I'm a T-Mobile customer and the behind-the-scenes changes are already happening and affecting me. A few months ago they discontinued the pseudo prepay plan I was on and made me pay a deposit. This month I had a bunch of dumb stuff happen that required a lot more minutes than I normally use. I called them to see about ordering more and their brand new policy is that you have to sign up for a new two-year contract just to add minutes to your plan for the month or you get charged $.49/minute (!!!) if you go over. The entire reason I went with T-Mobile was so I could own my own phone and not enter into any contracts with these evil mobile phone providers!

Prior art only applies to patents, not trade secrets. They are pretty exactly opposite sides of the IP landscape. There could be some algorithms behind the scenes or in any other number of secret locations that would still be secret.

How about just "The Shack"? It's real clean.

If the CEO has that to say then I don't know why anyone would go there.

(but seriously, everything there is so expensive and shoddy, the salespeople actually are that creepy, and hobbyists can usually afford to wait a couple days or even weeks to order the exact right parts for significantly cheaper from internet / China)

There are multitudes of cases where this nonsense falls apart and someone would have a good chance for a lawsuit on the off chance they have an army of lawyers to go up against Nintendo's. That's the problem with any of this, these giant corporations are becoming invincible because no-one but other giant corporations can challenge them. Just like Lodsys only suing smaller developers; granted they are dicks, but they have a good point that these big companies can wantonly do whatever they want and nobody has the funds to buy enough laws and lawyers to put up a fight. We can have our petty human lawsuits with each other, but only a god can go up against a god.

Everyone says how the patent system is broken so they leave it to the courts to figure out. Now it would be great if the courts are also saying there are too many patents for them to deal with. Progress!

Looks like you just found out the big problem with Chrome OS. You barely run Linux then, in the sense of being a distro that has WILDLY different build requirements from all other desktop distros. It's almost like saying, "Sure I run Linux, the DD-WRT distro, just give me a link".

By exploited, do you mean murdered?

I made the switch after the latest Ubuntu a few months ago would barely even run on my relatively recent box (2007 AMD something). XFCE actually runs at the speed I believe this hardware should run. More importantly, everything seems so reasonable instead of forcing all these new paradigms on everyone when we mostly all just want a desktop that works and stays out of the way. It really has come so far since I last gave it a serious whirl in ~2004. Bonus: all the good stuff out of GNOME, like the GUI admin tools, still integrate fine.

I've been with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox from the beginning; custom builds, bug reports, tech evangelism, extensions/userscripts; I have made more than one offline XUL application for personal use (JS application programming before it was cool!); the whole ten meters. It had been so good for so long.

In 2008 a few things happened. 1. The extremely sensible and welcome features added in the 2.x release cycle, coupled with the unique browser landscape, ended up derailing the original goals of the project (streamlined browser, minimal yet viable for mainstream use, with robust extension capabilities for anything else anyone could want) back into some ridiculous browser arms race; 2. I switched to OSX and I think the memory problems are even worse there; and 3. Chrome started shaping up to be everything I wanted technically, with its new extension and built-in userscript support (even if it was inferior), its sandboxing, and its sort of remotely sane memory usage, even if it didn't have the warm fuzzy feeling I had from my closeness to the Mozilla project.

I am still so guilty about my switch to Chrome but I spend so much of my life in a browser window that I really had to go the practical route.

And since then it's just been getting worse and worse, with all resources going into either JS performance to keep up in benchmarks or features to be able to add some more bullet points to a release announcement. All anyone wants is better memory management, and then tab sandboxing would be nice after that since Flash/Silverlight can really bring down an embedding process. Give us some core improvements that aren't marketing driven and move all the AWESOMENESS into extensions that can be disabled after install! That's all anyone (on /.) wants.

After a miserable time with GNOME in my last Ubuntu install (maverick), I ended up rediscovering XFCE after a ~7 year break. Back then it was absurdly minimalistic, but it has matured into just about everything I want from a Linux DE. Everything is extremely reasonable with just enough options for customization, and all of the GNOME applications and admin tools integrate perfectly. My primary box is OSX but Xubuntu is my goto from now on for other GUI boxen.

As far as this RADICAL DEPARTURE for the new GNOME...didn't they make a big hoopla and piss everyone off a few years ago when they made Nautilus open a new window for every folder you opened? And then at some point they reverted to the default being something sensible. I dunno; maybe this new interface will turn out to be really cool but I couldn't run the latest 2.x on a decent c. 2007 box so I'm not even going to try.

(time passes)

After attempting to read the articles, the one is a 404 and the other one is just rehashing a bunch of drama about Ubuntu using their own fancy new crapfest and GNOME being offended. From what I gather from other comments, the new interface puts a big focus on an Expose-like interface triggered by a hotspot in the corner? That's actually how I set it up in OSX for easy mouse navigating; like cmd-tab except mouse-oriented.

Executive summary: XFCE good! GNOME keeps getting worse but might have some good ideas!

It could be YEARS before Vanilla is released. They're only on Gingerbread!

Time Machine on OSX is really impressive.

As far as the OP, mbox and maildir are both plain-text-based and have been around for ages. Thunderbird uses mbox.

Netflix streaming said Chrome was incompatible last time I tried to use it. I've also had a lot of warnings on various sites that "all features may not be supported". As Mozilla knows, evangelism with major sites is as important as rendering bugs to the end user (me!). Usually everything just works or would work if they would unblock it.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/