Google calls into question that it's really sure there aren't going to be any problems.
Can anybody ever be sure there aren't going to be any patent problems with anything? IANAL, but it's my understanding that there is no way to know that someone may have applied for a patent on something until after the patent is granted (which can take years). So, you invent something independently, purely through your own hard work, and proceed with using it, not knowing that someone else may have already applied for a patent on it because that fact is invisible to everyone outside of the USPTO. Then, one day, the patent is granted and your business get skewered with it.
Even worse than that, you pay $15/day for WiFi at the Hilton in NYC and then it doesn't work worth a damn. I was exhibiting at a trade show there and I tried to email a 300kB white paper to a few people I met, and it timed out many times before I got it to go through due to the poor network. I had problems both evenings, but not in the morning, so they probably just can't handle the peak traffic. I emailed them a complaint about it when I got home, and I didn't get any response whatsoever. Not even a "we're sorry."
If you are accusing meetup.com of having phony people RSVP to your event, I kind of doubt it. What purpose would it serve? You've already paid for the subscription before anyone signs up for your event, and having a bunch of fake sign-ups certainly isn't going to help encourage you to renew your subscription in the future since you'll know they are no-shows before your next payment is due (in sharp contrast to classmates.com, where the fake stuff is used to grab your initial payment). I belong to several meetup groups, and I've never gotten the impression that the no-shows weren't real; they're just flaky people.
If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.
But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs.
Yes they do. Everyone does it. Nobody likes to do it, but inevitably it eventually happens to some pages.
Not everyone does it. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't. If you need to give an article a new URL because you've changed CMSs, or for some other reason, put in a redirect to send people accessing the old URL to the new location. There is virtually never a reason, beyond laziness or stupidity, to break URLs when you move something. Perhaps my original statement that you quoted should have said "don't break" instead of "don't change," but I think the point was clear from the context.
Here's an example, though obviously this is unlikely to ever disappear: http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
I don't have any problem with that URL at all. I never said URLs shouldn't be descriptive; I said that they shouldn't be so long that they become difficult to use. They shouldn't be so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to cope with them. What is it that motivates someone to create a URL that is 150 characters long? It's not an effort to make the URL more useful, it's just SEO. See more details here
Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?
So, you agree with me, right? The short URL is better than the obnoxiously long one.
Just to make sure we are all on the same page, I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that they become difficult to use. I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to use them in common contexts, which is not the case with your man-bites-dog example. I'm talking about URLs that are so long that you can't even read them in your browser because they don't fit in the location bar. I'm talking about URLs like this 150-character long mess, that I can't even paste into Slashdot as plain text because Slashdot won't accept a string that long. Such URLs aren't practical. Nobody can remember them, read them on the phone, or type them in without getting them wrong. That much text in a URL isn't designed for human consumption, it's there for SEO.
I think we're in complete agreement. Descriptive URLs are better as long as they are short enough to be used in a practical way. As soon as they become so long that people are tempted to use bit.ly, they become worse than using an articleid, because with bit.ly you have far less info that is visible to the user -- you don't even have the domain name. If the URL is too long to fit in the location bar of the browser, something is wrong -- they are probably aiming at SEO, not a human reader.
If Google would penalize any URL longer than 60 characters (long enough to fit nicely on one line in an email) in their search rankings, and make it publicly known that they were doing that, the web would probably be a better place.
I tried to paste in (as text, not links) two examples of actual obnoxiously-long URLs, one being 150 characters and the other being 135, and slashdot blocked me, saying "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there" I think that pretty much makes my point about long URLs being a bad idea.
So when the linked site goes down you have some information about the content beyond bit.ly/ERFHUQ.
I'm not sure why you've pulled bit.ly into the discussion in this sentence. Since the bit.ly URL just redirects to the full URL, bit.ly doesn't impact the amount of information that you have if the linked site goes down. Now, if bit.ly itself goes down, then you are truly screwed, with absolutely no information about where the link was going to. That's a very good argument for keeping URLs short enough so that people aren't tempted to use bit.ly on them.
And when even supposedly tech-savvy people [stackoverflow.com] can't properly back-up their webpages, it's incredibly shortsighted to use a link that tells you nothing about the content.
