Sam commented:

"Quality motion. This is exactly the point that I raise at just about every committee meeting I attend, but to have it formally supported by the wider membership is a good step. If things don't improve soon, we should try that line of attack in the Central and Eastern region."

One suggestion in the debate was to have a co-operatives fortnight, similar to the fairtrade fortnight, to promote the Co-operative Group (tCG) membership, other tCG businesses and other local cooperatives. Let's see whether SW can lead the way again! ;-) The question-and-answer session was pretty interesting. All of the questions were submitted in writing. Some of them were submitted in advance and others during the lunch break. No spoken questions were taken and most Insurance (CIS) and Bank questions were held back because no-one from financial services was there. The answers were grouped under a few headings.

Ethics, answersed by Catherine Staveley

1. CIS's voting record is public, but some details are buried under sustainabiliy on the group's corporate web site.
2. The panel were asked to define a few terms. By ethical, tCG means generally being "a good neighbour". Materiality is how much a business relates to tCG's aims and they think shelf penetration is how much space and promotion a product gets in the stores. The financial services profits aim to be all-ethical.
3. Members were asked to please take part in the consultations about the new food retail ethical policy.
4. tCG has a "triple bottom line" - in addition to looking at profits, we also consider our effects on our communities and sustainability.
5. tCG is leading the way on packaging minimisation: onion nets are already biodegradable, work continues on developing biodegradable fruit nets and a new light-weight (but still strong) whiskey bottle has just been launched. We'll see whether it's possible to give more dividend points for buying less packaged goods.

Food retail, answered by David Parker (regional food), Gary Metcalfe (operations), Clive Netherway (top 100 stores) and Nick Lowe (sales and support)

1. Local stores: Minehead Post Office contracts have been exchanged and planning permission granted in Budleigh Salterton - both sites should be ready in a couple of months.
2. There are new small stores at Amesbury, Ilfracombe, Perranport and Lyneham (where it's hurting Tesco Express more than anyone). tCG have also acquired 7 stores from Higgins, one from Savages and a petrol station with minimarket in Bath. Dawlish has just opened, giving a total of 14 new stores. In addition, 50 stores are being refitted in the south-west region.
3. The Falmouth store is a bit of a puzzle: whether to split the existing store or develop a nearby site.
4. tCG stores have outperformed the The Institute of Grocery Distribution index for 15 months in a row and is now seeing growth-on-growth.
5. Problems with product stocking should be taken up with store managers first.
6. Home delivery has been trialled and failed several times, but is being trialled again in the new OCO stores. (What does OCO mean? There's one at Portishead.)
7. Supply problems with RSPCA Freedom Foods meats will be investigated.
8. The Westbury-on-Trim Stoke Lane store will only be expanded if its turnover increases.
9. Suppliers are still letting some stores down on delivery times. This will be re-checked.
10. The best response to the crocodile community projects of other companies is to strengthen tCG's community project funding in areas before other supermarkets open new stores.
11. Local produce is rarely stocked because of problems with availability and meeting tCG technical standards (I could almost hear the hackles raise at this answer!). Organic is only usually stocked in areas where surveys suggest the target audience lives (which I guess is why my tatty 60s store has more sweets and sugar drinks than fresh food). Similar biases exist for other ranges.
12. Missing product complaints will get written answers: Clipper tea and sugar-free Mintoes.
13. There was a complaint about the lack of notices about the unique status of co-op milk. (In short, we own our farms so our milk had better not be getting abused.)

Corporate questions, answered by Frank Jones

1. Compensations of the merged tCG/United Co-op societies are shown on page 12 of Stronger Together.
2. There was a question about a 10% profit target which I didn't understand. The answer was on page 13 of the annual report.
3. Party politicians were in the hall.
4. The results of the merger meetings were unknown at the time.
5. The Co-operative Funerals are derecognising the GMB union, which has worried many members. The comment from the floor was "there's usually one motive for derecognising a union"!
6. There's a 16% pay increase for executives who don't join tCG's pension fund, which is what would have been paid into the fund for them. Whether it applies to all employees will be checked and a written reply given.

