I'm motivated enough to try anything that works well and reasonably intuitive. This is something that Gimp is not. I don't get on well with Photoshop either but at least it has some bloody straight forward drawing tools. I've never used a piece of software that is so difficult to draw with, deselect objects, manage layers and create gradients quickly. I use Paint Shop Pro for almost all graphical work. I'm not a professional designer or anything and only use Photoshop when I can get a decent tutorial to create effects.

Some people just need to create some graphics. Most Linux packages are vector stuff or photo editors. Deluxe Paint was one of the best packages for creating graphics from scratch. Paint Shop Pro is the next best up-to-date software. I think Ubuntu was right to drop this. But there is no good alternative either so maybe Linux is not ready for serious users. For real pros right at the top there are some excellent animation apps and related graphics software but other than that there are no good graphics packages for the average user.... something that Ubuntu aims for.

I develop on Ubuntu six days a week for both desktop apps and web. So, because I don't use Gimp I can't possibly be a serious user??? I think we need some better core applications on Linux.

You obviously never got suckered into Windows ME then. In all seriousness I had lots of bugs with 8.10 and 9.04. My clean install of 9.10 has gone remarkably well. Initially I was a bit dubious as to whether it had worked properly because the install was like lightning. Three days use now and the only bug I've had is I cannot seem to get Synaptic to show me all the available packages, just the ones that are installed. I don't seem to have suffered with Windows 7 either. The desktop looks crap but the whole thing works.

Yep, I have one of those boxes too. I don't seem to remember a computer being shipped with the DVD inside the box.

Very specific ideas should be patentable. The patent process is at fault not the idea of being able to patent something. People and companies genuinely spend their time researching and developing technologies - they should be allowed to protect their investment

Leniency is the problem when it comes to creating patents. People are allowed to patent a very vague idea and really the idea should be much more specific. Researchers worry when they have a very specific patent in case part of their development veers off from what their patent describes. This would be a good opportunity to build relations with another company who can help in this area or maybe they should be more sure of the technology they patented in the first place.

... but you are suggesting that Nokia is being silly by protecting their ideas and investment. Tell you what, create a business, make it a bit successful through hard work, put a lot of money into making it better.... then give it away to me for free.

Name one what? R & D is a whole range of different processes put together. Name a process? Name a research idea? Name an exact product of R & D??????

I was under the impression that most software and hardware technologies were built on existing ones to an extent so does this mean that most future technologies can be given away for free because nobody patented silicon wafers or the C programming language? You said yourself, this is the one implementation of the family. Nokia has spent a lot of money implementing that family, why should they just go out on a limb to do so with no financial gain?

Again, show you what? What you are talking about is such a large development area; are you wanting somebody to copy and paste the code that has been used or links to the 'huge number of people' that developed the underlying technology? If a company spends a lot of money 'implementing' a technology that is not yet on the market, and they have been willing to take the risk of it not being accepted, then, when it does work they deserve to pay themselves. At least Nokia are sharing. Should we start the troll wars again about Apple's use of BSD and charging for something they didn't create? Didn't think so. This is not a dig at Apple. But folks that think these companies should just hand everything out on a plate when they have forked up the cash to make it happen in the first place really get me mad.

Yes, can agree with you on this one Mark. And I would like to add my own bit.

As a British national living in Latin America I regularly check web sites like BBC news to keep myself up-to-date with what is happening back in the UK. It is amazing to see how media in other countries interpret situations and then how they report them to the awaiting public. Of course, it works the other way round too with media organisations manipulating the same reports back to their own people. But, when you are actually involved with some of these situations, and then you see the misguided/misunderstood/spin manipulated or whatever reports in other countries about the said situation you realise just how much bullshit there really is in this world and it is so hard to gain even 20% of the real truth.

As for this story, my brother-in-law (10 years old) is obsessed with violent games on his PS2. He tries to play real fighting games with my 2 and 6 year old daughters. I've had to ban him from the computer now because of downloading violent online games which usually come with a bunch of porn adverts down both sides of the screen. What is worse, is that you have to understand the pirate industry in Latin America too...... Trying to buy legitimate computer games in my city is impossible. Within three blocks of my home there are 16 stores selling pirate games - 80% of them violence related. I can understand the idea of blocking violent games though I don't think it will actually be as effective as it needs to be. You may pick on Chavez and his non-westernised views but these countries have got to start somewhere to curb the violence. If Chavez throws a few tens of thousands of troops on to the streets to deal with violence you will hear about it in ways that portray him as a military dictator. So what does the guy do?

mmmmm...... I've just spent the last two hours sorting an XP machine out with a DLL problem. On top of that most of my week has been spent updating our company machines with .net framework and it's updates because two applications that we have bought required it; and each machine would not update via our main server, only individually. In my book that constitutes dependencies and it was hell - three machines failed to update the frameworks and we had to pick out registry entries by hand to convince the machines that .net framework 3.5 wasn't actually successfully installed. I'll be honest, I use Slackware Linux which is always fun with dependencies without a package manager but I've had a lot more problems getting software to run on Windows without downloading patches, frameworks and other 'required' utilities. Also, last week, one of the department managers had a new laptop delivered and needed it for a short notice business trip. I installed Office 2007 as a complete install according to the menus. He took the laptop saying he would configure it later. Office then asked for the DVD three times while he was away to continue installing parts of applications rendering Powerpoint and Outlook useless until he came back to the office. That is the kind of dependency that really is hell.

