I know I can hide the top bar but what I did was deleting it and moving some of its components into the bottom one. This doesn't work so well for gnome 3 so far. It's my way of working vs their way and I'm thinking I better have to find another desktop environment.

Me too! I experimented with Gnome 3 in a VM, was unable to fix it in a satisfying way and then installed the Linux Mint desktop. Not as good as the Gnome 2 I have on my host system but much better than Gnome 3. I'll stick with Ubuntu 11.4 without Unity for a little while, waiting for a few things to mature in Mint 12. Don't ask me if Unity is better or worse than Gnome 3, it's very different but it's too close to call.

That picture you link is 1024x768 resolution. Unless it's from a very old monitor it is from something small (maybe comparable to the 10" tablet you write about) so there won't be much space left for anything else anyway. But on a larger display working in maximized mode would be unbearable. We agree on that.

I meant "they were so deluded but"... editing deluded me :-)

That mindset is called "cargo cult". I'm not sure they very so deluded but there are hints they are starting to listen. Quoting from one of the linked posts:

Maybe we'll get a Gnome 4 that works for us in some five years from now.

I believe that this new wave in the GUI design is due to the reductions of screen heights we experienced (suffered?) in the last years. On small screens maximizing windows and reducing the space for menus and toolbars is good design but probably the 4", 13" and 24" form factors need three different interfaces.

Actually somebody does legally race on public roads (but closed to traffic) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBauMfJ786E

Anyway, races are usually held on closed circuits because they are more convenient: racers are safer when accidents happens (check this for plausible examples), organizers can sell tickets, spectators have better views of the action from grandstands and they don't have to close roads to normal traffic. Nevertheless Monaco, Macao and countless other street circuits exist and are raced on every year, by cars and bikes. IMHO motorbike racing in Macao is even scarier than those Irish races in the first video.

Finally, the article on motorist.org linked by GP reports the results of some traffic experiments. It's an interesting reading.

Same for me but that's expected. What have I open on my Ubuntu desktop now? FF, Skype, Thunderbird, terminal, emacs. FF looks like the most complex application among them and the one with more data inside (many open tabs). I run top, sort by virtual image size and I see dropbox coming first (WTF?) in front of FF. Then nautilus and thunderbird as distant 3rd and 4th. Then clock-applet (wow). Dropbox and clock-applet are two really surprising memory hogs. I still remember when the process that filled my memory was emacs. It's a blip on the radar now.

I feel the same as you about Chrome: it looks a little faster but FF closed almost all the gap. I'm still on FF because of AdBlock, NoScript and Firebug. They have counterparts on Chrome (actually Chromium in my case) but not as good IMHO.

Damn, I only saw some HP mini computers at the *end* of the 80s but their hard disks were really the size of dishwater. I don't remember their capacity tough.

Amazing. How do you manage all those tabs? I bet there are desktop environments that crash with a fraction of that number.

I remember when a 360 kB floppy disk was considered a lot of space. A 10 MB IBM hard disk was physically big in those days, as large as the main case of the IBM PC it connected to.

In other news, hard disks are again bigger then computers nowadays - the Raspberry :-)