I think you need to read up on NetDevil a little more before passing judgement. This is a small group of developers who built the original Jumpgate in their free time out of their own pocket because they thought it was cool.
To respond to the GP and above... if you missed it from the comments in the article (and from original Jumpgate) the entire game environment is based on Newtonian physics. If you are piloting a large cargo ship with a full cargo load you have to deal with inertia issues, i.e. doing a full reverse burn at full thrust for a few seconds before you even think about docking at a station.
Fortify identified a total of 22,826 cross-site scripting and 15,612 SQL injection issues associated with multiple versions of the 11 open source software packages examined.
The projects in question: Tomcat, Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts.
For those who don't play in Java often:
Derby is an embedded database. Tomcat, Geronimo, JBoss, Resin and JOnAS are Java (EE) app servers. Hipergate and OpenCMS are (you guessed it) content management systems. Hibernate is a persistent framework. Struts is a web framework.
So of any of these, it seems that the only projects that would be open to XSS or SQL injection would be the CMS products. Unless they're referring to the web administration for the app servers?
The only way to have SQL injection attacks in javaland is if you're not using prepared statements or if your database driver isn't preparing/escaping properly.
So they're saying two CMS projects have tens of thousands of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities?
On the first, Ron Paul suggests, reluctantly I understand, that states should handle marriage themselves.
His position, as stated in the Candidates@Google interview, is that marriage is a religious issue and shouldn't be a concern of the state. He said something to the effect of "People can do what they want, and call it what they want, and the government should have no part of it".
On DoE (Department of Education), conservatives have long been lobbying for various subjects, like history and biology...
You're absolutely right. And what role did the DoE have in stopping the Arkansas (?) board of education from adding Intelligent Design to the curriculum? As I recall the people in favor of it were voted out of office at the local level, all without involving the federal government.
I get into similar discussions with people over civil liberties (or lack thereof) in the current administration. They say things like "It's okay, I have nothing to hide. I trust President Bush". I then say, "But what if Hillary Clinton was president, would you have the same confidence in government then?"... and their face usually turns a pale white.
So let's say the Department of Education suddenly decreed that state schools needed to enforce abstinence only education (with this administration that should not be a stretch of the imagination). Wouldn't you want the power (at the local level) to oppose that?
I was discussing monopoly enforcement, not just technology related monopoly enforcement.
On some of your other examples, let's take agriculture. When you add in government regulation, you get everything that comes with it. How about farm subsidies? How much of your paycheck pays farmers to not grow anything? How much of your paycheck goes to subsidize corn because of its possible use in ethanol?
Dr. Paul is against farm subsidies, even though he is from a district where a large percentage of voters are farmers. This would be considered political suicide by most politicians, yet he does it because he backs up his beliefs with his vote in congress.
Transportation, how much do we pay to bail out the airlines that can't balance a checkbook?
That is the problem with "big government", you don't just get regulation for free. If you the government regulates it controls, and guess who has control of government? It's the companies and special interest groups that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists to get legislation that they want passed. Sometimes (just to make sure the politicians get it right) they even write the legislation themselves. Are these the people you trust to regulate?
On the abortion issue, half the country wants a constitutional amendment that bans abortion and half the country wants a constitutional amendment that allows abortions. I would say this is a perfect example of a divisive issue that should be left up to the states. The grandparent said "He would allow states to ban abortion"... I would also add "He would enable states to *allow* abortion", even though he is personally opposed to it after being an obstetrician (sp?) for many years and personally witnessing an abortion early in his career.
On free trade, he is probably the candidates most *for* free trade. What we have now isn't free trade, it's managed trade. Ever wonder why there are such high tariffs on steel imports?
He is not anti-immigration, he is anti-*illegal* immigration. There is a big difference there.
If you're concerned about senior citizens on fixed incomes you should be greatly concerned about rising inflation and the crashing dollar, which affects senior citizens and the middle class first: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/inflation-tax/
He doesn't have a stated position on monopoly enforcement that I'm aware of. His default position is a "hands off" libertarian policy of letting the market handle most things.
