No, you're quite right, the newbies don't blindly do anything. I should have been clearer. I hear them complain about Win__fill_in_the_blank. I say, "Why not try Ubuntu? I can show you how." And I make a dual boot system, find out how they want their Desktop to look, which functions are important to them (multimedia, usually), and set it up for them. Takes me about half an hour.

Except with Unity, I can't do that customizing. So now it's no longer "Why not try Ubuntu?" That was my only point. And since that's how usage of Linux and the distros spreads, I think it needs to be made.

Bwahahahaha! Somebody! Mod parent up 5x funny! (And too true, salted with a tad of excess harsh.)

Yup. I'm no power user. More of a black-belt newbie. I used to spend quite a bit of time on the forums, mostly helping with installation and data recovery issues (when I could understand the question). Now? Without any conscious decision to move away, it's been a few months. Starting at about the time I installed a natty alpha and began to think that I might have to move away from ubuntu, if that was any indication of what it was going to be.

"newbies ... don't have expectations"

BS. Unless they've never used a computer before. Chances are, they're refugees from Windows. The problem some of us are trying to point out is that Unity can't be configured into something familiar for them. Gnome2 can, but I gather Gnome3 plans to take that away as well.

Result? Among too many of the potential refugees I know: "Oh hell. I guess I'll just go with Win7 if I have to learn a whole new Desktop anyway."

So now I'm suggesting Linux Mint. (And I'm having another look at Mandriva after the comment above. Haven't paid attention to them in years.) But it's still a shame. All that momentum behind Ubuntu, just evaporating because a bunch of geeks are the ultimate fools, the kind who don't know that they don't know. And what they all-too-obviously don't know is UI.

It couldn't be implemented perfectly, or even well. But it would be better than the current stream of logorrhea. It should at least be tried.

N900 voip calls over wifi work okay. I have a pretty sucky ISP (Time Warner / Roadrunner. Monopoly in my neighborhood.) and the bandwidth I get varies all over the map from less than 100KB to the advertised 1MB, but the voip calls work and don't drop. I am always starting to talk at the same time as the other person because of the jitter etc issues. Also, probably because I don't have my router set up right, for about half a second at the beginning of the call, speech is really chopped up. After that, I guess, it allocates the necessary bandwidth and it's okay.

Setup on the N900 is effortless, as people have pointed out. Enter the data, and the N900 finds the networks for you and hops on. What I haven't figured out, and I'd be glad if the parent mentioned how he did it, is how I can *stop* it from falling back to 3G. For some reason, it's always trying to route calls through T-mobile first and I have to keep selecting wifi.

My T-mobile plan is a $10/mo pay-as-you-go which, after the first year can be extended for $1/month. So, starting in July, I'll have cell service for $12 per year. I'm looking forward to it, since whole months go by without me using cell at all. Call quality on cell networks is crystal clear.

I have nothing but good things to say about Callcentric. They're 2cents/min, and ~$4 monthly for fees and 911 service. They do need a bit more savvy to hook up than Skype. Unlike Skype, though, they actually work all the time for every call. (I don't have anything to do with either company, except paying a bill for service.)

And where do these turkeys get off, telling me how to work? They should be making it easy for me to work *my* way -- it's called customizability -- and not coming up with some stupid touchy design for somebody else's box and telling me to wear it on mine.

That ie6countdown.com site needs a big "Get Firefox" button in the middle. Get to work!

Um, super secret tip. (Are we alone? Okay, then.) When your boss says jump, you say "How high?" Your boss is currently your prof. Your prof is going to be hugely unimpressed by your commitment to doing something he/she considers important enough for you to spend your own money on if you don't go. Your prof is the one who'll be writing letters of reference for you.

So, do you really want your prof to be hugely unimpressed with you? Networking is very important, as some of the other people down here in the I-work-for-a-living section have already said. Networking starts at home. Trust me on this. I'm a prof. And I've been in exactly the position you describe where I had a student who blew off what I thought was an important conference. I was hugely unimpressed. Etc., through the other consequences you might expect.

PHP users are both. Obviously.

(bwahaha. I'm not as nerdy as I thought I was. I hadn't even heard of lmgtfy before.)

If "Link, Please" would rather have a personal story of what happens when herd immunity is lost, here's a writer for The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/01/measles-mmr-vaccination.

Epidemiologically, about 1 in 500 measles cases result in death, 1 in 500 result in major brain damage, and so on. Young kids are the most susceptible. The rates of complications from the vaccine are on the order of one in millions, and do NOT include death, retardation, blindness. The math isn't that hard to do if you want to see what that means for unnecessary suffering due to reduced vaccination.

It's good that most children escaped the consequences of Wakefield's BS because enough were vaccinated to make it pretty hard for disease to spread. But the numbers are there showing that there were hundreds of excess deaths and life-changing disabilities, such as blindness or retardation, from kids not getting measles vaccines.

If it was Diaspora, I'd say, "Get a life." But I'm so sick of Zuckerberg's multi-billion smug mug, Facebook's lucky I'm not on that jury.

Seeding a minefield with indicator grass, I could see that working. Potted plants at airports catching passing terrorists? No.

I can hear them now: Ground crew to Terminal Control: "We need another delay on Flight 36983. The aspidistra at Gate 9 next to the guy with the briefcase may be kinda light green. We need more time!"