Noise and size aren't an issue, as it is in the crawlspace. Out of sight, out of mind... quite literally! All maintenance is done over the network.

All kinds of crap has gotten piled in front of it since I set it up; I haven't needed physical access to the box in over 3 years. When I eventually do need to get at it (which, at this rate, probably won't be until Ubuntu Server 10.04 goes EOL in about a year) I will need to un-bury it first!

I hear you on the Realtek NICs too. While their poor reputation was indeed deserved in the past, they seem to have gotten a lot better over the past few years. I don't know if they have fixed bugs in their silicon, or if recent drivers have implemented workarounds; but whatever the reason, they seem to work reasonably well now.

It is crap like this, and the abysmally unreliable hardware most consumer routers seem to be based on, that has convinced me not to buy consumer routers any more. Been using an old PC (running a copy of Ubuntu Server booted from a CF card) as my router for several years now.

Yeah, I know the power consumption of an old PC sucks compared to a consumer router. But after going through 3 routers in something like 5 years I was sick of dealing with that crap. The PC-based router is way more stable and reliable.

The phrase "technology utility player" almost perfectly describes my current role. My official job title is "Principal Software Engineer". However, I spend less than half of my time doing actual software development. I am also responsible for maintaining the Linux side of our infrastructure (it is a mixed Windows/Linux environment and IT only manages the Windows side); occasionally get pressed into service debugging low-level hardware issues in prototypes of custom boards and cables; and until fairly recently was being shipped all over the country on short notice to support product demos.

TBH I actually enjoy this kind of role, except for one aspect: I don't think management understands that everything takes longer because I am juggling so many different things. All they really see is that Project X, which was supposed to take 80 hours, takes a month or more of calendar time. Or that infrastructure issue Y goes unresolved for weeks because it isn't an emergency (yet) and never floats to the top of the priority list.

There used to be two of us "utility player" software guys here. The other one quit a few months ago, and we were not able to find a replacement with the same mix of skills. This has definitely lengthened the list of things I need to juggle.

Looks like someone can't tell the difference between "March" and "April". Hint: "April" is the one that starts with an "A".

The major distros posted patches for this flaw to their repositories within a day or two of it being made public. (Not to say that it isn't embarrassing for stuff like this to make it into the codebase; but at least it was fixed quickly once it was discovered.)

When you let someone else manage your data, you no longer control your data. That's the biggest flaw with the current "race to the cloud".

Huh. Confirmed. I had always assumed that the normal update process would bring you up to the latest point release within an LTS series. So I learned something today. OP could still install an older point release like 12.04.2 though. All 12.04.x releases are supported until 2017 AFAIK.

You sure about that? The package currently installed on my system appears to match the latest one in the Ubuntu repository for precise.

Well, something doesn't add up then. The OP states the bug was introduced in 1.13.1, yet my copy of Ubuntu 12.04 (which is current on patches) is running 1.11.3.

If their recent redesign of YahooGroups is any indication, this will be a massive train wreck. The overhaul of YahooGroups was definitely a case of "fixing" something that wasn't broken. I admin three long-standing fora on YahooGroups (one even dates all the way back to before the eGroups acquisition) and plan to migrate all of them off of their system. Randomly dropped members, members who want to be removed but can't be, and other stupid shit.

Replacement will be a hosted solution of my choosing, on a server I have more control over. I've had enough.

OK, I'm confused. You're saying that the specification states that the "Lock" option is not supposed to do anything?

As the post you replied to indicated, Ubuntu 12.04 is supported until 2017. If this accessibility issue is as serious as it sounds, certainly it will get fixed within the next 3 years?

X is not Windows. While I do sometimes get the annoying popup on Windows systems, I have never had that issue on my KDE desktop. Even on Windows there's a configuration option in the Control Panel to disable it. So no, it is not a "burden" to anyone, really. Unless you're using Windows (which isn't what this topic was about anyway), and are too lazy to spend 30 seconds on Google figuring out how to disable it.

I'll grant you that maybe Windows should have the feature disabled by default...

If I'm reading the description of the issue correctly, the problem is that an option that used to modify the behavior of the Sticky Keys feature now does nothing. How is that not a bug, by any stretch of the imagination?

Beer is, by definition, based on fermented grain. Sure, there are other (at times odd) ingredients involved in these ancient recipes, but at the end of the day Dogfish Head is a commercial craft brewery, and a very successful one at that. They didn't get where they are by making beers that suck. I've had quite a few of their beers, and while some definitely qualify as strange, most of them are quite good, and all of them are at least interesting.

Modern "embedded" x86 processors generally sacrifice a fair amount of performance to meet their target power/heat numbers. Once you make those concessions, the performance gap relative to ARM narrows considerably. Furthermore, the most computationally demanding tasks in the embedded space tend to be either graphics/video (which will use embedded GPU hardware) or amenable to running on a DSP (implemented using GPU compute or dedicated DSP hardware).