I recently went to xfce (xubuntu 12.04.) Before, I used Ubuntu (since 2007) and before Debian w/Kde 3 + Fedora w/Gnome 2.

This year I tried Kubuntu and Xubuntu in parallel and found Kde 4 a bit bloated, their (very nice) menus interferring my trivial tasks, and since the wireless detection failed, the network manager gadget never recovered from my manual configuration via ifconfig. The sound never worked at all (even when Ubuntu 10.04 worked like a charm in that same laptop.) The last ones may be related to mistakes from Canonical but I didn't want to give more time to the thing.

Xubuntu gave me a "fairly good" environment to work productively from day one, even with some limitations.

Well it's not just the LTS: several years ago I leaved RH and clones for good because of the RPM limitations (before YUM was incorporated.) Even from time to time when I tried a Fedora or a CentOS, I found yum too slow just for starting to download anything (yet I don't understand why... it feels a bit like the old java applets' startup), and very limited in packages compared to the debian/ubuntu counterpart.

Also, I have to support three Dell laptops and newer kernels tended to solve/improve some issues with the (cheap) hardware.

Good to know. Sadly I plan to remain with 12.04 in all of my machines because of the LTS thing. Hope to get some of those improvements with the updates.

> Don't be an incomplete and lacking project borne of frustration with other ones. (Xfce)

Ok AC, switched to Xubuntu 12.04 this month (from the great Ubuntu 10.04), and you're right, there are several instances for improvement.

But all in all I'm doing my work and the GUI is not interferring me (as happened when tested Unity and Gnome 3.) With more time I could try those "Gnome shell extensions thing" (whatever it is), but I'm too lazy (or busy?) and Xfce is just fine for me.

Java, Ruby, Python... Perl... none of these were invented for serving dynamic web pages. PHP did.

First, on any engineering courses the students take for granted the need for math/science. That's not your case, so take some time every class to explain why and how this could be useful for your students beyond passing the grade

Second, they usually had a very hard time with school math, so take it easy and by all means try to avoid showing how smart you are when dealing with the abstractions and the logic, instead focusing on how little is needed to cover most of your material.

Third, they don't enjoy the solution of very difficult problems or challenging exercises (like a science/engineering student does.) They really enjoy the simple fact of grasping the concepts and making something useful with that

Fourth, check your students' background. Be prepared to provide several high/elementary school sessions.

fifth, your students are very good for reading, so give them some literature partially related to math (for example a biography of Descartes showing some of his math discoveries.) That's a pretty good way to generate interest. If they're political interested, then talk about Marx's math manuscripts, etc.

Maybe the OP is talking about enabling incoming X connections. This varies with the display manager and its release, and sometimes does require the edition of a non obvious configuration file.

Or go Xubuntu.

I'm using it after trying Kubuntu (until now I can't use its interface to configure the wifi nor the sound), after discarding Unity (one instance per app is their target), and the "Classic Gnome" (several little things unpolished, but better than the previous.)

Now I'm using Xubuntu (xfce) for about three months and I'm very happy with it.

But after those measures the climate still will be changing (as happened from the start of the times).... what we need is a new technology (and science) for total climate control in order to suppress any change for ever.

I'm sure Microsoft can point to millions of users in lots of statistics and hundreds of focus groups about people liking clippy.

And is the same with the 99.9% of the experiments the scientists do: people just don't believe (how many experiments about potentially successful treatments for AIDS/Cancer/whatever get published on the news... who cares?)

For people to believe at heart in this or that thing, they need to see something working based in that experiment.... for example, "a new big touristic project for a new beach created (as predicted) by the GW".

Tsunamis, earthquakes, etc don't count... they are too random and always can be attributed to non natural sources.

In your view, a similar agreement with Google would also be prosecuted...

The O/R impedance mismatch may be a mental block but not the O/SQL one.

This complicates as the DBMS vendors are really good at improving SQL queries that doesn't necessarily fit the object model or the mapping layer.

For non trivial projects you end up applying the O/R mapping to replace the trivial SQL sencences, and the "raw" SQL (or even stored procedures) for the contrived or performance critical cases... which in the long term is a PITA.

> There's not even one Game, each is playing his own and wanting to "win" by whatever internal definition they have.

You need money to play any game, by whatever internal definition you have. And more to win... or because you win.

BTW, even if the CEO's priority is not the money, the shareholders (and most of the workforce) usually think different.

Apparently just the chapter 7 is about the XX:

  Chapter 1: Strategies, Approaches, and Methodologies, Chapter 2: Operating System Performance Monitoring, Chapter 3: JVM Overview, Chapter 4: JVM Performance Monitoring, Chapter 5: Java Application Profiling, Chapter 6: Java Application Profiling Tips and Tricks, Chapter 7: Tuning the JVM, Step by Step, Chapter 8: Benchmarking Java Applications, Chapter 9: Benchmarking Multitiered Applications, Chapter 10: Web Application Performance, Chapter 11: Web Services Performance, and Chapter 12: Java Persistence and Enterprise Java Beans Performance.

BTW, of course you should avoid the XX options, but when in need, it is better to have some authoritative reference than having to rely on the uninformative Oracle docs or random forums.