Tech jobs are being outsourced overseas in a great number of cases, so getting a CS degree is not some automatic ticket to a job like it used to be and doesn't mean long term stability if you can find a job
No degree is an automatic ticket to a long term stable job.
By the age of 18, kids have been using/learning about computers and using the Internet for a while, many have developed some level of technical skill, and are possibly getting jobs without having to go through 4+ years of drudgery.
Tinkering with your computer by yourself makes you a programmer the way tinkering with your car by yourself makes you a mechanic: you have a nice hobby, not a career.
Unless you're working for the biggest companies, programming is a grind. It's not glamorous, seldom exciting, and while the paychecks are nice, you sometimes end up working crazy schedules which don't allow you to enjoy the money.
Welcome to the real world. Or how do you think lawyers, accountants, physicians or engineers spend their days (not to mention policemen, nurses, opticians, construction foremen, taxi drivers, ticket conductors, tool die makers, high-voltage transformer technicians, sewage service personnel...)?
You want fame, fortune and an easy life? Join a reality TV show.
It can't be both that the programming field is in danger because we're outsourcing all our programming work, leading to no jobs for programmers, AND be that we're in danger of not having enough new programmers.
Of course there can be. "Programmers" are not one, monolithic, exchangeable mass.
On one hand you have "just" programmers. People that are sometimes self-taught, sometimes with a Comp-Sci education very heavy on programming and light on everything else. At times, html-people even successfully pass themselves off as members of this group. They know how to code. And they are thirteen to the dozen, and prime targets for being outsourced to the cheapest bidder.
On the other, you have professionals that also happen to have a background inprogramming. They may be biochemists (especially in pharmaceutics), accountants, economists, electrical engineers, writers or whatever, but they also have a minor in computing. They are valuable. They have a valuable skill set, _and_ are able to translate that skill set for the data systems the company needs.
The really good ones are those with both the above skill set, and the ability to effortlessly talk to people about it, to spread that knowledge of theirs and to make many more people intheir organization understand the insights they have, and to motivate and inspire them to run with it and make something good from it.
People in the first groups are many, and redundant. People in the second group are needed. People in the third group can (and do) name their own price.
While I basically agree (especially regarding cost of commuting), those hours need not be wasteful. I've been able to make very good use of my commute by doing most of my studying and quite a bit of writing on the train. The benefit, compared to home, is that you're free of distractions. You can't postpone your study by doing something else, since you have nothing else to do. For a habitual procrastinator like myself it is a great benefit, and I'm much more productive than I'd been had I not that time every day.
Of course, that assumes that you can take public transport; if you're stuck with a car you're just out of luck. I guess you could use audio books, but I'd think you need to focus too much on traffic for it to be a good study environment.
I think people still have choices regardless of the addiction they suffer from (OCD disorders, Serial Killer, Gambling, etc.) A person doesn't HAVE TO Gamble, but it feels that way. He doesn't HAVE TO wash his hands 5 times, but he thinks he does.
These abnormalities or "lesions" in our brains may make us feel we do not have a choice. In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
You are wrong, at least when it comes to actual neurological damage.
An excellent demonstration for damage in this area (the orbitofrontal cortex) is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Simply described, a subject tries to sort cards according to one of three criteria (color, shape or number). They don't know which criteria is correct, but get a yes/no feedback with every try. And of course, fairly quickly people catch on and follow the rule.
Now, once the subject has caught on, the rule changes (again, without the subject being told). It's quickly obvious that the rule is different, so normal subjects will start trying other rules until they find the right one.
People with this area damaged will not. They will continue the old rule even though it keeps failing. They can even te the experimenter that "I know the rule has changed; it's not the old one anymore!", and they _still_ can't change their behavior and switch the rule. But take them out of the room and into another one and continue the test, and they will imediately and easily wsitch to whatever new rule was needed.
Again, these people know the rule has changed. They can say so, and they can become quite distressed over it, but they can not switch their behavior. In a very real sense, the data pathway needed to initiate the switch is no longer functional, and so it doesn't matter how much they want to - nothing will happen.