I'm divided on this, to tell you the truth. I think the market addresses most concerns, but this may be one of those exceptions where intervention is needed. On the other hand, most monopolies are government sponsored. Also, look at how the "big government" approach of the EU fining Microsoft daily. That doesn't seem to really solve anything. Microsoft gladly pays the fine. The only other option would be to break up the corporation like Ma Bell, but as we've seen over the last few years it just seems to T1000 its way back together.
Then again, look at what is happening to Microsoft now without government intervention. Competition in the marketplace from Google has forced them to use the last of their cash on hand to try and acquire another company. At the same time, the OEM lock in has been eroded by alternatives like Linux which Dell and a few other mainstream manufacturers sell pre-installed in some models.
- Only person running that voted against the Patriot Act(s)
- Only person running that voted against Sarbanes-Oxley
- Opposes the DMCA
- Opposes the national ID card
- Has never voted to raise taxes
- Returns a portion of his congressional budget to the treasury every year
- He is a Republican who opposes the Iraq War on moral and economic grounds
There's a lot of FUD out there about Ron Paul, and there are a lot of fanatics on the internet who work against him sometimes, but if you look at his voting record over the last 20 years it speaks for itself.
This is a good guy who opposes the big government mentality that so many here on Slashdot rail against.
I remember Jeff Waugh (Gnome guy, also worked at Canonical) had mentioned at last year's Ohio Linux Fest there had been talk about this for years but everyone was always busy working on other stuff. Glad to see they finally are getting it out.
ShaunC said "If you want cheap tracts of land and cheap electricity, you build a data center in Oklahoma or Kansas".
And if you look it up, "Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri are entirely within Tornado Alley"...
I don't know what's more irritating, the clowns arguing about something that they missed the premise of in the first place or the people who are arguing with someone who has been to the DISA data center in OKC.
"He argues that extremely high expectations can only lead to disappointment for consumers and investors."
In that case they shouldn't ever announce any cool products ever again. Seriously, what kind of logic is that? Apple makes cool things so people put unrealistic expectations on them. People do the same thing with Google, but Google still releases new services. The new stuff might not match the hype but Google and Apple can't change how much people obsess about them.
1. Formalize and consolidate our global Open Source knowledge to accommodate new and existing client requirements
I'd say the first step here is defining how far you want to go. Do you just want to use some Apache Jakarta Commons libraries in some applications or do you want to deploy a full LAMP stack? Also, what is the purpose of adopting OSS products? Philosophical? Just want some free stuff? PR move?
2. Define a review process that will enable us to quickly review Open Source tools, applications, and so forth
This will probably be the most difficult of all. For every operating system, programming language or application there is at least one open source project. The biggest problem you'll face here is bureaucracy. You'll probably setup some type of review board that approves certain applications/libraries/whatever every couple of months before they can be deployed. But what happens if a bug is found, patched, and updated in version control? Can they deploy that modified and unapproved version? If they can't you lose flexibility, if you can you lose the quality control that comes from the approval process. The answer is somewhere in the middle, but these are questions that need to be asked.
3. Provide a contribution scheme so we can donate code to the Open Source Community.
IANAL, sorry. I work for a major IT company and I contribute patches to OSS projects. I just do it under my name, so (as far as I've been told by people who do have a law degree) that releases the company from potential liability.
I went through this same process within my group about a year ago. One of the hardest parts was breaking the "it's insecure if people can view the source" arguments from management. The larger the IT firm the more the ideas of "Intellectual Property" and "Security by Obscurity" have been crammed into the heads of people that make decisions. This is how I sold it:
"It's not about communist hippies in Birkenstocks saying everything should be free. Every web application I build needs a database, an application server and a web server. On top of that it needs libraries that do a lot of things common to other projects. It makes no sense for us to take on the burden of developing these from scratch. It is in our best interest to collaborate with others to build stable, portable solutions that can be deployed en mass without exorbitant licensing fees."
I forget where I read it, but apparently that's normal for South Park. They have a brainstorming session on Thursday (six days before air), then write and produce the entire show over the next few days and send it via satellite to Comedy Central on show day.
I think it's more about a manager trying to justify his position by "re-organizing" and "streamlining" positions and their descriptions. For instance, I'm a Java developer. You would think my job description would be "Senior Java Developer" or "Java Developer III" or something... no, I'm an "Information Design Specialist".
To me it doesn't affect my job or my pay, so they can call my position anything they feel like. When I choose to move on I'm still putting "Java Developer" on my resume.
