I would love to live in the US. It is too big a country to do justice to by simply visting. However I would not like to bring up kids there unless I won the lottery or something. On a modest income here in the UK you can guarantee your kids a reasonable quality of education without forking out a fortune on private schools. Ok, you need to subsidise them when they get to university, but even then to lesser degree than is needed over there. I actually like the idea of moving to Scotland in that regard: no university fees at all.
It's been evident ever since, so it's no surprise that Android suffers from it also especially with HTC's scrolling hacks all over it.
Sorry, maybe you did not read my post but my new Hero does not suffer from it. I cant help but think it is actually more about how responsive the OS is being that apparently an OS update fixed the Hero's lag issues.
I'm not trying to snarky, but I keep hearing about how cellphones are going to be the next big platform and how everyone is going to throw out their personal computers and start buying Apps from Google and Apple and installing them on their phones.
My last phone was an HTC tytn ii that I bought with this in mind. The problem for me was that it was too bulky. This seems to be the problem with this approach is that to make something useable in this regard, you have to push the form factor up slightly, and that makes it awkward to carry as a phone on a daily basis. As soon as you start building in things like keyboards or high spec processors, you seem to have to push the device size up, especially the depth. After 2 years of owning the Tytn2 I was fed up of having a brick in my pocket.
I am however looking at getting very small netbook PC or ultramobile PC to replace the things a phone cannot do. I would like this to still just small enough to fit in a pocket, but it does not have to be comfortable since it will not be in there very long. I suppose I have realised that I actually want something very different from a phone that I carry all the time: Size is most important.
The Hero is nice and all but, like other Android phones, it doesn't have the processing power. The Acer A1 looks like it will be coming with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor and Android 1.6. Now if it would just be carried by someone other than T-Mobile in the states I would be happy.
ok it has low spec processor, but its a phone so who cares as it does not need to do much. I have had mine a week and its great, the lag issues other people have complained about were obviously fixed by the latest update as I have never had any complaints in this regard, not like my old Windows Mobile piece of junk, now that was laggy. The way sense ui or whatever works is great.
My only criticism is the onscreen keyboard input, but now I have got used to that. The trick seems to be completely ignoring what actual letter you hit, and just finishing the word you wanted to type anyway and letting the phone sort it out, it almost always does. It does take some time to get used to not correcting every mistyped letter but when you do you realise how good the autocorrect really is.
Generally the amount of damage a new hire can do is much more than the amount of good. In most companies an intelligent employee can find ways to steal millions from the company or at least cause that much damage.
This is actually very relevant to the original posters question. One of my friends recently went back to work in the gambling industry at a company he had worked for previously. Even though he had several years prior experience at the same company he still had to go through a mountain of security check including contacting all the employers he had worked for in the interim since he left the first place. Working at a company that runs a high value website involving large amounts of money is only going to help your CV in the UK. In the states you might have to be a bit more vague, but until he gets there this job will be damn good on his CV.
Why? Seems like a straightforward thing to bring up during an interview.
Newsflash: people lie in interviews.
Any attempt to bring this up will result in them saying that they do code in their free time since this can have very little negative connotations but a great many positive ones. Also, many inexperienced developers try and pad out their lack of formal experience by saying this.
I'm not saying you're any less of a coder for that *not* being the case, but I think coding for fun can be a reasonable filter that an employer might use. It may have a higher-than-normal false positive rate (catching good coders such as yourself in its net), but it likely also has a very low false negative rate (not allowing bad coders past the filter).
Unless you are a complete moron it does not matter how bad you are at writing code, what matters is how willing you are to learn to improve. No employer expects you to be productive from day one, they just expect you to work to build up you skills and learn to work within the team that they already have in place. People skills are far more important in most jobs that coding ability unless you are right on the cutting edge, most jobs are not.
Just give them a basic coding aptitude test in their specialist language (on paper, no IDE) and see how they do. Then talk to them about their result. Faced with the lack of an IDE everyone makes the odd slip up, what matters is how well they deal with it. Ok, not everyone, but then you really have done well and you can recruit a genius.