If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.
But that's sort of the qhole point of this article: the designer just don't have the information needed to make sure the page looks good and is legible for all its users. Ultimately, you can not know what size and typeface I prefer or need. So you do need some solution to make it look reaonable across a wide range of device parameters and preferences.
Really, _tight_ design control on the web is a pipe dream. The successful designs are made to still look good despite a great deal of unanticipated variation in the end result. Those designers who go all posterior orifice over it and create brittle designs that may look "pixel perfect" on a narrow range of outputs, and fail badly on the rest.
but many sites do pixel positioning to have ultimate control over their design. This could throw that out of wack (it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use).
That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font sie with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage. IF you want "ultimate control over your design", publish a PDF.
Fortunately, and unlike your assertion, most sites do not do this, and adapt quite well already. In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.
you'll have a better chance if you develop skills in things like project management rather than just being a code monkey.
To put it a bit more forcefully: you really do need to have a "real" skill in addition to coding. Just being a coder is a bit like just being a writer - if you don't know anything to write about, you're not going to be very attractive for a lot employers.
So if you see yourself doing financial applications, get an economy degree (or even better, be a CPA so you can design compliance software). Chemical industry - chemistry degree. And so on.
why don't they just work all on 1 fantastic piece of software?
Because there is no one answer to what makes a piece of software fantastic.
When intelligent people can reasonably disagree on it, don't be surprised - or dismayed - when the end result is several divergent designs. That is truly a case where any one of the designs are good, and importantly, better than a compromise between them.
The current Dapper beta has beautiful support for Scim-chinese/pinyin. Of course, Firefox is stuck in the stone ages with libc5 and so won't work with it, but if you type in OOo or (I'd imagine) any other competent editor, it works perfectly.
Are you quite sure? I run Breezy with Scim for Japanese, and I can use it in the default Firefox with no trouble; never had to do anything, it just worked. If anything OOo is the most troublesome, since you need to set a bunch of options regarding preferred fonts and such that do not have good defaults.
The offspring you find in the wild is pretty normal. Of course, just about all offspring that does exhibit deleterious phenotypic expression die very quickly, and is in most cases spontaneously aborted long before birth. Most species can produce a lot more offspring than actually survive to adulthood (and most species do usually produce slightly more, as a hedge), so dramatically higher infant mortality or aborted pregnancies would just be compensated for by having more pregnancies and larger klutches in the first place. Of course, to some extent the mortality is lowered by the lack of human activities. You could hypothesize a donut-shaped overall mortality graph with the senter around the reactor and the outer edge at the edge of normal human habitation. Near the center you'd have high mortality from the radiation effects, and high mortality in human-habitated areas, but in between there'd be a sweet spot, with just a small increase in radiation mortality completely swamped by the lack of humans.
In fact, it would be really interesting to see a study of klutch size among birds nesting at the plant compared to the same species at various distances away from the area.
(On another point, if I use Adblock to block ads from a site, how easy is it for them to tell that I've done so, and to narrow it down to a specific ad blocked from a specific site on a specific visit?)
If you are blocking (not hiding) ads and they serve the ads themselves it should be feasible for them to notice that you did n ot in fact download all the content of the page. If they have a separate ad provider with their own servers it's more likely they will only note the aggregate effect of fewer viewed ads than pages visited over time.
Of course, if you set Adblock to hide rather than block, they don't know you didn't see it.
No need to hide anymore! Come out of the closet (it's too small for a soldering station anyhow)!
Cast your pretensions! Rise and walk proudly from the dark of the TV room into the bright flouerescent of the computer lab!
No more hiding copies of Make in a cover of Hustler! No more awkward stammering that you were just surfing for gay porn and somehow accidentally stumbled upon perl.org.
Testify! Say it: "I am Geek, hear me Mumblesomethingintelligleaboutapreprocessororsomet hing!".
In the US at least, there is no 'freedom from hearing'
But there is. The US, too, has similar restrictions on speech as Europe does. I think US people get hung up on the "hate speech" term since they don't use it themselves in a legal context, and the term has connotations there of affirmative action and other civil rights issues.
