I think this is hilarious. I had exactly the opposite experience. I had DSL installed under BellSouth (whose service was phenomenal) and then initiated a "move" order after they merged with AT&T. As part of the move I was supposed to get a new router (the old one was no longer supported) and a new installation disk.

So 2 weeks later--no router, no disc. I call up, and they tell me my router isn't supported and I had to configure it myself. 8 days and 16 phone calls later they discover it is actually a problem on their end, and to fix it they had to wipe out my entire account (including E-mail) and re-install me. 2 days later its working on my old router (still no new router or install disk) with 75% packet loss and 128 Kbps throughput. Ridiculous.

Anyway, all that to say that with DSL (AT&T at least) all you need to do is reset the router to factory defaults, go to http://192.168.0.1/ and set up NAT. (All DSL modems/routers I've dealt with have the factory gateway IP and admin credentials printed on a sticker with the MAC address, etc.) I think I had to put in PPP username and password, as well, but you don't need a disk for that.

And on cable, once the tech installs the modem (which acts like a gateway/bridge) you can put anything you want behind it.

Such is the beauty of TCP/IP and Ethernet.

It's what the system monitor reported. I usually run VirtualBox with Windows, NetBeans, JBoss, and run maven builds constantly, so it was pretty busy. I burned my finger when I touched the vent to feel how hot the air was.

Exactly. I had a Latitude D830 whose CPU was running at a more or less constant 212-218F and was virtually unresponsive. After blasting some canned air into the vent on the sides and back it started working like new.

I talked to the help desk guys about it and it's a pretty common occurrence with Dell laptops. Seems like a major design flaw to me.

That's one of my pet peeves as well. Menu fonts are too big, disabled menu entries are some kind of horrible inverse 3D black-on-black nastiness. Aggravating but not a show-stopper. AFAIK that's an issue with the GKT look and feel with Oracle's JVM. I've read that everything works as expected under OpenJDK (which is what Fedora uses).

Looks great under QT/Kubuntu too.

Could be the JVM. I've had a couple JVM crashes running NetBeans, but it wasn't NetBeans' fault.

Thanks for this.

I've read a lot of comments about nationalism being a primary factor in our sticking to the Imperial system. The fact of the matter is that we consistently use both systems almost daily. Our thermometers, odometers, speedometers, measuring cups, etc. all have both systems. Medicine is dosed in ml. Most people know that 32 F = 0 C and 212 F = 100 C and room temperature is 20-25 C and can guestimate from there. When the directions are in metric you use metric, and when they are Imperial you use Imperial.

The reason we "cling" to the Imperial system is that all of the "directions" happen to currently be in Imperial units and it is cost prohibitive to change them. Particularly road signs and mile markers--we have millions of them to replace. As we globalize and digitize (think GPS) we can eventually ween off of these things and convert (as it will be lest costly to do so) but in the meantime we're okay with dealing with both.

Ditto. In fact, I recently bought a $10 soldering iron to fix a loose connection on my rabbit ears. Wii + Netflix + Antenna + DTV converter + CRT = just about anything I care to watch for $10/mo.

I hate that the launcher disappears whenever something is maximized. And I hate that the window title and the menu bar occupy the same space and have different functionality on mouse-over. This completely fails the grandpa test: I have no idea how I would ever walk my grandpa through a simple task over the phone when things are constantly shifting, disappearing, and changing depending on where the cursor is. Horrible interface.

What frustrates me about Unity is the same thing that frustrated me about Windows 7. Simple tasks take longer to accomplish. Take opening a terminal, for example. In Maverick I can click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal, or click on the terminal icon I have on my panel. In Natty I have to either:

1. Right-click on the Applications icon and select "Accessories"
2. Click "See all" to expand the list
3. Scroll down a list of gigantic icons and find the terminal
4. Click on the terminal

Or:

1. Click on the Ubuntu icon
2. Type t-e-r-m
3. Click on the terminal

Or:

1. Left-click on the Applications menu in the launcher
2. Choose "Accessories" from the drop-down in the top-right
3. Click "See all" to expand the list
4. Scroll down a list of gigantic icons and find the terminal
5. Click on the terminal

None of these workflows are intuitive and they simply do not make sense. Yes, once I open the terminal I can pin it to the launcher, but this means that in order to prevent throwing my PC out of the window I have to pin virtually everything to the launcher. Then what good is the search/menu function that comprises the bulk of new functionality in Unity?

Ditto. I hated Unity as soon as I started playing with it, and felt no different an hour later.

I was frustrated with KDE from 4.0 - 4.5, but 4.6.2 seems to have addressed most of my gripes.

So let me get this straight. It's better for someone to take, for example, C, or Ruby, or PHP and implement roll their own implementations of:

1. Thread pool management
2. Load balancing and fail-over
3. Session replication
4. Distributed transaction management
5. Naming directory
6. EIS connection management
7. Pluggable authentication and authorization
8. HTTP request parsing and invocation
9. Tags and markup for data binding / AJAX support
10. UI component model
11. Logging
12. Web service management and deployment (including WSDL generation and publishing)
13. XML binding (marshaling and unmarshaling)
14. And so forth and so on

Now in this scenario the implementations will likely:

1. Only implement the functionality that is (perceived to be) needed
2. Will not be tested
3. Will not have the benefit of community scrutiny, certification, or knowledge
4. Will not be immediately understood by any developer other than the author(s) regardless of how much experience they have

Yes, you have to invest to learn JEE.

Yes JEE deals with complex issues and as a result is difficult to understand.

However, having invested that time, anyone who knows it in one place knows it everywhere. That is what saves time and money -- being able to hire someone who already knows JEE and have them hit the ground running.

Further, having a prescribed solution for many common problems allows developers to focus on the business needs, not the boilerplate.

Anyone who does not appreciate what JEE brings to the table is not a serious enterprise developer.

I've worked in many an enterprise and I have yet to use Spring for anything other than perhaps embedded unit testing of EJBs/JMS. And when it comes to that, I prefer OpenEJB anyway (although OpenEJB can be integrated with Spring if you absolutely have to).

Spring is to JEE as Struts is to JSF. It was an interesting precursor, but the improvements made in subsequent JDK releases have made it obsolete.

I'm haven't done a whole lot of reading on IPv6, so I was just curious whether the increased address space leads to any difference in how routing is done. It seems that with a unique public addresses and no NAT there would be more direct routes that could be taken, which would potentially mean more routers with the same address in their routing tables, which would mean more targets to check. Then, depending on congestion along various paths, one landmark may *seem* like the closest when in fact it simply has a fatter pipe going to the target.

And then, as another poster suggested, there is tunneling and all the other additional features in IPv6 , which would make it harder to do this.

Will the same technique work for IPv6?