Developing this sort of infrastructure on a school-by-school basis is incredibly stupid. There should have been a central government review of the options prior to the latest run of school building, and a proper IT spending policy should have been worked out then. Having the decision made by the headteacher and a couple of staff (only one or two of whom are likely to be remotely qualified to understand all the options) means one school ends up with a much better or worse IT system than another. That is plain wrong. It's not fair on the kids.
Not fair on the kids? Forcing everybody to use exactly the same stuff is what's not fair on the kids. The school in question is a City Academy, (strictly they're just called Academies now). They are usually schools which have failed in the standard Local Education Authority framework for whatever reason. Sometimes that's down to bad management, but usually because they're in a deprived area. The one-size-fits-all approach has already failed for that school, or they wouldn't be an academy. Academies are intended to have more freedom than normal schools over things like this, so they have the freedom to apply the approaches which actually work for their kids. They will frequently not be the same approaches which work for successful Secondary schools in middle-class areas. Some schools need a better X, even if it's at the expense of an inferior Y, because that's what's best for the kids they have to teach. Not doing what's best for the kids by forcing their schools to conform to some centrally mandated policy is what would be unfair.
I presume they are talking about electrolytic capacitors, because they're the ones which tend to go bad over time. Multi-layer is a technology used in ceramic capacitors, which tend to last longer and don't need replacing. Even if they do need replacing, they are (obviously) designed to take the heat of soldering. All the MLCCs I've hand-soldered have survived, even the ones I did with an iron rather than hot air.
Say the likelihood of a disk failing is 50% and you make two copies. The likelihood of at least one disk failing is 75%. But since both disks are identical, we don't care if one fails, we only care if both fail. The likelihood of both disks failing is only 25%.
The risk does not go up exponentially, it goes down logarithmically.
The failure of CDs and DVDs are not independent random events, they depend to a large extent on factors which apply to all the discs - like the physical and chemical properties of the stuff they are made from. As they aren't independent random events you're using the wrong kind of statistics.
They didn't say "170 vac rms", which is the point. Why don't you just admit that you made a mistake in saying it was 115 V peak-to-peak? All this twisting and turning just makes you look like a jerk. It's 120 V RMS, which is 170 V peak-to-peak. 115 V peak-to-peak is 81 V RMS. There's nothing significant on Google about "81 vac rms" either, if that's the metric you like to use.
Also important to remember is that CD's degrade after 5-10 years and DVDs are likely to be quicker, unless your making them like those NASA ones they send out on the space probes that last 10,000 years (and cost heaps).
Burned ones degrade, because they rely on chemical dyes which can degrade over time. Pressed CDs and DVDs are vastly more robust as the information is, as the name suggests, physically pressed into the material. A layer of plastic, a layer of foil, a layer of plastic. That's not going to rot or decompose quickly. My 15 year old music CDs still work just fine.
A SSD should hopefully be able to retain data for a decent length of time (Although I don't know if this is the case for the 1st generation mainstream drives we are seeing now which have various issues), but I'm assuming this project just involves old scrap systems rather then spending a few hundred $ on something. Maybe you could for out some money for a few SD cards and reader. Once again they need shielding from solar flares.
Flash memory stores information as a charge. That charge eventually leaks to the point where the information is unreadable (about 10 years last time I looked), so flash devices aren't suitable for long-term storage.
Then all I'd need would be another couple of million for production and marketing. Oh, and some idea of how to run a consumer electronics business and the desire to do so.
Hint: there didn't used to be a sustainable market for ultra-cheap laptops or mobile phones with no buttons either. Until someone made them. Then suddenly there were markets - big, lucrative markets. I bet you twelve internets that within two years these things will be selling like hot cakes.
I've got an Eee. It's not the same thing. Laptops force you to a particular body position to use them, it's just unpleasant to use a laptop/netbook when lying on your side, for example. You can be as free using a tablet thingy like this as you can be while reading a paperback. I'd prefer something a little more compact than their prototype though - an 8 or 9" screen should be plenty if it's light enough to hold in one hand.
I'm just utterly amazed it's taken this long for somebody to have a serious stab at a device like this. I've been asking for one for years. I got a Nokia Internet Tablet, but it's just too small. When Asus brought out the Eee and then everybody copied them within months I though they'd get the hint a build web tablets with the same kind of kit. But they haven't. Weird. This is exactly the kind of thing I want for browsing the web around the house and they will sell even faster than netbooks have, just as soon as somebody vaguely credible brings a reasonable quality one to market.
