In the blog entry, Mark writes about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there." From my experience, problems are not chased down but rather the Ostrich algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm is applied.

While running karmic (9.10), I noticed a bug with the network-manager pertaining static IP addresses and wireless connectivity, which made it unable to connect to certain configured wireless access points. Lets take a look at the network-manager released with 9.10: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/network-manager , it is (0.8~a~git.20091013t193206.679d548-0ubuntu1).

Now lets look at the updates for karmic at http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/net/ , there is not a single one (!) for network-manager. For the whole six months until the next release of 10.04, not a single update for it has been provided! They just took the git snapshot and left it in 9.10.

Just compare it to Fedora 12 and their updates on http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=172857 , karmic (9.10) was released at October 29th, and one can see the fixes and updates through Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan for F12.

I do not care about the marketing strategies and public image of Linux distributions, but rather about exactly what Mark said, about " ... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there."

For me, Ubuntu did not deliver that.

Is there a way to integrate R programs with another high level language like Java, for example to bind a R object to a Java interface? I have basic familiarity with R, and I would like to use programs written in R directly with other programs written in a object-oriented language, as opposed to do file i/o for the bridge between them.

The general idea is to be able to take Java objects and pass them to R and do all the stats numbercrunching with smaller R programs, that are somehow integrated with a Java program. The results then get back as other objects that can be further processed in Java.

Are there any possibilities for that?

Is "Cryptonomicon" in any way inspired by Thomas Pynchons "Gravity's Rainbow"? While reading "Cryptonomicon", I noticed that some aspects of the book resembled some parts of Thomas Pynchons book "Gravity's Rainbow", they share parts of the humour (Cryptonomicons Giant lizards during the drug/dilerium trips) or the WW2 timeline, and both are written in a postmodernistic style. After searching a bit on the net I saw that many other people noticed this. While "Cryptonomicon" being not so philosophical and linguistic complex structured as "Gravity's Rainbow" (and thus IMO not in the same class as "Gravity's Rainbow"), it still gives a feeling of allusion to "Gravity's Rainbow" to me.