Now we can clean up some of the garbage that's in the jdk. I've been developing Java for a few years now. I was really interested in Java 6, so I downloaded the source from dev.java.net. I was shocked at how hacked together some of the classes are. Specifically I was interested in the new "standard" ORM classes in java.sql. The code was error prone, inefficient (for Java geeks, it had repetitive reflection calls all over the place) and just plain bad design.
After writing my own implementation of most of the new java.sql classes for my own use (and using the supposedly new standard java.sql.DataSet interface) they apparently pulled all the new java.sql classes from Java 6.
Hopefully they get a better community process to go along with their new license.
If you're implying that MySpace is Web 2.0 I'd have to disagree. MySpace may be great for 'social networking', but from a technical point of view it's a nightmare. Malformed HTML, non-degradable Javascript, code injection issues... it's like a bad joke.
I'm a few years ahead of you (class of 2001) and I share your pain. While my school did have a few computers and a programming class, it was horribly outdated. The problem with the school systems is (obviously?) the administrators. Even as they throw out all the buzzwords for the parents about how "technology friendly" they are, they will always spend more on asthetics because they relate how they run their schools with their own high school experience. When I say asthetics, that's something that they can show parents and other school administrators to show what a great school they have. That can be a football stadium, new cafeteria, whatever. If you just look at how much money goes into a football team, for instance: stadium, equipment, extra pay for coaches, transportation for away games, maintenance, insurance... it really is staggering. And what educational value does football provide? Absolutely nothing aside from a little "school spirit".
Anyway, off my soap box about schools... what can you do about it? I seriously doubt you're going to change the culture of your school or how they spend money. More power to you for trying, and I'd be highly impressed if you did it... I just don't think it's going to happen. Sorry. What you do have is this incredible collection of knowledge known as the Internet. Pick a programming language. Almost any modern language you pick has an open source equivalent (at some level) that you can play around with at home. Even Microsoft has student/free editions of a lot of their tools. I wanted to build web applications (remember, I started high school in 1997) so I started with what I thought was the easiest and most popular web development language: PHP. Now, almost ten years later I know or have at least played with: C/C++, Python, PHP, Ruby (RoR), C# and what makes me money: Java.
You're the master of your own destiny and being in school you typically have a lot of free time to devote to playing with new languages and getting your feet wet. My advice is to find people that are like you, I gurantee there are at least a handful at your school, and team up with them. Pick an application that you want to build and a language you want to build it in and just dive in. Who knows, you could be the next Google.
I did exactly what I described above when I was in high school. Unfortunately all the cool software development I was doing distracted from school, so I ended up barely graduating with a 1.9GPA. It's hard to focus on worksheets and study guide busy work (all copied from the Addison Wesley material anyway) when you're going home and building all these really cool things. But using everything I had learned working at my own pace with my friends I'm now 23, own my own home and make around $70k a year. Screw school, do it your own way.
I'm a Windows user who's been looking at Ubuntu for awhile. I had tried Fedora and Mandrake in the past, but I just wasn't impressed enough to switch.
All I have to say is: wow! I burned the 'Desktop' CD, booted it up on my Thinkpad R52, and was able to play around in the OS to get familiar with the environment. Once I was satisfied that everything was running smooth (it saw all of my devices, including wireless, with no problem) all I had to do was click on the 'Install' icon on the desktop.
The installer itself was excellent. Like I said having installed other distros in the past this graphical install *in a desktop environment* was excellent. The part that I had dreaded the most was setting up dual boot (I already had XP installed). The installer saw the XP partition (NTFS) and allowed me to resize it and install Ubuntu in the newly freed space (and automatically installed GRUB). This was absolutely beautiful functionality, and I think it will really make a great transitional tool for migrating us lame Windows users over to Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you need to read up on NetDevil a little more before passing judgement. This is a small group of developers who built the original Jumpgate in their free time out of their own pocket because they thought it was cool.
To respond to the GP and above... if you missed it from the comments in the article (and from original Jumpgate) the entire game environment is based on Newtonian physics. If you are piloting a large cargo ship with a full cargo load you have to deal with inertia issues, i.e. doing a full reverse burn at full thrust for a few seconds before you even think about docking at a station.