I wouldn't hire, or work for, a person who treats programming as a 9 to 5 activity. Life is short, and the craft so long to learn.
How many people do you employ directly? What is your position? And do you have a family yet?
Unfortunately you do not usually find out if someone codes in their free time until after you employ them so is not doing this a sackable offence?
I have spent many years coding in my free time, but now I have been doing it professionally for several years I rarely find the time. I like to spend my free time doing things I enjoy. I get the impression you have only just started full time work, or have not been there yet since most people I know who work 40 hours a week then spend a few more travelling like to where they work like to make the most of not being there by doing something as different as possible.
I recently reinstalled Steam on a new machine after losing my account details from the old machine and having not used my account in 2 years. I had lost access to my old email account I signed up with so I had to provide them with the credit card details I signed up with. Now I have access to all the games I have ever bought using Steam. This is better than most game I bought a physical copy of as I am great at losing or damaging the discs or manuals.
The people here complaining about "renting" games are just whining they cannot buy a game, then take it back and resell it after they have completed it. This is something almost all game publishers expressly forbid in the licence you agree to when you install the game, but it seems easier to blame Valve for enforcing this that it is to blame the people who put it into their licence that Valve enforce.
This guy who gave this interview is the CEO of Gearbox Software right, does anyone here actually know if they encourage the resale of their games on ebay or if they ar just as opposed to it as all the other games publishers? I notice he has posted a comment here so maybe he will now also say how much he loves the idea of us all reselling his games and him not seeing a cent.
I am not saying he has to support this point of view since I do not anyway, but I am saying that an awful lot of the people posting here need to grow up and realise he has an entirely different issue with Valve than they do. What would please him would probably not make a blind but of difference to all the people here complaining they can't resell a game they have bought after they have played it from start to finish and had many hours of enjoyment from.
As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people.
Sorry, but you will have to explain why that is anti-competitive. It might not be the most consumer friendly policy, but it certainly does not stifle competition. I also note that most games are cheaper on Steam which is why I always thought you were not allowed to transfer ownership. Thhey are in fact completely open about this, when you buy a game you know it is limited to you, so you have choice: buy it anyway, or do not buy it and go and pay more to get a hardcopy that still probably prohibits resale, but only in licence you can safely ignore.
Please stop blaming Valve for actually enforcing a policy that almost all game publishers actually desire anyway, blame the publishers. This is like whining about Apple for using DRM they openly disliked but the music publishers insisted on. Apple ultimately refused to use DRM, but only after they had enough clout in the marketplace for it to make a difference.
Anyway, maybe we should all just hope Valve go under and Microsoft take over as the primary method of online game distribution. They are sure to be completely fair with their track record. They are also in a perfect position to take over the market as most games are played on their platform anyway.
Actually it does, it provides an easier way to meet the mass market than the alternative, which is the main games distribution companies like EA. You want a conflict of interest, try doing business with them and releasing a game at Christmas when their flagship titles are coming out.
I know Steam has its detractors as they do not allow resale of titles, but it also has its benefits.
Even their name, "Alcor Life Extension Foundation" is completley dishonest. They sell death suspension perhaps, but saying they provide life extension is a flat out lie.
Actually their website seems reasonably honest. It even contains a section detailing the problems they (you) face.
To be honest, I do know sod all about international law.
I do know a little something about hypocrisy though. It strikes me as ridiculously hypocritical that we are now in a situation of our government trying to put pressure on one country not to develop nuclear weapons, when they have neighbour that is known for being their enemy that has nuclear weapons already.
I see very little difference between Israel and Iran because both are countries that have a strongly intertwined notions of Religion and State, that makes me very nervous as I believe that governments should be religiously impartial. I believe this because I am completely atheist. I have no problem with other people being religious, but they should have no say in determining law or governmental policy based on the teachings of their religion.
In both Israel and Iran (and many other countries for that matter) people of different religions are treated differently, especially with regards to the Armed Forces. This makes me very nervous about these countries developing and possessing nuclear weapons.
Again, Israel has never signed onto or been a part of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. You are simply acting on incorrect information here. A simply google search would have show you this.