As to all the people wondering what else it will be able to do other than run a browser: It's an x86 box running Linux. It'll do whatever the hell you want it to do. Yes to PDFs, yes to ssh, yes to media player, yes to OpenOffice, yes to IM, yes to blowjobs on the beach, yes to absofuckinglutely everything you can do on any other Linux box. It's just a keyboard-less tablet netbook (not that that's not awesome).
Talk to your neighbors. Pick the AP with the highest wattage, unplug the rest, grab a 15dbi omni, form 1 single larger network, and everyone share 1 internet connection. You'll all save a few bucks too.
If you shared one DSL or cable line, gaming wouldn't work very well and bandwidth would suck for pretty much everyone, thanks to the connection being busy virtually all the time. If you wanted a connection with, say, 5x the bandwidth of a DSL line to compensate for this, you're looking at more than 10x the price plus some serious installation costs so you're no longer saving money. If you knew everybody only ever did web and email and didn't play games or download anything big it might work. But people do play games and people do watch streaming video and people do use bittorrent and the like. I'm not sharing the line I use for gaming with the line someone else uses to download movies unless it's 100Mbps or better.
Perhaps it's not much work for you, but not everybody wants ugly visible cable runs or lives in a modern plasterboard house. For me it would mean shifting a wardrobe, two desks, two filing cabinets, one set of bookshelves. Then lifting two carpets, lifting two sets of floorboards, drilling through half a dozen joists, removing two skirting boards, chiselling out two sockets and the recesses for the cables in the brick walls. Now running the cable and wiring up the sockets would be simple. Then of course I'd just need to put everything back together; hopefully none of the floorboards or skirting boards broke as I ripped them up, as in this 90 year old house they're not standard sizes or designs so replacing them involves a little more than a trip to the local supplier. Then it's just a matter of touching up the paint on the skirting boards and walls. All that so my unattended overnight backups are finished five hours before I get up rather than four hours before I get up. Umm, no thanks. I'll stick with my 10 ft wireless connection, thanks.
eBay have improved their feedback system. Now people don't always give the maximum rating, sometimes they give a 4/5. If the seller raped their mother, wife and daughter in front of them, they might get a 3/5. Nobody really uses the bottom half of whatever rating scale you pick, so the scale needs to be at least twice as large as the graduations you want to see. Really eBay need a 1-10 scale, not because you can really discern a 10% difference in something so intangible as quality of service, but because then people could be expected to rate adequate to good from 7 to 9, which would provide some granularity. Even professional reviewers do the same - check any games site and you'll see games getting scathing reviews with a 6/10 score. It's incredibly rare for something to get less than 5/10. Movie reviews are more subjective than most reviews, so you might expect them to be more varied, yet still most stuff is still scored from 3-5/5.
There's probably some interesting research into this phenomenon. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been condensed into a "$luminary's law" too.
It's worse than that, my Mac has no mouse buttons at all. Fortunately, my mouse has five (if you include the wheel click) and they all work in OS X.
For porn, I can heartily recommend the Firefox add-on DownThemAll (the CamelCase is important, or you might think it was some add-on to help kids hang around in shopping centres). Excellent for downloading a page of pics or videos.
First of all, what do you get from a temp agency? Hell, it's not like programmers have a really, really hard time finding a job around here. If they can code, they have a normal job. So what the hell do you think you get from a TA? Right. The sludge of the trade. The ones that cling to "doing something with computers" despite all odds and the fact that they simply can't.
I used to do contract work (if that's what you mean by "temp agency"), not because I couldn't get a permanent job - I was offered a permanent position at every single place I did contract work - but because being paid twice as much as you'd get in a permanent position, getting to work on a variety of projects with a variety of companies and being able to take several months a year off is just a nicer way of working.
Public transport sucks everywhere. It takes longer, is not reliably cheaper than cheap independent transport (subsidised buses and luxury sedans are a loaded comparison), and is full of people under conditions not inclined to foster good relations.
That's generally been my experience everywhere except London. In London everybody bitches about the public transport, but I thought it was fantastic when I lived there, mainly because there's just so damn much of it. Frequent buses, the comprehensive tube network and the world's best taxis for when the bus or tube just won't do. I never once felt the desire to own a car while living there.