The Departed? Blood Diamond? That new one with Russell Crowe, Body of Lies?
FTFA:
The projects in question:
Tomcat, Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts.
For those who don't play in Java often:
Derby is an embedded database.
Tomcat, Geronimo, JBoss, Resin and JOnAS are Java (EE) app servers.
Hipergate and OpenCMS are (you guessed it) content management systems.
Hibernate is a persistent framework.
Struts is a web framework.
So of any of these, it seems that the only projects that would be open to XSS or SQL injection would be the CMS products. Unless they're referring to the web administration for the app servers?
The only way to have SQL injection attacks in javaland is if you're not using prepared statements or if your database driver isn't preparing/escaping properly.
So they're saying two CMS projects have tens of thousands of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities?
On the first, Ron Paul suggests, reluctantly I understand, that states should handle marriage themselves.
His position, as stated in the Candidates@Google interview, is that marriage is a religious issue and shouldn't be a concern of the state. He said something to the effect of "People can do what they want, and call it what they want, and the government should have no part of it".
On DoE (Department of Education), conservatives have long been lobbying for various subjects, like history and biology...
You're absolutely right. And what role did the DoE have in stopping the Arkansas (?) board of education from adding Intelligent Design to the curriculum? As I recall the people in favor of it were voted out of office at the local level, all without involving the federal government.
I get into similar discussions with people over civil liberties (or lack thereof) in the current administration. They say things like "It's okay, I have nothing to hide. I trust President Bush". I then say, "But what if Hillary Clinton was president, would you have the same confidence in government then?"... and their face usually turns a pale white.
So let's say the Department of Education suddenly decreed that state schools needed to enforce abstinence only education (with this administration that should not be a stretch of the imagination). Wouldn't you want the power (at the local level) to oppose that?
I was discussing monopoly enforcement, not just technology related monopoly enforcement.
On some of your other examples, let's take agriculture. When you add in government regulation, you get everything that comes with it. How about farm subsidies? How much of your paycheck pays farmers to not grow anything? How much of your paycheck goes to subsidize corn because of its possible use in ethanol?
Dr. Paul is against farm subsidies, even though he is from a district where a large percentage of voters are farmers. This would be considered political suicide by most politicians, yet he does it because he backs up his beliefs with his vote in congress.
Transportation, how much do we pay to bail out the airlines that can't balance a checkbook?
That is the problem with "big government", you don't just get regulation for free. If you the government regulates it controls, and guess who has control of government? It's the companies and special interest groups that pay millions of dollars to lobbyists to get legislation that they want passed. Sometimes (just to make sure the politicians get it right) they even write the legislation themselves. Are these the people you trust to regulate?
This is a reply to you and the grandparent.
On the abortion issue, half the country wants a constitutional amendment that bans abortion and half the country wants a constitutional amendment that allows abortions. I would say this is a perfect example of a divisive issue that should be left up to the states. The grandparent said "He would allow states to ban abortion"... I would also add "He would enable states to *allow* abortion", even though he is personally opposed to it after being an obstetrician (sp?) for many years and personally witnessing an abortion early in his career.
On free trade, he is probably the candidates most *for* free trade. What we have now isn't free trade, it's managed trade. Ever wonder why there are such high tariffs on steel imports?
He is not anti-immigration, he is anti-*illegal* immigration. There is a big difference there.
Social Security: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/social-security/ (watch the embedded flash video)
Medicare: Ron Paul is a doctor who has experienced how broken the system is first hand, http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/health-care/
If you're concerned about senior citizens on fixed incomes you should be greatly concerned about rising inflation and the crashing dollar, which affects senior citizens and the middle class first: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/inflation-tax/
He doesn't have a stated position on monopoly enforcement that I'm aware of. His default position is a "hands off" libertarian policy of letting the market handle most things.
I'm divided on this, to tell you the truth. I think the market addresses most concerns, but this may be one of those exceptions where intervention is needed. On the other hand, most monopolies are government sponsored. Also, look at how the "big government" approach of the EU fining Microsoft daily. That doesn't seem to really solve anything. Microsoft gladly pays the fine. The only other option would be to break up the corporation like Ma Bell, but as we've seen over the last few years it just seems to T1000 its way back together.
