Well, there's an important difference. An oil company would bribe dictators to let them make more money by extracting the country's resources. A non-profit organisation producing educational equipment takes their money and supplies educational equipment. I suppose it's possible that the dictator hands out the laptops only to his supporters, but it's hard to really see OLPC as somehow propping up a dictator.

While gnome panel will still be available, the plan is apparently to have a simplified version of Unity, dubbed "Unity 2D" for machines which can't handle the necessary graphics acceleration.

Well, they're pushing the software centre as the main one for users, so I think it will work well enough. Apart from the command line package managers, there's only synaptic, which is hidden away in system -> administration for advanced users. And although I count myself as a power user, I generally use the software centre if I just want to install some application.

Well, in my applications menu, it's called "Ubuntu Software Centre". Technically, it's an an apt/packagekit GUI, separate from synaptic (which can still be found in the administration menu), which also uses some non-apt-standard bits (like ratings) on top. The Ubuntu repositories can still be accessed via standard apt without the extensions, of course.

I fail to see how this is in any way a problem.

There are already plenty of lists saying "MS Office -> Libreoffice" and "Photoshop -> GIMP" and so on. It tends to lead to people getting annoyed because they don't feel that the promoted replacement is as good as what they had before (whether or not they're right, they still feel that way).

Also, apart from geeks, people don't really care about openness in their software. If you can't program, the right to change the source code is meaningless. If you want to replace proprietary software, you do it by providing something people prefer. Like Firefox: only a few people choose it because it's open source; most have chosen it simply because it's better than IE. For something like an office suite, the job should be even easier if what you're offering is free (as in beer).

Apparently the next version of Ubuntu will have ratings and reviews in the software centre.

Only if you count each cell's DNA separately. It's mostly just imperfect copies of the same data, though, and your genome is only about 750 MB (3 billion bases, 4 possibilities at each, so 2 bits per base). There's probably quite a bit more if you count all the bacteria living on and in you (not a comment on your personal hygeine - there are bacteria on everyone), but I'm not sure that counts as "available storage".

Your memory is a much more interesting question. How much do we remember? When you remember the scenery of a holiday last summer, what resolution and colour depth is that memory? How is the memory of a sound encoded?

Dialling phone numbers is much less common than it used to be, thanks to electronic address books, skype, and so on. The risks of the internet are better solved by making systems easy to use, not by sitting around and wishing that users were better educated.

The car analogy is just stupid. We make people take a driving test because half a ton of steel at 70 mph can kill a lot of people very quickly without you doing anything obviously stupid. That's not a risk on the internet. My mother doesn't understand a URL, but the internet is still hugely useful to her (email, skype, online shopping, weather forecasts...). It's not your internet, and we're not kicking out 90% of the world when they're using it very productively.

And no, URLs are not "easy to understand". You start at the beginning, then jump into the middle and go backwards for a while, then jump back to the middle and read forwards. The obvious way to read them is left to right, so everything is a subdomain of www. They often contain odd codes ("sid=2004418"?). To properly explain it, you have to talk about servers (for many people, websites aren't on a server, they're just somehow "on the internet"), and static versus dynamic content. And now you can have internationalised domain names in various alphabets. To be fair, some browsers are now making it easier by highlighting the domain name in the URL bar (that is, improving the usability, not berating people for their ignorance).

Yes, Google make money. They provide a service that people use. That's capitalism for you. Wikia tried to make a non-profit search engine, but it didn't work out. I don't particularly like the idea of one company profiting from running such a key function of the web, but I don't think I could do it better...

Why do you think that people should type in URLs? If you accidentally type in paypall.com instead of paypal.com, you could end up getting your money stolen (in fact, it's a domain squatter - but the risk is there). If you type paypall into Google, you get pointed to paypal. Like IP addresses, URLs are becoming a technical detail that users don't generally think about (except perhaps for sharing links). It's not the end of the world.

There is a form that tells them to really delete it. They don't draw attention to it, and it's separate from the "deactivate account" option, but a search in the help centre does bring it up.

Well, if you have a smartphone, you could install the key generator app, which, since it doesn't require a signal, presumably doesn't report your phone number to Google. If you want to check that, you could always look at the source (for Android & Blackberry, at least).

I very much doubt they'll ever make it compulsory. It's just too much hassle for most people. If they really want to push it, they might show a banner ("Find out how to make your account more secure..."), but I bet it'll just sit on the settings page, only to be used by those who know they want it.

Do we really have nothing better to do than complain? It's an entirely optional way to add some security, and they do seem to have given it at least a modicum of thought (several methods to get the tokens, limited backup tokens if you lose your device...). What else should they provide? Free ponies?

I read it before it was /.ed. It wasn't obviously libel: he more or less approved of the atmosphere, said two dishes were alright, nothing great, then laid into them on the quality of a couple more dishes. Of course, I have no way of knowing if he was telling the truth, or being paid by a competitor, but it read like a negative review, not a hate-filled diatribe.

You miss his point. If you understand what's going on, you can happily switch over to LibreOffice and carry on without worrying. When you're management, and you don't follow open source software in your spare time, you hear "Most of the developers are jumping ship, and attempting to create a separate codebase in competition with the company that owns OpenOffice", and you think "that's not something we want to rely on for now. Let's just upgrade to the next version of Office. Maybe we'll give it another look in a few years." If you've got a particularly non-techy manager, they might even be wondering if this "forking" is entirely legal.

There's a lot in a name, and Microsoft know that. That's why they still release Windows and Office, even when they undergo a real change as dramatic as Office 2007. Libreoffice is a new name, so it will be considered as a new thing. And in a sense it is: the codebase isn't new, and many of the developers aren't new, but the process of writing it and releasing it is.

You know, I think any computer UI is likely to be a new one for many of the children they're targetting. They've got a rare chance to design an interface for people who don't already have expectations of how to use a computer. I know I'd take that opportunity to see if I could work out a better model.

Well, I have. And I've had pretty much no problems, no hoops to jump through. The worst response I've got was an 'unreferenced' message put on a new page I created. Which was quite accurate. I added one reference, and the page has seen no further problems.

Of course, the fact that it's still working pretty well isn't nearly as interesting as complaining about idiots reverting your changes, so carry on.