Disclaimer - I haven't even tried out Unity yet and still deciding when to upgrade - but just from looking at some of the screenshots, the Unity interface seems to be way too much of a compromise between the old interface and a Win7 style interface, trying to keep both camps halfway happy, and ending up with alienating both.

I like the Win7 interface a lot and would actually prefer to have a similar style bar on my Ubuntu desktop. However, the various Unity screenshots (such as the ones from the article link) have a launch bar plus an additional menu bar on top. This effectively negates all the gains of introducing the launch bar - instead of clean and slick, it now looks messy and cluttered, with a visually confusing mix of layout and styles.

Furthermore, people have their personal preferences where they like to put a (single launch bar without any additional bars) - e.g. I like to put mine on the right side of the screen, as I find it less obtrusive. And I like auto-hide, whereas others don't. It should be easy and intuitive to move it around and (de)select auto-hide.

So my $0.10 is I believe Unity is going in the right direction, but it needs to be more radical - the way Microsoft did with Win7. Have one single Win7-style bar, make it movable, and dump the bar on top. You don't hear people complaining about the Vista -> Win7 switch (where Microsoft did exactly this) - people were generally positive.

And for the power users, it really shouldn't matter - there is always alt+tab, alt+f2 etc.

How do I know that I am not reading this article as part of a dream - or for that matter, that I am not plugged into a Matrix-type reality? How do I know that the observations I make are accurate - I know for a "fact" (at least I think I know) that the mind can play tricks with visual illusions with e.g. parallel lines that do not seem parallel - knowing that perception is some times flawed, do I know when to trust my senses? Just because I have never noticed any object violate Newton's laws of physics (assuming non-relativistic etc.) - I cannot claim to have observed every object in the universe at all points in time, so can we trust even the most basic scientific "facts" that are taught in elementary school?

So of course science is based on 'faith', just as everything else. But at least science is based on a reasonably transparent system of observations, reasoning and scientific processes - which (apparently) can be reproduced. So it all somehow seems to make sense ... well, except the usual problems with greed, corruption, self-serving etc. in the scientific community, which you find with everything that has humans involved in it - so that is obviously a source of error.

Then again I might just be plain crazy. Or none of you actually exist so none of this really matters to anyone anyways.

The use of the Vulcan greeting in the article is not logical. By human standards for the male population, Mr. Nimoy already _has_ lived long and prospered.

/ CptJeanLuc

I have a similar setup, with three layers - "unprotected", "synchronized", and "full backup".

Synchronized is backed up with regular rsync. I put e.g. my music there to avoid re-ripping hundreds of CDs if the RAID gets corrupted. Full Backup gets an incremental backup, so older versions are retained. Plus running that backup from another PC, so any malware on the home server (however unlikely) would not be able to wipe the backup.

Keeping two external drives with LUKS file system encryption for running backups, and one of them is always in a separate physical location. Periodically swapping the two drives so there is always an off-site backup which is maximum 3-6 months old.

In order to simplify access to these directories, I mount all three read-only to the same mount point via aufs and share that mount point. So when browsing e.g. media, I do not care about which of the three a file is stored, as long as I have kept the same directory structure.

It gets a bit more complex when setting this up for multiple family members with separate permissions etc. and running backup for everyone, but it's still quite manageable. Also, aufs is quite convenient for e.g. joining everyone's privately managed media files into one master read-only media mount point.

This discovery could be a nice intro for a Star Trek TNG episode. Riker comes down with a new aggressive type of cancer and the captain refuses treatment. The crew is not very happy about the decision. Luckily, towards the end of the episode Dr Crusher discovers a method to gently beam cancer cells out of the patient's body. The cells are then relocated to an empty M-class planet.