Then again, look at what is happening to Microsoft now without government intervention. Competition in the marketplace from Google has forced them to use the last of their cash on hand to try and acquire another company. At the same time, the OEM lock in has been eroded by alternatives like Linux which Dell and a few other mainstream manufacturers sell pre-installed in some models.
You name institutions that you feel are vital that you think Ron Paul would like to dismantle, and I'll explain his position on each and every one.
- Only person running that voted against the Patriot Act(s)
- Only person running that voted against Sarbanes-Oxley
- Opposes the DMCA
- Opposes the national ID card
- Has never voted to raise taxes
- Returns a portion of his congressional budget to the treasury every year
- He is a Republican who opposes the Iraq War on moral and economic grounds
There's a lot of FUD out there about Ron Paul, and there are a lot of fanatics on the internet who work against him sometimes, but if you look at his voting record over the last 20 years it speaks for itself.
This is a good guy who opposes the big government mentality that so many here on Slashdot rail against.
I remember Jeff Waugh (Gnome guy, also worked at Canonical) had mentioned at last year's Ohio Linux Fest there had been talk about this for years but everyone was always busy working on other stuff. Glad to see they finally are getting it out.
ShaunC said "If you want cheap tracts of land and cheap electricity, you build a data center in Oklahoma or Kansas".
And if you look it up, "Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri are entirely within Tornado Alley"...
I don't know what's more irritating, the clowns arguing about something that they missed the premise of in the first place or the people who are arguing with someone who has been to the DISA data center in OKC.
Yes, what better place to build a data center than TORNADO ALLEY.
"He argues that extremely high expectations can only lead to disappointment for consumers and investors."
In that case they shouldn't ever announce any cool products ever again. Seriously, what kind of logic is that? Apple makes cool things so people put unrealistic expectations on them. People do the same thing with Google, but Google still releases new services. The new stuff might not match the hype but Google and Apple can't change how much people obsess about them.
1. Formalize and consolidate our global Open Source knowledge to accommodate new and existing client requirements
I'd say the first step here is defining how far you want to go. Do you just want to use some Apache Jakarta Commons libraries in some applications or do you want to deploy a full LAMP stack? Also, what is the purpose of adopting OSS products? Philosophical? Just want some free stuff? PR move?
2. Define a review process that will enable us to quickly review Open Source tools, applications, and so forth
This will probably be the most difficult of all. For every operating system, programming language or application there is at least one open source project. The biggest problem you'll face here is bureaucracy. You'll probably setup some type of review board that approves certain applications/libraries/whatever every couple of months before they can be deployed. But what happens if a bug is found, patched, and updated in version control? Can they deploy that modified and unapproved version? If they can't you lose flexibility, if you can you lose the quality control that comes from the approval process. The answer is somewhere in the middle, but these are questions that need to be asked.
3. Provide a contribution scheme so we can donate code to the Open Source Community. IANAL, sorry. I work for a major IT company and I contribute patches to OSS projects. I just do it under my name, so (as far as I've been told by people who do have a law degree) that releases the company from potential liability.
I went through this same process within my group about a year ago. One of the hardest parts was breaking the "it's insecure if people can view the source" arguments from management. The larger the IT firm the more the ideas of "Intellectual Property" and "Security by Obscurity" have been crammed into the heads of people that make decisions. This is how I sold it:
"It's not about communist hippies in Birkenstocks saying everything should be free. Every web application I build needs a database, an application server and a web server. On top of that it needs libraries that do a lot of things common to other projects. It makes no sense for us to take on the burden of developing these from scratch. It is in our best interest to collaborate with others to build stable, portable solutions that can be deployed en mass without exorbitant licensing fees."
I forget where I read it, but apparently that's normal for South Park. They have a brainstorming session on Thursday (six days before air), then write and produce the entire show over the next few days and send it via satellite to Comedy Central on show day.
... and most "enterprisey" Java developers have never met a problem that couldn't be fixed with more XML.
1. Manufacture a ridiculously low amount of units 2. Sell out of those units at a highly discounted rate 3. MAKE NO PROFIT!! 4. Declare victory
I think it's more about a manager trying to justify his position by "re-organizing" and "streamlining" positions and their descriptions. For instance, I'm a Java developer. You would think my job description would be "Senior Java Developer" or "Java Developer III" or something... no, I'm an "Information Design Specialist".