You almost had a point here, but you kind of missed the target. If an article is gone, I don't think you've gained very much by knowing what the title was. Check the URL in web.archive.org; if it's there, you're in great shape (regardless of whether the URL was long and descriptive or not), and if it's not there you've basically got nothing, regardless of how long the URL is. Now, you could have argued that if the website operator changed the URL of the article (rather than removing/losing the article), and the old URL contained the full title, you might be able to use the site's search engine to find the new location of the article. You would have a point there. But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs. In fact, I've seen quite a few websites that stuff article titles in the URLs break links by correcting typos in the article title, causing the URL to change. So, having the title in the URL helps you to fix a problem (find an article with a changed URL) that is caused by having the URL in the title (making the URL easier to change).
Except that you don't see where it is going if the URL is so obnoxiously long that people feel compelled to use bit.ly and other shortening services. If people use bit.ly, not only do you not see the article title that is stuffed in the URL, you don't even see the domain name. You don't know whether you are being sent to cio.com or goatse.cx.
So, to summarize, people don't normally see these obnoxiously long URLs in HTML because of anchor text, and in other formats where a URL must be displayed (like a printed magazine article), people don't see the obnoxiously long URLs because services like bit.ly are used to shorten them. So, what was the point of the long URLs, other than SEO, again?
Websites wouldn't be tempted to use such long URLs if search engines would stop using the URL (other than the domain name) as a factor in ranking the search results. How many CMSs now stuff an entire article title into the URL purely for SEO purposes? Is that stuff in the URL really telling the search engine anything that can't be found in the <title> or <h1> tags?
It was a small publisher; I don't remember which one. They were telling me about how they were letting Google's bot in, but requiring others to subscribe, and I pointed out that people would just spoof the user-agent. They said they were checking the IP (I don't remember if that was in place of checking the user-agent, or in addition to it).
...Perhaps they could visit each site they index twice? Once with their normal user agent, and once with it set to say FireFox - and compare the results? But that would cost them a lot in time and bandwidth.
Not just with a different user-agent, but also with an IP address that doesn't trace back to Google. Some sites do this stuff by inspecting the IP address, rather than the user-agent. Anyway, yes it would cost a lot in bandwidth, but it's pretty much necessary. Otherwise, the SEO types will have a field day feeding stuff to Google that is different from what a human would see.
The article doesn't give the names of any of the people involved in this, or any links where more detail can be found. Isn't it bad enough that researchers are paid crap; do they have to be anonymous too? How about giving these people some credit for their work.
Probability that one specific employee is NOT a criminal: 0.99 Probability that none of N employees is a criminal: 0.99 ^ N (i.e. multiply 0.99 together N times).
is there some other screen that admin can log in from?
The whole idea is that users DO NOT LOGIN AS ADMIN, EVER
You missed the point of the parenthetical comment that you quoted. By Ubuntu giving the error message "admin not allowed to log in from this screen," it implies that there may be some other screen where it is OK to log in as root. If it is never possible to log in as root, then that is what the error message should say, instead of saying something confusing about "this screen." The point of my post was to question whether or not Ubuntu is really so much more user-friendly than other distros, and having confusing error messages isn't user-friendly.
But I do seem to remember there being an "unlock" button to press occasionally
Please see my post here where I talk about the "Unlock" button.
perhaps some of the issues you had were growing pains from 64 bit
Congratulations on being the first person in this thread to propose a legitimate potential explanation for my experience with Ubuntu being so different from the apparent norm, instead of choosing to attack me personally. I had actually considered that as a possibility all along. That is why I made a point of specifying that I had used the 64-bit version, so if the 64-bit version was known to be crap, people could point that out as the explanation. On the other hand, I was already using 64-bit OpenSUSE before I ever touched Ubuntu, and had no problems with it at all. So, it is certainly possible to put out a working 64-bit version, and has been for years. But, if the majority of Ubuntu users are on 32-bit, and the 32-bit version works great while the 64-bit version is broken, that may very well explain why so many people love Ubuntu while my experience with it was such a disappointment.
you can do this on any distro, its a question of changing the privilege flags on the applications file (probably in/usr/bin)
I think you've misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't saying that the app was suid root. It wasn't. The app needed root privilege if you wanted to change the settings, and I didn't have root privilege. Most other distros will prompt you for the root password in a case like that, but Ubuntu didn't, it just failed to work. If you click the "Help" button, it says that it will prompt you for the root password, but it doesn't. See more detail here.
