beachdog - Slashdot User

Submission + - What if DARPA vehicle challenge went open source?

Submitted by

beachdog

on Thursday August 21, 2008 @02:52AM

beachdog writes: "I note that every vehicle entered in the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge uses a different setup of sensors, computers and software. None of the vehicles use the same data structure, none of the vehicles can share data, none of the vehicles can help each other.

So I ask Slashdot readers: What would happen if the DARPA challenge competitors collaborated and created open source software instead of the present many isolated efforts? What if the competitors worked together and created an open data structure to describe the vehicle path segments, if they had an open test data suite, if they had a vehicle-to-vehicle data exchange protocol, if they had a Google maps-for-autonomous-vehicles data service, and if there were open source vehicle control programs?"

Submission + - Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, many small failures

Submitted by beachdog on Tuesday October 03, 2006 @02:22AM

beachdog writes: I am puzzled at how my experience upgrading my Ubuntu distribution is not being reflected in reviews or news.

My experience as a long time Linux user is: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS has enough configuration errors that it shouldn't be offered as an end user distribution yet.

I upgraded from the 5.05 "Breezy Badger" Ubuntu to the 6.06 "LTS" about 6 weeks after LTS was released. After a news report mentioning a bug with the X windows driver I waited 3 weeks. Nope X was still broken.

The xserver package was still broken. It immediately broke my X display. From the ubuntu forums I got instructions to push the xserver package version back. Four hours later I got my X display back.

What has happened since then is one little application after another is coming up broken. Mostly minor changes are breaking applicatons. I have not found a single major improvement in 6.06 that compensates for the 16 hours wasted. I haven't messed with ticky tacky stuff like this since the RedHat C-compiler version problem of 5 years ago.

The agony is I am a bloody desktop user doing Craigslist job search and Rails. I actually need Google Earth to "just work".

I really am the wrong guy to back up and futz with problems like "the openGL graphics functions for the mga driver seem to be broken." For a long time now, I have depended on the Debian package system to set things up right.

The upgrade water torture ticky tack list for LTS:

- Local printing broken - required delete and reinstall printers.
- Adobe acrobat no longer being called as a firefox plugin (still broken despite messing with Preferences)
- Google earth now showing OpenGL error message (still broken)
- Matrox mga video driver, can't tell if the opengl functions needed by Google earth are working.
- mplayer stopped, requires an obscure edit to /etc/mplayer.config
- sound for YouTube videos now requires opening a new alsa package and futzing with mute settings. Desktop sounds are gone. (configuration for alsa-mixer changed).
- Firefox closes all windows (or crashes) when certain web pages are closed by the server.

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