These pictures are of a salt refinery. What they do is put salt water into large shallow pools and let the water evaporate in order to collect the salt. You can see the salt in the picture, too.

Pfft. I don't even used systems that don't come with systemd and Gnome 3 by default.

These PEBKAC exploits happen more often than you might think on Linux

Back in the pre-Gnome 2 days a lot of distros actually used to offer you a bunch of choices at install time which DE or WM you wanted, but that trend changed when distros started to focus heavily on offering one desktop experience that the system was targeting. Some distros would have separate teams working on different environment packages, so technically with distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, other desktops are available at install time, but you have to select the appropriate installer because they have different install images now. With many distros installing an additional desktop environment after the default can basically be done by typing a command.

My hat goes off to you because you go above and beyond the average usage case. Plus you know what you need, which is important.

What I get from a lot of commentators is that they feel betrayed like Gnome 3 is somehow forced on them, or just saying that they don't like how it works. I'm in no way trying to say that everyone should have to use Gnome 3 (desktop choice is important, after all), or that it must clearly be the best desktop ever (to be honest there's something special about Gnome 2 / MATE that is hard to replace). I just want to say that it's a little unfair that Gnome gets this angry sea of negativity, with people suggesting it's the worst DE ever conceived by man. It may not tickle everyone's toes, but it's not THAT bad.

I have been using Gnome 3 on Fedora for about a couple years now, and I honestly can't understand why people don't like it. In fact, I don't really feel like using other UI's anymore because Gnome 3 is too efficient. Yes, it still has its quirks. The title bar is a little big and gets obnoxious when you maximize some applications, but I'm willing to accept that in order to get everything else it offers.

The best thing about Gnome now is that it doesn't get in my way. Switching apps/windows is easy. All the useless crap I don't need to see has been taken off the screen. The application launcher is nice, though nothing particularly innovative because anyone who has used Mac OS X or Windows 7 knows what it's doing.

I'm guessing that people who don't like Gnome 3 never really learned how to use it, like people who say they hate vim. Learning how to use Gnome 3 isn't even that challenging in itself, as the main keyboard shortcuts are very standardized. Launcher and window behavior are exactly what you'd expect them to be. It's fast and sleek, end of story.

Also it can't be denied that the desktop has undergone appreciable improvements with literally every release. Two years ago the keyboard layout switcher was broken, but now it works beautifully (this feature is important to me because I switch layouts a lot). Fedora 22 has just gone into beta, and if you want to see what Gnome is like now then you can give that a spin. Like I said, I don't use anything else anymore, although when I want to remember what using Windows XP was like, I'll load up KDE or XFCE or LXDE or something. Plus if you're really that attached to Gnome 2, Gnome 3 got a "classic" mode several releases ago which basically duplicates Gnome 2's UI features. You'll get your drop-down app menu back and the little task bar at the bottom.

Language is pretty complicated. The culture among linguists today is summed up by this rule: "Keep it descriptive." While I agree that description is important and useful, I think that it's possible to throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying prescription *completely*. Yes, pedantry is awful, and so being overly prescriptive isn't helpful, but there has to be some possible argument at times for why prescription is beneficial.

Windows 8 is OK. What I find problematic about it is that the traditional desktop and Metro seem to clash with one another even though you can use them both simultaneously. On the outside you want to pick which environment you want to spend the most time in; if you want to stay in Metro, then use only Metro apps, but if you want to live in the Desktop, then you find yourself avoiding any Metro apps. It's just too hard to mix the two together.

Assuming, however, that you just want to use the Desktop all the time, Windows 8 is not that big of a deal. It boils down to the fact that they took away the start menu, and that apparently drives people nuts. Personally, I don't even like the start menu. The programs you use all the time end up being pinned to the task bar, and for the occasional other program, you just hit the Windows key and type in its name. It's really not hard, but people just don't figure this out. My uncle got a new Windows 8 laptop last week, and right when he got it I told him three or four times to use the Windows key and type in order to search for the program he wanted, and he *still* would just open the start screen with the mouse and then open "All Programs" and sit there reading all the entries in order to find the program he was looking for. A few days later he said, "You know, I realized I can just hit the Windows key to switch between the Desktop and the start screen."

I would consider Windows 8 to be an upgrade from 7, but people struggle with the interface changes. Windows 7 has a more "pure" UI experience, and it's what people expect.