did you even bother to look at the community documentation or the forums? if you run in to a problem 200 other people have too and more often than not someone smarter than you finds a way to fix it
No, I didn't turn to the community (and the built-in documentation was wrong). I wasn't hell-bent on running Ubuntu; I just wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. I'm sure it can be made to work with enough effort. The point of my post is that I don't understand why Ubuntu has a reputation for being so much more user-friendly than all of the other Linux distros. If you have to turn to the community and spend a lot of time mucking around to get basic functionality to work, it really isn't user-friendly. Maybe my experience was a fluke, but I've found the other distros to be much less of a hassle.
So we all know how qualified you are when it comes to unbuntu.
This thread is about whether or not Ubuntu is user-friendly and "just works." If you need extensive experience with it in order to be able to use it, it has already failed the user-friendly test.
Well maybe it would have helped to press that button label "Unlock" and then type your password.
Please keep in mind that this discussion is about it being user-friendly. I've seen lack-of-privilege problems handled in other distros two ways: 1) Tell the user he/she doesn't have the privileges required to do what he/she is trying to do. 2) Prompt the user for the root password. Both approaches make it obvious to the user what the problem is, and what they need to do to proceed. Is it really supposed to be obvious that everything is ghosted in the application because it needs to be "unlocked"? If I click the "Help" button, do you know what it tells me about the "Unlock" button? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it says "When you start the Network Administration Tool, you will be prompted for the administrator password..." which is most definitely not what happens. To make you happy, I just clicked the magical "Unlock" button. Do you know what happened? The window hung for 25 seconds (would not respond to mouse clicks), then a dialog popped up saying "Could not authenticate. An unexpected error has occurred." I was never prompted for the root password. Very helpful. If you honestly cannot acknowledge that this is a disaster from a usability standpoint, there is really no point in even talking to you, because you are lost in fanboy land.
How small a mind do you have to have to fight over which distribution of a single OS is the best? Heaven forbid someone else uses something different then you.
Take a look back at the beginning of this thread. Hell, just look at the subject line: "Ubuntu *is* Linux for a lot of people." I'm not at all arguing that everyone should use what I'm using. I'm arguing against the idea that everyone should automatically use Ubuntu. Specifically, I'm arguing against Ubuntu being the one and only user-friendly distro. Other distros were very user-friendly and "just worked" before Ubuntu even existed. I can hardly remember the last time I had to vi XF86Config. I'm not saying people shouldn't use Ubuntu if they are happy with it, I just don't see why Ubuntu gets so much credit for being user-friendly while the other distros get so little, and your post didn't add a single thing to that discussion.
Wow, so I'm not the only one that doesn't understand the Ubuntu love-fest? I only tried it once (8.04 64-bit), but I got frustrated with it very quickly. For example, I logged in as a normal user (not root), selected the network configuration app from the menu, and was not prompted for the root password. Everything just came up ghosted and unusable. I tried to log in as root, but you can't do that ("admin not allowed to log in from this screen" -- is there some other screen that admin can log in from?). I ended up having to pull up a shell, guess the name of the network admin app (/usr/bin/network-admin), then su and run it. This is supposed to be user-friendly? How does something that brain-damaged get released? I ran into several other problems (it's been too long for me to remember details), and just gave up on it after a few hours. I haven't had problems like that with other distros (OpenSUSE has worked quite well for me lately). I just don't see why people think Ubuntu is so much better than everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Google calls into question that it's really sure there aren't going to be any problems.
Can anybody ever be sure there aren't going to be any patent problems with anything? IANAL, but it's my understanding that there is no way to know that someone may have applied for a patent on something until after the patent is granted (which can take years). So, you invent something independently, purely through your own hard work, and proceed with using it, not knowing that someone else may have already applied for a patent on it because that fact is invisible to everyone outside of the USPTO. Then, one day, the patent is granted and your business get skewered with it.
MOD PARENT UP
That's a pretty big difference.
Well played.