Where did I say Israel was a signatory of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty? I did just check and was very surprised that Iran had signed it.
But the fact remains that both Israel and Iran have nukes. Should we give special credit to Israel for saying "screw you we are developing nukes and not signing?" Does that mean North Korea were fine to openly withdraw from the treaty and develop nuclear weapons?
We can try and enforce our will by military means alone, but this is a dangerous path since it results in us having to keep our armed forces in place all over the world to enforce our will against the will of the indigenous population. That is certainly not what the founding fathers of the US had in mind when they drew up the constitution.
Your 0 for 3 right now in the facts department. I'm not sure what you are getting at here outside of some other misconception about foreign affairs. Please elaborate a little more.
Are you actually saying that it is ok to breach international treaties if you do it openly and refuse to sign them in the first place? Are you saying that Iran can build all the nukes they please if they simply withdraw from the treaty?
And the US funds Israel which recently killed 1600 civilians using white phosphorus supplied by the US. This was also in violation of international treaties just like Iran's Nuclear ambitions. When Israel developed their nuclear weapons they violated the same treaty as Iran.
I am not saying I am happy with Iran having nukes, but I am also not happy with Israel having them. Especially when Israel are just as likely to use them. The problem for us is the that if Israel use them against their neighbours, then Russia will be unhappy and may just retaliate against us since we are supporting the country financially and militarily.
Lets not forget that both countries are built on religion and religion has caused too many wars already. Both countries also are moving away from democracy, Iran by rigging elections, and Israel by intimidating non-jewish citizens who try and vote. Both have an armed forces that is becoming more fanatical in the use of embedded religious teachers in with the troops. This is why we should have acted more strongly against Israel when they developed theirs, we set a precedent that we would ignore people breaching the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty if we like the country that was breaching it. This makes it much harder for countries breaching it now to take it seriously when they feel threatened by nuclear equipped neighbours.
We can try and enforce our will by military means alone, but this is a dangerous path since it results in us having to keep our armed forces in place all over the world to enforce our will against the will of the indigenous population. That is certainly not what the founding fathers of the US had in mind when they drew up the constitution.
And the best thing about Windows Mobile is that it allows me to tether my phone to my Linux Laptop, then use the laptop as an internet gateway to a small LAN. I know this does not give the best speed in the world, but it does enable me to download updates to a machine that is in a remote location so has no fixed internet connection. I only use that machine for playing games when I am there so I do not want to pay a monthly fee for a phone line and net account for a flat I am only in once per month at most.
The most recent game I bought on the basis of a free demo was Crysis. I am glad I did but I paid far less than half price as a I bought it off a friend who had it sitting around as unwanted gift.
When I completed it I do remember thinking it was pretty short and I would have been a bit disappointed if I had paid full price, especially when you consider they did not bother with the expense of a testing team:)
As for Shuttleworth I don't know so much about him, but generally I believe the proof is in the pudding and while Ubuntu might be the best or most popular desktop Linux distribution he seems to be more focused on assembling and polishing existing pieces of software leaving very little to differentiate his vision from the rest. Ubuntu isn't fundamentally much different from RHEL or Suse or Mandriva and that makes it hard for me to think of Shuttleworth as much more then a funding source for a popular and fairly vocal distribution.
The main difference seems to be Ubuntu's emphasis on useablity. In my experience it is far better at just working out of the box that any other distribution I have ever tried. It is the only distribution I would recommend to Linux newbies.
The only other distrubution that comes close out of the ones you have quoted is Suse, and in that case I would say you have a point. However SUSE seems to have moved away from the desktop market since they were bought by Novel so they lost ground to Ubuntu very quickly.
The problem with record locking on web apps is that unless they are written with it in mind then it can be very hard to implement. This is particularly an issue if the application uses the edit page as a way of viewing data as well. In this case the system may have no way of knowing if a user is actually editing a record or just seeing what is currently there.
