Q: What does Linux need to be if its going to be a real contender to Windows? What are you guys doing about that? A: It needs support from the major players. Personally I think we need to lure:

• Steam
• Adobe (all their stuff)
• Autodesk (all their stuff we don’t have)

We also are going to need to increase the buy in from hardware vendors. Nvidia/AMD/Intel all need to care about 2x what they do right now about.

Pretty sure that’s never going to happen. More Q&A:

Q: Will you please never drop Ubuntu Classic? We cannot stand seeing Ubuntu turning into an Apple Product.

A: Ubuntu Classic will probably remain for as long as the GNOME development team keeps it up to date and secure. This is really a question for them.

Q: I appreciate all the work you guys have done to make Unity better. But I have three really big questions:

1. Why have Unity at all? I’m thinking of GNOME 3 here.
2. Why is Unity (and other canonical-pushed projects) allowed to be put into Ubuntu repositories after so little testing and oversight compared other projects? Many other projects go through way more extensive testing and bug fixing before being pushed into the repos–especially main.
3. Why have so many settings been removed in Unity or do not exist? I’m thinking of UI theming primarily.

A:

1. We didn’t like GNOME 3, we didn’t like the technology it is based on. I think GNOME 3 is an excellent project and great competition.
2. We go through heavy testing and oversight too. Some things can fall through the cracks and there is a lot of focus on fixing that once and for all.
3. I can’t say for sure. Personally I would love to have them, but it’s not my decision and never been entirely clear to me

Read more on IamA – We are the Ubuntu Unity Development Team.

Ed Bott: Yes, there must have been a point where you noticed that a lot of people were dealing with this Mac Defender thing and that it wasn’t just your calls.

AppleCare : We have a team of people who go though all case notes and find new issues that are popping up a lot and send notices to all of AppleCare. Our notice for Mac Defender is that we’re not supposed to help customers remove malware from their computer.

Ed Bott: Wow.

AppleCare: That’s about what i said when I read it. The reason for the rule, they say, is that even though Mac Defender is easy to remove, we can’t set the expectation to customers that we will be able to remove all malware in the future. That’s what antivirus is for.

via An AppleCare support rep talks: Mac malware is “getting worse” | ZDNet.

(If you’re wondering what Mac Defender is –> take a look.)

So, with the latest and greatest technology at their disposal, Dave’s team built outdated and mediocre software that functioned and communicated exactly like the old software. It did everything it was supposed to do and it did it right. And therein lay the problem.

Shortly after they delivered the software, the retailer rejected the QA testers’ build and sent David’s company a list of bugs. But it wasn’t a list of bugs that their software had — it was a list of bugs that it didn’t have.

via The Daily WTF:Faulty by Design.

Brilliant.

Going through Ask Ubuntu, found a nice answer on keyboard shortcuts for Ubuntu Unity. Now if that’s too much for you to remember,  Octavian Damiean has created this sweet wallpaper with the shortcuts and gestures overlayed on it.

Click on the above image for a full size version, or a here’s a SVG version if you prefer the same.

I have no idea why, but for some reason the Gmail app on Android doesn’t allow you to save files. How stupid is that? Recently, I needed to send a document from my Google Apps account to my work account.

[...]

This is a place to find information about some of the more fundamental algorithms used in computer science. This information is widely available on the net, but hopefully the way it’s presented and discussed here will resonate with you.

via simple algorithms.

Very nice illustrations of every step of various algorithms.

20 years ago, Linus made the first Linux kernel release – v0.01, starting off with this post.

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.  This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready.  I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

LinuxFoundation has been running a series of events commemorating this. Some highlights:

[...]

Android + Ruby = Ruboto

Charles Nutter, a member of the JRuby team, had an epiphany: because the Android toolchain could convert compiled Java code to Dalvik files, and because JRuby had a Ruby interpreter in compiled Java bytecode, then he should be able to run Ruby on Android. Within an astonishingly short time, he had performed this task, and Ruboto was born. Thanks to the efforts of several other developers, Ruboto has become an active project that is growing increasingly intriguing to Android and Ruby developers alike.

Today, Ruboto comes in two flavors: ruboto-irb and ruboto-core. ruboto-irb is an interactive Ruby shell that runs on Android.

via Ruboto: Ruby on Android.

Cool.

You might have read this on Hacker News/reddit, but still, this is too much of a WTF NOT to share.

Basically, if you try to login to Caledonian Record, – a St. Johnsbury, Vermont based media website which

recently put the site behind a pay wall and I can no longer catch up on hometown news

you get an “announcement” of epic proportions

RETURNING CUSTOMERS, PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING SECURITY CHANGE: YOUR USERNAME WILL NOW SERVE AS YOUR PASSWORD AND YOUR PASSWORD WILL NOW SERVE AS YOUR USERNAME

*facepalm*.

“Icing” on the cake?

Not unsurprisingly, x’ AND email IS NULL; — works as the username with no password. Injection FTL.

It seems like any username that includes a semicolon at any point will authenticate

Security change, indeed.

via Hacker News | Your Username Will Now Serve as Your Password and Your Password as Your Username.

However, there’s one thing I always thought could be drastically improved in many open source projects: The User Experience. When I ask a not-so-techinal friend why they don’t use some open source project instead of commercial one many say that “it’s because ugly”.

[...]

Designers are scared of developers. Developers speak a foreign language, they are like aliens. Developers don’t package their source code in .zip files, instead we use some scary thing called version control. The frontends typically presuposes a pretty extensive knowledge of the backend, a knowledge the designers simply don’t have and will have a pretty tough time getting. Designers don’t know how to modify a QT GUI, although they may have a daunting idea on how the interface could be so much better.

via Improving the Open Source user experience.