Strategic questions, answered by David Doyle

1. Travel offers will be promoted in the food stores. tCG wants to avoid "silo" businesses which don't cross-promote with other businesses where appropriate.
2. Leaflets of other tCG and other co-ops should be stocked, particularly at festive times.
3. Offsetting CO2 is not a complete answer to climate change, but it was the only one of five suggested actions which was approved. Is the Co-operative Travel chain underperforming because it doesn't offer enough ethical choices? Some shouting from the floor about them still not offering European rail tickets.
4. The regional view of the United merger... This was nicely controversial, as it bloody well ought to be... There's no requirement for a tCG membership vote, so there will be no tCG membership vote. There was a hierarchical vote: very few of the Cornwall area turned up at the regional meeting in Bristol, but Devon and Somerset turned out in numbers and the south-west's delegates to the national meeting voted against 5 of the 6 merger resolutions, which were passed anyway. The chair stepped in and cut short the debate, stating that everyone knows the south-west is unhappy about certain aspects, like not having a choice on the first merged chief executive, but what's done is done.

Finally, a list of questions being sent for written answers were given by Andrew North and the chair (was it Colin House? It's annoying to find one name and lose another).

It's been a long time since I last wrote, mostly because we've been pulling out all the stops for XTech. Next week is set to be stimulating and challenging. I'm amazed at the collection of thinkers and innovators we've drawn together, and am looking forward to getting a boost of energy and inspiration from the conference.
Browser summit On Tuesday next week, Molly Holzschlag and I are sponsoring a Web Browser, Standards and Interop Summit. This is an opportunity for browser vendors, standards advocates, W3C and related standards supporters to talk in a vendor (and standards-body) neutral atmosphere about tackling the problem of browser interoperability. As the full announcement mentions, we're also throwing open the doors to interested bloggers and journalists to get involved in and cover the discussion. The summit came about after Molly and I got talking about our desire to provide a forum for effective exchange between the people shaping the future of HTML. This is something that spawned the vision of the Browser Track and XTech in the first place three years ago. I don't know how much we'll solve at the first summit, but it puts down a marker and a challenge for participation. I am not the only one concerned at the increasing fragmentation of the HTML landscape, the breakdown in communication, and the ultimate ill-effects for web developers and users. Personal scheduler and evaluations As my conference software Expectnation nears its public launch, we'll be using some of its fun features at XTech. Normally, the bulk of the work is done behind the scenes, so it's nice to have a feature to show off to attendees and the wider public. The personal scheduling feature lets you compose your own timetable for the conference, just by clicking on the stars throughout the schedule. As a bonus, you can subscribe to your personal schedule as iCal, allowing you to take it with you on your phone or PDA. In addition, we'll be allowing attendees to submit evaluations of sessions online. If you're using the personal scheduler, it gets even neater as you can quickly find links to submit your evaluations, and review ones you've already submitted. Behind the scenes, I can see which sessions are the most popular and get advance warning if we're likely to need to move rooms to avoid overcrowding. I'm pretty excited about this. Features like this aren't exactly new, but now we've made them a standard feature for every conference. We're looking forward to adding more social software facilities to enhance the conference experience. 

I'm not convinced. It looks to me like they're aiming at something a bit more dynamic/higher level than Java, in more or less the space that Javascript, Ruby and Python operate in. The declarative GUI stuff looks pretty good, but I don't know if the rest will make that worth it. The language itself seems neither here nor there. It's a lot like Javascript - but not quite. It doesn't have real hash tables, something I don't care for in JS, and I didn't see an eval() method in the documentation, which means that their aim is to make something that you compile, and that doesn't carry around an interpreter with it like most dynamic languages with eval have to. I wonder what kind of support it will get from Sun and the open source community? Will the internal Java group view this as some sort of competitor? I wonder what sort of discussions went on during the creation of this system at Sun. They can't have take the decision to make a new, incompatible language very lightly. A new language has to have a killer app to drive acceptance, and I don't quite see one for this. The FAQ sheds some light on where they'd like to go:

Why did you create another scripting language? JavaFX Script is specifically designed to optimize the creative process of building rich and compelling UIs leveraging Java Swing, Java 2D and Java 3D for developers and content authors. Why isn't Groovy enough? Groovy and other languages have two specific traits which don't precisely meet these needs, namely that they are generic in nature and don't provide the appropriate abstractions necessary to optimize the UI design process and similarly are designed specifically for programmers other than content authors.

