Well, I disagree. I think the motivations and some of the changes are quite nice, but they are badly misguided. Both Ubuntu and MS are making the mistake of trying to cram UI concepts not suitable to the environment they are going to be used:
- Metro UI: Awesome for tablets and touch interfaces in general - I'd go as far as saying it's the best UI concept on these cases, better even than iOS. But that concept just doesn't make any sense and it's counter-productive when you're interfacing with your device using a keyboard and mouse.
- Unity: Same thing, doesn't translate well to desktops, but it's worse because this UI doesn't really work well with touch interfaces either; it really was made for and works well only on a dying breed of devices: Netbooks.
- Gnome 3: I'll refrain from too much comment on this one because I haven't really used it yet, but from what I've seen, this is the one that's actually the saner of the other two in the sense that they are not trying to jam a square in a peg hole like the other two are doing - they are really trying to redefine traditional UI concepts on the desktop, and maybe other environments too. That's not to say that they're on the ball though: I think they've really gone way too radical there. What I'm really saying is that Gnome is the less bad of bunch.

... every one of those games would be a thematic variation on GTA. Like this. People don't want reality, they want to be entertained.

I don't like that my G+ profile shouts my real name everywhere too. So I was looking around in my profile, and guess what: There's a "Nickname" field in there - but the profile form explicitly says that it won't be shown in the profile. Why the hell are they doing that? Why have this field if it's not going to be used?

The dumb part is that Google could be fixing this problem in a much less disrupting way: Make the "Nickname" field actually useful, make it the default field shown for the public, or have the user setup if he wants the Nickname to be shown or his real name. Hell, if Google is so bent into real names, at least make the Nickname the field to be shown to the public, and the real name only to your friends / circles. What a waste.

Hm, that sounds dangerous. I have a triple-boot setup on my MacPro (OSX, Windows 7 and Linux). How will Lion handle that? Sounds like it could trash one (or both) of my other OSes in the process...

Fair enough. However, this is not Android's (the OS) fault - the bootloader locking mechanism is hardware based, so only Motorola's to blame here. As always in these cases, all you can do is vote with your wallet: get a HTC or some other brand that doesn't lock you out of your property.

Please mod the parent up to the moon. I've been reading all the comments on the story, and it baffled me that no one caught this simple fact - GPS logs can be easily tampered with, or even forged. I don't know if the ruling on this case was made with this technical knowledge, but it's nevertheless a good thing a bad precedent wasn't set. Nevermind GPS accuracy, GPS logs just aren't a reliable source of evidence in the first place.

Yea, I think it's a bit elitist too. I mean, if they don't want a sequel, don't read it!

Case in point, a classic: The Time Machine, from H.G. Wells. A century later, a sequel was authorized and written by Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships. And I like it so much more than the first book, because it expands so much on the idea, concepts and caracter. Granted, there was a lot to expand from given the late 19th century science, and Stephen Baxter is also an excellent SF writer... So the question really is if Mr. Reichert is up to the task, since he's pretty much unkown. But so was Baxter, back when he wrote the The Time Ships. I guess we'll just have to wait and hope that Mr. Reichert does a good job.

Nice, but your Quake has statically linked libraries, which was (and still is) a simple solution for running binaries across wildly different distributions or linux environments without hassle.

Of course, not everyone does that. The common and default way to compile stuff is using dynamic linking (i.e. using the standard libraries you'd already have installed), and if your version of Quake (compiled 10 years ago) was dinamically linked, you'd be in for a big surprise.

And anyway, while it is a good strategy for backwards compatibility and cross-distribution portability, static linking is not fullproof and has its drawbacks - you could still run in to compatibility problems that are kernel-bound (usually, interfaces that have been changed or obsoleted), in which case static linking won't help you, and statically linked binaries are bloated (thus, taking a lot more memory). You really just got lucky with that version of Quake.

Well, I can't vouch for the GP, but my ISP has a very flaky DNS service. For some reason, every 3 out of 10 queries for a given DNS returns a NX - or (in layman's terms), every 3 (at least) out 10 times I try to access a website (that is, one specific website, 10 times), Firefox says the domain doesn't exist. After the first 3 errors the domain is found and cached, and all is well, but this annoyed me to no end.

There were some days when it was bad, and others days the problem never showed up. After trying to diagnose the problem on my end, I finally concluded the problem were my ISP's servers, so I gave up and switched to OpenDNS. Never had the problem again.