The problem with your little "Record in Use" box is that the system has no way of knowing if the person who locked the record actually closed their browser and so the record would be locked indefinitely. Now you might say that you could use JavaScript and the onUnload event to trap this, but you would be wrong as most of these toolbars (Google, Yahoo, etc) that people have installed trap the onUnload event silently and do not provide a list of allowed sites. This then leaves the only way do to record locking well in a web app as to have the edit page constantly sending status reports to the server.
While this is not very difficult to implement it does require a developer with some fairly advanced knowledge of Javascript. You would be amazed how easy it is to write a web application with almost no javascript knowledge. I do not find it hard to believe that a small company who only have one product would have very little knowledge of AJAX.
It took me about 1 month of being a professional web developer before I needed to use Javascript to validate a form. After 5 years I have still not come across a situation where I needed to use AJAX. I have worked it into a few projects to keep my skillset up but the reality is that I could have completed those projects with other, possibly inferior but still acceptable to the client solutions. Were they happier with my fancy method? Yes. Was the extra time spent always worth the good will of the customer or the extra time charged? Maybe.
This sounds like your problem. It sounds like you need to suggest to your vendor that the lack of decent record locking may be a deal breaker that is forcing you to look elsewhere. If you have a good relationship with them this may help, but do you think the money you give them as a client will cover the cost of implementing this or are there enough other clients asking for it as well?
Don't worry, I'm sure that when horses were first tamed someone bemoaned the loss of walking. I imagine the same thing happened when the carriage was invented, and the bicycle, and the automobile. Pretty girls will still walk, and when they don't they usually get fat, anyway.
Of course the difference there is that riding a horse is actually quite hard work. It is pretty easy if the horse is at a gallop, but they cannot gallop all the time so you have to learn how to sit on a horse while it trots. This kills your thighs because you have to use your legs as suspension.
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You have saved your problems up for when you install the final build. That will force you to do a clean install I believe.
This is not about interest rates, this is about inflation. Student loans here are linked to the inflation rate not the interest rate.
Here in the UK our student loans are linked to inflation. My current APR is -0.40 :)
I would love to live in the US. It is too big a country to do justice to by simply visting. However I would not like to bring up kids there unless I won the lottery or something. On a modest income here in the UK you can guarantee your kids a reasonable quality of education without forking out a fortune on private schools. Ok, you need to subsidise them when they get to university, but even then to lesser degree than is needed over there. I actually like the idea of moving to Scotland in that regard: no university fees at all.
It's been evident ever since, so it's no surprise that Android suffers from it also especially with HTC's scrolling hacks all over it.
Sorry, maybe you did not read my post but my new Hero does not suffer from it. I cant help but think it is actually more about how responsive the OS is being that apparently an OS update fixed the Hero's lag issues.
I'm not trying to snarky, but I keep hearing about how cellphones are going to be the next big platform and how everyone is going to throw out their personal computers and start buying Apps from Google and Apple and installing them on their phones.
My last phone was an HTC tytn ii that I bought with this in mind. The problem for me was that it was too bulky. This seems to be the problem with this approach is that to make something useable in this regard, you have to push the form factor up slightly, and that makes it awkward to carry as a phone on a daily basis. As soon as you start building in things like keyboards or high spec processors, you seem to have to push the device size up, especially the depth. After 2 years of owning the Tytn2 I was fed up of having a brick in my pocket.
I am however looking at getting very small netbook PC or ultramobile PC to replace the things a phone cannot do. I would like this to still just small enough to fit in a pocket, but it does not have to be comfortable since it will not be in there very long. I suppose I have realised that I actually want something very different from a phone that I carry all the time: Size is most important.
The Hero is nice and all but, like other Android phones, it doesn't have the processing power. The Acer A1 looks like it will be coming with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor and Android 1.6. Now if it would just be carried by someone other than T-Mobile in the states I would be happy.
ok it has low spec processor, but its a phone so who cares as it does not need to do much. I have had mine a week and its great, the lag issues other people have complained about were obviously fixed by the latest update as I have never had any complaints in this regard, not like my old Windows Mobile piece of junk, now that was laggy. The way sense ui or whatever works is great.
