It's likely that the problem isn't with the UI but with the people who use it. The majority of people who have a personal/professional investment in the UI of a particular OS are not your average user. We're power users or developers or whatever you call people who make their Apples make noises and call it music. We tend to know how our computers work and can make them do things that outsiders look at as magical amazing feats. The designers of these new UIs had us as customers due to the tech under the UI and, in many cases, in spite of it.

With this new march of "progress," the target appears to be only the technically inexperienced. The UI is becoming the way you interact with your computer and not just something that makes the masses capable of doing their job while those of us who know how to use computers can work around them. When the UI becomes the only way to do things, then it's time for us to move on.

Win2k had my favorite Windows UI and I've made all future iterations work the same way.
I never liked Apple.
Xfce has all the interface I need to hold up a web browser, a chat client and a bunch of terminals.

I don't color. I don't take pictures. I don't play games. I write code. I read the interwebs. I conduct business. I am the 1%.

I can't find any evidence to support that statement. Shuttleworth didn't write it, he just blows a lot of smoke about it. I would love to hear a primary dev on the Unity project talk about it and then do a Q&A. Unfortunately, Shuttleworth being the mouthpiece is received as well as Lars Ulrich being the voice of the RIAA.

Wait a week and their mantra of "move fast and break things" will take them down again anyway. The piss poor engineering practices in that company are a liability to themselves and anyone who monetizes off of them. The reason Facebook has such a large infrastructure? They ignore resource utilization in their infrastructure and compensate with vast amounts of hardware. If they wait for Facebook to take down their app servers and then focus on the border network, they could likely keep them down for a while. Facebook pukes out multiple releases a day and many of them are bad. Anon will have ample opportunity.

I'll sit back, with some popcorn, and root for the %s guys... I can't figure out who are the bad guys and who are the good guys in this case. Regardless, I'm rooting for Anon on this one.

As someone who knew this pompous windbag personally, I'm in no way surprised that he promotes "do[ing] dumb things." Most of the crap that came out of his mouth was dumb. He was a power hungry egomaniac who got by on his edginess and good looks. Few, if any, smart ideas came from him. The smart ideas that flourished within his organizations were almost always started as somewhat subversive projects for fear that morons that be would step in a dumb them up. When Google finally came to realize his uselessness, he was "promoted" to the East Africa office or some place thereabouts. We celebrated his "promotion" and his departure even more.

As has been mentioned many times, you're trying to find a solution for a problem you can't identify. What you need to do is think about you would feel is missing and how much you will miss it in the future.

My professional experiences have all been with companies where the end goal would require massive growth at some point. A twelve person company doesn't need a whole lot. The people working together are usually pretty intimately familiar with each other and data organization isn't very critical. If the long term plan isn't to stay small, but to eventually grow to hundreds or thousands or employees, keep that in mind when examining your needs. When everyone isn't on a first name basis and/or working in the same office, sharing data becomes a chore is not properly done. A wiki (or CMS) is a good thing for a dozen people but of absolute importance to a larger organization. Why not start one now?

Sticking with my theme of eventually having a large organization, the ability to find people is an often overlooked need until it's too late. Consider having a user directory with pictures, contact information and work group data. When doing this, make sure it allows for editing by the user as people are likely to link out to their projects and documents when given the chance. Also, having a single point of management for vital information (like when phone numbers change) means it can be an administrative nightmare.

Forums and blogs! Email is great but it's not always the best way to propose ideas and have random discussions. Forums allow for much better data persistence (usually only an admin can remove a thread) and give people a place to have more "off topic" banter. While I don't personally have much of a use for a blog, many people find them to be useful scratch pads. At the last place I worked, I occasionally updated a blog with tips and tricks, software patches for third party tools and random tech bugs I'd dealt with.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a central point of access. A unified search component (like a search appliance) is key to making sure that, when you have the date, you can find it. People are good at remembering a single point of entry but less so at remembering an ever growing list. All of these resources are useful but, unless you have a simple way to get to them/find data, they won't get nearly the utilization they could.

Lastly, if you do this all on a single host, you're destined for pain. I don't know anything about the Drobo (and I don't feel like looking it up), so I have no idea if it's running in a redundant state. Regardless, the fact that you have a single machine attached means that, if that box has a problem, all of this is for nothing. At the very least, you should get a second machine with a mirror of any resources/sites you create, so you're not left dead in the water if it fails. I'd actually recommend three, so you can have two in a production swappable state and one where you can test new software and upgrades before making them live.

Good luck.

Wow... just wow... Who will comprise their community development teams if not the power users? I had a hard time swallowing the fact that a distro founder would actually say they'd like to push parts of their user base away so I looked it up. Holy crap:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/shuttleworth-on-ubuntu-1104-linux-unity/8780

"""
Is Unity too simple for power users? Yes, it is. But, as Shuttleworth tells us that’s by design. If you don’t like simple, consumer-oriented desktops, you’ll want to look at another Linux distribution because that’s exactly where Ubuntu is now and will continue to go.
"""

I didn't intend to post that anonymously. Feel free to attack me directly.

children? are you serious? ninja networks has been a part of defcon since inception. we've been attending, participating and throwing parties (yay, minibosses!) for years. the FB sponsorship just allows us to one up ourselves from last year. sit on it.

Had Wired paid more attention they would have made it clear that the crew is Ninja Networks and the individuals are Ninjas.

Jealous much? Ninjas are all well employed (sans one who won't be named) and very social individuals. Where your hobbies including trolling, this happens to be a hobby of the crew that hacked this out.

But idiotic generalizations are the mark of a savant...

Perhaps we should call it the "war that you don't know anything about but slavery is a good buzzword for the topic and so we'll ignore all of the other reasons (which make up the bulk of them) why states wanted to secede." That's probably too much for you to understand. You're right, we'll just go with the slavery thing. I'll give you the fact that slavery was one of the straws that broke the proverbial camel's back but it wasn't the bulk of the issue. Then again, it's hard to get that information from the text books we were raised with, here in California*, because of the "apolitical nature" of our curriculum. Oh wait... that's actually a complete load of crap. I'm pretty sure I was taught to have "white guilt" in school.

Look how I brought that back to the actual topic at hand... nifty. I definitely don't support Texas being the dictator of education but California has very little room to whine about another state's political leaning being introduced into their curriculum. Regardless of what a text book said, California teachers push the idea that the founding of America was an evil venture. We screwed everyone, at every step, and should feel horrible about this. Make sure to disregard that this was _how business got done_ at the time. I don't want god in my books but California needs to stop forcing their own political agenda, via public schools, before calling out someone else.

* I'm not native but I was 3 when we moved here. Every school I went to was public and all in the Silicon Valley. I mention this so people don't try and debate my understanding of the school systems here.

Of course I hate computers! I hate them so much that I spend my time, at work, writing ways to stop doing my job. There's only one glowing thing about this profession: cash. If it wasn't for the cash, I'd never be able to afford a stress free (post-work) lifestyle. Also, if I had a job I loved (and paid less), I wouldn't have nearly as much fun doing the activities I love. What fun is snowboarding, when you have a reason to not risk life and limb in the pursuit of freestyle tricks? Thanks computers. If it wasn't for you all being such horrible bitches, I wouldn't be okay with landing myself a long hospital stay.

Cave, headphones, loud music. I can't stand having people walk up to me, or trying to chat with me, while I'm head down in a problem. I'm currently in the back row of three rows of desks and I'd kill my underlings for a cubicle. Privacy is a right granted to you by the Supreme Court (affectively, of the course of the years) and taken away once you enter your office. Kinda sucks...