If it has, I'm sure it's failed miserably. Don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting notion, and possibly quite productive overall, but it would be really annoying to quick learners or ingrafts from other UNIX backgrounds. Or just people like me, who don't really do any kernel hacking, but would want the ability to drop in on the really interesting threads at that level. (Actually, I doubt any real kernel discussion takes place or is expected on Ubuntu forums, but the same attitude applies to other levels.)

And that sort of authoritarian slotting of people into classes rubs a huge number of people the wrong way, especially those actually involved in OSS; it might drastically prune the upper tiers, just from aversion to the concept, even though they would have been grandfathered in at an unrestricted level. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the power of the mind to rationalize authoritarianism for the sake of slotting ignorant, annoying, helpless imbeciles into their appropriate classes.

It's an interesting problem that I've been thinking about for a while. I keep wondering if there is some technical solution or modification to keep forums from failing under their own signal to noise ratio. So far it seems like a good organizational system, more active moderation and branching threads help things. On this forum the thanks system seems to be a big help too. Is there some obvious feature that we're missing to keep forums from turning into howling black holes after they pass through their main sequence?

Hm, I didn't realize cyborgs were into loose coupling. Wonder what the offspring would look like? Guess it depends if the child gets more of the human part or machine part of the DNA.

Puppy linux is also easy to use and has an active helpful forum. I was considering 'advancing' to ubuntu, but maybe I'll flush out my issues with Puppy.

That's cause we are in the Off Topic folder.

If Maemo ever becomes popular enough people will claim it's for "Newbies." That's just the way it works in this community, people try and find a reason to try and do/be something different. If that weren't the case, then they probably wouldn't be here. Besides, the newbies are really the answer to the problem. Linux needs these people: Companies like Sound Blaster aren't going to waste their time writing and releasing drivers for their hardware for linux until they're convinced that there is a substantial market. So, it's the people that generally don't have a clue about how windows works, that try out linux and expect it to "just work" that will complain in enough numbers to get results.

To the OP: you could try looking for answers to the fix in almost any linux forum for x86 because the answer will likely be transposable to ubuntu.

If I have a problem I first try to find solution on ubuntu forums, then irc, and lastly on mailing lists. In most cases(97%) I find it in forums.