"hate speech" (the term differs per country) is of course well defined, legally. And for the inevitable gray areas, well, thet's what we have courts for - just like for any other law out there.
What it is, at its heart, is a restriction on inciting violent crime, with the bar extremely high (but not nonexistent) for private citizens and in general, and with the bar lower for broadcasting and publishing (where a lot of people hear the message) and also lower when it is directed at groups that are especially vulnerable, and it's especially likely it will result in violence. And you have that in the US as well - if you scream "grab that sucker and kick his brains out!" and your friends doe just that, you can't hide behind free speech; you'll be found guity of inciting the beating.
Completely separate from that is specific laws in some countries (mostly Germany and France, I think), that forbid the use of Nazi symbols in media. Most EU countries do not have those laws, and it's not part of any EU-wide regulation either.
Your critique is about the existing rules, such as they are, not about having the same set of rules regardless of medium. Those are two separate questions, and it is the one you're not adressing that is in focus here.
Riiiight. Just like European companies are the only ones affected by French copyright laws.
Companies wishing to do business in Europe are affected by European laws, no matter where they are based. Just like companies doing business in the US needs to follow US law, and companies in Japan need to follow Japanese law, wherever their headquarters may be located.
Is that online content doesn't know about borders. If I post a hate filled advertisement for children in the United States, will I find myself hauled before a French court?
No. European newspapers, broadcasters and other media organizations are the only ones affected, of course.
And likewise, European media happily plastered Janet Jacksons nipple everywhere on the net (as an example of US prudish overreaction, but anyway) without any rebuke from your FTC - and there's plenty of more serious material available in the EU that would be illegal had a US entity posted the same thing.
Any entity can only enforce regulations within their purview. That doesn't mean it's pointless.
Why is it even necessary? I mean, other than to give already bloated bureaucracies an excuse to help themselves to another bite of intrusive power....
Um? This is a simplification. Why have separate rules for different transports?
Or, if you mean why are any rules at all necessary, then can you name any place that doesn't have them (can you say "nipple incident"? I knew you could!)?
This just says that if a commercial would not be allowed in print in Europe, it would not be allowed on a Eurpoean media site either.
Ps. Contrary to popular belief, the EU is a fairly slim organization. Just compare employees to people ratio with other, similar organizations. Ds.
As far as I understand it, the proposed rules simply say that any advertising, hate speech or other content rules already applied today for other media in Europe would apply for the same media when online. Where's the problem?
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.
On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.
On the file system level, the standard file systems seem very, very stable. I have never heard of disk corruption that wasn't hardware related. The more experimental stuff, like ReiserFS, seem anecdotally less stable; but then, they aren't used by default either. As usual, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, expect to cut yourself from time to time.
I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code.
I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.
I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for me to do so. And of course, whenever I need a shell, it's still right there for me to use (and while I do use the shell a lot, it's still less than it used to be).
Most people are working on things that benefit all of Ubuntu, not just one desktop. And since Ubuntu started specifically as a polished Gnome desktop - and since that was a major reson for the early enthusiasm - it is hardly strange that most employees and contributors are Gnome users and developers as well.
Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.
Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.
Let countries and territories have their top-level domains, as today, and let the unused ones free.
Country-level domains is a good example that the organization doesn't really work anymore - for every domain that's actually placed neatly in the country it belongs to, you have another that doesn't. For instance, the tiny island of Niue has a lot of registered sites under the.nu domain - but they are mostly Swedish, since "nu" is Swedish for "now", which makes for memorable domain names. Tuvalu's.tv domain is of course used for a lot of television-related sites. And with.com,.net and.org letting anybody register anything, organization is pretty much broken down by now.
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Tech jobs are being outsourced overseas in a great number of cases, so getting a CS degree is not some automatic ticket to a job like it used to be and doesn't mean long term stability if you can find a job
...)?
No degree is an automatic ticket to a long term stable job.
