I'm a long time GNOME user myself, and have tried the new KDE release for a couple of days... I absolutely have to disagree. I was happy coming back to GNOME. I find the performance of KDE to be on par with GNOME, with GNOME far outperforming KDE in terms of stability. Also I don't like the overkill KDE is using in its interface, I find it too distracting to get any real work done. It probably all comes down to personal preference? I like running more minimalistic GUI's as opposed to having the GUI in your face all the time.

So I just removed OO.o from my Arch installation and replaced it with LO. Looks just the same except LO adds a systray icon. And the copyright notice still says Oracle on it.

Well if everyone had your attitude, we'd never have left the trees!

How do we belgians fit in there again?

Ordered mine in September and it should be on it's way any day now!

Some flashlight!

Good arguments all of them - one but though: I know Norway isn't *that* close to Russia, which makes it exactly this weird... either that's a freaking large missile or it faulted pretty close to Norway. From the footage it looks like the spiral is forming over the next hill...

Several things contribute to me not going for the rocket explanation:

• - Highly symmetrical pattern. Most if not all rocket explosions you can find footage of, show erratic patterns instead.
• - Same thing happened in 2006 in Russia and another poster linked to a Chinese video of this phenomenon. These look exactly the same though different occasions.
• - Why would Russia fire a missile from their (and the) largest submarine this close to Norway? It would be too dangerous this close to population especially if it's a test launch.
• - On these pictures as well as the older footage, the larger spiral seems to be radiating light (not just the center or one point which could be an exhaust - the whole spiral emits light).

It's probably just me, but I smell a cover up in the guise of a failed Russian missile launch ;)

Apparently it's not the first time: http://topufo.com/ufosightingvideos/143-spiral-ufo-russia-2006.html

Images still not showing up here, not even after a refresh... Did anyone figure out in the mean time if this was a real event or not btw? It looks too perfect, which makes it stand out of the footage as something that shouldn't be there. I'm going to call hoax on this one. If its's not - all the better :).

There's a perfect solution for this: manufacturers really need to stop preloading Windows on everything... Leave the OS disconnected from the HW and offer it as a separate item, + installation costs if you can't install it yourself. And while they're at it, they can take that ugly Windows key and stick it where the sun doesn't shine. Really.

Slightly off topic, but it's often forgotten that the filesystem also plays an important role in drive performance. Newer filesystems like NILFS (http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7345/1.html) are created to suit SSD's instead of the legacy rotating media. It claims to hold the same performance, no matter how large the filesystem is.

Back on topic: We're seeing the same evolution with SSD's now like we saw it with spinning media several years back, when they started to increase the drive size ever more. Eventually these performance differences between larger and smaller drives will disappear: they will simply not be an issue anymore at all when you won't be able to get SSD's smaller than 200GB, like the similar trend with spinning media.