My eldest daughter came home from university for a visit with a new laptop that dual-booted Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.10. They'll do what they need regardless of what I want.

As it should be.

That damn free market.

Obviously the only successful way to run the show is to have a central committee decide what everyone needs and wants, and an effective 5-year plan to meet those objectives.

"I wish there was a central config team that spanned the distro companies and concentrated on doing a mgmt interface ONCE AND FOR ALL."

Because after all, the free market works best when it is centrally planned and controlled.

Historically, apprentices would study at the master's feet. They would start by doing menial support tasks (like sweeping floors), moving to copying the master's work as journeymen, then finally after many years becoming themselves masters and actually creating works.

Up to 80% of the cost of software is maintenance. There are very few maintenance programmers. See, most kids want to start out at the master level and skip paying their dues. There's a bug or an enhancement? No problem! just rewrite the program from scratch, do it right this time! It's actually less expensive to rewrite the software than to maintain it, since you save that 80% of the cost. At least in the very very short run.

If programmers were required to do an apprenticeship, doing software maintenance for a couple of years before ever writing something new, they would be exposed to what went before and overall quality would go up. It just seems the know-it-all of youth has been taken too far in the industry and the price is being paid.

HELLO [7,3]
PIP/DELE *.*;*
BYE

Far be it for me to defend the current government, but to be fair they're not attacking science. They're simply getting out of the science business and eschewing it for the purpose of policy formation. They're not persecuting scientists or preventing science from being done outside of government circles.

It can even make boy bands sound like their voices have changed.

> If it hates it so much why did it evolve us to do it?

Because it was not very intelligently designed.

The problem with Linspire was there was no "there" there. Their office was a wiring closet in San Diego.

Canonical hired no Linspire employees. Zero. None. Nada. Not that the six of them didn't need work after they were sold to Xandros, which itself then disappeared in a puff of debtload and sold themselves to the devil.

Some people are just not cut out for academia, nor is academic persuit a prerequisite for a career as a technician.

An undergraduate degree in a mathematics or science discipline is not job training. It is learning something interesting for the joy of the persuit of knowledge, plain and simple. It is also a valuable way to learn self-discipline and useful information, but not the only way. If you are not earning your undergraduate degree as an end in itself, you may very well be wasting your time and money.

You can also change as you age. You can find joy in learning at any age.

Srsly guise, if you're asking this question, you're in the wrong field.

Canonical is dedicated to fixing problems in Unity to the point of having a dedicated team doing just that. Turns out, though, that making Unity work like a clone of Microsoft's Windows XP is just not in the cards, no matter how much Gnome2 used to try. Sorry.

When the first netbook shipped, it ran Xandros (a GNU/Linux distro) instead of Microsoft Windows, partially because the Windows OS was too demanding of the hardware a partially because the license fees wiped out then entire profit margin for the manufacturer. Sales were briesk at first, but then Microsoft dropped the license fees (sellings Windows at a loss to muscle in to an emerging market) and demanded that the manufacturers up the specs to that of a small notebook so their XP product would run. People immediately abandoned their Linux netbooks because, according to the feedback we received at Xandros, "it didn't run Photoshop."

I suspect when folks find out Windows RT doesn't run the copy of Photoshop or Office they's brought home from wor, borrowed from a friend, or downloaded, they're going to raise a stink and abandon it for a "real" computer. If it has a screen and a keyboard and says Microsoft on a sticker on the front it had better run that free copy of expensive software otherwise it's just not going to work. If it doesn't have a keyboard, why don't iPad or Android apps work on it?