Even worse than that, you pay $15/day for WiFi at the Hilton in NYC and then it doesn't work worth a damn. I was exhibiting at a trade show there and I tried to email a 300kB white paper to a few people I met, and it timed out many times before I got it to go through due to the poor network. I had problems both evenings, but not in the morning, so they probably just can't handle the peak traffic. I emailed them a complaint about it when I got home, and I didn't get any response whatsoever. Not even a "we're sorry."
If you are accusing meetup.com of having phony people RSVP to your event, I kind of doubt it. What purpose would it serve? You've already paid for the subscription before anyone signs up for your event, and having a bunch of fake sign-ups certainly isn't going to help encourage you to renew your subscription in the future since you'll know they are no-shows before your next payment is due (in sharp contrast to classmates.com, where the fake stuff is used to grab your initial payment). I belong to several meetup groups, and I've never gotten the impression that the no-shows weren't real; they're just flaky people.
It is not profitable to go through this much trouble and expense for one or even a dozen units. There must be hundreds out there.
This post claims NewEgg got 300 fakes in a shipment of 2000 from a distributor.
If this change is indicative of what'll happen to the "serious business" series (T, X, R), then the ThinkPad has, after some 18 years or so, finally jumped the shark.
I think the shark jumping already happened when they decided to start popping ads up on people's screens.
But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs.
Yes they do. Everyone does it. Nobody likes to do it, but inevitably it eventually happens to some pages.
Not everyone does it. Tim Berners-Lee doesn't. If you need to give an article a new URL because you've changed CMSs, or for some other reason, put in a redirect to send people accessing the old URL to the new location. There is virtually never a reason, beyond laziness or stupidity, to break URLs when you move something. Perhaps my original statement that you quoted should have said "don't break" instead of "don't change," but I think the point was clear from the context.
Here's an example, though obviously this is unlikely to ever disappear:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
I don't have any problem with that URL at all. I never said URLs shouldn't be descriptive; I said that they shouldn't be so long that they become difficult to use. They shouldn't be so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to cope with them. What is it that motivates someone to create a URL that is 150 characters long? It's not an effort to make the URL more useful, it's just SEO. See more details here
Surely:
http://example.com/articles/man-bites-dog [example.com]
is vastly superior from the user's point of view to:
http://example.com/cgi-bin/article.php3?PHPSESSID=0983sdf0er888fsd&article_id=73522 [example.com]
Which one are you going to remember? Which one would you rather read over the phone?
So, you agree with me, right? The short URL is better than the obnoxiously long one.
Just to make sure we are all on the same page, I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that they become difficult to use. I'm complaining about URLs that are so long that you need a URL shortening service like bit.ly to use them in common contexts, which is not the case with your man-bites-dog example. I'm talking about URLs that are so long that you can't even read them in your browser because they don't fit in the location bar. I'm talking about URLs like this 150-character long mess, that I can't even paste into Slashdot as plain text because Slashdot won't accept a string that long. Such URLs aren't practical. Nobody can remember them, read them on the phone, or type them in without getting them wrong. That much text in a URL isn't designed for human consumption, it's there for SEO.
...that is caused by having the URL in the title (making the URL easier to change).
Obviously, I meant to say "having the title in the URL"
I think we're in complete agreement. Descriptive URLs are better as long as they are short enough to be used in a practical way. As soon as they become so long that people are tempted to use bit.ly, they become worse than using an articleid, because with bit.ly you have far less info that is visible to the user -- you don't even have the domain name. If the URL is too long to fit in the location bar of the browser, something is wrong -- they are probably aiming at SEO, not a human reader.
If Google would penalize any URL longer than 60 characters (long enough to fit nicely on one line in an email) in their search rankings, and make it publicly known that they were doing that, the web would probably be a better place.
I tried to paste in (as text, not links) two examples of actual obnoxiously-long URLs, one being 150 characters and the other being 135, and slashdot blocked me, saying "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there" I think that pretty much makes my point about long URLs being a bad idea.
So when the linked site goes down you have some information about the content beyond bit.ly/ERFHUQ.
I'm not sure why you've pulled bit.ly into the discussion in this sentence. Since the bit.ly URL just redirects to the full URL, bit.ly doesn't impact the amount of information that you have if the linked site goes down. Now, if bit.ly itself goes down, then you are truly screwed, with absolutely no information about where the link was going to. That's a very good argument for keeping URLs short enough so that people aren't tempted to use bit.ly on them.