By the age of 18, kids have been using/learning about computers and using the Internet for a while, many have developed some level of technical skill, and are possibly getting jobs without having to go through 4+ years of drudgery.
Tinkering with your computer by yourself makes you a programmer the way tinkering with your car by yourself makes you a mechanic: you have a nice hobby, not a career.
Unless you're working for the biggest companies, programming is a grind. It's not glamorous, seldom exciting, and while the paychecks are nice, you sometimes end up working crazy schedules which don't allow you to enjoy the money.
Welcome to the real world. Or how do you think lawyers, accountants, physicians or engineers spend their days (not to mention policemen, nurses, opticians, construction foremen, taxi drivers, ticket conductors, tool die makers, high-voltage transformer technicians, sewage service personnel
You want fame, fortune and an easy life? Join a reality TV show.
It can't be both that the programming field is in danger because we're outsourcing all our programming work, leading to no jobs for programmers, AND be that we're in danger of not having enough new programmers.
Of course there can be. "Programmers" are not one, monolithic, exchangeable mass.
On one hand you have "just" programmers. People that are sometimes self-taught, sometimes with a Comp-Sci education very heavy on programming and light on everything else. At times, html-people even successfully pass themselves off as members of this group. They know how to code. And they are thirteen to the dozen, and prime targets for being outsourced to the cheapest bidder.
On the other, you have professionals that also happen to have a background inprogramming. They may be biochemists (especially in pharmaceutics), accountants, economists, electrical engineers, writers or whatever, but they also have a minor in computing. They are valuable. They have a valuable skill set, _and_ are able to translate that skill set for the data systems the company needs.
The really good ones are those with both the above skill set, and the ability to effortlessly talk to people about it, to spread that knowledge of theirs and to make many more people intheir organization understand the insights they have, and to motivate and inspire them to run with it and make something good from it.
People in the first groups are many, and redundant. People in the second group are needed. People in the third group can (and do) name their own price.
This is your boss, I demand that you lower your rates or I'll hire less-expensive overseas developers.
I am an overseas developer you insensitive clod.
While I basically agree (especially regarding cost of commuting), those hours need not be wasteful. I've been able to make very good use of my commute by doing most of my studying and quite a bit of writing on the train. The benefit, compared to home, is that you're free of distractions. You can't postpone your study by doing something else, since you have nothing else to do. For a habitual procrastinator like myself it is a great benefit, and I'm much more productive than I'd been had I not that time every day.
Of course, that assumes that you can take public transport; if you're stuck with a car you're just out of luck. I guess you could use audio books, but I'd think you need to focus too much on traffic for it to be a good study environment.
I think people still have choices regardless of the addiction they suffer from (OCD disorders, Serial Killer, Gambling, etc.) A person doesn't HAVE TO Gamble, but it feels that way. He doesn't HAVE TO wash his hands 5 times, but he thinks he does.
These abnormalities or "lesions" in our brains may make us feel we do not have a choice. In reality if we are honest with ourselves and we work hard to overcome these urges, we can overcome almost any adversity, vice or compulsion.
You are wrong, at least when it comes to actual neurological damage.
An excellent demonstration for damage in this area (the orbitofrontal cortex) is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST). Simply described, a subject tries to sort cards according to one of three criteria (color, shape or number). They don't know which criteria is correct, but get a yes/no feedback with every try. And of course, fairly quickly people catch on and follow the rule.
Now, once the subject has caught on, the rule changes (again, without the subject being told). It's quickly obvious that the rule is different, so normal subjects will start trying other rules until they find the right one.
People with this area damaged will not. They will continue the old rule even though it keeps failing. They can even te the experimenter that "I know the rule has changed; it's not the old one anymore!", and they _still_ can't change their behavior and switch the rule. But take them out of the room and into another one and continue the test, and they will imediately and easily wsitch to whatever new rule was needed.
Again, these people know the rule has changed. They can say so, and they can become quite distressed over it, but they can not switch their behavior. In a very real sense, the data pathway needed to initiate the switch is no longer functional, and so it doesn't matter how much they want to - nothing will happen.
