DVD burner I bought years ago. Now you don't get the menus or interactive bits, it's just a DVD recorder that acts like a VCR. With far better quality though. It's simple enough for anyone to use, just choose the recording length and go.

Composite video (the "analog hole") means no restrictions on copying or displaying content.

At least after getting kicked in the groin, the pain subsides after a time. Windows 8 on the other hand...

The store would receive that one right back. That's BS.

Oh! We're all going to die when that happens...

For those of us who dislike Microsoft and got f'd up the A with the Sony rootkit, we would purchase a console from Satan if one was made available. It just so happens that company is "Nintendo".

Gotta agree with you... you go through the process and somebody forgets to test some "little thing" that is no longer supported in the new version. If it's commercial software, that can leave you scrambling to work around the issue.

With custom software it's still a pain but you seldom run into something that absolutely can't be done, usually it's something takes awhile to program around and you impact business in the meantime. No matter how carefully you examine the requirements you will always miss something, it's the nature of the beast. If you rely on third party tools to plug into your IDE you may find the licensing has changed drastically and it may no longer be acceptable to use that widget or tool.

And let's not forget about bugs... you may run into something that is documented, works in testing, and when it hits production it just doesn't work when you have hundreds of people hitting it at once. Good design solves a lot of that but you can always have scenarios that can't be adequately tested before you roll it out. Parallel systems help with that but at some point you spend so much time and effort keeping everything in sync while you prepare for full deployment that it's easier to cut off the old system and just deal with the issues as quickly as you can.

1. We have a teen mixing chemicals that she admitted she had no idea what they would do.
2.She's doing this in the schoolyard, not in a lab or classroom, and not under the direction of any teacher.
3.Some friend was guiding her into mixing the chemicals.

Ok, so it was a prank. I understand. A teenager doesn't always make the best decisions. We have all likely done pranks before.

But the difference is, in this day and age, and after recent bombings, mixing random things together at the advice of your friend is really really stupid. She had no idea what would happen and admitted as much. That's how you get people "innocently" making real bombs and killing real people. And I think that's why there was such a harsh response.

I wish I could say race played no part, but I think it did. This is a very conservative county, a real backwater.

Insightful. The only way to stop the other bullies is to stand up to the bully in front of you now.

If he will lie about something as silly as that, who in their right mind will trust him in business? He sold his integrity for a ridiculously low price and doesn't even understand why that matters.

Thank you for seeding :) It's underappreciated.

cwRsyncServer (I'm not affiliated with them) makes setting up an rsync server in Windows straightforward. It's only 5 minutes or so in Linux. Bandwidth limiting is a --bwlimit switch. I do notice that in general rsync in Windows is slower than on Linux or OSX.

You made a sweeping generalization that "every real research institution" was concerned with treating animals humanely. Who appointed you the spokesperson for "every real research institution"? Then you followed that by stating that obviously they would do what's right because of PR.

At best, your logic is specious. It might be correct and it might not, but an analysis of the issue would lead you to other possibilities and reasons. The PR angle is very weak. Even PR over things such as pink slime and meat glue hasn't stopped people from eating meat... and that's something that can eventually kill them. Why do you think the public's interest in lab monkeys would be seen as a more important issue?

A much more reasonable conclusion is that researchers are not universally concerned about the welfare of animals being tested (or why on earth would you want to test things on animals?) and that on occasion, someone gets caught doing something they shouldn't be doing or using excessive brutality. And occasionally activists boil over and take matters into their own hands.

It's as if this were a mystery to you somehow.