Don't forget the real dealbreaker for innovation: CEOs are legally required to turn a profit for stockholders. Throwing money away on unsure bets is not the best strategy for staying out of jail, should a "bet" go sour.
The parents and peers steer Black youths away from educational pursuits.
sic. Ow. My spelling nazi nerves are jangling. How can you spell a word two different ways in the same post, and not feel weird about it?
Also, you will always find what you're looking for. If you're looking for racism, you will find it. If you're looking for opportunities to learn and advance yourself, guess what you'll find?
I'll tell you like I told the other guy, further up the thread. Computers and internet access are available for free in several locations in any town in the US.
Seriously, even libraries in "East Podunktownville" have an array of 2 or 3 computers, now. I've seen them. Similarly, most schools with more than a dozen students have at least one student-accessible internet-attached computing device somewhere in the building.
It's not an XBox, and that may be a fatal flaw as far as the kid ever paying attention to it. If, on the other hand, the kid has the potential to get "the bug", then there are plenty of opportunities for rabid consumption of computer/internet time, without ever spending a dime.
My local Goodwill has several towers on the shelf - for a while, there was even a separate Goodwill shop next door to the main one, that had nothing but PCs, parts, components, peripherals, etc. - they shut it down because it wasn't making enough money to justify the extra employee. So much for "non-profit".
I'm not telling you not to hate Goodwill, but make sure it's for the right reasons.
A locally-owned thrift shop is usually a much better target for a box of donated items, and a local tech group (check the college, the library, the gaming shop) is usually a better target to score a cheap (or even free) PC or laptop. I don't know how many (dumpster-dived, trash-picked, or simply outgrown) machines I've given away over the years, simply because someone had a need for a computer, and I had one I wasn't actively doing something with.
It's due to the comparative lack of computer availability to young black teens.
Oh bullshit. A computer exponentially more powerful than the ones that we learned on can be found sitting on the curb on garbage day if you're willing to look.
A computer that can do more calculations per second, yes. Hell, my phone has more processing power than the computers I grew up using.
A computer a kid can have in his home and connect to the internet and mess around with the guts of, no.
Oh, are black kids not allowed to have library cards? Last I checked, there was free WiFi there. Wait, I know - black kids aren't allowed to use the school's computer labs. That's not true, either?
Huh.
A computer is not necessarily a prerequisite for internet access. Speaking of which, I don't know where you're from, but in most of the United States, one can acquire broadband internet service for less than $20 per month. Actually decent speed, too, none of this "1mb down, 128k up" crap that some providers call broadband. It might be a "trial" offer, only valid for 90 days, or 6 months, or something, but if the discount runs out, just hop providers. Most "major" providers have that as their standard rate for a "decent" connection, anyway.
I don't mean to sound like an oldster, or shout at you whippersnappers to get off my lawn, but back when I was paying $50 a month for a 14.4kb dialup connection to the internet, I actually went and got a job to pay for my information-seeking habit. The crazy things we had to do in those days, eh?
A dumpster-dived computer (or a castoff from a friend, neighbor, relative, school, office building, or any number of other sources for free or low-cost computing devices) can get a kid some hardware, a trip to the nearest school (ok, maybe "college" is a better term, there) can get a Linux disk, and a little internet access can get software to do just about anything. Worst case scenario, the software to do "thing x" doesn't exist yet, and must be written. Surprise! There are tutorials for programming languages on the internet, too.
I dumpster-dived my second PC, when my first one (a ten-year-old "gift" of a 486 I gave my dad $200 for) died. I've had used parts (cannibalized from my previous machines) in nearly every computer I've ever owned, eventually. Come on, I use Linux, for crying out loud - if my personal machine worked absolutely perfectly at some point, I'd probably have a heart attack and die of shock.
There is something to be said for the proper amount of self-motivation. I think any geek worth the card knows exactly what I mean.
This book includes a reference to a study wherein subjects were shown a photo of a human before taking a test. Those subjects who were shown a photo of a white man outperformed those who were shown a photo of a black man, regardless of their own race.
I am inclined to accept this as an indication that American culture is prejudiced against black intellectualism. I don't know what the root cause is, and therefore have no idea how to approach this issue, but its existence seems to be arguably doubtless.