And when even supposedly tech-savvy people [stackoverflow.com] can't properly back-up their webpages, it's incredibly shortsighted to use a link that tells you nothing about the content.
You almost had a point here, but you kind of missed the target. If an article is gone, I don't think you've gained very much by knowing what the title was. Check the URL in web.archive.org; if it's there, you're in great shape (regardless of whether the URL was long and descriptive or not), and if it's not there you've basically got nothing, regardless of how long the URL is. Now, you could have argued that if the website operator changed the URL of the article (rather than removing/losing the article), and the old URL contained the full title, you might be able to use the site's search engine to find the new location of the article. You would have a point there. But, website operators that aren't idiots don't change URLs. In fact, I've seen quite a few websites that stuff article titles in the URLs break links by correcting typos in the article title, causing the URL to change. So, having the title in the URL helps you to fix a problem (find an article with a changed URL) that is caused by having the URL in the title (making the URL easier to change).
It's really handy to see where a link is going!
Except that you don't see where it is going if the URL is so obnoxiously long that people feel compelled to use bit.ly and other shortening services. If people use bit.ly, not only do you not see the article title that is stuffed in the URL, you don't even see the domain name. You don't know whether you are being sent to cio.com or goatse.cx.
So, to summarize, people don't normally see these obnoxiously long URLs in HTML because of anchor text, and in other formats where a URL must be displayed (like a printed magazine article), people don't see the obnoxiously long URLs because services like bit.ly are used to shorten them. So, what was the point of the long URLs, other than SEO, again?
Websites wouldn't be tempted to use such long URLs if search engines would stop using the URL (other than the domain name) as a factor in ranking the search results. How many CMSs now stuff an entire article title into the URL purely for SEO purposes? Is that stuff in the URL really telling the search engine anything that can't be found in the <title> or <h1> tags?
This is just a stunt being pulled by the Higgs Boson to distract us away from the LHC, so we won't find it.
It was a small publisher; I don't remember which one. They were telling me about how they were letting Google's bot in, but requiring others to subscribe, and I pointed out that people would just spoof the user-agent. They said they were checking the IP (I don't remember if that was in place of checking the user-agent, or in addition to it).
...Perhaps they could visit each site they index twice? Once with their normal user agent, and once with it set to say FireFox - and compare the results? But that would cost them a lot in time and bandwidth.
Not just with a different user-agent, but also with an IP address that doesn't trace back to Google. Some sites do this stuff by inspecting the IP address, rather than the user-agent. Anyway, yes it would cost a lot in bandwidth, but it's pretty much necessary. Otherwise, the SEO types will have a field day feeding stuff to Google that is different from what a human would see.
The article doesn't give the names of any of the people involved in this, or any links where more detail can be found. Isn't it bad enough that researchers are paid crap; do they have to be anonymous too? How about giving these people some credit for their work.
Probability that one specific employee is NOT a criminal: 0.99
Probability that none of N employees is a criminal: 0.99 ^ N (i.e. multiply 0.99 together N times).
Examples:
N=100: 36.6%
N=200: 13.4%
N=300: 4.9%
N=400: 1.8%
N=500: 0.7%
Doesn't work. See this post for details.
FAIL.
is there some other screen that admin can log in from?
The whole idea is that users DO NOT LOGIN AS ADMIN, EVER
You missed the point of the parenthetical comment that you quoted. By Ubuntu giving the error message "admin not allowed to log in from this screen," it implies that there may be some other screen where it is OK to log in as root. If it is never possible to log in as root, then that is what the error message should say, instead of saying something confusing about "this screen." The point of my post was to question whether or not Ubuntu is really so much more user-friendly than other distros, and having confusing error messages isn't user-friendly.
