To quote your linked article:

On Saturday a WikiLeaks spokesman, who said he uses the name Daniel Schmitt in order to protect his identity, told The Associated Press that the group had requested help from NATO to check the files prior to publication to ensure the lives of civilians were not put at risk.

"For this reason, we conveyed a request to the White House prior to the publication, asking that the International Security Assistance Force provide us with reviewers," Schmitt said. "That request remains open. However, the Pentagon has stated that it is not interested in 'harm minimization' and has not contacted us, directly, or indirectly to discuss this offer."

If the government/NATO wants to protect civilians that assisted them then they should do what's right and help Wikileaks to redact such names from the documents. This is exactly the same thing that happened with the leaked cables -- Wikileaks asks the government to, if it wishes, tell them what names need to be redacted from these documents, and the government refuses to do so. The recklessness is coming from NATO and the government, not from Wikileaks which has shown every interest in addressing this particular issue.

And if you don't think they're serious about cooperating for redactions, I would remind you that the ball is not in Wikileaks court regarding such redactions. Anyone that does die because of these leaks (something that has not been proven anywhere) dies because the government refused to shield them, when it should be doing the right thing and focusing on damage control. The stuff is out there and it's going to be released, it's only responsible to try to make sure that innocent people who aided your efforts won't get hurt because you want to play the role of tough guy.

I honestly think if more people knew about NX they would never use VNC unless it was absolutely the only solution available, period. VNC just blows chunks way too bad, and NX makes things so easy when bandwidth is important. Anyone who has not tried NX and uses VNC should seriously give it a try because the difference is night and day.

Ext4 doesn't have online defrag yet, it is planned. Btrfs has an fsck tool but it is not capable of fixing any problems on the disk, it can apparently only let you know there are problems (I say apparently because while I've used btrfs I haven't before had to fsck it thanks to lots of luck with not running into any hiccups during my usage). They say as much on the front page of the Btrfs wiki. To quote the main page of this wiki:

Btrfs is under heavy development, but every effort is being made to keep the filesystem stable and fast. As of 2.6.31, we only plan to make forward compatible disk format changes, and many users have been experimenting with Btrfs on their systems with good results. Please email the Btrfs mailing list if you have any problems or questions while using Btrfs.

Note that Btrfs does not yet have a fsck tool that can fix errors. While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle flush requests correctly. This will be fixed when the fsck tool is ready.

So not only are you railing against ext4 for a fsck operation which should take a long time (5TB? Come on, most people don't have 1TB in their box, and we're talking about desktop users), but you are unawares of the features and capabilities of both filesystems you are discussing. Btrfs is great, but it's not something Average Joe should be using just yet either in production or on their desktop. I have used it before and I will use it again in the future, but it is not complete yet.

If I had any mod points I probably just would have modded up ratboy666's reply because he did a fantastic job of explaining the whole situation.

WoW and most MMOs are under constant development, and while early development could be interpreted as "during alpha/beta" it could also be interpreted to mean "early on in the game's lifetime".

It wasn't even really a trick of wording though, because the patch notes linked by KingMotley explains the change in more depth. The change was drastically for the better, as the patch notes explained it allows for more freedom in exploring aspects of gameplay aside from level grinding. Before, you had a set amount of time before your XP was diminished significantly. After the modification, the only thing that was really impacted by being rested was level grinding. This change gave users the freedom to not have to worry about spending the first few hours grinding, and they could play at their own pace.

So your point really doesn't stand because much more of the gameplay was changed than "oh the rested mechanism works slightly different but pretty much the same" because it's an oversimplifcation. If you don't see the very real and very drastic differences between how it worked and how it's been tweaked to work, you aren't trying very hard or you haven't played the game for a significant amount of time.

That's funny because I remember posting that what he was describing was how things were at one point in the Beta.

I already posted a follow-up response to my own comment that stated that XP did work like this in Beta, and how it's not really honest to present it like the game was ever functioning like that once it was released to the public.

