which is why I don't run mixed repos, at least not for the past few years. Stable suits me just fine now that the fascination of testing the latest and greatest crap has worn off.

... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.

Compiz has its uses. Sure, I only turn on wobbly windows to impress newbies, but its window placement rules are a god-send! If only Linux apps would damn-well remember where they were last time, I wouldn't need it, but since this is utterly beyond quite a few Linux application programmers, we need such hacks. Though, specifying certain rules based on window title, etc, mean that my windows open 100% where I expect them to, every time. Going back to Windows at work is a huge pain when you're constantly having to de-overlap explorer windows, for example.

Speaking as somebody who abhors DRM and the various limited digital music stores out there (with pathetic, mostly-pop rubbish catalogues), I agree with the post above your reply. Optical drives are invaluable for playing or ripping CDs, and I will never give up my CD collection and start buying these horrid music downloads from equally horrid online stores that more often than not tie you into iTunes or some other evil ecosystem (and since I use Linux, they don't work for me anyway, and if they can, courtesy of some hack, then that's unacceptable anyway).

No thank you very much! It's my CD collection for me from now until the day I die. I have about 1,400 of them so that ought to keep me busy, and yes, I have ripped most of them them but I also play them in my car and also in my kitchen stereo. There can be no substitute for owning the real thing, IMHO. All these people buying into proprietary online digital music stores will be sorry when the day comes that the store dies and your music is screwed. It has happened before, and it will happen again. And I'm not going near iTunes (since I use Linux) and because its offerings are so paltry that I laugh at its catalogue's meagre range!

What else is the NBN for other than using copious bandwidth for digital content? I sure as hell ain't gonna get a Telstra T-Box and be forced into watching movies and TV shows on their pathetic schedules, and most likely be forced to watch advertising without being able to skip through it. Or, what's worse, being forced to select from the paltry range of good TV shows from overseas and have to watch locally-produced content which is mostly rubbish. No thank you.

This government has got to go. Make no mistake!

Whilst I'm not happy with Firefox's interface changes since the good old version-3 days, I still prefer it as a browser. For one, Firebug is unbeatable when it comes to debugging web sites (especially with AJAX), but since Chrome's developer tools use a font that's so small (which you can't change), there's no way I could even consider using it. Their hatred of menus and buttons gives me the heebie jeebies, too. So, for now, I'm staying loyal to Firefox (with a view to just giving up and using Ephipahy, on Debian, when even Firefox becomes so horrible I can't use it anymore).

That video just demonstrates why I'm sticking with 2.30.2. No traditional taskbar method of switching between applications is a deal breaker. Oh, and that video seems to be 20% visits to "Help > About" windows... quite boring indeed!

For starters, they're calling it a "mash up" which is an instant reason to reach for the puke bucket. What's wrong with going to each "service" as and when you need them? Why trust some ".bomb" with all these services? You're just asking for trouble.

I don't know about you but I've never really liked the look of programming languages that use colons. Semi-colons are OK but two dots, one on top of the other? That's just craziness! And "do" statements remind me of BASIC... yuck.

Where I come from "HSV" stands for Holden Special Vehicle. I don't know what you're on about :-)

You make it sound like I'm a tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist sitting in my mum's basement. I do believe that man went to the moon, for example, and I had never heard of your conspiracy theories concerning CFCs, so therefore I don't believe in them either. And naturally I reject creationism.

I voted for the Greens at the 2007 Australian federal election in the Senate, partly thanks to Al Gore's alarmism, but since reading Professor Ian Plimer's excellent book "Heaven & Earth", I don't believe a word of this house-of-cards global warming theory. It's just a collection of alarmist and unsubstantiated group-think given the nod by fellow greenie activists seeing dollar signs if they tout ever more alarming headlines in their journals and magazines. It's no wonder that the founder of Greenpeace has resigned. The greenies are putting all their hopes in this one basket of a flimsy theory, and meanwhile, true environmentalism suffers because it's clouded out by the non-issue of CO2.

I cite Bjorn Lomborg and MIT professor Richard Lindzen as two of the other eminent thinkers in the field to back up why I don't buy into this theory. Look them up.

I couldn't care less about Dr. Spencer's religious views. I happen to be an atheist, but that doesn't mean I should disregard him because atheists and creationists aren't supposed to tolerate each other's points of view. This whole "global warming" thing is a major beat up, and the proportion caused by mankind is insignificant compared to volcanoes and sunspot activity.

Most "peer reviewed" articles on global warming tend to come from rent-seekers or those with an agenda to push, so the fact that Dr. Spencer may be an anti-extreme-greenie-socialist-watermelon matters naught as far as I'm concerned.

Y'all have a nice day now, ya hear? :-)

... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal :-)

Amen to that, brotha! Firefox 4 & 5 (being absolutely identical... so why the version increment? why keep numbers in sync with other losers???) are still good browsers as far as the bit inside the GUI is concerned, but the menus, etc, around it are just ridiculous. What's wrong with a menu bar and a toolbar/location bar? It's simple. It works. You don't need to scratch your head to figure out how to use it. This disease you speak of where designers unleash their fantasies on unsuspecting users twice yearly is ridiculous. It's why I've stuck with 10.04 Ubuntu. The writing is on the wall: look for another distro when this one seems to be a bit old. There was a time where I at least respected Apple for their philosophy of not re-inventing stuff every few years, but it now looks like Steve Jobs is no longer satisfied anymore and is beginner to tinker way too much.

BTW, why does that "Working..." spinner at the bottom of slashdot constantly spin? It's annoying, damnit! Get off my lawn, while yer at it :-)

"And in fact, apart from this obsession with the internet filter, the current government actually has the best ideas."

Labor's last good idea came under Hawke and Keating in the 80s and 90s. This current lot are the crumbling shell of a once proud party, packed full of former political staffers and union apparatchiks. They are devoid of good ideas, and even if I agree with you for the sake of argument that they might actually have some, their implementation of them is a complete joke.