My generation has been fortunate enough to grow up in a society where the horrors of racial hatred were not the norm but the exception, where the rule of law — despite the rampant, by Scandinavian standards, corruption — prevailed over extremism, mass murder, hate crimes, street mobs and racial violence.

The events that took place this week in Athens are exceptional; not only in their barbarism, not only because they — collectively — in an almost cynical way, showcase all those fragments of fundamentally explosive issues present in hellenic society today (the lack of proper policing, extremism within the police force, the ghettoisation of the historic centre of Athens, rampant crime in some areas of the Hellenic capital, deep and criminally violent racial and nationalist sentiment among people of lesser intelligence, education and integrity), but because they are an embarrassment to all sane, decent Hellenes.

I cannot remember, in living memory, any instance where I felt a distinct similarity between the events happening in Greece to the Nazi Germany pogroms against Jews and communists of the 1930s; not only a sign of a society where the rule of law is totally absent, not only where the state fails to protect its citizens, but one in which the state, be it due to inability/incompetence, tolerance or will, encourages extremism; the near fatal beating of a protester by riot police corroborates the view that the state is, perhaps unwillingly, party to such actions.

With the Hellenic government having lost the support of a large number of people due to the financial crisis and the widespread criticism it faces from all sides of the political spectrum, any tolerance (let alone apparent encouragement by state employees) of extremism can and will most certainly bring about grave consequences for the people of this country, unless the it takes action and bring about justice. Justice that is blind, that doesn’t take sides, that is not a charade.

The police are bound to know by now — even if they didn’t before — of the identities of most of the criminal extremists that chased, attacked and injured immigrants, that destroyed and looted shops belonging to non-Greeks, in yesterday’s pogrom in Athens. Extremists that exploited the brutal murder of a Greek man, on his way to take his wife to the hospital to give birth, by three immigrants a few days earlier. Those people should face justice, in the same way the murderers of the Greek man and the riot policemen who almost killed a person for no reason should (suspending the policemen, as the government did, is no punishment for an act of this gravity).

Justice is a prerequisite to social peace and I’m afraid that — right now — you’d be hard pressed to find it in this country, no matter where you looked. Crime is rampant in parts of Athens, immigrant groups are afraid and persecuted by extremists, racial hatred is brewing and poverty is threatening a vast number of people. When the economy falters, the conditions are ripe for extremism, crime and unrest. It is the government’s job to bring all those responsible for illegal, let alone reprehensible actions to justice, no matter what their nationality, colour, haircut, or creed is, as soon as possible. Anything else risks inciting a cycle of violence and unravel this country’s social cohesion to a level unseen for many decades.

A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point to an extent), that found it to be half-baked and offering little more (if anything) over the classic desktop and a couple of additional programs (e.g. a Dock, a launcher etc.) while much slower and kludgey (a totally valid point, but it’s a 1.0), Unity is here to stay.

It is true that, despite Shuttleworth’s ramblings on his blog, most of Unity is hardly innovative. Most useful things in there can already be found in most modern desktop environments (including some linux desktops) while Unity’s implementation of those very features is hardly the best. But there are also some unique offerings that are different, such as lenses and the proposed (but not yet included, thankfully) windicators. The question there is: are those features really useful? Are they well thought-out?

I think not. Take for example desktop search, a hot subject in mid 2000s desktops that’s been largely solved in an exemplary way in OS X by Apple’s Spotlight and a number of third party tools on that platform (LaunchBar and then Quicksilver are prime examples of early game changers), and even Windows 7 to some extent through the built-in search field in the start menu. Then, with five years of hindsight, Canonical decides to make things somewhat harder for users by exposing the search context to the user in the form of completely separate ‘lenses’ as opposed to keeping the distinction internal (in the same way OS X does) and presenting filtering options in an innovative way. Put it simply: I’d much rather have a single search field, ala Mac OS X’s Spotlight that searches for my input text across ‘data domains’ and contexts and returns useful, filterable lists of data, than the frustratingly badly designed ‘lens’ concept that forces a clear separation of searches while taking up screen real estate and wasting the users’ time with additional clicks and keystrokes.

Which begs the question: why on earth did the fine people at Canonical make such a bad design decision, when the stated mission of Unity was to streamline the desktop while taking less space etc. and at the same time there are numerous implementations of search/launch applications (even in linux) that work significantly better than Unity? Were they afraid of being labelled copycats? Is that worse than been called bad designers?

The same can be said about the new ‘global menu’ and AppIndicators that replace Gnome panel in Unity. Having few replacements for the staple Gnome Panel widgets of yesteryear is fine, given it’s a 1.0. Having botched the whole concept of a global menu through inconsistencies when windows are maximised and in multi-display scenarios betrays a badly designed (viz. not just incompletely implemented) system that shouldn’t have been out in the first place.

Unity has divided the GNOME community by introducing a new shell on the world’s most popular linux distribution. While it’s true that the state of linux desktop has been moving frustratingly slow for a number of years and that a quasi-open project, funded by a commercial entity with a focus on usabilty and æsthetics — exactly like Unity is on paper — could help accelerate its development and help reach parity with the two main desktops in some of the more difficult areas where linux has been falling back over the years. Still, Unity is largely incomplete, it’s missing many of the configuration options and functionality that linux users are used to — nay, demand — and, sadly, what’s there betrays a rushed, badly designed feature set that should never have gone past alpha inside Canonical, let alone be part of the world’s most popular distribution.