He lives in New York, he's always swung from the multitude of high rises.

There is nothing wrong with the word Theory, the problem is that the people that are looking for arguments against evolution use the wrong definition.

There's a lot to this kind of thing. I worked in a help desk once where a system was promised to be rolled out by X date. The contractor brought on all the staff based on that promised, kitted out the building with all the required hardware to provide the support and... nothing. The guys couldn't be fired, and there was no other contracts to move them on to, so they sat around waiting for the software to finally be rolled out.

In other words, it's not just the software that cost all the money, all the fuck-ups along the way compounded and inflated the price tag way beyond what it should have been.

You're assuming that the machine RHEL is installed on is a server. If you have mission critical desktop machines, wouldn't you pick RHEL for that?

Surely this level of pandering is an extremely bad thing?

If we're telling our sysadmins that they don't have to learn a new desktop environment, what's the point in them learning anything else? For example, at some point, their favourite firewall software might be discontinued, but we shouldn't pander to them telling them that the old way was certainly best. If they don't want to learn about new firewall software, they're not going to be in their job much longer as their network is hacked.

New != Bad
Old != Good

We should be looking at everything in terms of their own merits, not based on what is going to cause the least tension for stuffy users that want things to always be done their way.

Well... that's precisely because it is unrefined and not finished. At the moment, they're only running enough on there for it to work as a phone. The design team are putting together theming stuff right now. It's a brillian piece of multitasking, which all companies to. While one group is working on apps, and doing rather well, the other team is holding back on any designs until it is ready.

To say there is no mass-market appeal is too early to say right now. Sure, I don't predict that there's going to be a great deal of adoption, but I do feel that some people will really take to it. I'm personally keeping an eye on it for that moment that it does become a viable replacement for my android phone. It's not there yet, but I'm confident it will be.

As a power user, I have to disagree, at least on the unity front.

For starters, I have created my own .desktop files which are pinned to my unity side bar. This means I can right click on my terminal icon and quickly ssh in to any server.

Next up, I can very quickly get to menu items by hitting the alt key and typing what I want. For example, in gimp, pressing alt and typing crop is a lot quicker than lifting my hand off the keyboard and using my mouse to hunt down the menu item. Additionally, it's a lot more intuative than remebering "alt+key" combinations.

Finally, just *starting* and app is so much faster than it ever was in gnome, or xfce. I just press super and start typing. All I need to press if F and firefox is already the selected app.

I really don't understand what "power users" feel like their missing, considering I'm one of them and I'm not missing anything in the slightest.

The thing is that the preception *here* is completely different to the perception over at sites like OMG!Ubuntu! This place has a hard core tech audience who seem to like things done their way or not at all. As soon as something Ubuntu related gets posted, everyone here starts arguing against it. However, OMG!Ubuntu is a site that has had to constantly change its hosting over the last few years because with each new release, the founder is finding that the current set up can't deal with the new influx of traffic.

Ubuntu is popular, it works extremely well, and contrary to what a lot of people say on here, Canonical is not trying to force unity down your throat, and not trying to destory linux. Canonical is working hard on that Linux Phone that people desperately want but the only thing ./ers seem to have against the Ubuntu phone is that it's not their distro of choice. What I see mentioned here all the time when Canonical start working on something to replace some old tech is that they suffer from NIH (not invented here). Well I put it to slashdot thaters they have their own disease, and it's called NMD - Not My Distro, and that is primarly what causes a lot of the Ubuntu hate.

I would actually like to know what metrics you're using for this.

I've taken a look at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm, and it seems that, while it's not a perfect metric, Ubuntu is the only Linux OS (except android) which is actually creating more hits per month since this time last year.

Sure, this is not perfect, but considering that Fedora, Arch, and SUSe are all down and Ubuntu is up, it looks like Ubuntu is getting stronger.

Well no one is actually asking *anyone* to put it on their phone right now because it's still in development. They're just looking for testers right now. If you can't spare time or money to test then don't worry about it. If you can, sure, go ahead.

I think you might be taking this argument to extremes. The gender of our monarch doesn't matter here. Be they male, female, or a pot of icecream, what is put in front of the monarch by parliament is what shall be read out.

The queen is actually very forthcoming with her own opinions, especially when talking to lawmakers both here and abroad. We should consider this only ceremony, and not try to delve any deeper into it.

I would disagree. It's nice to think that royaly has some for of power in the country, but in reality they do not (at least, not in the UK). The Queen's speech will have been written for her by Parliament, so in instances like this, her opinions are not really her own.

Many Brits will agree (though not all), that having a monarchy does a great deal of good for our nation and the commenwelth, strengthening reltationships, and providing a massive tourist industry.

Worth every penny in my books.

I don't know if you've seen/heard much of what Mark Shuttleworth has ever said, but he is clearly very passionate about Linux and open source. I get this feeling that a lot of people are attributing to malace that which can easily be attributed to a differing opinion. He doesn't want to destroy linux, he doesn't see it as a play thing, but he does want to give users a great experience, give administrators/engineers a great platform, *and* make some money out of it. The latter point seems to be what many people have an issue with, which to me is insane! Just take a look at Geary. They've been asking for $100,000 for an email client, yet Canonical are trying their best to give you the best desktop environment for free, while persuing a buck in other ways.

I have been thinking long and hard about this and I can only come to this conclusion. It is a nice feature. It needs tweaks, so results for photoshop don't pop up, or if they do it should explain it's not compatible with Linux. But what it needs more than anything, which is something Canonical keep missing out of all of their super new features is a simple tickbox for on or off. I understand that this is still beta, and it's certainly not LTS so it is more or less a testing platform, so I'm not jumping up and down right now. Canonical have proven to me that they can iron things out between normal releases and LTS, and I'm happy to accept that this may well be the case here. I'm basing this on evidence that I have seen over the last 4 years, not just what Mark says. This really is a great step forward for UX, as it is saying "hey, let's do more 'cloud' stuff from the desktop." Think about what else will be possible with a bit of thought. We could have it bring up all of your photos, from all sources (picassa, facebook, twitter) and present them in one place. I could type something like "London" into my dash and it shows me all the photos I've taken in London, a list of all my friends who are currently *in* London, and maybe sell me a London guide book. I cannot begin to express how awesome features like this can be. Amazon is only a single step to a full set of amazing features, and we must remember that these aren't *ads.* I am searching for a product, I can chose to buy it, and I won't get prompted to buy anything similar next time I fire up the dash. One thing that I also think is important to remember, is that we are a set of pretty clued up power users and as such we will see problems and we will jump to justify why something is a bad idea. However, if I were to install this on my Dad's laptop tomorrow, I can guarantee he would actually be quite thrilled with this feature. This is Linux for Human Beings and I think product searching is a very human thing to have.

Run a program that only allows whitelisted applications, and block all removable media. It's the only way you can be absolutely certain there is nothing running on your network that shouldn't be there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitelist#Application_whitelists