The Release of the 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot is due on the 13th of October, bringing with it the Gnome 3 desktop and many other cool updates.
Support for the Arm CPU architecture. This is used by many tablet computers and this will allow installation of Ubuntu onto these machines. Also included is the latest OpenStack cloud software named Diablo and a cloud services orchestration engine. The distribution looks to be set for a cloud based future. Mozilla Thunderbird will be the default E-Mail client and building on the cloud support, there will be a full backup facility included that will support backup to either a external hard drive or a cloud based backup service. The service will provide scheduled backups and restores from a backup just as you would expect from a proper backup program.
I am hoping that the Ubuntu 11.10 release goes well and the software is well received. Some people have said that a transparent layer in the operating system for running Windows software would be a good thing. There is Wine for running Windows programs on Linux and this can work well, maybe Canonical need to work on integrating Wine into the Ubuntu desktop so that installation of Windows software is as seamless as it is with Windows, then more users could be moved away from virus prone installations of Windows 7 or the venerable and insecure Windows XP.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricReleaseSchedule.
The Carbon tax has passed and now we wait for our country to be decimated by this unnecessary tax that will cost us all dearly in the future.Once this is in full effect everything will cost more to produce, driving manufacturing overseas and the price of electricity will sky-rocket ever higher. Julia Gillard said that most Australians support this tax but that is not true at all, there is few around that support this tax and the pricing of Carbon which is an element that was created inside stars soon after the big bang at about 200,000,000 degrees Celsius and is essential to life as we know it. They also say carbon dioxide which is a gas we all breath out and that plants breath in to live, putting a price on this essential element is pointless, the global temperature would only decrease by a thousandth of a degree despite what Al Gore and his cronies would have you believe. The climate is changing, but putting in a great big new tax will not stop this at all.