This is not (purely) for your benefit as a user, of course: the real reason they're doing this is so that they will get a better hint on which pages are actually relevant. You see, they can't track which of all pages you had to wade through that actually had the info you were looking for with the current system (since hitting "Back" to go back to the results page to try another result does not send any requests back to their server). But this way, if people start hovering over links and only click on the ones that appear the most relevant, they suddenly have a much better data than before (and the competition). Very smart move.

Agreed. There is a lot to be said for a consistent, unified, and integrated desktop experience. For example, a GNOME app will not magically start to use my KDE wallet for storing and retrieving passwords, just because I've managed to put some makeup on it and have it look almost similar to proper KDE applications. Same goes for the underlying systems such as KIO slaves as opposed to GnomeVFS.

You can get GNOME and KDE apps to play well on the surface, but you miss out on the deep integration offered by choosing just one environment.

Fair enough, that obviously would be very bad. What if there could be a program that monitors your system for a period of time (including e.g. DBus events), and uses this to get a pretty good idea what your system actually requires from the kernel and provides a "smart" kernel config for you?

However, I realize that the main reason companies such as Canonical don't want this stuff to be in Ubuntu is because it would create a support nightmare. They want your kernel to be the same standard one that they use, otherwise dealing with "my program XYZ crashes all the time, I'm paying you, fix it now, dammit!" would be horrible, even more so than today.

Unfortunately, I find that the opposite also is true, namely that > 1.0 not necessarily implies that the software is stable. This is not unique for the FOSS community, of course.

Absolutely. You could try Zero Install[1]. The list of software[2] is pathetically small (it does, however, provide useful apps such as Firefox, Inkscape, and Xara Xtreme), but there are ways of generating your own package. So, you could just generate your favorite packages and either publish them on the web or carry them with you on a USB stick or something. I don't think this will be the future package management system to rule them all, but it is nice to be able to install an app you need without spending ages compiling it (and its dependencies!) or by requesting that your systems administrator approves a request, which could take a long time, particularly if your request is uncommon.

[1] http://0install.net/
[2] http://0install.net/injector-feeds.html

As the product page explains, it is intended for the developing markets. It has the same limitations.

Your claim that "[t]hey wrote the best programs they could to perform different tasks in each language and compared the results" is incorrect. That is not how the Language Shootout works, unfortunately.

From the FAQ (emphasis theirs):

To me, at least, this makes the test results quite useless, unless you want to compare two languages that are very similar to begin with. Thus, comparing a functional language that is amazing at dealing with parallelism (e.g. Erlang) to a procedural one (e.g. C/C++), for instance, is likely very unfair if the same algorithm must be used.

The question, then, is whether Java and C/C++ are similar enough so a comparison like this one can be made. Given their close score (for time consumption, not memory usage) I would say yes, but that is also the only thing these tests show.

Actually, Sweden does censor the Internet for its citizens as a protection against child pornography.

Interestingly, this was used once in an attempt to shut down the Pirate Bay, because it was accused of "hosting" child porn -- yet the accusation did not indicate what torrents were believed to be of that kind. This means that all the Big Media people have to do is to just point at a site and scream "child porn" to shut down a site here in Sweden. Lovely.

Yes, in fact, HtmlUnit is my preferred browser simulation library in Java for this very reason: it allows you to write very easy to understand Java code, and it uses Rhino as a JavaScript interpreter. Completely brilliant, and yet few people know about it.

While not on topic, this seems like a good time to link to the It's All Text! extension to Firefox. It adds a tiny button below all text areas on web pages. Click it, and you get to edit the text in your favorite text editor. The text is loaded automatically when you save (flashes the text area too, so you know something has happened). It is extremely good.

And to be on topic: this stuff is hardly new, but it will likely be something that people will use in the future. Google has that office suite that seemed to be somewhat popular for different reasons -- integrating many of these webapps into one unified GUI seems like a logical next step.