My only criticism is the onscreen keyboard input, but now I have got used to that. The trick seems to be completely ignoring what actual letter you hit, and just finishing the word you wanted to type anyway and letting the phone sort it out, it almost always does. It does take some time to get used to not correcting every mistyped letter but when you do you realise how good the autocorrect really is.
Generally the amount of damage a new hire can do is much more than the amount of good. In most companies an intelligent employee can find ways to steal millions from the company or at least cause that much damage.
This is actually very relevant to the original posters question. One of my friends recently went back to work in the gambling industry at a company he had worked for previously. Even though he had several years prior experience at the same company he still had to go through a mountain of security check including contacting all the employers he had worked for in the interim since he left the first place. Working at a company that runs a high value website involving large amounts of money is only going to help your CV in the UK. In the states you might have to be a bit more vague, but until he gets there this job will be damn good on his CV.
Why? Seems like a straightforward thing to bring up during an interview.
Newsflash: people lie in interviews.
Any attempt to bring this up will result in them saying that they do code in their free time since this can have very little negative connotations but a great many positive ones. Also, many inexperienced developers try and pad out their lack of formal experience by saying this.
I'm not saying you're any less of a coder for that *not* being the case, but I think coding for fun can be a reasonable filter that an employer might use. It may have a higher-than-normal false positive rate (catching good coders such as yourself in its net), but it likely also has a very low false negative rate (not allowing bad coders past the filter).
Unless you are a complete moron it does not matter how bad you are at writing code, what matters is how willing you are to learn to improve. No employer expects you to be productive from day one, they just expect you to work to build up you skills and learn to work within the team that they already have in place. People skills are far more important in most jobs that coding ability unless you are right on the cutting edge, most jobs are not.
Just give them a basic coding aptitude test in their specialist language (on paper, no IDE) and see how they do. Then talk to them about their result. Faced with the lack of an IDE everyone makes the odd slip up, what matters is how well they deal with it. Ok, not everyone, but then you really have done well and you can recruit a genius.
I wouldn't hire, or work for, a person who treats programming as a 9 to 5 activity. Life is short, and the craft so long to learn.
How many people do you employ directly? What is your position? And do you have a family yet?
Unfortunately you do not usually find out if someone codes in their free time until after you employ them so is not doing this a sackable offence?
I have spent many years coding in my free time, but now I have been doing it professionally for several years I rarely find the time. I like to spend my free time doing things I enjoy. I get the impression you have only just started full time work, or have not been there yet since most people I know who work 40 hours a week then spend a few more travelling like to where they work like to make the most of not being there by doing something as different as possible.
I recently reinstalled Steam on a new machine after losing my account details from the old machine and having not used my account in 2 years. I had lost access to my old email account I signed up with so I had to provide them with the credit card details I signed up with. Now I have access to all the games I have ever bought using Steam. This is better than most game I bought a physical copy of as I am great at losing or damaging the discs or manuals.
The people here complaining about "renting" games are just whining they cannot buy a game, then take it back and resell it after they have completed it. This is something almost all game publishers expressly forbid in the licence you agree to when you install the game, but it seems easier to blame Valve for enforcing this that it is to blame the people who put it into their licence that Valve enforce.
This guy who gave this interview is the CEO of Gearbox Software right, does anyone here actually know if they encourage the resale of their games on ebay or if they ar just as opposed to it as all the other games publishers? I notice he has posted a comment here so maybe he will now also say how much he loves the idea of us all reselling his games and him not seeing a cent.
I am not saying he has to support this point of view since I do not anyway, but I am saying that an awful lot of the people posting here need to grow up and realise he has an entirely different issue with Valve than they do. What would please him would probably not make a blind but of difference to all the people here complaining they can't resell a game they have bought after they have played it from start to finish and had many hours of enjoyment from.
As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people.
Sorry, but you will have to explain why that is anti-competitive. It might not be the most consumer friendly policy, but it certainly does not stifle competition. I also note that most games are cheaper on Steam which is why I always thought you were not allowed to transfer ownership. Thhey are in fact completely open about this, when you buy a game you know it is limited to you, so you have choice: buy it anyway, or do not buy it and go and pay more to get a hardcopy that still probably prohibits resale, but only in licence you can safely ignore.