Have you got evidence that the NBA in fact doesn't reflect society? Yes, we can all think of why there might be more black 7 foot tall guys in the NBA that in society, but there's no excuse for not having the evidence to hand. The assumption that evidence will turn out as expected, especially for things that seem obvious, will make people not bother to check reality against what they're saying. This goes for all sorts of issues, such as the cause of ulcers, whether lower taxes increase government revenue, whether people act rationally, and so on.
"For some reason, blacks have come to represent the vast majority of players in the NBA, even though they form only 12 percent of the U.S. population."
The above quotes are from links available on the first page of the search results I linked to. They represent the trend of data returned by the Search, and are not intended to be linked directly to the articles in question.
White persons, percent, 2010 (a) 72.4% Black persons, percent, 2010 (a) 12.6% American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2010 (a) 0.9% Asian persons, percent, 2010 (a) 4.8% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2010 (a) 0.2% Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2010 2.9% Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2010 (b) 16.3% White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2010 63.7%
To ask why certain segments of our population are demographically absent from certain vocations is not to accuse you of racism, and shouldn't be seen as such; rather, it is an opportunity to answer questions and possibly improve our society as a whole.
But you see, the white man has been trained to avoid even the appearance of racism at any cost. Thus, attacking our social structure (which, arguably, has been built just as much by the "minority" groups as by any other, at this point) is automatically an attack on the white man.
If you want an answer to "why" there is racial conflict, gender conflict, homo/hetero conflict, etc, then you might consider who gains from the lower classes being at war with one another, rather than seeking out their common enemy.
-- Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to pay taxes and die.
About 0% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of this year are white with my ethnic background.
I'm tired of being lumped together with "rich white men" just because I'm white.
I understand and agree. I am a white male, over the age of 25. Thus, I cannot get a grant for being a "minority" ethnic group, I cannot get a grant for being a "minority" gender, and my age has nothing to do with anything, other than that I can no longer claim to be "just a kid" as an excuse when I screw up.
I am a member of the only minority group to not have special funding for being a minority group.
I don't understand this whole race thing - if I tried to start a college fund called the NAAWP, I'd be run out of town on a rail - I might even get sued for hate speech. Public opinion would certainly be against me; heaven forbid I should decide not to pull the white man down.
Otherwise, we can all stand around shouting that green people get more X than purple people, and they get more Y than purple people, too, and it's all just so unfair I could scream!
If anyone in America has an excuse to say "go home, get off our lawn", it's the "red" man.
If you are an American, and you are not a Native American (judging from your (lack of) intellectual capacity, you probably know them by the misnomer "Indian"), then you need to determine your pre-American ancestry, and ship yourself back to wherever you "came from". By your own misguided arguments, you have no right to be claiming a monopoly on American soil unless you can claim American heritage that predates the European Protestant Pilgrimage. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
"White guilt" has gone too far, I'll agree. Just like any other stereotypes, though, it has a factual basis. The Euro-trash who came over to this side of the planet over two centuries ago did some pretty horrible things - including biological warfare and attempted genocide of the people who were here for a long time before the white man showed up. The whole "black" thing is a bit much to be obsessing over, in my opinion, considering that the slaves were purchased from other dark-skinned guys, so they'd have been slaves whether they were shipped across the pond or not. On the other hand, that only accounts for the first generation... it's a big gnarly mess that we might be best off skipping over entirely, rather than apologizing to people whose dead ancestors were wronged by our dead ancestors. Can't we all just agree that some bad stuff went down, and move on from there?
Back to the subject at hand: you're arguing against yourself! Just because your ancestors immigrated a couple hundred years ago doesn't give you the right to go around threatening to shoot the new immigrants. This isn't me siding with the Native Americans (or the "blacks", or the Mexicans either), this is me telling you to pull your head out of your sphincter.
If people can find a way to buy $400 sneakers, they can buy a computer.
Sell the sneakers?
...
Seriously, though: there actually are cultural issues with black people and "smart" careers. I recently read a book called "Blink" that talked (among other things) about a study that was done wherein people were shown a picture of a person before they took a test, and the ones who were shown a white person before the test scored higher than the ones who were shown a black person before the test - regardless of the tester's race.
There are some serious cultural barriers, somewhere. The trick will be figuring out where they are, so that we can tear them down; all this arguing about what to do isn't accomplishing anything without conclusive proof indicating where the problem actually lies. I'm inclined to believe there is a cultural bias against intellectual pursuits in the "black" community, but I have no idea what the root of that bias is, so I have no idea where to even begin looking for a solution.
