I guess I hoped Ubuntu would succeed because it was good Free Software not in spite of it. It seems like Ubuntu is cooling off on some of the values that make free software great including openness (secret Mir developments), collaboration (going their own way on new infrastructure), respect for privacy (Amazon Dash) etc.

I wish the Ubuntu guys would stop trying to be another Apple, and instead focus on what they and the community can offer than Apple never could.

On the subject does can anyone make a suggestion about where best to go in terms of other distributions. I want to stay in the Debian family. Debian Stable is too behind the curve. Debian Testing seems rather volatile - a friend told me wine disappeard for a while on his install. Mint seems quite ok, but does it try too much to be a windows clone. Really I want something like debian but with some user polish, and a ~6-month release cycle.

Mod parent up.

RTFA: They have made some good progress on this - but I can't tell if MOC is dead yet.

Did they make any moves towards using standard C++ features rather than the MOC ugliness? What with Boost::Signals, sigcxx and C++11, I see no reason why they have to bastardise the language to provide signals.

Amen to that! One of the first things that got me interested in developing this software was how expensive decent electronic test tools with capable software really are. Unless you're willing to drop some serious cash, you get a device that contains no more than £15 of parts being sold for >£400, with VB6 software than is generally no more than barely usable with each manufacturer reinventing the wheel over and over.

sigrok is cool because we can use the same software to sample from any device, but they can all share the powerful decoding features of the software, no matter how expensive the logic analyser hardware. Then we can begin to do cool stuff by piping the collected data through any script or FOSS tool that we might care to try - even in continuous real time. For example recently I have been working on an IS decoder (digital sound) that can extract the digital data from an audio interconnect, then pipe it into a wav. I can now hear what my DSP chip is producing, and that with a device that costs less than £30.

Bert Vermeulen has been working on adding support for analog sampling for oscillascope devices. Maybe one day soon we will be able to leverage the power of GNU Radio, and have them work as a spectrum anaylser, a demodulator.

The possibilities are endless, and lightyears ahead of anything the proprietory world has to offer.

I don't quite understand the trajectory of the probe. For example in the last shot, it swoops past Mimas zooming straight toward the Saturnian surface, then appears to change direction curving vertically, passing through the rings (why no hail of ice damage?), then swoops back around and turns around heading toward Encledatus at top speed. How is this even possible?

...this probably won't help Wine much. As this post explains http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-September/086885.html : "IIRC, it's been discussed before, and it simply wouldn't work. D3D has too many ties to the Windows API that a non-Windows based implementation wouldn't be appropriate for Wine (try getting an HDC from a D3D resource, or passing an HWND to D3D). Gallium would have to substitute these for X11 resources, or custom resources that tie into X, so wouldn't reflect the Wine's internal state. Additionally, not all drivers will support Gallium (eg. nVidia binaries), so a D3D10->GL path will still be needed."

It's getting popular precisely because it tries to make the desktop more GUI centric and less terminal centric. Most users (rightly or wrongly) find the terminal unintuitive and intimidating, which is why if Ubuntu wants to grow it can only do so by doing the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.

...makes you think, doesn't it?

Hey I drew that diagram! Small world.

It seems to me these days (certainly here in the UK) we have almost no sense of optimism about progress. In the middle of the last century when so much SciFi was created, there was this grand humanistic notion, that one day technology would solve all the wrongs of the world, and we'd all live in peace and harmony e.g. Star Trek.

These days our optimism has shriveled and died, so that now we no longer dream of a utopia - we just dream of getting by without too much discomfort, and it seems to me like modern SciFi (where it exists) reflects this.

Seconded. And unless you're willing to shell out for a WinXP license for the sake of a single app it's even less appealing.

Now that I've switched away from windows after getting stuck with Vista, it's so annoying that the next release by all accounts is actually going to be passably good (though is that astroturfing?).

It's annoying because Windows is like a wife-beating husband. You live with it for years and years of pain, disappointment and broken promises, but just when you think you're ready to leave forever they turn around all smiles and sweetness.

I'm tired of MS's patent crap. I'm tired of the DRM. I'm tired of the FUD. I'm tired of mediocre product after mediocre product. I'm tired of their high prices. I'm tired of them stacking the ISO. I'm tired of embrace extend extinguish. I'm tired of fixing other people's computers from malware. I'm tired of the overwhelming OS storage footprints, and everything else they do to ruin computing for everyone. I'm tired of the whole company and I wish everyone would dump them forever.

But just as people begin to consider it, they give you a bouquet of flowers.

Will this ever end?