Please stop blaming Valve for actually enforcing a policy that almost all game publishers actually desire anyway, blame the publishers. This is like whining about Apple for using DRM they openly disliked but the music publishers insisted on. Apple ultimately refused to use DRM, but only after they had enough clout in the marketplace for it to make a difference.
Anyway, maybe we should all just hope Valve go under and Microsoft take over as the primary method of online game distribution. They are sure to be completely fair with their track record. They are also in a perfect position to take over the market as most games are played on their platform anyway.
Actually it does, it provides an easier way to meet the mass market than the alternative, which is the main games distribution companies like EA. You want a conflict of interest, try doing business with them and releasing a game at Christmas when their flagship titles are coming out.
I know Steam has its detractors as they do not allow resale of titles, but it also has its benefits.
I really wish I has some modpoints for this since it is easily the most insightful comment in this whole thread to this point.
I have another example of a fairly open platform that does not suffer from a large volume of malware though: Linux.
I have been using it for years and have never come across any.
Even their name, "Alcor Life Extension Foundation" is completley dishonest. They sell death suspension perhaps, but saying they provide life extension is a flat out lie.
Actually their website seems reasonably honest. It even contains a section detailing the problems they (you) face.
To be honest, I do know sod all about international law.
I do know a little something about hypocrisy though. It strikes me as ridiculously hypocritical that we are now in a situation of our government trying to put pressure on one country not to develop nuclear weapons, when they have neighbour that is known for being their enemy that has nuclear weapons already.
I see very little difference between Israel and Iran because both are countries that have a strongly intertwined notions of Religion and State, that makes me very nervous as I believe that governments should be religiously impartial. I believe this because I am completely atheist. I have no problem with other people being religious, but they should have no say in determining law or governmental policy based on the teachings of their religion.
In both Israel and Iran (and many other countries for that matter) people of different religions are treated differently, especially with regards to the Armed Forces. This makes me very nervous about these countries developing and possessing nuclear weapons.
Who exactly contributed on TCP/IP outside the us?
A quick look on wikipedia confirmed that University College London were involved from fairly early on. Here is the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_Suite
Again, Israel has never signed onto or been a part of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. You are simply acting on incorrect information here. A simply google search would have show you this.
Where did I say Israel was a signatory of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty? I did just check and was very surprised that Iran had signed it.
But the fact remains that both Israel and Iran have nukes. Should we give special credit to Israel for saying "screw you we are developing nukes and not signing?" Does that mean North Korea were fine to openly withdraw from the treaty and develop nuclear weapons?
We can try and enforce our will by military means alone, but this is a dangerous path since it results in us having to keep our armed forces in place all over the world to enforce our will against the will of the indigenous population. That is certainly not what the founding fathers of the US had in mind when they drew up the constitution.
Your 0 for 3 right now in the facts department. I'm not sure what you are getting at here outside of some other misconception about foreign affairs. Please elaborate a little more.
Are you actually saying that it is ok to breach international treaties if you do it openly and refuse to sign them in the first place? Are you saying that Iran can build all the nukes they please if they simply withdraw from the treaty?
And the US funds Israel which recently killed 1600 civilians using white phosphorus supplied by the US. This was also in violation of international treaties just like Iran's Nuclear ambitions. When Israel developed their nuclear weapons they violated the same treaty as Iran.
I am not saying I am happy with Iran having nukes, but I am also not happy with Israel having them. Especially when Israel are just as likely to use them. The problem for us is the that if Israel use them against their neighbours, then Russia will be unhappy and may just retaliate against us since we are supporting the country financially and militarily.
Lets not forget that both countries are built on religion and religion has caused too many wars already. Both countries also are moving away from democracy, Iran by rigging elections, and Israel by intimidating non-jewish citizens who try and vote. Both have an armed forces that is becoming more fanatical in the use of embedded religious teachers in with the troops. This is why we should have acted more strongly against Israel when they developed theirs, we set a precedent that we would ignore people breaching the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty if we like the country that was breaching it. This makes it much harder for countries breaching it now to take it seriously when they feel threatened by nuclear equipped neighbours.
