 Today's episode of The Ubuntu Show is brought to you by MtGox, m-t-g-o-x dot com, online bitcoin exchange, and The Thank You Economy Book by Gary Vaynerchuk. Thank You Economy Book dot com. Hi everybody, Bruce Wagner here. Welcome to the numero uno premiere number one initial first episode number one of The Ubuntu Show. Ubuntu Linux is the operating system of choice around here anyway. It replaces the need for Windows and or Mac sort of. So anyway this is a new show, this is our initial premiere episode and we're going to introduce you to Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. It's free open source software and it's the number one flavor of Linux which you've probably heard of. So today I have an incredible guest. He is a columnist from IT world and his own website profit dot org. His name is Brian Profit. Are you there Brian? Hey, how are you doing today Bruce? Hey, good, good, good. So where are you joining us from? You're not here. No, I'm definitely not there. I'm actually coming to you from northern Indiana. Northern Indiana. Oh cool, okay. Yeah. That's kind of a sister state to where I'm from in Ohio. So good. Midwestern. That's unfortunate. I always think of Indianapolis as like a sister city to Columbus. If you blindfolded me and took me there I almost wouldn't be able to tell you where at which one I was in for a little while. They're so similar but no, we love the Midwest. So I first read about where did I find you on Twitter or reading your blog or both. I can't remember which one came first. I think it was an article you wrote. That's right. It was an article. It's coming back to me. Unity versus, is it GNOME, how do you pronounce it? I've always heard it as GNOME. GNOME, alright. So it's a little weird but we'll call it GNOME. So in the newest version, well actually the current version is brand new but say the previous version of Ubuntu they decided Canonical which is the company that sponsors Ubuntu decided to switch the windowing user interface, I guess the windowing presenter, is that what you call it? Yeah, basically the window shell. The shell, okay. From GNOME to Unity. So tell it, what's the story? What's your take on that? Well basically what was going on and I'm highly condensing this and Canonical made want to correct this later but basically the story was the Canonical developers and the GNOME developers each had their own ideas about where they wanted the interface to go. So they essentially tried to work things out but at some point the core Ubuntu development team decided that they just can stay with where GNOME was going towards the 3.0 series that it's in now. So Canonical decided to basically push out its own windowing shell basically called Unity because they really had a different idea about what direction they wanted to go in terms of GNOME. And now we see in hindsight that the plan was they really want to focus not only on the traditional desktop like laptops and PCs but they also want to focus on the mobile tablet and smartphone interface as well. So your take is that this Unity interface is primarily designed to I guess appease or to work better in the form factor of a tablet or a mobile device is that the idea? I think so. I think it's trying to be a hybridization of the desktop and the mobile platforms. One of the things that a lot of people complained about with Unity at the beginning myself included was the fact that there was really a compared to all other forms of Linux and Linux interfaces there was a real lack of customization and configuration. It's hard to actually make Unity do a lot of the things that you know other Linux environments could do. I mean you can't move menus around it's hard to theme that sort of thing and really now I think we see why you don't do those things on a mobile platform. So if you're going to have something that sort of bridges that gap then yeah you're going to want something that's a little more solid and less configurable. So from a technical person like an old Linux hack that's for sure what they would look at is the customization features of it. I always look at things from a novice barely can work a mouse crowd and I have users who have been sitting like new employees who sit at their computer here in the office for two weeks and ask what is that Ubuntu thing you're always talking about and I'm like that's what you're using. It's like that dish soap commercial you're soaking in it you know you're using that you're using it every day and they're like really I didn't know that I mean they're just using Chromium or Chrome and they're using the web 90% of the time and they probably noticed there's a little bit of a different file manager but they don't even realize they're using it. So for that crowd for me it wasn't so much about the customization it was simply usability I know it's supposed to be easy to use but for me I found it much harder to use and we lost him. So this seems like a great time to go to thank our sponsors. So let's do that we'll just thank our sponsors and if it weren't for them you know we wouldn't be here so be sure to check out Mt. Gox. Now if you haven't heard of Bitcoin it's B-I-T-C-O-I-N Bitcoin is the money of the future it's an electronic cryptocurrency it's called it's based on three technologies that have kind of merged into one one is peer-to-peer file sharing technology in general and another one is the state of the art in cryptography and the third is the idea of a limited quantity of something being a value if we all agree it has value. So that's what Bitcoin is if you want to learn about Bitcoin check out bitcoinme.com that's my site that I created just kind of like a brochure about Bitcoin to explain what it is but it's phenomenal in fact the December issue of Wired magazine is going to have a big article about it there are many many articles online about it but anyway the number one Bitcoin online exchange site which would be where if you want to buy or sell Bitcoin for cash or your local currency this is where you would do it online as opposed to meeting somebody in person and the number one exchange site is Mt. Gox and they're our sponsor so that was a long way of introducing who Mt. Gox is. Mt. Gox.com that's like mountain Mt. Gox.com Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange they have like more than 90% market share the oldest most reliable trustworthy online exchange for Bitcoin in fact you can actually use them as a Bitcoin wallet to securely store and hold your bitcoins it's a free account you just go to Mt. Gox.com sign up and in moments you'll have your own Mt. Gox account and you can use it very very securely they have a little button that says order a UB key and it's a Y U B I K E Y I think it is UB key anyway you order one of those things and it's a little tiny USB dongle that you carry on your key chain and you can't log in without it so you have to plug that in to to log on which is great because that'll protect you even if you're using some public computer that's virus ridden it won't matter because nobody can get in without that UB key so anyway check it out Mt. Gox.com now they handle 16 currencies for this new worldwide currency called Bitcoin so currencies as in like it doesn't matter if you have Australian dollars, euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars or Japanese yen 16 different currencies you can buy bitcoins for dollars and sell them and the Thank You Economy New York Times best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk has written his second book is called Thank You Economy you can check it out at ThankYouEconomyBook.com Gary is amazing I've always been a huge fan long before we started promoting his book but this book I've read it twice now it's amazing it talks about how you can use the state-of-the-art in internet social media technology to promote your business in the right way 99% of people are not doing it in the right way but you want to promote your business in the proper way using the state-of-the-art technology you've got to read this book it's a primer to teach you how to bring your business in a scalable way no matter how large or small your business is you can use these tricks and tips and tools to not just sell a product but to create a relationship a long-lasting one-on-one relationship with your customers and really build your brand so we thank Gary Vaynerchuk and Thank You Economy Book check it out so we're back Ryan who lost you so I'll tell you what click right here to continue with part two of this episode