As much as I hate to say this, Facebook is really the only service that offers "everything." First of all, you can message anyone on Facebook by their name, so now you've eliminated the need for addresses/screen names. Facebook messages can be long like e-mails, and conversations can span weeks or days, or they can be short like instant messages and carry on in real time. Facebook messages can include multiple recipients like e-mail conversation, or in the same way it can be like a chat room. You can access it through the web, mobile apps with push notification, or desktop software. It automatically syncs the inbox/history across all platforms; you basically never miss a message. You can attach files, embed photos, and so on. The only thing that e-mail does better is lets you have multiple conversations going on simultaneously with the same person, categorized by subject (they could probably implement this with some sort of conversation forking option).

Various services offer all these things in slightly different ways, but never wit the same level of accessibility and unification. Google tried to step into Facebook's territory and ended up with 3 distinct messaging services: Gmail, Talk, and G+ Messenger (mobile). On top of that you can "inbox" people on G+ by sharing posts with notifications. The integration between Gmail, Talk, and Android can give you a sort of omni-chat experience, but it simply lacks the cohesion and ease of Facebook.

As for Skype, it is coming close to offering what Facebook offers in terms of chat features, but a) their mobile app needs to be more "mobile", and b) they need a good web interface.

The obvious course of action for Skype is, if the French government considers imposing regulations on Skype, to deny service to France. The French government is not powerful enough to put Skype in a disadvantageous position; all Skype has to do is pack up its bags and leave, and then France will be denied the revenue it was after and will also have to deal with a bunch of angry constituents.

Not all DRM is evil. It really depends on who is applying it, when, where, and how. DRM is an ugly name for a set of technologies that have their uses; if I agree to let Netflix stream a movie to me and understand that my computer is going to encrypt and handle it in such a way that I won't be able to save or download the movie, that's OK with me; I'm still the one in control. That doesn't mean proprietary video streaming will always be crammed down my throat.

Using DRM in this way is a great boon for open technology. In this case it's helping HTML5 video to stand on its own and be established as a universal standard. When the standard become more popular, it becomes easier to utilize it for our own libertarian purposes. This will get people off of and away from disgusting things like Flash and Silverlight. It's a win win situation.

I used to block ads because they slowed down my computer or interrupted what I was doing. For example, if an ad was a popup of some sort, or if it had to load a plugin like flash. 10 years ago I had an Athlon XP 3000 with 256mb of RAM, and with my internet connection and computer speed even normal ads slowed down my browsing. The most logical thing to do was block the ads; I never even looked at them anyway, and I certainly had never clicked on an ad.

Fast forward to now, I have an Athlon II 4x, 8gb of RAM, and Google Chrome, and ads just don't seem to make a difference anymore. I don't notice the time it takes for them to load, and they generally don't get in my way. Now just installing an ad blocker would be a hassle. On systems that are a little sluggish I will mainly just use a flash blocker, which I find to be more simple and effective than ad blocking.

I don't believe very strongly in online advertising. It works effectively for some companies, but also there is this prevailing notion that you can make any web-based company/endeavor work just with ads. Not everyone is entitled to a slice of the pie; I'm not going to stay awake at night wondering if video game bloggers are getting paid to blog about video games or not. Let them eat cake.

I use serveral operating systems frequently due to work (and it used to be my hobby). I appreciate OS X's desktop interface a lot, but I don't realy understand Miguel's justification that Mac "just works" in terms of package availability and the quality of the base system.

It's no secret that OS X's base is lifted from FreeBSD. Is Linux too fragmented and chaotic for you? Do you long for a complete and and integrated system base in a single source tree, backed by unified development effort? FreeBSD has that. It also has very high package availability (better than most Linux distros).

On the Linux side, I use Fedora. I never have any trouble finding packages for Fedora. The quality that gets put into the base system of Fedora also leaves little to be desired.

I don't fault Miguel for his choice. OS X is nice--it gets the job done. I just don't think OS X is really giving him something special that he couldn't have gotten with Linux, BSD, or even Windows. If he misses the development toolchain of Linux, he should go back to Linux; that's totally understandable.

There are lot of companies in places like China and Taiwan that are able to manufacture mobile devices. Because of Android's liberal licensing, a lot of these companies have churned out Android devices under brand names that you've never heard of. If Ubuntu software is equally or more liberally licensed, they will be more than happy to slap this free software on their devices and flood the market with them cheaply.

Of course, I forgot to add that in many countries blasphemy is not the real issue, but rather the blasphemy card gets played as an excuse for politically motivated censorship. The reason why states often clash with sites like YouTube is because they perceive them as vehicles of foreign influence and a challenge to their authority.