As many times as it takes to figure out slashdot is the wrong place to say it. You need to bug the people in charge of the money.
The people in charge of the money are elected officials, who are elected by (among others) the people on Slashdot. One person bugging the people in charge of the money won't do much good, you need lots of people to do the bugging for anything to happen. The way you get lots of people is by raising awareness of the issue with the public by doing things like posting on Slashdot and talking to your friends (who talk to their friends...). Discussing issues is public is how you get public support, which is how you get the people in charge of the money to do what you want.
Yep, one foot is exactly 12 inches. One inch is defined as exactly 0.0254 m. So the "English" inch is based on exactly the same standard as the SI metre, because it is based on the SI metre. I don't see the problem though, if you need to know how long a metre is you buy a calibrated, certified thingy which measures to the accuracy you require. If the OP wants to bitch about something, they should bitch about units of mass with their easy to understand "particular lump of stuff" standard. Easy to understand, but unfortunately lumps of stuff have a bad habit of gaining and losing mass, changing the definition of your units all the time.
Apple keyboards are great if you want to really hammer your RSI. I can't work intensively on my laptop for more than 10 or 15 minutes without significant pain.
I ask this in all seriousness - what's wrong with them? The keys are similarly spaced to a normal keyboard; the metal between the keys is just taking up the space the taper on typewriter-style keys would take up. There are no indentations on the keys, which I found odd at first while touch-typing, but I don't see how that would fsck up your hand position. The desktop Apple keyboards are flat, but not flatter than a typical laptop keyboard. I'm genuinely curious about what's ergonomically unsound about Apple keyboards compared to normal keyboards. I can accept both are worse than "weirdly" shaped ergonomic keyboards, but you don't get those on any laptop anyway, and you did single out Apple keyboards and mention a laptop.
It doesn't look like much use as a laptop due to the tiny screen in an awkward place and lack of cover for the keyboard. A three hour battery life means it's not much use as a wireless keyboard. I suppose as a desktop PC it would be OK, but then why have the tiny additional screen and battery? They just make it larger and more expensive than it needs to be. Ditch the screen and battery and it might make for a cheap, compact desktop PC, but as it is I just don't see the point. On the other hand there are plenty of things I don't see the point of that are hugely popular, so what do I know?
I'd want several, so I could try all the different passwords I've used over the years for unimportant stuff. I use unique and secure passwords for important stuff, but I just not going to bother trying to remember different passwords for a dozen different forums where the worst that could happen is someone posts something rude with my account. So I re-use a standard password with somethign to do with the site appended to it - my Slashdot password might be pa55wordslash, or pa55wordslashdot, or pa55word/., or oldpa55wordslash, or evenolderpasswordslash... I might need several guesses.
Nearly anything you plug into the wall has a power consumption rating on. However instead of a big yellow sticker on the front saying it will save you $5 a year on your electric bill its on the back and its measured in watts. Shocking no?
The sticker on the back doesn't tell you how much it uses in practice, it tells you the maximum it will ever use. It's useful for sizing circuits and picking fuses, but not for estimating running costs. The label on the back doesn't tell you if it uses 80W or 1W in standby. It doesn't tell you if the maximum rating applies during normal viewing, or only for two seconds at startup.
as for the greedy student who makes a million dollars... do you really think he's going to sit on that money and do nothing with it? Or do you think he's going to spend it on a house, a car, some new clothes, a few expensive whores, and invest a large portion of the leftover money in equities? See, that's what we call productivity and it makes the economy work... go make a million dollar idea and then spend and invest about 90% of it, please... everybody... now...
Trickle-down economics? I wish you were here, so I could laugh right in your face.
Re:Ultimate ubuntu kung fu move
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 0
I know this is considered/. heresy, but I really believe that windows is the best OS for the desktop. I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
Ubuntu is way better than the others I've tried as a desktop OS, but I agree it has a way to go till it matches Windows. In fact I'm not sure it ever can, there are just too many cats to herd. But, uh, why haven't you tried OS X? It makes every other OS I've tried look clumsy, annoying and intrusive. It's not perfect, but I've never had any other OS which let me spend a higher proportion of my time getting stuff done.