So it does look like they're aiming for a language that makes it easy to quickly create GUI's for people who perhaps aren't expert enough (or patient enough) to deal with Java itself. Pity they didn't just stick with Tcl and Tk, which have had a more or less declarative syntax for specifying layout for something like 10 years, and in any case have a flexible enough syntax to "run DSL circles" around most languages that are currently popular. As the author of Hecl, I'm particularly curious about their mobile strategy. If I may be permitted a bit of hubris, it's nice that they see things my way, that mobile apps need a good scripting language in order to make them more accessible to the masses, but it wasn't too hard to see that coming, with the ever increasing capabilities of higher end phones, and the "scaling down" that scripting languages bring to programming (making it easier for people to get started even if they aren't experts). I wonder what sort of diffusion they'll get with their phone system, and how fast, and how easy it will actually be to program the phones. For many people it's probably not as important, but by creating a real interpreter, rather than something that's compiled and doesn't have an eval function, Hecl lets you download and execute code, which makes for some very interesting possibilities (as well as some risks, of course). That's probably not important though, if they can actually make a system that's widely used, and easier to create applications for than J2ME currently is. I wonder if they'll allow J2ME on the phone platform, or close that down in favor of JavaFX? Even for Big Companies, launching a new language is a difficult endeavour[1], and it will be a number of years before we see where this ends up, but I'm not convinced. [1] The Economics of Programming Languages

GCC 4.3 changed pedantic preprocessor warnings in C++ code into errors, in line with the C++ front-end. Because of this change, preprocessor warnings are now errors. This leads to a number of errors that are in my opinion too strict and I've started a discussion about this problem on the GCC mailing list. I hope this change will be reverted, or that some of these errors are downgraded to warnings again, but users of current gcc-snapshot package might encounter these errors. I haven't filed bugs about these issues since I'm waiting for a census from GCC developers. Nevertheless, it makes sense to fix these problems if they are present in one's package. This change has caused at least the three following errors which are all fairly common. error: "xxx" redefined It's not allowed to #define something twice, as in this example:

#define TEST "foo"
#define TEST "bar"

This code will lead to the following error:

test2.cc:2:1: error: "TEST" redefined
test2.cc:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

Most typically, this occurs because something is defined in a header that is included and then redefined in the current source file. It can also happen when a #define is put in the code but also on the command line, e.g. via -DTEST="bar". This will lead to:

test2.cc:1:1: error: "TEST" redefined
<command line>:1:1: error: this is the location of the previous definition

The correct solution is to avoid redefinitions directly or to use #ifndef to make sure that something has not been defined already. extra tokens at end of #endif directive While an #ifdef obviously needs a second parameter, it's not allowed to give one to #else and #endif. Unfortunately, this is commonly done as a reminder for what is being tested for:

#ifdef TEST
#endif TEST

This code will lead to the following error:

test3.cc:2:8: error: extra tokens at end of #endif directive

missing newline The last line of a source file has to end with a newline. If this is not the case, the following error is now shown:

test4.cc:1:19: error: no newline at end of file

When I first saw UltraStar (a PC conversion of the famous karaoke game Singstar), I decided I wanted it in Debian, but I found it quite difficult to port it (even being GPL), as it was programmed in Kylix/Delphi. There are lots of songs around there for UltraStar, and it is also possible to import them from SingStar. UltraStar-NG (the NG stand for Next Generation) is based on UltraStar, but it’s being recoded in C++. It allows you to add your own songs in the forms of mp3s along with a song text and a music video file. The game allows a computer to evaluate how good you are when you sing by analyzing your voice pitch. We‘ve already finished packaging UltraStar-NG for Debian yesterday, and it is now waiting in the NEW queue for the FTP-Masters approval. Lets hope it’ll be available soon SingStar is a karaoke video game for the PlayStation 2, published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and developed by SCEE and London Studio. It is popular karaoke game in which players sing to music videos in order to score points. Players interface with their PS2 via SingStar USB microphones while a music video plays on screen. Lyrics are shown at the bottom of the screen. SingStar matches a player’s song voice to the original track, with players scoring points according to how accurate their singing is. Usually, two players compete simultaneously.