Supporting evidence: It is extremely difficult to determine the skin color of a well-spoken, educated person by staring at the monitor the subject is on the other side of an internet connection from...
It is also difficult to determine that someone's race, religious preference, or sexual preference via a phone interview.
Meritocracy, indeed.
Allow me to add some anecdotal evidence: I met my wife on IRC, and for 2 years after I met her, I thought she was a guy. She had a gender-ambiguous nick, was an "oper" in a large channel, and was an intelligent person with a keen wit. My experience up to that point had indicated to me that the only females on IRC were lonely housewives looking to cyber, so I never suspected that someone with a vocabulary including words larger than two syllables was anything other than "just another geeky dude". Like female gamers, female geeks used to be rare.
It's plausible, or it could be a continuation of the chronic lack of access to capital that exists elsewhere in Black America. Bill Gates would never have been able to found MS had he not had access to both connections and money to start things off.
I don't know if you've noticed, but "Black America" is not really that bad off, compared to "White America", "Hispanic America", or whatever label you want to apply to subsets of the people who live on this side of the pond. There's a recession on, and there are people with college degrees who can't get jobs at McDonald's.
I'm a "white people", living in a fairly well-off area of town, with about 25 years of experience in the field of "computer stuff". I have a garage full of cast-off systems, some of which came from dumpster diving. Some of them are in use in my home, and some of them are (low-end) production machines.
Your attempt at an ad-hominem attack is not only flawed, it's spitefully ignorant. This is the type of thing that stereotypes are made of - your label reads "attempts to pull the prejudice card on things that have no relation to race/color/creed/gender, in order to receive 'compensation' for imagined wrongs".
A computer isn't a learning tool any more than an automobile is. Some people just want to use it, some people want to take it apart and see how it works.
I have yet to see an automobile that not only comes with instructions on how to use it (pressed F1 lately?) but also has a built-in mechanism for rearranging your dashboard, changing how many pedals it has, or instructions for building/learning anything and/or everything you can think of.
Admittedly, for the computer to have these things requires internet access, but schools, libraries, and netcafes exist, and are fairly easy to access.
I have to agree with your post's parent that the "culture" a child grows up in (primarily the family environment) is a huge factor.
XFCE isn't "shiny" enough for my tastes - it feels like stepping back in time about a decade.
Add XFCE's lightweight compositing option + Cairo Dock and you have a very shiny desktop which is still lighter and more responsive than most.
The dock is actually one of the things I find objectionable - I started using menus about 20 years ago, and I'm kinda stuck on their functionality. The docks seem less about usability, and more about "adding crap to the desktop". The only thing I wanna see on my desktop is mounted filesystems, and that only because it makes the USB stick's removability immediately apparent. Anything more than that just clutters up my pretty desktop picture, or hides behind my open application that I'm doing work in. Worse still, the dock makes my maximized application window quite a bit shorter than it ought to be.
To put it another way, there are reasons why the users who are used to Gnome2 are screaming bloody murder.
On the other hand, I hadn't noticed before just how amazingly lightweight XFCE is... Less than 300MB of RAM used, with half a dozen programs actively running (including firefox! (admittedly with NoScript and AdBlockPlus)). It is now the default desktop on some of my older machines, and I'm starting to warm up to it, even with the dock down there instead of a full panel.
Yes, I'm aware I can "fix" the panel. My users run (mostly) default setups, so I do, too - it makes it easier to support other things if I'm not also fighting a strange desktop interface. Wobbly windows and desktop cube do not count as "non-stock", for this purpose - it's just a prettier method of doing the exact same thing it did before. On the other hand, moving everything in the entire interface... that's definitely "not stock". Shame on you, Canonical.
Slashdot Mirror
Taylor Mali, "What Teachers Make"
Just wanted to say, love your sig.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.
Oops, here come the off-topic mods.
Don't forget the real dealbreaker for innovation: CEOs are legally required to turn a profit for stockholders. Throwing money away on unsure bets is not the best strategy for staying out of jail, should a "bet" go sour.
The 1960s weren't very long ago.
As a matter of fact, 1961 was 50 years ago.
Half a century.
That's at least 2 generations, and conceivably 3.
Find a better tree to bark up.
As such, educational persuits are wasted.
