Seriously, the newscaster sounded like he was out of breath. Is that so that regular news sounds as exciting as sports? Every sentence had to have _emphasis_ on *everything*?

There is no political entity called the Republic of Ireland. The phrase "the Republic of Ireland" is the official description of the political entity called "Ireland" which makes up 80% of the island called "Ireland"

http://dotancohen.com/eng/britain_england_united_kingdom.html

Where did you get the Skype v4l script from? Please share!

I have been fighting with Phillips, MSI, and Logitech webcams and can get none to work, even in the latest Kubuntu (9.04). And of course I have to explain to family members who want to see my daughters online that they still cannot, and when they ask why not I have to mumble some excuse so _Linux_ does not look bad.

Webcams are interoperability devices and so long as they are not "supported" in Linux, other users will only ever hear the word "Linux" when we are telling them why something does not work.

So have you written to the hardware manufacturers and expressed interenst in Linux support? Something along the lines of "Does XYZ product work with my preffered OS? If not, which of your products do?". Write to one company a week (I do) and help let the hardware manufacturers know that there even exists a viable Linux market. Don't expect them to magically support a percieved tiny market. Help make that market to be percieved as worth sustaining a product for.

I should mention that there is a similar, much shorter yet less skewed, course that you could take to get Ubuntu for $0.

Even though the History panel was removed from Konqueror in KDE 4.3? Seriously, how do these decisions get made?
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193966#c1

Even though Krunner turns UTF-8 into gibberish?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192166

Shall I go on?

Windows also cannot open Word, Excel, or Powerpoint files out of the box. You need Office for that. Ubuntu, on the other hand, opens them just fine (for certain values of fine mind you).

Where do you think the "theme" part came from? Before, it was just "parks"!

Spoiled brat. In my day, for birthdays we would find five friends, each of us would plant a flag, and call that a themepark! Where do you think your "six flags" came from? Trees?

Rotten kids...

Yet if someone says that Linux support suffers because of the hardware, he is apologetic. How fitfully ironic.

I'm one of those. I absolutely love Sony hardware: their headphones and earbuds are the best for reasonably-priced consumer brands. However, anything that depends on Sony _software_ is a big no-no.

Just like with Sony, I love Microsoft hardware. I just bought a new MS ergonomic keyboard and I love it to death. All my input devices are now MS, and I don't have a single MS operating system in the house (four computers).

Great, now we're going to get proprietary vector animation in our shoes?

They do if you know the right tricks:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=remove+ribbon+in+Gift+2009

Actually, it might lead to courses that use Moodle (my university does) to require Windows Live Messenger for each student. That means that Linux users, who otherwise could use the Moodle coursework, will now not be able to interoperate fully with the rest of their coursemates. This seems to me to be adding an option for a _dependency_ on Windows to Moodle. I am afraid that many courses will exercise that option.

Those are mine.