Life without Adblock Pro is horrible, indeed.
I sometimes use browsers different from Firefox, just to remind me how it was. It takes hours to comb my risen hair afterwards.

Learning Python makes a lot of sense.
It's well-designed and organized, and teaches several important lessons - importance of clarity while maintaining brevity; having a standard way to solve standard problems; smart module management; painless introduction to functional and lazy programming.

Most ISP's in Russia already only give you "gray" (i.e. NATted) IP address. "White" one (i.e. the one from global IP space) usually costs extra, about $5/month.

Most users don't seem to care, but for advanced guys that's a bummer.

Mint is much more friendlier to Windows user while retaining most of Ubuntu's goodness.

I've read a certain British book recently: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Warming-Other-Bollocks-Science/dp/1844547183

They have numbers and figures to prove that British rail is FAR, FAR MORE subsidized and far less efficient than the road network. Their explanation seems quite plausible: most of the railway tracks is empty at any given moment, while road is constantly filled with the column of vehicles.

If we take this into account, coaches seem to be much more optimal way of medium-range passenger transportation.

> Half as dense as helium (so twice the lifting power)

Erm, which one did you flunk - math, chemistry or both?

Air has molecular weight of around 29. Helium (He) has 4, hydrogen (H2) has 2. Thus helium produces lift proportional to 29-4=25, and hydrogen - proportional to 29-2=27.

Not twice as much, but merely 8% higher.

Let's hope that UK guys will at least remember to drive on the right side of the road.

SmartQ V7 is available for around $270 on eBay.

http://en.smartdevices.com.cn/Products/V7/200912/04-40.html

I reckon that "cancer research" and "carbon footprint" are most fashionable toys that filthy-wealthy westerners enjoy nowadays?

Nice ivory tower you have, guys.

> OLED is extremely susceptible to burn-in, thus unsuitable for computer displays.

If they will be affordable enough, they can be replaced every 3-5 years.

I've tried Mandriva and OpenSuse. In my opinion, they are horrible compared to Ubuntu/Mint. Many things are broken, many are counter-intuitive.

Good, polished usability beats eye-candy any day of week.

Subpixel positioning is something NEW?! ClearType has been supported in Windows for ages, man. And it was even turned on by default in IE7 engine (even if the rest of the system didn't have it on).

All this "improved graphics" stuff sounds like DirectBullshit to me. Well, at least they have tranparent PNGs now.

9.10 made my Intel 855GM graphics card to finally run at full speed. No more jerky games and videos. Hooray! This alone was a worthy reason for an upgrade.

What's broken for me:
- xv is broken for my card (mentioned in release notes), so video playback is ugly and I had to switch KMS off
- after switching KMS off, my mouse cursor is invisible. I have to do Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-F7 after every boot
- russian keyboard layout was lost, had to re-configure it
- touchpad settings were lost
- 9.10 actually boots slower than 9.04 for me, and booting splashscreen sometimes falls back to console

All in all, these problems are manageable and release is pretty neat. But for my next PC I'm gonna try OpenSuSE 11.2, it looks promising and I've heard some good reviews of KDE 4.3

Ehm... Am I the only one who is _completely satisfied_ with USB 2.0 performance? What is there to improve? What kinds of devices are gonna use it?

Ah, I see.
The project I have worked on used neither WinForms nor unmanaged code, so C# made a very good impression on me.