> Gregory Perry
> Chief Executive Officer
> GoVirtual Education
>
> "VMware Training Products & Services"

So I'm seeing a chain of thought like this:

"I'm a bit player in the VMware training market. I need to get my name out there somehow if I want to expand. Maybe if I can make somebody big like Scott Lowe look like an idiot... Hmmm, he's been pushing OpenBSD lately, and I bet Theo still remembers me. Maybe if I concoct a story that Lowe is complicit in some kind of subversion of OpenBSD, Theo will want to get to the bottom of it so he'll tell people about it -- and then no matter what, people will just remember that Lowe was rumored to be doing something shady."

Also, as another poster noted, government NDAs regarding something like this (which would be considered classified info) never "expire" (until the info is declassified, and then only to that extent). So this guy is either lying, or violating federal law, by making this claim. He doesn't even know that EOUSA is a parallel division of Justice, not "the parent of the FBI", so my bet is on "lying".

Actually, back inthe day, the IRS wanted to do exactly that, but the entire tax industry screamed "unfair competition" and threatened to sue. Ultimately the IRS agreed to not do its own tax software, but only if the industry collectively would provide free online filing to a certain increasing percentage of Americans each year.

One of the subcontractors was Kollsman AG, a subsidiary of Israeli firm Elbit, that makes their border cameras.

...but did they have to pick the worst possible shades of purple for the wallpaper? It's not a "light" pastel wallpaper, it's not a bright, energetic wallpaper or a deeply-, richly-colored wallpaper. It'a wallpaper that looks like it's sat in a corner fading in the sun for a year or two, at least on my screen.

One of the things I like about Windows 7/Vista is the more aesthetically-pleasing colors in the default theme compared to XP. Hell, half the reason I first installed compiz + emerald years ago was because the themes I saw in screenshots looked bright and inviting as opposed to the themes included with Ubuntu. (OK, and because the desktop cube and wobbly windows are AWESOME SQUARED.)

I have suffered similar frustrations to tux0r, most recently in trying to tweak the parameters of my xorg.conf so I could make my CRT look nicer (timings and such make a huge difference as to whether something like 1400x1050 looks good or like crap on a 17" monitor). So, xorg.conf exists, but it's barebones -- so unlike every "hard-to-use" Linux distribution I've used previously, I have to go through the extra step of generating the xorg.conf file and then editing it. How hard would it be for Ubuntu to auto-detect the hardware and then SAVE that config where it's actually tweakable?

I get the sudo thing, but there is still software out there that assumes the root account exists and has a password (I forget what it was but just recently I was installing something that made that asumption).

And finally, tux0r's point wasn't that it took hours and hours to find out about generating xorg.conf. It was that it took hours and hours to find the answers to many problems that he should not have had to deal with.

Ubuntu is very good at getting you to "good enough to use", but very bad (and getting worse) at allowing you to go past that to "works as well as it possibly can". Some of this is probably GNOME's fault, but the Ubuntu devs often seem to be of the same mindset as the GNOME team, which may be why the Kubuntu folks are starting to chafe -- I've tried Kubuntu more than once (most recently after the gdm "the old themer is dead, the new themer is yet to come" fiasco) and it does often seem to be an afterthought to Canonical.

Ridiculous. Somebody has to pay for the services that maintain your rights as a property owner -- things like police, fire, courts, etc. Property ownership does not exist in a vacuum, and somebody has to pay for those most basic social services. Thus, property tax.

Your argument is as ludicrous as suggesting that you don't own your car because you have to pay to put gas in it.

Ubuntu has certain non-free packages available already -- various drivers, Flash and Adobe Reader come to mind. There's a whole Ubuntu/Debian "non-free" repository for those and others.

As for how an app gets into the repo in the first place, the developer community has a review process for adding apps. There's also nothing stopping you from packaging any app you please and just providing the package on your website -- when you download a .deb, Ubuntu knows what to do with it and gives you a nice GUI installer (GDebi) when you double-click it.

You keep saying that, and keep failing to substantiate it with even one example. I don't own a modern (post-MacOS 7) Mac, and even I'm pretty sure you're full of it.

First off, the GP poster (jedidiah) who used the phrase "app store" put scare quotes around it, because he wasn't talking about the Apple App Store. He was talking about the equivalent for Android devices.

Second, even when talking about the iPhone/iPod touch, you're wrong. Apple charges for certain upgrades and many people using iPods simply don't buy them. iPhone users don't have to pay but may not bother anyway.