But I do seem to remember there being an "unlock" button to press occasionally
Please see my post here where I talk about the "Unlock" button.
perhaps some of the issues you had were growing pains from 64 bit
Congratulations on being the first person in this thread to propose a legitimate potential explanation for my experience with Ubuntu being so different from the apparent norm, instead of choosing to attack me personally. I had actually considered that as a possibility all along. That is why I made a point of specifying that I had used the 64-bit version, so if the 64-bit version was known to be crap, people could point that out as the explanation. On the other hand, I was already using 64-bit OpenSUSE before I ever touched Ubuntu, and had no problems with it at all. So, it is certainly possible to put out a working 64-bit version, and has been for years. But, if the majority of Ubuntu users are on 32-bit, and the 32-bit version works great while the 64-bit version is broken, that may very well explain why so many people love Ubuntu while my experience with it was such a disappointment.
and was not prompted for the root password.
you can do this on any distro, its a question of changing the privilege flags on the applications file (probably in /usr/bin)
I think you've misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't saying that the app was suid root. It wasn't. The app needed root privilege if you wanted to change the settings, and I didn't have root privilege. Most other distros will prompt you for the root password in a case like that, but Ubuntu didn't, it just failed to work. If you click the "Help" button, it says that it will prompt you for the root password, but it doesn't. See more detail here.
did you even bother to look at the community documentation or the forums? if you run in to a problem 200 other people have too and more often than not someone smarter than you finds a way to fix it
No, I didn't turn to the community (and the built-in documentation was wrong). I wasn't hell-bent on running Ubuntu; I just wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. I'm sure it can be made to work with enough effort. The point of my post is that I don't understand why Ubuntu has a reputation for being so much more user-friendly than all of the other Linux distros. If you have to turn to the community and spend a lot of time mucking around to get basic functionality to work, it really isn't user-friendly. Maybe my experience was a fluke, but I've found the other distros to be much less of a hassle.
So we all know how qualified you are when it comes to unbuntu.
This thread is about whether or not Ubuntu is user-friendly and "just works." If you need extensive experience with it in order to be able to use it, it has already failed the user-friendly test.
Well maybe it would have helped to press that button label "Unlock" and then type your password.
Please keep in mind that this discussion is about it being user-friendly. I've seen lack-of-privilege problems handled in other distros two ways:
1) Tell the user he/she doesn't have the privileges required to do what he/she is trying to do.
2) Prompt the user for the root password.
Both approaches make it obvious to the user what the problem is, and what they need to do to proceed. Is it really supposed to be obvious that everything is ghosted in the application because it needs to be "unlocked"? If I click the "Help" button, do you know what it tells me about the "Unlock" button? Absolutely nothing. In fact, it says "When you start the Network Administration Tool, you will be prompted for the administrator password..." which is most definitely not what happens. To make you happy, I just clicked the magical "Unlock" button. Do you know what happened? The window hung for 25 seconds (would not respond to mouse clicks), then a dialog popped up saying "Could not authenticate. An unexpected error has occurred." I was never prompted for the root password. Very helpful. If you honestly cannot acknowledge that this is a disaster from a usability standpoint, there is really no point in even talking to you, because you are lost in fanboy land.
How small a mind do you have to have to fight over which distribution of a single OS is the best? Heaven forbid someone else uses something different then you.
Take a look back at the beginning of this thread. Hell, just look at the subject line: "Ubuntu *is* Linux for a lot of people." I'm not at all arguing that everyone should use what I'm using. I'm arguing against the idea that everyone should automatically use Ubuntu. Specifically, I'm arguing against Ubuntu being the one and only user-friendly distro. Other distros were very user-friendly and "just worked" before Ubuntu even existed. I can hardly remember the last time I had to vi XF86Config. I'm not saying people shouldn't use Ubuntu if they are happy with it, I just don't see why Ubuntu gets so much credit for being user-friendly while the other distros get so little, and your post didn't add a single thing to that discussion.
Wow, so I'm not the only one that doesn't understand the Ubuntu love-fest? I only tried it once (8.04 64-bit), but I got frustrated with it very quickly. For example, I logged in as a normal user (not root), selected the network configuration app from the menu, and was not prompted for the root password. Everything just came up ghosted and unusable. I tried to log in as root, but you can't do that ("admin not allowed to log in from this screen" -- is there some other screen that admin can log in from?). I ended up having to pull up a shell, guess the name of the network admin app (/usr/bin/network-admin), then su and run it. This is supposed to be user-friendly? How does something that brain-damaged get released? I ran into several other problems (it's been too long for me to remember details), and just gave up on it after a few hours. I haven't had problems like that with other distros (OpenSUSE has worked quite well for me lately). I just don't see why people think Ubuntu is so much better than everything else.