Hurricanes - nature's way to wealth redistribution

Hurricane Sandy is expected to do billions of dollars of damage. A pessimist would look on this as a loss, but, ever the optimist, I see this as a wonderful boost to local economies and a redistribution of wealth. There will be basements to pump, trees to clear, windows to replace, roofs to repair, lawn gnomes to recover. Most of this will be done with local labor, putting work in the hands of people who could use it.

In the best cases, insurance claims will be picking up the tab. That's a Robin Hood scenario, where we steal from the dividend payments of stockholders, and place it in the pockets of people who work with their hands. OTOH, I do own stock in insurance companies, and don't work with my hands, so this is not really directly serving my interests. Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

Ubuntu 12.04 - a worthless turd

I've used Ubuntu daily at work and home for the last 5 years. It's been great.

A few weeks ago, I made the mistake of letting the update manager update me to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have had a barely working system since then.

• 2 displays on an Nvidia card seems completely broken. One of my heads is just dead, no matter what I do.
• It is unstable as a deck of cards on the titanic. Every 30 minutes it freezes, give me a bug report window, and restarts the session manager.
• The new desktop is an abomination, but that's a minor bug. I installed cinnamon to get back to something usable.
• Chrome would not work at all. I had to downgrade to Chromium.
• Networking was broken after the upgrade. In the past, you used to be able to hard assign an IP address, but still use dhcp to get the name servers from the dhcp server. Not any more. The network administration panel seems to have removed most features, so I ended up having to hand edit the start up files to hard assign the name servers.

After 2 weeks of fighting it, there is no alternative than to downgrade back to 10.x or switch to another distribution. And, before you even consider disagreeing with me, let me give you some background.

• I've been using Unix daily since 1978.
• I've written and modified various X window and session managers.
• I've written network trace analyzers.
• I've shipped several commercial software products, that had to install correctly and I had to support when they didn't work.

I'm not some noob off the street. When I conclude 12.04 was not ready to ship, it's because I recognize that it really is too unfinished to give to experts, let alone casual users.