If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.
But that's sort of the qhole point of this article: the designer just don't have the information needed to make sure the page looks good and is legible for all its users. Ultimately, you can not know what size and typeface I prefer or need. So you do need some solution to make it look reaonable across a wide range of device parameters and preferences.
Really, _tight_ design control on the web is a pipe dream. The successful designs are made to still look good despite a great deal of unanticipated variation in the end result. Those designers who go all posterior orifice over it and create brittle designs that may look "pixel perfect" on a narrow range of outputs, and fail badly on the rest.
but many sites do pixel positioning to have ultimate control over their design. This could throw that out of wack (it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use).
That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font sie with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage. IF you want "ultimate control over your design", publish a PDF.
Fortunately, and unlike your assertion, most sites do not do this, and adapt quite well already. In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.
you'll have a better chance if you develop skills in things like project management rather than just being a code monkey.
To put it a bit more forcefully: you really do need to have a "real" skill in addition to coding. Just being a coder is a bit like just being a writer - if you don't know anything to write about, you're not going to be very attractive for a lot employers.
So if you see yourself doing financial applications, get an economy degree (or even better, be a CPA so you can design compliance software). Chemical industry - chemistry degree. And so on.
why don't they just work all on 1 fantastic piece of software?
Because there is no one answer to what makes a piece of software fantastic.
When intelligent people can reasonably disagree on it, don't be surprised - or dismayed - when the end result is several divergent designs. That is truly a case where any one of the designs are good, and importantly, better than a compromise between them.
The current Dapper beta has beautiful support for Scim-chinese/pinyin. Of course, Firefox is stuck in the stone ages with libc5 and so won't work with it, but if you type in OOo or (I'd imagine) any other competent editor, it works perfectly.
Are you quite sure? I run Breezy with Scim for Japanese, and I can use it in the default Firefox with no trouble; never had to do anything, it just worked. If anything OOo is the most troublesome, since you need to set a bunch of options regarding preferred fonts and such that do not have good defaults.
in fact, the offspring are pretty much normal.
The offspring you find in the wild is pretty normal. Of course, just about all offspring that does exhibit deleterious phenotypic expression die very quickly, and is in most cases spontaneously aborted long before birth. Most species can produce a lot more offspring than actually survive to adulthood (and most species do usually produce slightly more, as a hedge), so dramatically higher infant mortality or aborted pregnancies would just be compensated for by having more pregnancies and larger klutches in the first place. Of course, to some extent the mortality is lowered by the lack of human activities. You could hypothesize a donut-shaped overall mortality graph with the senter around the reactor and the outer edge at the edge of normal human habitation. Near the center you'd have high mortality from the radiation effects, and high mortality in human-habitated areas, but in between there'd be a sweet spot, with just a small increase in radiation mortality completely swamped by the lack of humans.
In fact, it would be really interesting to see a study of klutch size among birds nesting at the plant compared to the same species at various distances away from the area.
(On another point, if I use Adblock to block ads from a site, how easy is it for them to tell that I've done so, and to narrow it down to a specific ad blocked from a specific site on a specific visit?)
If you are blocking (not hiding) ads and they serve the ads themselves it should be feasible for them to notice that you did n ot in fact download all the content of the page. If they have a separate ad provider with their own servers it's more likely they will only note the aggregate effect of fewer viewed ads than pages visited over time.
Of course, if you set Adblock to hide rather than block, they don't know you didn't see it.
No need to hide anymore! Come out of the closet (it's too small for a soldering station anyhow)!
t hing!".
Cast your pretensions! Rise and walk proudly from the dark of the TV room into the bright flouerescent of the computer lab!
No more hiding copies of Make in a cover of Hustler! No more awkward stammering that you were just surfing for gay porn and somehow accidentally stumbled upon perl.org.
Testify! Say it: "I am Geek, hear me Mumblesomethingintelligleaboutapreprocessororsome
In the US at least, there is no 'freedom from hearing'
But there is. The US, too, has similar restrictions on speech as Europe does. I think US people get hung up on the "hate speech" term since they don't use it themselves in a legal context, and the term has connotations there of affirmative action and other civil rights issues.