The parents and peers steer Black youths away from educational pursuits.
sic. Ow. My spelling nazi nerves are jangling. How can you spell a word two different ways in the same post, and not feel weird about it?
Also, you will always find what you're looking for. If you're looking for racism, you will find it. If you're looking for opportunities to learn and advance yourself, guess what you'll find?
I'll tell you like I told the other guy, further up the thread. Computers and internet access are available for free in several locations in any town in the US.
Seriously, even libraries in "East Podunktownville" have an array of 2 or 3 computers, now. I've seen them. Similarly, most schools with more than a dozen students have at least one student-accessible internet-attached computing device somewhere in the building.
It's not an XBox, and that may be a fatal flaw as far as the kid ever paying attention to it. If, on the other hand, the kid has the potential to get "the bug", then there are plenty of opportunities for rabid consumption of computer/internet time, without ever spending a dime.
Citation Needed.
My local Goodwill has several towers on the shelf - for a while, there was even a separate Goodwill shop next door to the main one, that had nothing but PCs, parts, components, peripherals, etc. - they shut it down because it wasn't making enough money to justify the extra employee. So much for "non-profit".
I'm not telling you not to hate Goodwill, but make sure it's for the right reasons.
A locally-owned thrift shop is usually a much better target for a box of donated items, and a local tech group (check the college, the library, the gaming shop) is usually a better target to score a cheap (or even free) PC or laptop. I don't know how many (dumpster-dived, trash-picked, or simply outgrown) machines I've given away over the years, simply because someone had a need for a computer, and I had one I wasn't actively doing something with.
It's due to the comparative lack of computer availability to young black teens.
Oh bullshit. A computer exponentially more powerful than the ones that we learned on can be found sitting on the curb on garbage day if you're willing to look.
A computer that can do more calculations per second, yes. Hell, my phone has more processing power than the computers I grew up using.
A computer a kid can have in his home and connect to the internet and mess around with the guts of, no.
Oh, are black kids not allowed to have library cards? Last I checked, there was free WiFi there.
Wait, I know - black kids aren't allowed to use the school's computer labs. That's not true, either?
Huh.
A computer is not necessarily a prerequisite for internet access. Speaking of which, I don't know where you're from, but in most of the United States, one can acquire broadband internet service for less than $20 per month. Actually decent speed, too, none of this "1mb down, 128k up" crap that some providers call broadband. It might be a "trial" offer, only valid for 90 days, or 6 months, or something, but if the discount runs out, just hop providers. Most "major" providers have that as their standard rate for a "decent" connection, anyway.
I don't mean to sound like an oldster, or shout at you whippersnappers to get off my lawn, but back when I was paying $50 a month for a 14.4kb dialup connection to the internet, I actually went and got a job to pay for my information-seeking habit. The crazy things we had to do in those days, eh?
A dumpster-dived computer (or a castoff from a friend, neighbor, relative, school, office building, or any number of other sources for free or low-cost computing devices) can get a kid some hardware, a trip to the nearest school (ok, maybe "college" is a better term, there) can get a Linux disk, and a little internet access can get software to do just about anything. Worst case scenario, the software to do "thing x" doesn't exist yet, and must be written. Surprise! There are tutorials for programming languages on the internet, too.
I dumpster-dived my second PC, when my first one (a ten-year-old "gift" of a 486 I gave my dad $200 for) died. I've had used parts (cannibalized from my previous machines) in nearly every computer I've ever owned, eventually. Come on, I use Linux, for crying out loud - if my personal machine worked absolutely perfectly at some point, I'd probably have a heart attack and die of shock.
There is something to be said for the proper amount of self-motivation. I think any geek worth the card knows exactly what I mean.
Or try any hacker convention.
I could probably count the number of black attendees to DEFCON on my fingers.
Yeah, like you were there.
This book includes a reference to a study wherein subjects were shown a photo of a human before taking a test. Those subjects who were shown a photo of a white man outperformed those who were shown a photo of a black man, regardless of their own race.
I am inclined to accept this as an indication that American culture is prejudiced against black intellectualism. I don't know what the root cause is, and therefore have no idea how to approach this issue, but its existence seems to be arguably doubtless.
Have you got evidence that the NBA in fact doesn't reflect society? Yes, we can all think of why there might be more black 7 foot tall guys in the NBA that in society, but there's no excuse for not having the evidence to hand. The assumption that evidence will turn out as expected, especially for things that seem obvious, will make people not bother to check reality against what they're saying. This goes for all sorts of issues, such as the cause of ulcers, whether lower taxes increase government revenue, whether people act rationally, and so on.
