This is the first person in any discussion of Unity who's said what I too felt. I spent ages fiddling with and customising GNOME 2 to try to get it working as smoothly as I can do in 2min with [*whispers*] Windows. Unity has just blown this away. Minimal tweaking and it works just fine.

I really do not understand people who are flexible enough to move away from majority, default-choice commercial OSs to a minority FOSS OS such as Linux and then have a nervous breakdown because the desktop changes a bit!

Unity is a /lot/ more like GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is. GNOME 2 is dead, same as KDE 3.x (and Trinity) are dead. Staying with them isn't an option.

And Unity does actually work pretty well. It replicates all the important functionality from GNOME 2, Mac OS X and, yes, even Windows. No, not everything I'd like is there, but everything I /need/ to get my work done is.

GNOME 3, from a fairly brief try, is far more disruptive - but it's pretty and there were some elements of it I liked. When it's an option on Ubuntu, I will give it a proper try.

Bugger the video formats, where are the transcripts?

I could either spend half a day watching them or 5-10 min reading. You guys may have all day; I don't.

We can expect the first biological package to hit Kilimanjaro soon... right after Iapetus turns black and Hyperion disappears.

(Hint for the terminally unhip.)

Congrats! I did indeed change my password & post from it myself. Almost surreal to use a Spectrum on the Web...

Good to finally meet you, as well. If I'm back on the Isle of Man, I'll let you know. :)

I shall pop over and say hello while I'm there, then!

The big fat extended battery is one of the things I miss from my HTC Universal from before it got stolen.

640*480 VGA screen, touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard - albeit a lousy one - 3G, SDHC, IRDA, Wifi, Bluetooth, 2 cameras, one for video, one for photos - that phone had nearly everything. And with the 4.8Ah battery I had, not only did the camera still work and so on, but it ran for a whole long weekend of heavy use on a single charge. I could leave home for work Friday morning, go away for a weekend, and it'd still be going when I got back to the office on Monday morning to charge it. OK, so, it was fat with the big battery and no longer fitted in its case - but totally worth it.

The only snags were the disastrous keyboard - poor layout, but app keys for the various bundled programs in the main alpha block, so if you didn't quite hit the space bar, you left your current app in mid-sentence and entered the web browser or something - and the fact that it ran Windows Mobile. Which is utterly horrid.

My current Nokia E90 does more and has a better keyboard, but it has no touchscreen, can't charge over USB, lacks a standard headphone socket and if I use it hard its battery is dead in 5-6hr. If I use my wonderful media phone as an MP3 player or radio all day, and navigate using its GPS, before sunset it's dead - and I can't charge it without the special Nokia charger. Old ones don't work, they changed the connector size.

If I tether it to my notebook it works fine as a 3.5G modem - but its battery is dead in 2-3hr of use.

And no extended ones are available.

It's so stupid it's tragic.

Not only Wolfenstein - which arguably was the origin of the engine of Doom - but other significant milestones are missing.

Firstly, Jez San's "Starglider", marketed by Rainbird. Possibly the first 3D game for home computers. ("Battlezone" ran on dedicated vector-graphics hardware.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starglider

David Braben's "Lander" and later the full game "Zarch" for Acorn's Archimedes were AFAIK the first /solid/ rendered 3D graphics on home computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch

Of course, Braben's Elite was the first computer game to use any 3D at all - Starglider was /all/ in 3D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(computer_game)

These seem to me to be worthy of a mention, at least an opening paragraph. So, probably, is Maze War (1973!) - just limited box-drawing, but a display of 3D and a widely-used technique.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War

It doubtless inspired 3D Monster Maze from 1981 on the ZX81, a machine which didn't even have graphics as such:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze

3D Ant Attack from 1983, which also provided the engine for Zombie Zombie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Attack

It's not some royal proclamation that can never be violated.

If you get sweaty, shower. (If you don't get sweaty, you're not doing it right.) If it starts to rain or whatever after you leave, shower. If there is no shower in the office, find a nearby health club or something and shower there. Probably still cheaper than the costs of motor transport.

If the weather is really inclement or dangerous, *then* you use a vehicle. There's nothing that says that normally doing one prevents the other.

And if you feel ill, then you probably aren't going to work anyway.

These are red herrings.

I worked a 7pm - 7am shift for 9 months last year, too. I lived 10 miles from my work, which was in the centre of London, one of the largest cities with some of the most congested traffic in the world.

I got on my bike.

With a month or so of practice, I could equal the time spent on the train - about 45min each way. If you get reasonably skilled, a bicycle can make better time in urban traffic than a car. It burns a thousand plus calories a day, and not only gets you fit, it saves money, as well.

If you're particularly overweight or unfit, try a recumbent. They are massively more ergonomic as well as vastly more aerodynamic to ride.

A daily commute of 15-20 miles each way is perfectly doable and it will transform your life.

It's also a great way to wake up at the start of the day. Beats the hell out of caffeine.

Oh I say, well played!

I know about as much about PCB construction as I do about playing the bagpipes, unfortunately, but I hope that this project attracts some attention. It's deeply cool. :)

Well, I'm impressed, anyway. I'm boggled, actually.

If you ever get to the stage of either selling these things, or publishing the specs so that someone else can, it sounds like something I'd love to play with... :)