That's a good argument. I am losing my mod points to post this. Your point is that we are polite (sic impersonal) to people whom we aren't closely associated. That's true up to an extent but we are living in a society that actually encourages overconfident (sic rude) and boisterous behavior. In a family, the assertive sibling prevails over the quieter ones, more looked after by the parents, at work the loudmouth employee prevails over his peers and is more favored by the boss. Consciously or subconsciously we all appreciate overconfident behavior unless it affects us personally. But there is a visible shift in social perception of overconfidence, what was considered overconfident behavior in past (say 60's) is now more acceptable, and a standard behavior more or less.

Dell does offer a "N Series" model on their Vostro family of laptops and desktops, that are shipped without any pre-installed OS.. All you get is a FreeDOS installation disk for free; better still there is no "Designed for Windows xx" logo on these machines.

And interestingly, Apple is smart enough to understand that the tablet/smartphone UI isn't optimal for a PC based OS. They seem to have no intention to force their touch screen UI on Mac OSX, as GNOME, Unity and now Windows 8 seem to be doing.

I tried out with a fresh install on a separate partition first. But that was even worse, the system didn't get to hibernate at all. Finally i decided to go for an upgrade, since it didn't make any sense to run an old version for long. True, their upgrade process isn't that good, some old configs get deleted. Also, never try to upgrade with YaST, i.e while being booted in the old version, you are most likely going to end up with a broken system.

The biggest thing they have fucked up in 12.1 is the power management. I now do get around 15 mins of extra battery backup on my 4 cell Vostro laptop, compared to version 11.2, but the system refuses to gracefully shut down or hibernate most of the times. Plus, the boot up time has gone up by 1 minute.

I still prefer them over Fedora though, which is always shipped with random anaconda bugs. Also openSUSE's software repo setup is a breeze compared to Fedora.

I think the GP meant these : http://www.google.co.in/search?q=usb+number+pad&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=D1p&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Gu23T5bcEIrlrAe8_9TeBw&ved=0CHkQsAQ&biw=1362&bih=561&sei=Ke23T7zEAoHYrQfbkbmNCQ . The 'Fine Original Post' is probably complaining of full size USB keyboards and if that isn't the case I really don't understand whats his problem with externally connected keyboards or keypads. Those might be inconvenient to carry around but you probably won't either require serious Num typing while sitting at a coffee shop or a hotel lobby. Serious typing work calls for a full size external keyboard; laptop keyboards just aren't convenient enough.

I do think its a problem if one tries to add a new empty panel after deleting the default. KDE pulled out the resize button since the 3.x release; the panel won't occupy the full width until you add enough widgets on it; which i suppose indeed is very annoying. This isn't a bug, it appears they want it to work that way. There's more to the list of KDE stupidities, you cannot drag a widget in the panel to change its position; cannot add a desktop icon for your custom binary or script etc. Compared to GNOME 3 insanity though, KDE is still a very usable desktop.

Maybe it could make a difference; NVIDIA joining the Linux foundation. So far, on openSUSE, their closed source drivers available via YaST repos fail to detect the installed NVDIA card in most of the cases. Since the bundled nouveau driver isn't good enough, currently the only alternative to get them working is to compile their default proprietary driver(s) into the kernel.

Just curious about this, will Mozilla get paid for any search made directly from the google.com homepage opened from Firefox (that is, by not using the Google/Firefox start page or by selecting Google from the search engine list)?

I agree. Those who want to sound politically correct (gender equality/neo-feminism being one of those areas) shouldn't write fiction, they should relegate themselves to lower forms of literature like magazines or newspapers. The concept of female superiority is as absurd as male superiority. Its just the social conditioning that makes an individual suitable for a job or task regardless of the gender. If you read the works of some so called "misogynist" authors of last century (Maupassant, Saki etc), you might notice that most of their characters were equally shared by men and women of doubtful morals. But its just because their portrayal of the latter that they were labeled as misogynists. Fiction should come from heart; without any desire for praise, or fear of ostracism. Sadly, popular authors of this era seem to be guided by both these factors.

If you have a penchant for classics, try short stories from Twain, Saki, English translations of Maupassant and Kafka, HG Wells, O Henry and Oscar Wilde. A short story winds up in typically 15-30 mins and provides good reading satisfaction. And all works from these authors are in public domain, so those can be accessed freely online.

Are you saying that 5 year old machines don't have DVD drives..which world do you come from?

Wow! thanks for enlightening us Sir, that sounds incredibly easy. Could you please go ahead and write a stripped version of an existing language and then (co-)write a stripped version of an existing OS using it? The world will be indebted to you forever, believe me.

Not only they are extracting money from phone manufacturers, grabbing them by collar; they are also bragging about in their blog. What has software industry come to?