I'd like to add Hermann Hesse's Sidartha and (if you have more time) The Glass Bead Game. Great and entertaining readings.

And for another kind of classic, despite the Rampa's fiasco, The Third Eye is also a very nice story.

Same here. Recently I had some issues with fonts that were solved by switching to sun-java from openjdk (along other measures.) Sadly that issue was mandatory for my app.

For the time being, I'll have to disable all updates on those PRODUCTION machines in order to avoid the application from being stopped.

I don't understand why Cannonical can't just show a message declaring sun-jdk as deprecated.

Many times with a (semi)broken operating system, you don't have all the usual tools.... sometimes your only clue is a syslog driven console text message.

Right... at that time I (in Peru) had no idea of the BSDI issue, yet Red Hat, Slackware, SoftLanding and others provided decent (for the time) fdisk-based installers and most of the cheap hardware was fairly supported. Soon came the LAMP stack...

> It's the same comment over and over again, who mods this up?

The same people that submits this story over and over again.

I hope that the KDE folks don't get infected with the tablet flu for at least 10 years on. I'll try kubuntu 11.10 in a VM getting ready for a full reinstall of my machines with the 12.04.

Yep... imagine having to pay several $K for background antivirus software running 24x7.

Ok, use a DVD, now you have space for whatever Unity/Gnome3... AND Gnome 2.

Did you forget A Beautiful Mind?; IMO the Turing story has a lot more potential...

actually those answers could be considered clever or funny by teenagers; a plain 3 would be considered so boring.

Maybe the faster and faster upgrade wave is unavoidable. But please at least give us some better tools to downgrade the packages for when things break. It's possible with the apt tools but in a clunky way.

BTW I rely on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I'm happy with it. I use it for my work and don't plan to upgrade it until I get some new and really incompatible hardware.

For server apps I haven't had any issue when going to the last official Sun JVM (of course, avoiding the first and buggy releases like the 1.7.0 and other jre vendors.) IMO the technical issues were frequent up to the 1.3 days. The real problem I had was related to the JVM app vendor "certified version" which forced us to carry several versions at times. Of course, that's not a Java problem per se. For example, exactly the same issues arise about the operating system version. Fortunately I never had a vendor requiring C99 libs which potentially could conflict C90 apps.

BTW I totally agree about the plugin issues; seems like Sun screwed the thing for ever.

> So thanks for that, Rob! We'll miss you. And I saw that you were musing about writing a book.

But please, DON'T go to Packet Publishing.. you have a good reputation here...

Now seriously, well done Rob!

I don't understand why people is still trying to justify the official release of an unfinished software. If you know your software is unfinished (not ready for the users) you just continue publishing betas.

Do you really believe the users must read every developer blog for each piece of software in a distro upgrade looking for notes about a final release that at some point is no longer "for normal users"?