Slashdot Mirror
Developing this sort of infrastructure on a school-by-school basis is incredibly stupid. There should have been a central government review of the options prior to the latest run of school building, and a proper IT spending policy should have been worked out then. Having the decision made by the headteacher and a couple of staff (only one or two of whom are likely to be remotely qualified to understand all the options) means one school ends up with a much better or worse IT system than another. That is plain wrong. It's not fair on the kids.
Not fair on the kids? Forcing everybody to use exactly the same stuff is what's not fair on the kids. The school in question is a City Academy, (strictly they're just called Academies now). They are usually schools which have failed in the standard Local Education Authority framework for whatever reason. Sometimes that's down to bad management, but usually because they're in a deprived area. The one-size-fits-all approach has already failed for that school, or they wouldn't be an academy. Academies are intended to have more freedom than normal schools over things like this, so they have the freedom to apply the approaches which actually work for their kids. They will frequently not be the same approaches which work for successful Secondary schools in middle-class areas. Some schools need a better X, even if it's at the expense of an inferior Y, because that's what's best for the kids they have to teach. Not doing what's best for the kids by forcing their schools to conform to some centrally mandated policy is what would be unfair.
I presume they are talking about electrolytic capacitors, because they're the ones which tend to go bad over time. Multi-layer is a technology used in ceramic capacitors, which tend to last longer and don't need replacing. Even if they do need replacing, they are (obviously) designed to take the heat of soldering. All the MLCCs I've hand-soldered have survived, even the ones I did with an iron rather than hot air.
Say the likelihood of a disk failing is 50% and you make two copies. The likelihood of at least one disk failing is 75%.
But since both disks are identical, we don't care if one fails, we only care if both fail. The likelihood of both disks failing is only 25%.
The risk does not go up exponentially, it goes down logarithmically.
The failure of CDs and DVDs are not independent random events, they depend to a large extent on factors which apply to all the discs - like the physical and chemical properties of the stuff they are made from. As they aren't independent random events you're using the wrong kind of statistics.
They didn't say "170 vac rms", which is the point. Why don't you just admit that you made a mistake in saying it was 115 V peak-to-peak? All this twisting and turning just makes you look like a jerk. It's 120 V RMS, which is 170 V peak-to-peak. 115 V peak-to-peak is 81 V RMS. There's nothing significant on Google about "81 vac rms" either, if that's the metric you like to use.
Silvering? No, it's aluminum.
Even if it's silvered with aluminium, its still silvered.
Also important to remember is that CD's degrade after 5-10 years and DVDs are likely to be quicker, unless your making them like those NASA ones they send out on the space probes that last 10,000 years (and cost heaps).
Burned ones degrade, because they rely on chemical dyes which can degrade over time. Pressed CDs and DVDs are vastly more robust as the information is, as the name suggests, physically pressed into the material. A layer of plastic, a layer of foil, a layer of plastic. That's not going to rot or decompose quickly. My 15 year old music CDs still work just fine.
A SSD should hopefully be able to retain data for a decent length of time (Although I don't know if this is the case for the 1st generation mainstream drives we are seeing now which have various issues), but I'm assuming this project just involves old scrap systems rather then spending a few hundred $ on something. Maybe you could for out some money for a few SD cards and reader. Once again they need shielding from solar flares.
Flash memory stores information as a charge. That charge eventually leaks to the point where the information is unreadable (about 10 years last time I looked), so flash devices aren't suitable for long-term storage.
Then all I'd need would be another couple of million for production and marketing. Oh, and some idea of how to run a consumer electronics business and the desire to do so.
Hint: there didn't used to be a sustainable market for ultra-cheap laptops or mobile phones with no buttons either. Until someone made them. Then suddenly there were markets - big, lucrative markets. I bet you twelve internets that within two years these things will be selling like hot cakes.
I've got an Eee. It's not the same thing. Laptops force you to a particular body position to use them, it's just unpleasant to use a laptop/netbook when lying on your side, for example. You can be as free using a tablet thingy like this as you can be while reading a paperback. I'd prefer something a little more compact than their prototype though - an 8 or 9" screen should be plenty if it's light enough to hold in one hand.
I'm just utterly amazed it's taken this long for somebody to have a serious stab at a device like this. I've been asking for one for years. I got a Nokia Internet Tablet, but it's just too small. When Asus brought out the Eee and then everybody copied them within months I though they'd get the hint a build web tablets with the same kind of kit. But they haven't. Weird. This is exactly the kind of thing I want for browsing the web around the house and they will sell even faster than netbooks have, just as soon as somebody vaguely credible brings a reasonable quality one to market.
