Depends on your phone. I bought an HTC a while ago (my first smartphone) and thought it was pretty neat. I was surprised at how much different other Android phones were when I compared them, particularly the lack of consistency between the various apps. (HTC includes their own media player, mail, calendar, etc. so it all looks the same throughout.) I have a few gripes with my phone, but on the whole I'm very satisfied with it.

That has been the default for some time now. The only reason to install sun-java-6 is if that is the target runtime for, say, a production Java application you happen to be writing, especially if you rely on esoteric command line arguments (-XX:MaxPermSize for example). So while it's not the end of the world, it certainly will cost a day or two of productivity for many Java developers and admins running Ubuntu as they will need to install the official Oracle packages, update alternatives, change symbolic links, etc. on any workstations and servers that are currently running sun-java-6. For developers targeting Java 7 this might not be that much of an issue, since the Oracle Java 7 packages are based on OpenJDK (although the commercial Oracle Java packages do have JIT and GC optimizations that may could result in unexpected behavior between dev and production environments).

It would be nice if Oracle would extend the distributors license indefinitely for Java 6. Not sure why they're bothering with it now, other than branding.

While this is true, the part I find most disturbing about CarrierIQ is its capture of HTTPS request details and traffic over Wifi, neither of which would be available to the carrier otherwise. Yes, meta data related to calls are logged... carriers are in fact required to do so for a number of reasons (billing, mediation, audits, and servicing subpoenas, etc.) However, I do not subscribe to a data plan and any traffic I send over a Wifi connection should be between me, the Wifi router, and the remote machines I am connected to, particularly when using "secure" protocols like HTTPS.

File a complaint. It takes a while, but they do actually process these. I filed several of them years back and recently received E-mails notifying me that they had taken action. You don't get any money out of it, but it's my understanding that the companies in violation are fined, so filing enough complaints will (hopefully) provide a disincentive to harass people.

Isn't this what Ubuntu was trying to achieve with Unity and Gnome with Gnome Shell? The smartphone/tablet market is the one that's growing right now, so everyone's chasing those dollars.

(Incidentally, I happen to like Gnome Shell and it seems to work well with large desktops and multiple monitors, so it seems like the goal is achievable.)

I suggest QMail. The code isn't that big, it's well written, and it's modular (lots of executables calling other executables). I wrote some authentication plugins for it about 10 years back and as I recall it wasn't too hard to figure out what was going on.

Fall in Florida starts somewhere around November.

AMD CPUs come with adequate stock coolers, especially the 65W range. Both motherboards I've purchased in the last 3 years each came with 2-3 SATA cables (as well as old school ribbon cables).

I put together a quad core Athlon system with 4 GB of RAM (integrated sound/video) for less than $300 ($400 including a 20 inch LCD 1900x1080 monitor) over 2 years ago, so it wouldn't surprise me at all that a halfway decent system could be had for $200-$300 (including monitor).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

As much as I like AMD, the stock cooler that came with my Phenom II X6 was garbage. It was incredibly loud and while CPU temps were acceptable they were borderline high/critical. Contrast with the Zyman I replaced it with, which ran silently and dropped temps by 12 degrees on average. Having gone through that, I'd definitely take a discount on a high-end CPU without a heatsink and provide my own aftermarket cooling solution--I don't think I'll plan on using stock coolers anymore...

It's simply a matter of terminology. The PC is going away, but workstations are here to stay

My previous company provided managed/hosted communications services and we used PoE quite a bit. When deploying 100 or so phones it ends up being cheaper to put in a PoE switch than it is to buy power bricks at $5/pop. In the consumer space you only have, what, maybe 3 devices on a switch? At home I have an Ooma, LinkStation NAS, and my computer. PoE only provides enough power (~25W) for the Ooma (maybe), so as much as I'd like to get rid of three power cords it just isn't possible or cost-effective.

100W USB might work for the NAS and the linkstation, but to eliminate the extra cord it would require support for IP over USB and an upstream USB NAT or bridge device. (It would be neat if the standard evolved to the point where every device could request an IP address from the host and be treated like a network device.)

So this technology might work for:

1. Charging larger devices (netbook, tablet) from a PC / standardizing charger form factor
2. Powering and driving external displays
3. Some kind of smart power standards ... being able to put a powered device into sleep mode from the host or vice versa using signals, and adjusting the power supply/draw accordingly.

So I started with Gnome (Kharmic) and tried KDE 4 on a lark (Kubuntu Kharmic). Loved it, except that it was too buggy. Stuck with it through 4.5.2, and then went back to Gnome in Lucid. I liked Ubuntu's added touches and it seemed more solid, so I stuck with it until Natty. Hated everything about Unity, so I stuck in a FC15 Alpha LiveCD and after about 5 minutes decided it was so much better than Unity I installed it and have been running ever since.

I do Java development, system administration, E-mail, photos, backups, samba shares, PHP/Apache, and make heavy use of VMs. And for every single one of these tasks I find that my workflow has improved significantly. The notifications system, while immature, is a huge step forward over any other desktop environment I've used. With a few shell extensions and the gnome tweak tool I have everything I need: date and time top center, weather icon and details on the panel, places menu with shortcuts to the filesystem, etc.

I'll grant you, it's not perfect. The power options stink. I can't pin certain Java apps (NetBeans) or custom shell commands to the shortcut panel (e.g. VBoxManage --startvm "Foo"). It would be nice if there was first class support for samba configuration and other things. The system configuration menus are anemic and confusing, and a lot of stuff has to be configured via gsettings. But I only deal with those things very infrequently. For my everyday tasks everything is much better. (I make a lot of use of the expose feature and the search tools.)

Now FC15 as a distro, on the other hand, is a complete pain to deal with, and if Ubuntu provided decent support for Gnome 3 then I'd switch back in a heartbeat.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but relevant to the OP...

In Linux everything I need comes from one or more trusted software repositories, and all of the updates are performed through the same tool in the same way, so I do not need to familiarize myself with the different update systems for different pieces of software.

In iOS everything is downloaded and installed through the app store, updates are similarly pushed through a single (presumably trusted) source. Same with Android and the various marketplaces and presumably with Windows-based smartphones. (Symbian and RIM aren't really in the game anymore, and it is likely related to this.)

So that leaves Mac OS X and Windows as really the only predominant platforms where you grab stuff from every which where and install it. And IIRC, even Mac OS X tries to consolidate the updates into a central tool (I remember Java and Adobe updates coming through the Mac OS X update tool).

I expect that this model will prevail and within 5 years the majority of software for any system (Windows included) will start coming through central repos (or "App Stores"). Linux has been there for over a decade, but hasn't got their act together with respect to branding, ease-of-use, and revenue sharing (Ubuntu is bridging that gap). So if we can get to a point where software is signed, or at least has a verifiable hash, and it all comes from the same trusted place, then a lot of these issues will be moot.

As much as I hate to say it, Kubuntu is the one I've had the least amount of frustration with (I've tried OpenSuSE, Fedora, and Chakra besides). There's a lot more eyes on Kubuntu and a lot more forum posts related specificly to Kubuntu, so it's easy to find answers, and Canonical does a good job of installing the basics by default (codecs, flash, binary drivers, etc.).