Two pair (4 wires) is required for 100 Mbit, Four pair (8 wires) for Gigabit.

Despite my own personal dissatisfaction with Unity, there are "lots" of people who actually like it. I found the launcher to be annoying and the transitions far less sleek than Gnome Shell. I work in a University where Ubuntu is the most popular distro of choice among the researchers & academics and most of them appear to like Unity. Unity does have some pretty cool features I'd like included in other Linux UIs, like the Application menu search feature - really cool. There are a few Mint users scattered around, even less Debian and the usual spattering of Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux.

I personally do not like Unity, but calling it a failure is pretty short sighted and obviously based on your own experience and the complaints of other /.ers. I have been running Ubuntu as my desktop OS for years now and ditching Unity for Gnome Shell and LDM for the GDM has brought me the best productivity - the simplicity of Gnome Shell really won me over, but that doesn't mean I think Unity is a failure. I guess I might as well be using Fedora, but I am familiar with Ubuntu's Debian heritage and it's where I feel most comfortable in the Desktop environment. I am a slave to frequent updates and cutting edge releases, so a little pain every now and again is fine for the advantages that the latest features offer me, as I'm quite happy to persist and nut problems out when they appear.

I have no opinion on Mir at first glance it seems silly to me to branch away from Wayland, but I'm sure they have their justifications. Considering the Steam presence on Linux it will make for some interesting times, it will certainly be an interesting battle among ideals.

Kind of hard to be upset when you aren't actually paying anything for the OS, I'm sure the Intel GPU support will be perfectly fine with Mir regardless of the active support from Intel.

This is a good idea, it's quite common in Australian houses now, to rotate your fire blocks/noggins between the wall studs 90 degrees so that the width which normally blocks all cable drops in the cavity becomes the height of the Noggin. This leaves a nice cable sized cap between the dry wall/plasterboard and room exterior to allow you to painlessly drop cables anywhere, in any room from the ceiling. I was worried about structural integrity, so far I haven't seen any houses with this arrangement been blown over by a big bad wolf - it is probably wise to check your building code whether this is a legal wall configuration in you area.

It is horribly convenient to have access to drop a cable anywhere you want, most conduit is ugly on the outside of the wall in my opinion. However, if routed inside the wall, the conduit would be a last layer of defense for any mice/rats crawling around inside your house against chewing your cables, if this is a concern in your area - in most places in Australia this is not so much of a concern. I do think some good cross house conduits/trays in the ceiling is a good idea for cable routing and management, but have never implemented this myself as yet.

http://www.hometips.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/wall-construction.gif?84cd58 - just rotate the fire blocks 90 degrees and you'll be thanking yourself that you thought ahead when you are trying to find room for the child/family member that you didn't plan for.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/quigley-nbn-co-to-deliver-1gbps-339301748.htm?omnRef=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com.au%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dnbn%2Bto%2Bdeliver%2B1gbps%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial%26client%3Dfirefox-a Sorry to put water on your fire; but this is for business only at the moment.