As to all the people wondering what else it will be able to do other than run a browser: It's an x86 box running Linux. It'll do whatever the hell you want it to do. Yes to PDFs, yes to ssh, yes to media player, yes to OpenOffice, yes to IM, yes to blowjobs on the beach, yes to absofuckinglutely everything you can do on any other Linux box. It's just a keyboard-less tablet netbook (not that that's not awesome).
(I lied about the blowjobs)
Talk to your neighbors. Pick the AP with the highest wattage, unplug the rest, grab a 15dbi omni, form 1 single larger network, and everyone share 1 internet connection. You'll all save a few bucks too.
If you shared one DSL or cable line, gaming wouldn't work very well and bandwidth would suck for pretty much everyone, thanks to the connection being busy virtually all the time. If you wanted a connection with, say, 5x the bandwidth of a DSL line to compensate for this, you're looking at more than 10x the price plus some serious installation costs so you're no longer saving money. If you knew everybody only ever did web and email and didn't play games or download anything big it might work. But people do play games and people do watch streaming video and people do use bittorrent and the like. I'm not sharing the line I use for gaming with the line someone else uses to download movies unless it's 100Mbps or better.
Perhaps it's not much work for you, but not everybody wants ugly visible cable runs or lives in a modern plasterboard house. For me it would mean shifting a wardrobe, two desks, two filing cabinets, one set of bookshelves. Then lifting two carpets, lifting two sets of floorboards, drilling through half a dozen joists, removing two skirting boards, chiselling out two sockets and the recesses for the cables in the brick walls. Now running the cable and wiring up the sockets would be simple. Then of course I'd just need to put everything back together; hopefully none of the floorboards or skirting boards broke as I ripped them up, as in this 90 year old house they're not standard sizes or designs so replacing them involves a little more than a trip to the local supplier. Then it's just a matter of touching up the paint on the skirting boards and walls. All that so my unattended overnight backups are finished five hours before I get up rather than four hours before I get up. Umm, no thanks. I'll stick with my 10 ft wireless connection, thanks.
eBay have improved their feedback system. Now people don't always give the maximum rating, sometimes they give a 4/5. If the seller raped their mother, wife and daughter in front of them, they might get a 3/5. Nobody really uses the bottom half of whatever rating scale you pick, so the scale needs to be at least twice as large as the graduations you want to see. Really eBay need a 1-10 scale, not because you can really discern a 10% difference in something so intangible as quality of service, but because then people could be expected to rate adequate to good from 7 to 9, which would provide some granularity. Even professional reviewers do the same - check any games site and you'll see games getting scathing reviews with a 6/10 score. It's incredibly rare for something to get less than 5/10. Movie reviews are more subjective than most reviews, so you might expect them to be more varied, yet still most stuff is still scored from 3-5/5.
There's probably some interesting research into this phenomenon. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been condensed into a "$luminary's law" too.
It's worse than that, my Mac has no mouse buttons at all. Fortunately, my mouse has five (if you include the wheel click) and they all work in OS X.
For porn, I can heartily recommend the Firefox add-on DownThemAll (the CamelCase is important, or you might think it was some add-on to help kids hang around in shopping centres). Excellent for downloading a page of pics or videos.
Plenty of software is bad because it's not designed at all.
First of all, what do you get from a temp agency? Hell, it's not like programmers have a really, really hard time finding a job around here. If they can code, they have a normal job. So what the hell do you think you get from a TA? Right. The sludge of the trade. The ones that cling to "doing something with computers" despite all odds and the fact that they simply can't.
I used to do contract work (if that's what you mean by "temp agency"), not because I couldn't get a permanent job - I was offered a permanent position at every single place I did contract work - but because being paid twice as much as you'd get in a permanent position, getting to work on a variety of projects with a variety of companies and being able to take several months a year off is just a nicer way of working.
Public transport sucks everywhere. It takes longer, is not reliably cheaper than cheap independent transport (subsidised buses and luxury sedans are a loaded comparison), and is full of people under conditions not inclined to foster good relations.
