Ok, use a DVD, now you have space for whatever Unity/Gnome3... AND Gnome 2.

Did you forget A Beautiful Mind?; IMO the Turing story has a lot more potential...

actually those answers could be considered clever or funny by teenagers; a plain 3 would be considered so boring.

Maybe the faster and faster upgrade wave is unavoidable. But please at least give us some better tools to downgrade the packages for when things break. It's possible with the apt tools but in a clunky way.

BTW I rely on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I'm happy with it. I use it for my work and don't plan to upgrade it until I get some new and really incompatible hardware.

For server apps I haven't had any issue when going to the last official Sun JVM (of course, avoiding the first and buggy releases like the 1.7.0 and other jre vendors.) IMO the technical issues were frequent up to the 1.3 days. The real problem I had was related to the JVM app vendor "certified version" which forced us to carry several versions at times. Of course, that's not a Java problem per se. For example, exactly the same issues arise about the operating system version. Fortunately I never had a vendor requiring C99 libs which potentially could conflict C90 apps.

BTW I totally agree about the plugin issues; seems like Sun screwed the thing for ever.

> So thanks for that, Rob! We'll miss you. And I saw that you were musing about writing a book.

But please, DON'T go to Packet Publishing.. you have a good reputation here...

Now seriously, well done Rob!

I don't understand why people is still trying to justify the official release of an unfinished software. If you know your software is unfinished (not ready for the users) you just continue publishing betas.

Do you really believe the users must read every developer blog for each piece of software in a distro upgrade looking for notes about a final release that at some point is no longer "for normal users"?

Oh no please! imagine a successful mutation of these people!

Maybe you need a process in order to detect and fire those bad programmers.

> If C and C++ were to vanish overnight we'd be back in the stone age.

If COBOL were to vanish overnight, C programmers wouldn't get their paychecks; that's stone age...

I think Agile is useful for shops that develop new software with internal requirements (dictated by their own internal marketing, the artists or even the programmers) and when the objective is the software experience per se... but (in general terms) is inconvenient for standard business software where you must satisfy (or comply) external/client's business, political and contractual requirements, and where the software exists basically to help/control some other core operation...

I'm not using NB now, but OpenJDK is the standard in current Ubuntu (at least since 10.04.) The SUN JDK does require adding a non standard apt source.

The time it takes to read the first 1% of those great WS-* specs is enough to build a full featured rest-styled system.

> mainly it's available on ALL UNIX systems

Mainly it doesn't matter since this book is about LINUX shell scripting.

Besides Bash, a lot of tricks and utilities are only available if you assume a Linux environment.

3- turn on, wait 1 sec, and start programming in BASIC (P [SHIFT] + [O] 53281,0 , etc...)