Showing headlines posted by keithcu

I feel that all Ubuntu users, even the happy ones, who ever decide to contribute back should just directly join the Debian team. Ubuntu might not realize it, but it is best for everyone if all work is done in Debian first.

Futurists talk about the “Singularity”, the time when computational capacity will surpass the capacity of human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil predicts it will happen in 2045. The flaw with any date estimate, other than the fact that they are always prone to extreme error, is that our software today has no learning capacity, because the idea of continuous learning is not yet a part of the foundation. Even the learning capabilities of an ant would be useful.

Mark Shuttleworth and I have a forth and back on the Ubuntu / Debian relationship.

When I write about Debian and Ubuntu, I have focused mostly on the inefficiency of the separate teams.

I find it interesting that the idea of Linux on the desktop is responded to by either yawns or derision. I think it depends on whether you see Linux as a powerful operating system built by a million-man army, or one filled with bugs and missing the cool stuff like speech recognition.

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux. If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by looking at existing shipping device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you sometimes have to guess at what is happening down below.

I have had this idea for a Virtual Darpa Grand Challenge for a couple of years now and I’m starting to shop it around to angel/venture capital people. But I thought I’d also put this out there to the Linux community and see what they think of it. I’ve never done anything like this before so I’m not even sure if I should take on this idea, but I’d be interested in hearing what people think of it and any advice on how to make it happen.

The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code. Ubuntu’s large user base means that it will find bugs not found by the upstream developers, which is mostly teams of just handfuls of people.

A lot of open source advocates like to rage against the machine at Microsoft, but when a former Microsoft Research employee says that Windows 7 won't stop Linux from market domination, that's an opinion to note. Keith Curtis, author of the book After the Software Wars, says just that. But he goes further. He thinks Microsoft and its customers would be better off if the company ditched Windows and instead built its own version of the Linux operating system.

It goes almost without saying that the release of Windows 7 is important for Microsoft to stem the tide of customer dissatisfaction with Vista, which has been extremely damaging to the Microsoft brand, and has caused it to lose users to both the Macintosh and Linux.

I have just finished a new book about free software. Excerpt: Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.

I was honored to present my ideas about Ubuntu & Debian at Debconf 7, with a number of Ubuntu and Debian developers present, including Mark Shuttleworth and DPL Sam Hocevar.

I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another piece of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc. [Ugliest blog evar, but makes some interesting points]

OAXTEPEC, MEXICO -- The 7th annual Debian Developers Conference (DebConf6) brought close to 300 Debian developers, package maintainers, and other interested parties to Mexico's government-owned Oaxtepec Vacational Center last week. [A long, but very interesting and important article.]

I've written a number of article about Ubuntu and Debian in the last few weeks, saying that: in principle I should be running Debian, that Ubuntu is too small a team for the size of their customer base and buglist, questioning the size of the fork Ubuntu has made, etc. I decided to see if I could test out any of these assumptions so I grabbed the latest 'testing' bits from Etch and installed it on a 2-year-old Sony VAIO laptop.

When Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz repeated Greens' statement on stage, the audience cheered. "The question is not whether we will open-source Java, the question is how," Schwartz reiterated.