As a small addendum I forgot to mention: In the beta the XP gains worked differently. Beta was a long time ago and gamers don't generally consider discussions of Beta stages to be relevant to the game at-and-post-launch. TBH your description is similar to how things worked in Beta, but it's not like there was widespread outrage because WoW didn't exactly have a huge public beta test (Or any public beta test that I can remember).

See this for more details on the situation how it was in Beta, and then scroll up to see how it's been ever since..

World of Warcraft was never like that. If you spend any time, logged out or logged in, inside a major city or an inn at a minor city/outpost then you become "rested". While you are rested you gain a bonus to your XP gains, This mechanism has never been modified and has been in place since launch, and I do not remember ever hearing anyone raising a stink over getting to log out for the night in town and come back in the morning with half a level or more rested so that your leveling is in fact highly accelerated.

The results from html5test have my Chromium nightly leading the pack with a score of 241 with 8 bonus points out of a total of 300. For comparison, in order of most "compliant" to least:

• Chromium 7.0.531.0 (60152): 241/8

• Chrome 7.0.517.8 dev: 231/12

• Firefox 4 (Minefield nightly): 207/9

• Opera 10.61 build 3484: 159/7

• Firefox 3.6.10: 139/4

• Internet Explorer 9 beta: 96/5

So the IE9 beta does lag pretty far behind the competition on this test for html5 support, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to see Chromium/Chrome in the lead with FF4 gaining ground. The point is, though, that no browser is completely standards compliant yet, much less with html5 and/or CSS3.

Right you are, I didn't notice at first that minute difference.

Works fine over here on Chrome 6.0.472.62 beta, the Acid2 test looks exactly like the reference.

SRWare Iron was created for the sole purpose of earning the "creator" some money on ad revenue. To borrow from my previous post on the subject:

Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron. The article and the linked IRC log tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.

The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.

Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.

I don't think it should deviate the way it has so far with Shell on desktops, and have other hopes for GNOME 3.0. :)

Is gnome a product?

Yes, it is. GNOME is a product (software project) that is included with various other products into a meta-product (for-pay distributions, as well as distros that offer support contracts). Matter of fact, a product doesn't have to cost money or be proprietary in order to be considered a product, but the GNOME project has to push their product or they risk losing relevance, market share and mind share if they appear to be dragging their feet and lagging in progress.

Its delay proves gross incompetence to whom?

The core GNOME developers and maintainers of the project along with various sub-projects which have fallen behind schedule quite a bit are to blame.

I'm not personally of the mindset that any of these delays constitutes anything more than very bad management and planning.

Isn't this what open source was suppose to be about? No shareholders to answer to, the software is realeased when it's done?

No, it's not what OSS was supposed to be about and it's not what it is about. The shareholders in the F/OSS world are not only the community members but any businesses which have a significant stake in releasing a solid product. Don't think that if GNOME falls far behind KDE or anything else that major distributions won't drop support for it, or simply remove it entirely from its repositories. Case in point -- Slackware. GNOME failed as a product to satisfy the Slackware developers (Meaning Patrick Volkerding, primarily, if I recall correctly) and was thus dropped in favor of KDE. If it becomes a pain in the butt for RedHat to support a GNOME desktop on RHEL because GNOME feels old and/or crusty they will look for other options.

In short, GNOME can take as long as they want getting to 3.0, but other software projects (especially desktop environments and window managers) are not stopping and waiting for them to play catch-up. The lesson to take away from this is to be a little more conservative about estimates for getting projects needing more attention out the door. Maybe they lost a few or many developers or volunteers, but the most likely explanation to a lot of people will appear to be that they underestimated how much time and how many developers and testers were needed.

FWIW, as someone who wants to see GNOME Shell and 3.0 finished, I am at least glad they have recognized publicly that GNOME Shell is absolutely nowhere near ready. I've tried it out a few times in various distros and it's about as disappointing as can be as far as performance and stability. If they would have stuck to their original release schedule this would have been far worse than the reaction to KDE4 when it landed. It would be like the Four Yorkshiremen skit with the GNOME 3.0 early adopters scoffing at how much easier the KDE 4.0 early adopters had it.