Access is important. Owning, sharing, borrowing from a library are all means to access.

DRM is about controlling access, which is what we worry about. Will we be able to look something up from this book later on? Can we hear the tune we like again? Will that be possible? Will it drain all our spare money away just to remember things we like?

I did the scripts because I found that I always had one workspace empty - a blank desktop - so I made the script update things automatically so that there was always one empty desktop. However as you suspect I had trouble because previously I relied on the spatial layout of the workspaces. I used Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right to move through them in a horizontal row (because then they're not too small on a small panel).

I think dynamic workspace creation could work provided they remember their position or order. If there was a means of telling what task a workspace was then they could be sorted primarily by task type, and you'd choose the order of task-types somewhere. Ultimately a task type would begin from a set of program launchers and shortcuts to documents and folders.

At the moment I'm using Gnome on Ubuntu 9.04, and I make use of workspaces quite a lot. I like that implementation most out of everything I've tried so far. I tried making a script to automatically create and remove workspaces but it seemed a bit clunky (which I think was mostly down to my implementation - it polled the output of 'wmctrl -l'), so now I just have several by default.

Yeah, plus spaces/workspaces offer the added benefit of being able to see multiple task-relevant windows at once. For example one to read from and the other to type into, or having multiple information displays at once.

What workspaces need though is the ability to create workspaces when you need them and destroy them when they're unneeded as opposed to having a fixed number of them, and possibly more refined or enhanced ways of identifying those spaces at a glance (without any further input needed).

THEY do! They're everywhere, clicking the links in the summaries on tech sites.

They could've called it Graham

There is at least one open source IDE: MonoDevelop, licensed under the GPLv2.

The British system as I recall - starting age 4:

7 years primary school.
5 years secondary school (after which education is no longer compulsory).
2 years college or some secondary schools teach the same courses as a "sixth form".
University, 3 years (or 4 with a work placement) bachelors degrees, masters and upward.

Also they changed the numbering system to use zero indexing, so year 1 is actually the second year of primary school, but year 0 is called FILE_NOT_FOUND^W "reception". When I was there it was divided into 3 years "infant" followed by 4 years "junior".

Yes. I have had full screen flash in Linux for about a couple of years now, ever since I started using it.

The income from a service should ideally be proportional to how good it is. The income from a good should ideally be proportional to how good it is. The income from a work of art should ideally be proportional to how good it is. This would encourage people who want more money to provide better service, make better goods and create better art.

The way I see it though, a more popular artist would likely attract the attention of more people prepared to pay, so there would be some kind of relation to popularity. But people being prepared to pay when they don't have to might make for a more substantial measure of quality than just popularity alone.

I can also see art being made for the people who pay rather than marketed to children who would likely just take a free copy.

It's kind of cute. They should make it fluffy. But not self replicating.

Or if Ubuntu is the unstable and annoying one out of distros, the rest must be utterly amazing.

With some films it doesn't make much difference. Take AVP2 for example, where you can hardly see what the hell is going on half the time. Other films I'm glad to have watched over someone's shoulder before I had a chance to make the mistake of seeing, for example 'Surrogates', where the plot revolves around some technology being uninvented because people don't really want to have to deal with it.

With that in mind, banning laptops in cinemas isn't that much of a problem, because if they don't let you in you can just go somewhere with wireless access and watch the film on your laptop.

Workspaces are an amazing new way to manage your windows an applications.

With conventional window managers, your windows are just grouped by application, or even not at all. Suppose you're writing an article, and you open up a web browser with some reference material. You open up your mail client and open a PDF attachment which a colleague thought might be helpful to you. Then you put on some music and start writing. But now you're switching back and forth through all the webpages you have open until you reach the one you want, past the mail client and the music player and the PDF back to the document you're writing. Things like this are a big problem, but thankfully, that's the old way.

With Workspaces, we offer you an awesome and new way to organize yourself. So you're ready to start writing that article again - you open the word processor. We're all familar with that, but what happens next is where the incredible new power of Workspaces is shown: press ctrl-alt-2 to switch to a second Workspace where you can open the browser of reference material. That's just amazing!

But that's not all. Next, you can press ctrl-alt-3 and open your mail client, and it opens in yet another workspace. We can open the colleague's email attachment and press ctrl-alt-shift-left to move it to the previous workspace, where we can arrange it side by side with the web browser window. Now what's awesome and incredible about that is you can flip between your word processor and the reference material with the keyboard shortcuts, without having to sort through windows ever. Amazing!

Oh, but before you start, you want your tunes again. Ctrl-alt-4, open your music player, ctrl-alt-1 back to the word processor. Awesome!

Workspaces. It really is just that simple.

All my free time is when I'm bored at work. And I spend that time coding random stuff.

(Whoosh In Advance)