Chrome runs about the same speed as Opera on my machine. Firefox is a bit of a dog these days and I gave up using IE for anything other than testing web pages a long time ago. To me, Firefox feels like IE with most of the confusing graphics and stupid menu options taken out. Opera feels like Firefox with the graphics replaced with impossible to read, badly rendered text, though I prefer to use Opera for browsing as it seems to render actual pages better. One thing that annoyed me with Google Chrome is that they suddenly decide to design this Chrome OS thing based on Linux, yet Chrome browser seems to be continuously stuck on some kind of preview version and Windows version is always bang up-to-date. What's the deal here? Surely if you were going to build an OS linked to your browser technology you would develop for your primary OS base.

Okay, I'll disagree all I like (but I do agree a bit). Microsoft have innovated very little and many people feel that they have destroyed more of the industry than helped it.

No they didn't. Commodore (as much as I disliked them), Amstrad and Atari had a much bigger hand in this. I know a lot more people who had an Apple on their desk before they had a PC. In England in particular ICL were quite dominative in the early eighties with bringing non-DOS based desktop computing into businesses with networking clients that spanned continents. My father used one of these in his council job. Really, Xerox and Apple pioneered GUI's, Microsoft kind of 'borrowed' the technology from them (or Apple to be more precise).

I always found Microsoft products to be overpriced. I would pay good money for them but in the UK when Vista came out a retail boxed edition of XP Professional was still GBP180. That is not affordable for an operating system that MS were trying to ditch. I first used Linux in 1996 (Suse) and didn't have to hack anything on the kernel. It took me two hours to get the stupid WinModem to work admittedly but I was spending much more than two hours a week trying to prevent Windows from crashing.

Even Microsoft admit their mistake on the slow uptake of the Internet. The easy to use software you are talking about was developed by third party companies and universities, not by Microsoft. They didn't even make it easy to use, stable or flexible when they did launch their own.... unless you were on MSN of course.

This may seem like trolling, but it really does get my goat when folks think Microsoft did all this stuff. Bill Gates is a very good businessman. His philanthropy shows a better natured side to him. But there have been many, many more pioneers who really have developed the industry you see now. In defense of Bill, I don't think I would put him on par with RMS. RMS may have pushed freedom in software but others have done the same thing without the extremities.

I agree, but I'm not too happy about this guys comments from Red Hat either. I'm British and live in Latin America. I'm just about to get broadband internet enabled in our area (capital city, 800m from the centre) and it's going to cost me $80 a month for a 256k connection. You still can't get free phone handsets with contracts here either (talktime only contract is $64 a month for 240 minutes). So what's the relevance of my statement?

It costs me $11 to update my Linux computer after a fresh install, at a cafenet and takes around 7 hours. Windows use is out of the question, it's almost impossible to buy legit software here and even when you try you end up with pirate disks. My only choice to have a reliable machine up and running for more than a week (okay a year is more realistic) is a Linux desktop which I have updated at install time and installed all the software I need to work. This guy at Red Hat seems to think the whole world is running on 24Mbit connections and cloud networks. Even if we had them here it would still cost us more than half a months salary to use these systems. In the UK, I would wait for the new technology to settle in for maybe three months and then the prices would drop. Prices don't drop here, they go up for better tech until something new is invented.

You're also not in the minority. My sound hasn't worked in Ubuntu since 6.06, I installed Dia from Launchpad and had to wipe my machine because it didn't work afterwards. Linux has a long way to go but it will still be relevant on the desktop in ten years for those of us without any choice.

As for legit software down here Mr Ballmer, when XP doesn't cost me 2/3rds of my months salary I might buy it. Don't even think about asking me to cough up for Vista or Win7

Actually they'll probably call you a pirate if you keep this up but you could get a great job at Microsoft's boxed distro production unit.

I agree..... and I don't. As a development platform for the PS3 installing Linux isn't the best idea in the world. There is a lot of hardware that although it could be supported, you just don't get access to because Sony doesn't want. Same story for PS2. Most of the chips inside were customized so unless you'd got your own fab plant and could resolder a few hundred pins you were pretty much locked out of the hardware. On the other hand, folks trying to hack these systems may just have a chance of eventually convincing these proprietary monsters like Sony to support some homebrew development. Maybe they might actually have some capable programmers left by the time PS4 is released. I'm sure they would sell a lot more consoles if they were to open these systems up a bit more - just look at the success of the 80's - C64, TRS-80, ZX Spectrum, Atari XE, Amstrad CPC. Okay so they weren't necessarily consoles but at least programmers had a chance to develop using the whole system and these guys have been writing our games for years now. I use my PS3 for Cell programming training. I'm not that good yet so I can't work for the big boys but I hope to use it at some stage on server boards not on a games console.