It's not the technology upgrades which will engender longer tweets, it's profitability.

When the new subscription rate slows and Twitter decides that promotion/advertising revenue isn't enough, I expect the ability to tweet longer will be a "premium" (paid) enhancement. 140 char tweets stay free, but if you load up your account with Twitter credits ("Twedits"?), every block of 70 extra chars costs you x twedits...

You know you've been coding too much when the brain reads that as "noun noun noun noun noun" and throws a parse error expecting a verb...

Coalition to halt NBN-Telstra deal (if elected later this year).

FFS.

Oh, the irony.

Marketing opportunity: Hardcore Ubuntu Gaming Edition - "It's HUGE".

$0.57 × 7169 = $4086.33... Other benefits aside, I'd certainly be happy with a low-cost word-of-mouth promotion allowing me to pick up four grand that was otherwise unlikely to come my way...

Me too, with one important modification: I want the app I'm using to be able to wait in the background until the phone call is done, then bring me right back to where I was (ie mid-calculation/-level/-video) without delay.

The phone app should be one that executes "over top" of the others, causing the other apps to pause, rather than quit.

While Ubuntu was installed and running on the laptop well within an hour, the extended time trawling through forum posts and help pages to try and figure out things like to generate the xorg.conf file, the X server needs to be stopped or the X server runs in the service called 'gdm' or sudo is your friend, once you know about Ubuntu 9.10* meant that the net time investment on the WinXP setup (including driver downloads) was lower.

Your comment ignores the fact that with a similar time investment, WinXP achieved the desired result (and I knew that it would); Ubuntu did not achieve the desired result (and when I gave up, I still didn't know whether it could).

* It takes a while to discover that the password entered during setup isn't the root password, and in fact, that Ubuntu 9.10 does not have a user-set root password after installation. Might be obvious to others, but to the Ubuntu 9.10 newbie, it was baffling...

Yes, I made an xorg.conf, but wrangling with drivers, text files and unanswered forum posts of others trying to do the same thing quickly became tiresome. It's the same old issue: desktop Linux configuration is too much for Everyman. I'm technically capable and not averse to troubleshooting, but still couldn't readily identify what to do to get it to work (or even whether it could be done at all). To search the net for desktop Linux configuraton advice is to trawl a wasteland of old information, misinformation and absent information.

S-video because it's an old rear projection TV, and I've got no money for upgrades. The point is that I've done it on the cheap, but not by using Ubuntu.

WinXP Just Worked, and Boxee runs fine.

Warning: anecdote follows.

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on an Acer Aspire 3680, to use as a basic HTPC with Boxee. I was impressed with the overal finish of the OS and initially was glad I could use open source software. At least, that was until I tried to get s-video working, with either the laptop screen at native res, or the same res as s-video but in the correct aspect ratio (4:3 on 16:9).

After discovering that Ubuntu now believes Xwindows to be so good at autodetect that it no longer requires xorg.conf, and then wrangling with various configuration options for hours, I gave up, found the WinXP disc and had everything up and running in short order. No voodoo magic workarounds, no text file configs to create, and dual video output with native res on each.

TL;DR: Ubuntu's good looks and neat UI effects are fine, but when It Just Won't Work, people jump ship - fast.