Yes.
"Apparently the league is currently 71.8 percent African-American, 18.3 percent international and 9.9 percent white American and there's a problem."
Need more?
"For some reason, blacks have come to represent the vast majority of players in the NBA, even though they form only 12 percent of the U.S. population."
The above quotes are from links available on the first page of the search results I linked to. They represent the trend of data returned by the Search, and are not intended to be linked directly to the articles in question.
United States Census Info (to reflect "society")
White persons, percent, 2010 (a) 72.4%
Black persons, percent, 2010 (a) 12.6%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2010 (a) 0.9%
Asian persons, percent, 2010 (a) 4.8%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2010 (a) 0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2010 2.9%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2010 (b) 16.3%
White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2010 63.7%
To ask why certain segments of our population are demographically absent from certain vocations is not to accuse you of racism, and shouldn't be seen as such; rather, it is an opportunity to answer questions and possibly improve our society as a whole.
But you see, the white man has been trained to avoid even the appearance of racism at any cost. Thus, attacking our social structure (which, arguably, has been built just as much by the "minority" groups as by any other, at this point) is automatically an attack on the white man.
If you want an answer to "why" there is racial conflict, gender conflict, homo/hetero conflict, etc, then you might consider who gains from the lower classes being at war with one another, rather than seeking out their common enemy.
--
Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to pay taxes and die.
About 0% of entrepreneurs who received venture capital in the first half of this year are white with my ethnic background.
I'm tired of being lumped together with "rich white men" just because I'm white.
I understand and agree. I am a white male, over the age of 25. Thus, I cannot get a grant for being a "minority" ethnic group, I cannot get a grant for being a "minority" gender, and my age has nothing to do with anything, other than that I can no longer claim to be "just a kid" as an excuse when I screw up.
I am a member of the only minority group to not have special funding for being a minority group.
I don't understand this whole race thing - if I tried to start a college fund called the NAAWP, I'd be run out of town on a rail - I might even get sued for hate speech. Public opinion would certainly be against me; heaven forbid I should decide not to pull the white man down.
Nothing personal, but... [citation needed]
Otherwise, we can all stand around shouting that green people get more X than purple people, and they get more Y than purple people, too, and it's all just so unfair I could scream!
Wow, you just hate everybody, don't you?
That's so sad. I think you need a hobby.
If anyone in America has an excuse to say "go home, get off our lawn", it's the "red" man.
If you are an American, and you are not a Native American (judging from your (lack of) intellectual capacity, you probably know them by the misnomer "Indian"), then you need to determine your pre-American ancestry, and ship yourself back to wherever you "came from". By your own misguided arguments, you have no right to be claiming a monopoly on American soil unless you can claim American heritage that predates the European Protestant Pilgrimage. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
"White guilt" has gone too far, I'll agree. Just like any other stereotypes, though, it has a factual basis. The Euro-trash who came over to this side of the planet over two centuries ago did some pretty horrible things - including biological warfare and attempted genocide of the people who were here for a long time before the white man showed up. The whole "black" thing is a bit much to be obsessing over, in my opinion, considering that the slaves were purchased from other dark-skinned guys, so they'd have been slaves whether they were shipped across the pond or not. On the other hand, that only accounts for the first generation... it's a big gnarly mess that we might be best off skipping over entirely, rather than apologizing to people whose dead ancestors were wronged by our dead ancestors. Can't we all just agree that some bad stuff went down, and move on from there?
Back to the subject at hand: you're arguing against yourself! Just because your ancestors immigrated a couple hundred years ago doesn't give you the right to go around threatening to shoot the new immigrants. This isn't me siding with the Native Americans (or the "blacks", or the Mexicans either), this is me telling you to pull your head out of your sphincter.
If people can find a way to buy $400 sneakers, they can buy a computer.
Sell the sneakers?
...
Seriously, though: there actually are cultural issues with black people and "smart" careers. I recently read a book called "Blink" that talked (among other things) about a study that was done wherein people were shown a picture of a person before they took a test, and the ones who were shown a white person before the test scored higher than the ones who were shown a black person before the test - regardless of the tester's race.
