I get that, but I'm not sure how that benefits the study.

It seems to me, the goal of the study was to see how much of an impact a cellphone has on people not noticing their surrounding - not to see how primed Americans are to thinking of people who follow Islam as terrorists. Your suggestion would certainly be an interesting study but I'm not sure it's useful to the goals of the study in question.

Why do you think that would that be a better experiment?

I think the implication is that, no, it's not common...

Yeah... until you're the one who has to support the code that this monkey wrote. If you're going to put comments, at least put comments that will help others understand what you're doing...

Actually, the same is true for Linux. glibc anyone? Older applications don't always work on newer distros. It's just that a lot of stuff is rebuilt in the distros repos. It's not a failing of stability, it's more an advantage of the package manager systems then anything.

Actually, I think I can answer this. At home I run Linux and at work we have Windows XP. Can you say, with a straight face, that Linux has anything close to what Outlook+Office+exchange allows you to do (and does it as well)? Yes, there are things that we can do that are "equivalent" but with Windows having it all integrated is a time-saver. Heck, Outlook 2007 uses Word as a default editor. Can you say the same thing about Evolution or Thunderbird or KDE's equivalent? Outlook's calendar is very easy to read whereas evolution's display (or at least its default one) looks like crap. The point is there's tons of "little" things that add up.

That said, I will always have Linux on my personal computer(s). But honestly, using Linux would likely make my company's employees less productive just by not having the Office suite available. That productiveness makes up for the cost of Windows when you break down the time saved. Until there's something available on Linux (or some distribution) that is at least as good as the Office suite then it's not worth it to switch.

In my opinion (based on doing web development in college) the "Web Designer" & "Design Technologist" descriptions need rolled into one title. The person doing the mockup needs to understand how websites and what is possible with HTML besides knowing how "to design". I'll give an example why.

One of the university's divisions hired a company to do the design of an event website for them (which we'd normally do internally). This company's expertise was in advertisement and it showed. While it looked beautiful it didn't look like how one expects a website to look and was incredibly ackward to develop for.

I think you stopped reading a couple sentences to early.

Emphasis is mine.

I haven't been impressed with Ubuntu's quality control of late. Do you know what you'd be looking for in a distro?

The one advantage I can think of is that Debian has a fairly significant amount of packages available in their repositories. Perhaps it's easier to port over the kernel than to port over all the resources Debian has at its disposal.

That's only a guess though. I'd still like to hear a well-thought out answer to your question. Every other thread seems to have moved in to tangents totally removed from the article (surprise!)...

Another question I have is, as a desktop user, do I even care? I have never tweaked my kernel so is switching "which kernel" my computer uses really going to noticeably affect me when I'm keeping Debian's userland? I realize that there are some that do tinker with the kernel but I would wager that a majority of users don't.

Out of curiousity, which distros actually default to pulseaudio? I know Fedora did a year ago (and I assume it still does). Debian defaults to alsa so I've never had a problem with sound. I would hope that only distros trying to be on the "bleeding edge" would be using that...

You can install synaptic easily on debian and it actually comes with Lenny if you select the desktop "package". It'll automatically check for updates. You could always put the updating into a cron job, so you never have to do it. I'll probably do that once lenny goes to stable.