This is an outstanding comment, and it's worded very well. I'm bookmarking this so I can reference it later. I'd mod +1 insightful if I had mod points, but this reply will have to do. Thanks for articulating so precisely how I feel about freedom and the 2nd amendment.

Nice try, verizon rep. I'm a sprint customer, and my coverage is excellent. My experience as a whole is much better than when I was on verizon and at&t before that.

See how using personal anecdotes as actual evidence is silly?

Mod parent up, please! This is perhaps the most maddening aspect of the whole ordeal, and the parent nailed it.

Not that I'm a huge Meg fan, but what the hell does her being female have anything to do with it? Honestly, why the gender attack? Would hiring another male for the job have elicited the same "let's find another failed male politician" remark from you? No, didn't think so.

Obligatory "Researcher Translation" xkcd.

I'd actually prefer to use Kubuntu for 11.04, but it turns out that the nvidia drivers are broken for both. Until they fix the nvidia drivers, there's no point in upgrading to either flavor.

What's shocking to me, more so than the new Unity interface, is the fact that so many nvidia cards aren't working. I know that this isn't an LTS release, but it's still really bad that such a huge bug went into the release version of 11.04. The issue spans across several generations of NVIDIA cards, on both desktop and laptop systems, and is confirmed in Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Shoddy testing doesn't begin to describe it. Bottom line, stick to 10.10 for another month or two, or just wait for 11.10.

(emphasis mine)

Ahh.. spoken like a true project manager! The "minor tweaking" might as well be measured in magical units of time that expand and contract at will. Until you actually look at each individual app on a code level, it's almost impossible to say how much work is involved. But management sure does love to hear about how quick and easy it will be! That's generally a "minor" amount of time before they can your ass for blowing your deadlines.

Right, _you_ may take the latter any day, but I think Ubuntu's point is that most people will take the former. Certainly more so when you consider their target demographic and the direction they're taking the platform (tablets, netbooks, etc). It seems to me that they're aware that they're trading in some geek cred in exchange for more ubiquity and appeal to greater masses. Some of the more tech-centric, niche features of Ubuntu will certainly drop-off in exchange for visual appeal and ease-of-use to attract a greater audience.

I welcome the direction, especially considering that we geeks we still be able to easily switch to a more traditional desktop environment if we so choose.

Exactly. The whole time I'm watching the news coverage and reading the article (crazy, I know...), I'm thinking "Ok, so where did this thing END UP, exactly?"

It seems to me that finding out where it went -- and what happened when it got where it was going -- are just as important as knowing where it came from. Why is no one asking about that?

Funny, I noticed the same thing!

I'm a huge n++ fan as well. But one thing about it drives me absolutely nuts: The constant UPDATES. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for free software that automatically updates itself. But it seems like every other time I open n++, it wants to update itself (which takes about 30 seconds start to finish). When I'm trying to do a quick edit to a file, the delay can be maddening.

I wish they would queue the updates to roll out once a week or something along those lines.

If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Why people do that is beyond me. If it's so offensive, stop reading and skip to the next article!

Or, to put that first part in non-douche: "Do you have any specific, tangible ideas about how to improve the products highlighted above?"

You raise a good question, but dude, come on. The way you worded it made it sound like a condescending PHB preparing for a departmental meeting.