There are some serious cultural barriers, somewhere. The trick will be figuring out where they are, so that we can tear them down; all this arguing about what to do isn't accomplishing anything without conclusive proof indicating where the problem actually lies. I'm inclined to believe there is a cultural bias against intellectual pursuits in the "black" community, but I have no idea what the root of that bias is, so I have no idea where to even begin looking for a solution.
Supporting evidence: It is extremely difficult to determine the skin color of a well-spoken, educated person by staring at the monitor the subject is on the other side of an internet connection from...
It is also difficult to determine that someone's race, religious preference, or sexual preference via a phone interview.
Meritocracy, indeed.
Allow me to add some anecdotal evidence: I met my wife on IRC, and for 2 years after I met her, I thought she was a guy. She had a gender-ambiguous nick, was an "oper" in a large channel, and was an intelligent person with a keen wit. My experience up to that point had indicated to me that the only females on IRC were lonely housewives looking to cyber, so I never suspected that someone with a vocabulary including words larger than two syllables was anything other than "just another geeky dude". Like female gamers, female geeks used to be rare.
It's plausible, or it could be a continuation of the chronic lack of access to capital that exists elsewhere in Black America. Bill Gates would never have been able to found MS had he not had access to both connections and money to start things off.
I don't know if you've noticed, but "Black America" is not really that bad off, compared to "White America", "Hispanic America", or whatever label you want to apply to subsets of the people who live on this side of the pond. There's a recession on, and there are people with college degrees who can't get jobs at McDonald's.
Wake up.
I'm a "white people", living in a fairly well-off area of town, with about 25 years of experience in the field of "computer stuff". I have a garage full of cast-off systems, some of which came from dumpster diving. Some of them are in use in my home, and some of them are (low-end) production machines.
Your attempt at an ad-hominem attack is not only flawed, it's spitefully ignorant. This is the type of thing that stereotypes are made of - your label reads "attempts to pull the prejudice card on things that have no relation to race/color/creed/gender, in order to receive 'compensation' for imagined wrongs".
A computer isn't a learning tool any more than an automobile is. Some people just want to use it, some people want to take it apart and see how it works.
I have yet to see an automobile that not only comes with instructions on how to use it (pressed F1 lately?) but also has a built-in mechanism for rearranging your dashboard, changing how many pedals it has, or instructions for building/learning anything and/or everything you can think of.
Admittedly, for the computer to have these things requires internet access, but schools, libraries, and netcafes exist, and are fairly easy to access.
I have to agree with your post's parent that the "culture" a child grows up in (primarily the family environment) is a huge factor.
To further this point: a staggering majority of ALL CEOs are not only male and white, but also over 6 feet tall.
Does this indicate a bias? Probably.
Is whining about it going to "fix" it? Probably not.
Is it actually a problem? If so, is it something we're prepared to address?
I am suddenly reminded of "Harrison Bergeron", for some reason.
... or we could just shoot them.
Add XFCE's lightweight compositing option + Cairo Dock and you have a very shiny desktop which is still lighter and more responsive than most.
The dock is actually one of the things I find objectionable - I started using menus about 20 years ago, and I'm kinda stuck on their functionality. The docks seem less about usability, and more about "adding crap to the desktop". The only thing I wanna see on my desktop is mounted filesystems, and that only because it makes the USB stick's removability immediately apparent. Anything more than that just clutters up my pretty desktop picture, or hides behind my open application that I'm doing work in. Worse still, the dock makes my maximized application window quite a bit shorter than it ought to be.
To put it another way, there are reasons why the users who are used to Gnome2 are screaming bloody murder.
On the other hand, I hadn't noticed before just how amazingly lightweight XFCE is... Less than 300MB of RAM used, with half a dozen programs actively running (including firefox! (admittedly with NoScript and AdBlockPlus)). It is now the default desktop on some of my older machines, and I'm starting to warm up to it, even with the dock down there instead of a full panel.
Yes, I'm aware I can "fix" the panel. My users run (mostly) default setups, so I do, too - it makes it easier to support other things if I'm not also fighting a strange desktop interface. Wobbly windows and desktop cube do not count as "non-stock", for this purpose - it's just a prettier method of doing the exact same thing it did before. On the other hand, moving everything in the entire interface... that's definitely "not stock". Shame on you, Canonical.
Personally, I'm hoping Gnome3 is usable by the time I am "forced" to step away from my 10.04 LTS.