To me it doesn't affect my job or my pay, so they can call my position anything they feel like. When I choose to move on I'm still putting "Java Developer" on my resume.
Now we can clean up some of the garbage that's in the jdk. I've been developing Java for a few years now. I was really interested in Java 6, so I downloaded the source from dev.java.net. I was shocked at how hacked together some of the classes are. Specifically I was interested in the new "standard" ORM classes in java.sql. The code was error prone, inefficient (for Java geeks, it had repetitive reflection calls all over the place) and just plain bad design. After writing my own implementation of most of the new java.sql classes for my own use (and using the supposedly new standard java.sql.DataSet interface) they apparently pulled all the new java.sql classes from Java 6. Hopefully they get a better community process to go along with their new license.
If you're implying that MySpace is Web 2.0 I'd have to disagree. MySpace may be great for 'social networking', but from a technical point of view it's a nightmare. Malformed HTML, non-degradable Javascript, code injection issues... it's like a bad joke.
I'm a few years ahead of you (class of 2001) and I share your pain. While my school did have a few computers and a programming class, it was horribly outdated. The problem with the school systems is (obviously?) the administrators. Even as they throw out all the buzzwords for the parents about how "technology friendly" they are, they will always spend more on asthetics because they relate how they run their schools with their own high school experience. When I say asthetics, that's something that they can show parents and other school administrators to show what a great school they have. That can be a football stadium, new cafeteria, whatever. If you just look at how much money goes into a football team, for instance: stadium, equipment, extra pay for coaches, transportation for away games, maintenance, insurance... it really is staggering. And what educational value does football provide? Absolutely nothing aside from a little "school spirit".
Anyway, off my soap box about schools... what can you do about it? I seriously doubt you're going to change the culture of your school or how they spend money. More power to you for trying, and I'd be highly impressed if you did it... I just don't think it's going to happen. Sorry. What you do have is this incredible collection of knowledge known as the Internet. Pick a programming language. Almost any modern language you pick has an open source equivalent (at some level) that you can play around with at home. Even Microsoft has student/free editions of a lot of their tools. I wanted to build web applications (remember, I started high school in 1997) so I started with what I thought was the easiest and most popular web development language: PHP. Now, almost ten years later I know or have at least played with: C/C++, Python, PHP, Ruby (RoR), C# and what makes me money: Java.
You're the master of your own destiny and being in school you typically have a lot of free time to devote to playing with new languages and getting your feet wet. My advice is to find people that are like you, I gurantee there are at least a handful at your school, and team up with them. Pick an application that you want to build and a language you want to build it in and just dive in. Who knows, you could be the next Google.
I did exactly what I described above when I was in high school. Unfortunately all the cool software development I was doing distracted from school, so I ended up barely graduating with a 1.9GPA. It's hard to focus on worksheets and study guide busy work (all copied from the Addison Wesley material anyway) when you're going home and building all these really cool things. But using everything I had learned working at my own pace with my friends I'm now 23, own my own home and make around $70k a year. Screw school, do it your own way.
Been there, try this
I couldn't get through the second sentence without a wtf moment:
"We met while working on Windows Server 2003 at the twice daily status meeting."
Morning meeting: "I'm planning on writing some code today"
Afternoon meeting: "I had planned on writing some code, but I was busy preparing my presentation for this meeting"
This explains a lot...
I'm a Windows user who's been looking at Ubuntu for awhile. I had tried Fedora and Mandrake in the past, but I just wasn't impressed enough to switch.
All I have to say is: wow! I burned the 'Desktop' CD, booted it up on my Thinkpad R52, and was able to play around in the OS to get familiar with the environment. Once I was satisfied that everything was running smooth (it saw all of my devices, including wireless, with no problem) all I had to do was click on the 'Install' icon on the desktop.
The installer itself was excellent. Like I said having installed other distros in the past this graphical install *in a desktop environment* was excellent. The part that I had dreaded the most was setting up dual boot (I already had XP installed). The installer saw the XP partition (NTFS) and allowed me to resize it and install Ubuntu in the newly freed space (and automatically installed GRUB). This was absolutely beautiful functionality, and I think it will really make a great transitional tool for migrating us lame Windows users over to Linux.