I'd read a lot of good things about Arch, so I decided to give it a go a few months ago. I wanted to like it, I really did, but my experience over 3 ~ 4 hours was reminiscent of installing Slackware circa 2002. I don't want to have to know how to configure every package on my system from scratch, I want them to mostly work, and then be able to tweak them. I simply don't have the time for anything else. Maybe this just means Arch isn't for me, but it seemed that the install process was going out of it's way to make things as complicated as possible, a particular example was wpa_supplicant being selected for install by default, but not wireless-tools!

Did I miss something obvious that makes the whole process a lot easier, or is Arch just "like that"?

For me the problem is precisely that they moved to Unity. Never mind the fact that it was clearly unfinished alpha quality software in it's first release, they fundamentally changed the default GUI with no warning. It was bad enough when they moved the default position of the window controls with no easy way of changing back, but a sudden switch from Gnome 2 to Unity is just ridiculous. My in-laws have a PC running Ubuntu and we've been keeping them on 10.04 so as not to confuse the hell out of them.

Umm, that's a bit of a leap from "a terminally ill person should be allowed the right to decide when they die" to "the government are going to start killing mental patients".

I'd have liked to see the test done with many more than 2 groups:

* real treatment, and told so
* real treatment, and not told anything
* real treatment, and told it's a placebo
* placebo, and told it's real
* placebo, and not told anything
* placebo, and told so
* no treatment

I'd also hazard a guess that the above list might be in order of effectiveness.

The Horrendous Space Kablooie?

Exactly, it's called "giving a technical answer to a non-technical question".

The suggestion that if no C style "link"ing occurs then the GPL doesn't apply implies that the GPL applies differently to software written in different languages. And that's just daft.

Exactly the same way that Apple claimed the iPhone 2G radio hardware couldn't support MMS, despite the existence of SwirlyMMS. Also, not long after 3.1 came out, there was a hack to enable MMS on the 2G, and, surprise, surprise, it worked perfectly (apart from if your network detected you had a iPhone 2G and turned of MMS on your account).

I've done this with an iBook plugged into the cassette input of an Amstrad CPC. It was actually surprising how much you could compress the MP3. I think I went down at least as low as 64kpbs (can't remember any of the other settings) and have programs still load.

Are you assuming or have you actually tried? I got my beta key just now using my free Fileplanet account. Maybe it's cos I've had the account for ages, I only ever use it to get freebies :)

If you have to do all that to make an SSD reliable, I'd say they aren't reliable enough for normal consumer use yet. :)