We can try and enforce our will by military means alone, but this is a dangerous path since it results in us having to keep our armed forces in place all over the world to enforce our will against the will of the indigenous population. That is certainly not what the founding fathers of the US had in mind when they drew up the constitution.
And the best thing about Windows Mobile is that it allows me to tether my phone to my Linux Laptop, then use the laptop as an internet gateway to a small LAN. I know this does not give the best speed in the world, but it does enable me to download updates to a machine that is in a remote location so has no fixed internet connection. I only use that machine for playing games when I am there so I do not want to pay a monthly fee for a phone line and net account for a flat I am only in once per month at most.
The most recent game I bought on the basis of a free demo was Crysis. I am glad I did but I paid far less than half price as a I bought it off a friend who had it sitting around as unwanted gift.
When I completed it I do remember thinking it was pretty short and I would have been a bit disappointed if I had paid full price, especially when you consider they did not bother with the expense of a testing team :)
As for Shuttleworth I don't know so much about him, but generally I believe the proof is in the pudding and while Ubuntu might be the best or most popular desktop Linux distribution he seems to be more focused on assembling and polishing existing pieces of software leaving very little to differentiate his vision from the rest. Ubuntu isn't fundamentally much different from RHEL or Suse or Mandriva and that makes it hard for me to think of Shuttleworth as much more then a funding source for a popular and fairly vocal distribution.
The main difference seems to be Ubuntu's emphasis on useablity. In my experience it is far better at just working out of the box that any other distribution I have ever tried. It is the only distribution I would recommend to Linux newbies.
The only other distrubution that comes close out of the ones you have quoted is Suse, and in that case I would say you have a point. However SUSE seems to have moved away from the desktop market since they were bought by Novel so they lost ground to Ubuntu very quickly.
The problem with record locking on web apps is that unless they are written with it in mind then it can be very hard to implement. This is particularly an issue if the application uses the edit page as a way of viewing data as well. In this case the system may have no way of knowing if a user is actually editing a record or just seeing what is currently there.
The problem with your little "Record in Use" box is that the system has no way of knowing if the person who locked the record actually closed their browser and so the record would be locked indefinitely. Now you might say that you could use JavaScript and the onUnload event to trap this, but you would be wrong as most of these toolbars (Google, Yahoo, etc) that people have installed trap the onUnload event silently and do not provide a list of allowed sites. This then leaves the only way do to record locking well in a web app as to have the edit page constantly sending status reports to the server.
While this is not very difficult to implement it does require a developer with some fairly advanced knowledge of Javascript. You would be amazed how easy it is to write a web application with almost no javascript knowledge. I do not find it hard to believe that a small company who only have one product would have very little knowledge of AJAX.
It took me about 1 month of being a professional web developer before I needed to use Javascript to validate a form. After 5 years I have still not come across a situation where I needed to use AJAX. I have worked it into a few projects to keep my skillset up but the reality is that I could have completed those projects with other, possibly inferior but still acceptable to the client solutions. Were they happier with my fancy method? Yes. Was the extra time spent always worth the good will of the customer or the extra time charged? Maybe.
This sounds like your problem. It sounds like you need to suggest to your vendor that the lack of decent record locking may be a deal breaker that is forcing you to look elsewhere. If you have a good relationship with them this may help, but do you think the money you give them as a client will cover the cost of implementing this or are there enough other clients asking for it as well?
Don't worry, I'm sure that when horses were first tamed someone bemoaned the loss of walking. I imagine the same thing happened when the carriage was invented, and the bicycle, and the automobile. Pretty girls will still walk, and when they don't they usually get fat, anyway.
Of course the difference there is that riding a horse is actually quite hard work. It is pretty easy if the horse is at a gallop, but they cannot gallop all the time so you have to learn how to sit on a horse while it trots. This kills your thighs because you have to use your legs as suspension.
Both Iran and Syria want nukes because we in the west turned a blind eye to Israel developing them.