That's generally been my experience everywhere except London. In London everybody bitches about the public transport, but I thought it was fantastic when I lived there, mainly because there's just so damn much of it. Frequent buses, the comprehensive tube network and the world's best taxis for when the bus or tube just won't do. I never once felt the desire to own a car while living there.
As many times as it takes to figure out slashdot is the wrong place to say it. You need to bug the people in charge of the money.
The people in charge of the money are elected officials, who are elected by (among others) the people on Slashdot. One person bugging the people in charge of the money won't do much good, you need lots of people to do the bugging for anything to happen. The way you get lots of people is by raising awareness of the issue with the public by doing things like posting on Slashdot and talking to your friends (who talk to their friends...). Discussing issues is public is how you get public support, which is how you get the people in charge of the money to do what you want.
Yep, one foot is exactly 12 inches. One inch is defined as exactly 0.0254 m. So the "English" inch is based on exactly the same standard as the SI metre, because it is based on the SI metre. I don't see the problem though, if you need to know how long a metre is you buy a calibrated, certified thingy which measures to the accuracy you require. If the OP wants to bitch about something, they should bitch about units of mass with their easy to understand "particular lump of stuff" standard. Easy to understand, but unfortunately lumps of stuff have a bad habit of gaining and losing mass, changing the definition of your units all the time.
Either give up and don't bother or do the password reset email thingy. Neither particularly endears the site to me.
Apple keyboards are great if you want to really hammer your RSI. I can't work intensively on my laptop for more than 10 or 15 minutes without significant pain.
I ask this in all seriousness - what's wrong with them? The keys are similarly spaced to a normal keyboard; the metal between the keys is just taking up the space the taper on typewriter-style keys would take up. There are no indentations on the keys, which I found odd at first while touch-typing, but I don't see how that would fsck up your hand position. The desktop Apple keyboards are flat, but not flatter than a typical laptop keyboard. I'm genuinely curious about what's ergonomically unsound about Apple keyboards compared to normal keyboards. I can accept both are worse than "weirdly" shaped ergonomic keyboards, but you don't get those on any laptop anyway, and you did single out Apple keyboards and mention a laptop.
It doesn't look like much use as a laptop due to the tiny screen in an awkward place and lack of cover for the keyboard. A three hour battery life means it's not much use as a wireless keyboard. I suppose as a desktop PC it would be OK, but then why have the tiny additional screen and battery? They just make it larger and more expensive than it needs to be. Ditch the screen and battery and it might make for a cheap, compact desktop PC, but as it is I just don't see the point. On the other hand there are plenty of things I don't see the point of that are hugely popular, so what do I know?
I'd want several, so I could try all the different passwords I've used over the years for unimportant stuff. I use unique and secure passwords for important stuff, but I just not going to bother trying to remember different passwords for a dozen different forums where the worst that could happen is someone posts something rude with my account. So I re-use a standard password with somethign to do with the site appended to it - my Slashdot password might be pa55wordslash, or pa55wordslashdot, or pa55word/., or oldpa55wordslash, or evenolderpasswordslash... I might need several guesses.
Nearly anything you plug into the wall has a power consumption rating on. However instead of a big yellow sticker on the front saying it will save you $5 a year on your electric bill its on the back and its measured in watts. Shocking no?
The sticker on the back doesn't tell you how much it uses in practice, it tells you the maximum it will ever use. It's useful for sizing circuits and picking fuses, but not for estimating running costs. The label on the back doesn't tell you if it uses 80W or 1W in standby. It doesn't tell you if the maximum rating applies during normal viewing, or only for two seconds at startup.
as for the greedy student who makes a million dollars... do you really think he's going to sit on that money and do nothing with it? Or do you think he's going to spend it on a house, a car, some new clothes, a few expensive whores, and invest a large portion of the leftover money in equities? See, that's what we call productivity and it makes the economy work... go make a million dollar idea and then spend and invest about 90% of it, please... everybody... now...
Trickle-down economics? I wish you were here, so I could laugh right in your face.
I know this is considered /. heresy, but I really believe that windows is the best OS for the desktop. I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
Ubuntu is way better than the others I've tried as a desktop OS, but I agree it has a way to go till it matches Windows. In fact I'm not sure it ever can, there are just too many cats to herd. But, uh, why haven't you tried OS X? It makes every other OS I've tried look clumsy, annoying and intrusive. It's not perfect, but I've never had any other OS which let me spend a higher proportion of my time getting stuff done.