"hate speech" (the term differs per country) is of course well defined, legally. And for the inevitable gray areas, well, thet's what we have courts for - just like for any other law out there.
What it is, at its heart, is a restriction on inciting violent crime, with the bar extremely high (but not nonexistent) for private citizens and in general, and with the bar lower for broadcasting and publishing (where a lot of people hear the message) and also lower when it is directed at groups that are especially vulnerable, and it's especially likely it will result in violence. And you have that in the US as well - if you scream "grab that sucker and kick his brains out!" and your friends doe just that, you can't hide behind free speech; you'll be found guity of inciting the beating.
Completely separate from that is specific laws in some countries (mostly Germany and France, I think), that forbid the use of Nazi symbols in media. Most EU countries do not have those laws, and it's not part of any EU-wide regulation either.
Your critique is about the existing rules, such as they are, not about having the same set of rules regardless of medium. Those are two separate questions, and it is the one you're not adressing that is in focus here.
Riiiight. Just like European companies are the only ones affected by French copyright laws.
Companies wishing to do business in Europe are affected by European laws, no matter where they are based. Just like companies doing business in the US needs to follow US law, and companies in Japan need to follow Japanese law, wherever their headquarters may be located.
Is that online content doesn't know about borders. If I post a hate filled advertisement for children in the United States, will I find myself hauled before a French court?
No. European newspapers, broadcasters and other media organizations are the only ones affected, of course.
And likewise, European media happily plastered Janet Jacksons nipple everywhere on the net (as an example of US prudish overreaction, but anyway) without any rebuke from your FTC - and there's plenty of more serious material available in the EU that would be illegal had a US entity posted the same thing.
Any entity can only enforce regulations within their purview. That doesn't mean it's pointless.
Why is it even necessary? I mean, other than to give already bloated bureaucracies an excuse to help themselves to another bite of intrusive power....
Um? This is a simplification. Why have separate rules for different transports?
Or, if you mean why are any rules at all necessary, then can you name any place that doesn't have them (can you say "nipple incident"? I knew you could!)?
This just says that if a commercial would not be allowed in print in Europe, it would not be allowed on a Eurpoean media site either.
Ps. Contrary to popular belief, the EU is a fairly slim organization. Just compare employees to people ratio with other, similar organizations. Ds.
As far as I understand it, the proposed rules simply say that any advertising, hate speech or other content rules already applied today for other media in Europe would apply for the same media when online. Where's the problem?
If you were on trial, would you want the assumption of innocence?
The trial is long over and MS lost. This is not a trial, but about whether MS is conforming to the judgement handed down or not.
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.
On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.
On the file system level, the standard file systems seem very, very stable. I have never heard of disk corruption that wasn't hardware related. The more experimental stuff, like ReiserFS, seem anecdotally less stable; but then, they aren't used by default either. As usual, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, expect to cut yourself from time to time.
I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code.
I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.
I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for me to do so. And of course, whenever I need a shell, it's still right there for me to use (and while I do use the shell a lot, it's still less than it used to be).
Most people are working on things that benefit all of Ubuntu, not just one desktop. And since Ubuntu started specifically as a polished Gnome desktop - and since that was a major reson for the early enthusiasm - it is hardly strange that most employees and contributors are Gnome users and developers as well.
Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.
Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.
It's Swedish for "naked".
No.
Let countries and territories have their top-level domains, as today, and let the unused ones free.
.nu domain - but they are mostly Swedish, since "nu" is Swedish for "now", which makes for memorable domain names. Tuvalu's .tv domain is of course used for a lot of television-related sites. And with .com, .net and .org letting anybody register anything, organization is pretty much broken down by now.
Country-level domains is a good example that the organization doesn't really work anymore - for every domain that's actually placed neatly in the country it belongs to, you have another that doesn't. For instance, the tiny island of Niue has a lot of registered sites under the