Ubuntu in the other news?

[John]

Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

>>
> 
> Funny you should ask ;-)
> 
> In Launchpad we now have a support request tracker. Every (almost, GUI,
> mostly) app in Breezy has a menu item "Get Help Online...", which takes
> you to a simple page that should eventually, list sources of support
> available for that app, both upstream and in the distro. And that page
> also leads you to the support tracker, where you can file a support request.
> 
> I hope this will be a formalised place for informal, community based
> support, supplementing the mailing list and the forums. The good thing
> is that we can easily convert a support request into a bug, if it really
> is a bug. And we can keep track of the number of support requests that
> are associated with a given bug, to help us gauge severity.

I appreciate the reasons for doing this, but _I_ mostly use Linux off 
the Internet. And when connected, I'm mostly behind a firewall or two, 
and short of pinging a remote site there's no way for Linux to tell 
whether a remote connexion is possible.

Software that assumes that access to the Internet is available _right 
now_ seriously peeves me - even more when, as in Windows Update in XP 
SP2, I cannot turn it off.

I really don't like it when the "help" selection launches a browser and 
tries to load a document from www.remotesite.info. When I'm connected, 
probably I'm using the bandwidth for something useful like downloading 
the latest Linux fixes, list of houses for sale and/or the latest sales 
of stocks and shares from www.asx.com.au - any of these is well able to 
use all available bandwidth and often more than one of those us running 
at the same moment.

If I'm not doing those things, and sometimes if I am, I'm likely doing 
some interactive work and downloads of any kind are seriously 
incompatible with interactive work. Mostly, the interactive work is 
commandline-driven using ssh via a VPN, but sometimes I use a remote 
desktop, and that's incompatible with anything else.

It's quite likely I won't actually be bothered with this facility, 
unless someone else here (eg my wife) decides to try it.

I know from my own experience that developers tend to overlook the 
possibility of their software being used in less well-equipped environments.