You press the pop-out button on the Styles pane. It creates a floating tool window rather than a sidebar.

These pop-out buttons are standard in the Ribbon UI.

The Agincourt map wasn't "on a hill." He misremembered.

If you don't see the blatantly obvious differences between GNOME-Do/Windows start search and the bash shell, you are beyond help.

Thank you for once again proving why the majority of Slashbots Don't Get It(tm).

Flickr comes to mind. Personally I like it more than Picasa.

Delicious used to be good, but I've never used Google Bookmarks. I use Xmarks.

Oh, and keep in mind that this lets them tie in and monetize Flickr (huge), Del.icio.us (also huge), and Yahoo's other services.

If you knew anything about the business, you wouldn't say that.

Microsoft's search strategy is long-term. Giving up a sizable profit for now (I strongly doubt that they're losing money on it, but the numbers tell you their overhead pretty clearly) gives them:

-Yahoo's search engineers, who will move to Microsoft
-A company with experience in ad sales and portal development
-Over twice the market share

This is a long-term run at Google, not something to keep Slashbots entertained for the next week or so.

Yeah, Mono apps are so hard to write to be both command-line and GUI-accessible!

Oh, wait, they're not.

Yeah, Mono is such a monoculture! It doesn't have support for a dozen different languages, perhaps more!

Oh, wait, it does.

(And it can use Qt too; that's my GUI toolkit of choice in it.)

I understand that you're a Schestowitz-sucking little troll on the same level as Mark Fink, but let's actually have a little bit of honesty here, hmm, fucktard?

I know, and I generally turn it on if I ever have to deal with a Linux X session for any length of time, but it doesn't look as nice as ClearType or OS X's font rendering. You say I can tweak it, and I say "but it should just work out of the box."

Font rendering is a real shitshow on Linux (spacing issues, kerning, all sorts of crap everyone else solved years ago), but it is (very slowly) improving.

No; this is why I said that Windows doesn't do it all the time. However, as another poster noted, the start menu now has a search bar (not as flexible as Quicksilver or GNOME-Do, but good enough for exactly what it's for). Hit the Windows key, type "firefox", hit enter.

The control panel has been shuffled around, but mostly because they added new features. It, too, has a search bar. I don't bother hunting up icons; I just go to the search bar and type "programs" and hit enter, and Add/Remove Programs comes up, etc.

You make some good points. I like the command line, but only for quick-and-dirty stuff that I don't have to screw with regularly. However, normal end-user software should not have "thousands of paths". Ever. If you do, you are either dealing with very specialized software and people can just suck it up and deal with it, or your design is shit.

YaST is generally a good option, the problem is just that it runs on SuSE.

There are times when Windows doesn't "just work." But here's the thing: there are a hell of a lot fewer times than with Linux.

OS X is the best of the lot, but I can't afford a Mac.

Hint: you just replied to a fellow freetard.

The closest thing to a standard GUI app platform (especially a cross-platform one) is Mono. It's not perfect--I like MonoDevelop (and NetBeans, for that matter) a hell of a lot more than Xcode, though not as much as VS--but their interface designers have gotten a lot better and it's gotten leaps and bounds easier to deal with.

Of course, half-human morons like Mark Fink (Slashdot's very own twitter) and Roy Schestowitz piss and moan about Mono despite it being the only tool of its kind (hint: Java isn't). It's kind of pathetic.

The font issues are really, really noticeably bad in Linux these days. ClearType is patented, but I'd hope that GNOME or KDE could come up with something better than "durp, fuzz some gray in there!".