I agree. I'm not much of a visual learner myself, so maybe I just can't appreciate it... I feel like an asshole for saying it, but Scratch looks to me as if it is quite literally child's play, and totally out of place in a university. I would be more inclined to simply teach students to draw their own diagrams when planning out their design, but maybe that's supposed to be some of what this software does.

I just don't know. Anyone can be tripped up by a new concept just because of that novelty; someone currently struggling to understand programming concepts may go on to be a good programmer. But what kind of a programmer does a student become when that struggle to understand would have caused them to quit if they hadn't been given this 'drag and drop programming language'? Who wants to work with the guy who gives up unless he's spoonfed to this degree? The stated purpose just seems wrong.

Well, those things really belong under two different degree designations: Computer Science and Software Engineering. In either case, the electives should leave you some room to place additional emphasis on either the practical or the theoretical.

It's also here on my installation of Ubuntu Natty, but it still doesn't actually _fix_ any errors, although it's happy to tell you about them. :-P

But it is good to see that it exists in some form by now. :-)

I've actually been running the system I'm typing from with Btrfs on the root partition for some time now. Since I always have an ext2 /boot partition, I didn't have to worry about this.

I still wouldn't recommend using Btrfs for / unless you have a separate /home partition, though: there is not yet any fsck.btrfs! In addition to a separate /home partition, I'd recommend having another Linux install with ext4 alongside it, so if something does go wrong with your Btrfs partition, you can boot a fully functional OS without having to reach for a LiveCD. That said, the Btrfs filesystem has handled several hard shutdowns without issue (there's some problem with my Nvidia graphics card that's been causing intermittent/unpredictable hard freezes, impervious even to the Magic Sysrq key).

The cool thing about using Btrfs for the root partition on an ordinary system (this is why I'm trying it) is for fast, transparent filesystem compression. I have an OLPC XO-1, and a bootable FSF membership card, neither of which has much free space. The traditional solution to such space issues is to have a SquashFS (read-only) root partition to save space, and use a persistence file to store changes. But if the changes become too great, the persistence file will reach the size of the partition that holds it, and you have to recreate the SquashFS image to start using the system again. While the compression factor isn't quite as good for Btrfs compression (it can do gzip and lzo), it's still very handy when trying to get a full system into 2GB, and it lets you have read-write access with good performance, too.

Fair enough with regards to WebM vs H.264, but its worth noting that due to numerous patent restrictions, there are significant legal obstacles for WebM to overcome before it can acquire feature parity with H.264. It's not as simple as a failure on Googe's part to devise a technically equivalent format, but to develop one that matches H.264's capabilities while circumnavigating patent landmines from proprietary video technologies including H.264 and others. It may not be feasible to create something that remains free-as-in-freedom, unambiguously non-infringing on the patents of others, and technically superior to H.264 without some major innovation in video compression algorithms that is either originated in F/OSS, or explicitly placed in the public domain, or something similar.

Incidentally, KDE 4.5 introduced tiling support for kwin. So KDE's WM *is* a (basic) tiling window manager.

With the release of KDE 4.6, KDE has also finally incorporated oxygen-molecule, which is a very complete Oxygen theme for GTK+.

Did you read the post GP was responding to? The point was not that Linux users will be forever generous. The example was provided as evidence against the idea that GNU/Linux users are unwilling to pay for what they want. In fact (making the same observation that you did), their desire to have more games has inspired them to pay _more_ than they might otherwise do. GP's point was that GNU/Linux users do want games, and that they've showed us so. That point stands.

I think ConnectBot will do what you want (via port forwarding).

Hmm... is that what I said?

Nope. All of this advice is essentially public knowledge, for one thing. But mostly, as geeks, we enjoy looking at problems for their own sake. What we enjoy even more is showing people we have the answer. I think the thought process more or less ends there.

Not to mention that it's trivial to harvest MAC addresses from clients of ANY access point, without having to set one up of your own. Or that you could spoof your MAC address to some arbitrary, meaningless value and do more or less the same thing but without associating that MAC with anyone in your general location. And of course there's the fact that framing your neighbor makes you a huge asshole.