It may not help in your case but people in the EU can send anything ordered online and delivered by post/courier ('distance selling') back without having to give a reason within 7 days (14 in some countries). So there's no reason you can't buy online and if something about the keyboard, screen, Linux driver support or anything else isn't to your liking just box it up and send it back.

I did this with a 1000 Euro ultrabook in Germany that when it arrived I realised had very poor wireless range, in both Windows and Linux. Something only a few of the reviews mentioned and obviously something I couldn't test until I had the thing in my house. I ran the recovery DVD, boxed it up and sent it back to Amazon. Money was refunded a couple of days later (cash in my account, not gift vouchers or any credit) and I bought a different Ultrabook.

http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_int/safe_shop/dist_sell/index_en.htm
"Consumer's right to cancel the contract within a minimum of 7 working days without giving any reason and without penalty, except the cost of returning the goods (right of withdrawal);"

Good to hear fastmail has an emergency plan, it's been very, very reliable for the last couple of years and I hope it stays that way :)
I'm begginning to realise how reliant I am on email - today I got an invoice by email that if I hadn't seen it straight away would've costed over 100 pounds extra due to not cancelling something early enough.

BTW the new Fastmail interface is great!

Exactly, I had the same problem as the GP except that Windows update never found SP1, even after leaving it for around 24 hours. It's very frustrating that there's no way to get everything in one go - updates just seem to come from the ether at random times in Windows Update on an newly installed Win 7 box, meaning it could be days before you're truly up to date.

Downloading SP1 manually and installing it helps though.

+1 But KDE with Thunderbird as the email client is still a great combination. Still not sure what akonadi's really supposed to help with in practice (I've read the documents and blog posts describing the theoretical rationale behind it).

+1 I really don't understand all the effort going into resurrecting GNOME2 and fighting GNOME3 and Unity when KDE is right there, with tons of features and works today.

London is +0000 (i.e right on GMT) for approx half the year and +0100 for the other half (roughly) because of daylight savings time.

I've experienced the same, in the Ukraine in an old 'Soviet-style' hotel. But the price of less than 5 Euro/night including free-Wifi took the edge off any discomfort :) In any hotel in western Europe you should have your own bathroom, unless it's a really cheap place with prices comparable to a hostel.

Put simply a hostel is where you 'rent' a bed that may be in shared room for one or more nights as opposed to a hotel where you 'rent' a whole room for yourself for one or more nights.

You'll find that almost all hostels, in both western and eastern Europe, are very professionally run. Theft is very uncommon and really isn't something you need to worry about beyond putting valubles (passports, laptops, phones, cameras, credit cards and spare cash) in a locker.

A lot of hostels have female-only rooms but even where those aren't available no hostel (or the 99.99% of the guests who are decent people) are going to tolerate harrassment or assault.

Friends from here in Europe say the hostels in Australia are of similar standards to in Europe. The US is different altogether though, friends of mine who are used to staying in hostels in Europe had really bad experiences trying it in the US. Either the hostel was expensive and crap or it was actually more of a half-way house for homeless and criminals. We've avoided US hostels since then.

I'll second this as I've had this argument before with people. The ICE is supposed to be a high-speed train but only actually reaches it's 300km/h max speed on some sections of track such as bits in norther Bavaria near Nuremberg, so the total journey time is around the same as the car.

The price of the ICE tickets are the real problem though, basically I've worked out that the only time it's cheaper than a car is when you're going on your own. And since I don't have a car that's basing my calculations on the cost of rental cars!

It's not just Munich-Berlin, me and my girlfriend did Munich-Hamberg return in a rental car for cheaper (incl. fuel) than 2 ICE tickets for the same route would've been. I'd prefer to take the train as it avoids dealing with car rental companies and looking for parking at your destination, but the astronomical prices and overcrowding on some sections like BerlinLeipzig, are too much.

You're one of many I think.

It's vastly improved since the 4.0-4.2 releases which were alpha or beta quality.

I'm not knocking the OBS, it's a very useful tool, but it really doesn't help much here since making a package that works cross-distribution would involve a lot of manual integration work.

For example I could easily use the OBS to take my Opensuse package for foo and build it on Fedora and ensure it at least builds and is installable. However the real work, integrating it into the Fedora distro and ensuring it works well with and is the right version for the other packages in that distro, is not done by the OBS and isn't easily automated.

If you look in the mailing list thread on this article you'll see it's exactly that kind of integration work and the difficulties with it (even within one distro) that's causing the problems. Probably the most realistic model is the Debian one where several distros (Mint, Ubuntu etc.) feed off and (hopefully) contribute back to a central packaging effort. IMHO the number of packages in a modern Linux distro is getting too much, and the integration work too complex, for smaller projects like Opensuse.

Actually Ubuntu LTS releases draw from testing[1], only non-LTS releases draw from unstable.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

No, RPM-based doesn't mean it's repackaging Redhat, you're confusing it with Centos and Scientific Linux. Mandriva is actually one of a small number of distros that does a unique packaging effort - ie. the developers package most things themselves rather than basing it off another distro such as Ubuntu does with Debian.

In the past, i.e. early 2000's, Mandrake/Mandriva had some of the nicer desktop-focused features such as:
- automatic resizing of the Windows partition in the installer-
- GUI partitioning program available not just in the installer but in the Control Centre after installation
- decent package manager with dependency resolution and large repos (almost on a par with Debian's)
- decent default settings for KDE and GNOME
- working USB and CD/DVD automounting (the Mandrake/driva developers went to great pains to get this working long before HAL and udev came and made it a comodity feature)

But that was the past and all major distro's have those things now. So you're probably right, currently there's no standout feature that Mandriva has over other distros, probably just personal preference for those that use it.

+1 if I couldn't remove the DRM from Amazon ebooks easily I wouldn't buy them. FWIW here are the steps (all based on software from that apprenticealf.wordpress.com blog):
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

***Amazon Kindle***
- Download and install the Kindle for PC application and ensure all ebooks you want to remove DRM from are downloaded in Kindle for PC

- Download & install Activestate Python Community Edition

- Download the 'combined tools package' from apprenticealf's blog (http://tinyurl.com/6asq47f)

- Double-click KindleBooks/Kindlebooks.pyw from the 'combined tools package', it should pop-up a GUI dialog with window title 'Kindle/Mobi/... eBook Encryption Removal'

- Click the ... to give it the path to the eBook input file. It'll be a .azw file in My Documents\My Kindle Content. Then select the directory where the unencrypted output file should go

- For the 'Alternative Kindle.info file' line do a Windows Search for *.kinf, this will find your kindle.info (in later versions .kinf) file. Eg. on Windows 7 it might be in c:\Users\myuser\AppData\Local\Amazon\Kindle\storage. On Windows XP it's C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Local Settings\Application Data\Amazon\Kindle\storage

- Click Start!

Note: 'Directory for Unencrypted Output File(s)' should be something simple like c:\ or C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\Desktop. Kindlebooks.pyw has a problem with either the path length or particular characters in the path.

Indeed, I'm a big KDE fan but also a big fan of certain GTK applications that are better than anything QT-based - Firefox, GIMP etc.

If you don't like the way GTK apps look in KDE just go to KDE System Settings->Application Appearance->GTK+ Appearance and choose another widget-style. oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (Ubuntu package kde-style-qtcurve) are particularly good.