The Libs' idea of family friendly internet is a voucher for free "security software" that families may *choose* to install if they wish (and families probably should). Thankfully, the Libs believe in freedom of choice (and strong law and order to hunt down illegal stuff and shut it down where necessary, to balance things out).

...because the current government is utterly doomed at the next election, and all their half-baked ideas will be junked, like they should be. Given the current - and trending downwards for over 12 months now - opinion polls, they'll be reduced to a mere rump of their former selves. The Australian Labor Party federally has the same disease as their state-based comrades in New South Wales and will be severely punished in similarly spectacular fashion at the next election, you mark my words :-)

This disease of making something a designer's wet dream at the expense of actual usability is becoming more and more widespread. It needs to stop! The same can be said of Unity or GNOME 3. Sure, taken as a stand-alone GUI art installation, it might turn some heads and get a few people excited, but if you have to use the darn thing for more than an hour, its inadequacy outshines the shiny!

The ultimate arbiter of whether a design or a change is a good thing should be whether or not you've increased the number of clicks/hovers/steps that a user has to go through to achieve the same task. If so, then bin it and start again. Sorry, but fancy interfaces won't win anybody over if you're pissed off simply having to use it. Just like a trophy bride, she might look nice, but eventually the nagging turns you right off.

This disease that so many software makers seem to be getting whereby useful one-click-away buttons and widgets are regarded as heresy HAS TO GO! I'm so sick of idiots with new unproven ideas foisting them on us all, forcing us to re-learn tried and true methods of achieving things. First it happened to Microsoft Office, now I hear Open Office wants to be infected with the same disease. First chrome decides to strip away all functionality, so Mozilla has to copy? WHY GOD, WHY? Just leave stuff alone FFS!

If there are options to turn this stuff back on, then I guess I will at learn learn to accept it. Not even Apple in all their we-hate-features-and-user-choice philosophy wouldn't dream of going to this bizarre extreme!

...delete your account! Well, at least do your best to delete as much of it as you can. As soon as I learnt years ago that you could never delete your Facebook account I knew never to sign up to that rubbish. And Facebook have vindicated my decision every step of the way ever since.

You'd be a complete nutjob to be using Facebook. I hope that Diaspora is made available to the public in some form this year, though I'm reasonably content with Twitter.

I set the Nautilus process to "best effort" using ionice as a startup application in GNOME. Problem solved. I don't care how long a large file copy takes, if I can still do my other stuff at the same time, so what? Nautilus really needs to be set to a lower priority by default. It's scary behaviours like this that drive away potential Linux converts (it almost drove me back until this was pointed out to me by a kind Tuxian in Adelaide, South Australia).

You'll never get people tagging all their files, and any system that tries to impose its own ideas on tagging or whatever is only ever going to raise eyebrows and frustrate people because they think/do know better.

I'd prefer to err on the side of upgrading the multi-touch capabilities of Nautilus and adding more icons to the toolbar (that'll take some convincing the Gnome-devs for sure!) to make multiple selections, copying, pasting, etc easier with the touch of a finger (or fingers).

If not, then the very least there needs to be a way to tone down any such "Ubuntu Netbook Remix knows best" setting for those that know better!

I was always a KDE man but when version 4 came out GNOME actually looked decent by comparison, which is why I'm still using it today (over a year later). If they go and muck up a near-perfect desktop for the sake of fixing something that ain't broke, then I will be voting with my feet, and returning to KDE.

GNOME should be working to improve things that are still ridiculously complicated, like configuring input devices (reassigning mouse buttons for weird devices, etc) and improving Nautilus (which hasn't had any love for years). For general GTK apps, things like Evolution could do with less "mac-like dictatorship" and allowing users to minimise it to the tray, and to return to the Inbox when deleting a message. These simple things that some Nazi has decided people shouldn't be allowed to do is what makes people dismiss Linux and stick with their Windows or Macs.

I've often wondered about this, too. Looking at Philips's product information though, I'm not sure I'll be handing them my cash. All I see are tiny product images and meaningless slogans all over their page. I want details, damnit! Like, does it also have built-in FM radio? What's the remote look like? Can I have multiple remotes in each room and does each thing receive commands from the remote? Does it have to be connected to the internet or can it operate stand-alone? Some companies' marketing departments are really so clueless these days.

I bought this e-book just the other day. I got sick of trying to piece together various out-of-date tutorials and following the API docs online. Whilst you can't say the API docs aren't all there, I think it's probably too much. The hide inheritance members button at the top is a must!

However, the learning curve for Ext JS is HUGE and an approach such as "Learning Ext JS" is what's called for, even for competent programmers. I found the Apress "Practical Ext JS Projects With Gears" to be far too centred around the example scenarios, whereas, "Learning Ext JS" is perfect for somebody with a use in mind but just wants to know how all the widgets work. The Gears book would be ideal for somebody with no real idea in mind and plenty of time on their hands to "see what this Gears/Ext JS caper is all about" but if you want to just get to the point of how a grid works, or any other widget, then you're going to have to read through a lot of verbiage to answer your question.

I've also got no problem with the licensing. I use Ubuntu and prefer open source software, and if you're FOSS too, then there's no problem with Ext JS. If you're commercial, then the rather meagre licensing fee for Ext JS is hardly going to make you ditch it and piece together all that cross-browser-Ajaxy-goodness yourself! Whilst jQuery is nice and I prefer it's leaner syntax, its plugin repository is getting tad messy these days and jQuery UI only has six widgets. Can't beat Ext JS if you're not a FOSS license zealot and you just want something to take the pain out of RIA development. Life's too short to get hung up on things that don't matter.

Why do you have to "mv hello.jar hello"? Can't you simply chmod the jar file and run it? If not, then that's just another typical reason why Java = Fail.

I'd be happy if I could get my back and forward buttons working in Dolphin (I'm using openSUSE 11.1). I can't believe that in the year 2009 a linux distro still can't properly configure a mouse out of the box.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to put Windows back on my drive, but seriously, a mouse? One could hardly blame a random Windows user for thinking Linux is crap if his mouse doesn't work properly (something that works fine out-of-the-box in Windows).

Oh, and I've tried xmodmap, evdev, and fiddling with my xorg.conf, to no avail. It seems I probably have to compile imwheel (since there's no RPM for it in openSUSE). One shouldn't have to do this for something so trivial.

If this thing works as advertised, and no way is found around it, then I might be forced to lead a healthier lifestyle, and perhaps even become a more productive member of society!

Nooooo!

Sarcastometer: 50% (this really could make life rather dull and boring)