Daf blogged earlier about some of the work we’ve done thus far for the One Laptop Per Child project. Tubes (although the picture looks more like snakes if you ask me :D) are a really cool technology which should let the OLPC activity authors just work on their activity, and use D-Bus and Telepathy to take care of the communications. At the moment our implementation for Gabble (Telepathy’s XMPP backend) is pretty rudimentary and sends all data via the server, but this already lets us layer multi-user tubes over XMPP multi-user chat rooms and have it act like a bus where each member of the room is also a D-Bus endpoint. You can export objects, call methods and emit signals just as normal. Next up we’re going to implement them in Salut (the link-local XMPP backend, which we’ll use for communications over OLPC’s mesh networking) using good old TCP for the one-to-one connections, and some of Sjoerd’s more exciting link-local multicast stuff for multi-user tubes. To make tubes work for desktop clients we’re going to go on and look at more advanced Jingle-based ICE NAT traversal stuff. Maybe one of our next ports of call should be raw stream tubes for existing TCP protocols, then we can make a reality from X over Jabber (or whatever other protocol) that Matthew Allum was wondering about. :) I’ve also just stolen Planet Collabora from Daf’s home directory and put it on its own subdomain, so you can add it to your feed readers and keep track of what we’re up to with Telepathy, Farsight and friends.

Another beautiful day here in Paradise. Montreal is fantastic in the late Spring/early Summer -- it's a great time to be here in the city. Yesterday, Amita June and I went to Parc Jean Drapeau, the beautiful park on an island in the St. Lawrence, the former site of Expo 67. We played at the (really cool) new playground, ran around in the grass, and looked at the river rushing by. Today I rolled out a new table-of-contents layout on Wikitravel; you can see an example on our page about France. It's the culmination of about 11 months of debate and compromise amongst Wikitravellers, me, Maj, Internet Brands, and pretty much everyone else under the sun. It took a looong time, but we eventually got something that most people could live with and (shock!) some people actually liked. It wasn't easy, and my earlier unilateral decisions about it were so upsetting to people that it produced our current Wikitravel:Technical infrastructure policy. It's been great to finally reach some closure on this particular issue, since it was such a source of learning for me. tags: wikitravel wiki montreal amitajune toc

RoCoCo -- one week and counting We've got about one week before RoCoCoCamp starts. It's going to be pretty exciting; we've had a lot of responses and the list of participants is growing strong. But there are still a lot of infrastructure things to be done -- I'm going to be really impressed if we get them all done before next Friday. I'm getting more and more amazed that the folks in Portland (Oregon) manage to put on RecentChangesCamp there. It's pretty hard to do a three-day unconference. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp

Kanren So, I've just finished re-reading The Reasoned Schemer, the sequel to The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. Reasoned is a really nice introduction into what seems to be a classic compulsion for Scheme freaks: re-implementing the logic language Prolog more-or-less in Scheme. The little language that unfolds in Reasoned is elegant, simple, and best of all, extremely Scheme-y. There's a really long digression into binary mathematics and deriving bitwise operations for arithmetical functions, which all seems to be the long way around the block since it's unlikely that users of their system would use anything but the math system built into the host language, Scheme. The implementation in TRS is laid out at the back of the book. It's a learning version of a bigger project, called Kanren. I've been fiddling with the system, which has re-inspired my dream of creating a declarative language framework for Web applications. I'd like to see what Web programming in Kanren would be like... I'll see how it goes. tags: kanren scheme the reasoned schemer logic prolog

Domains Another way I spent my time today was that we've finally gotten around to transferring the wikitravel.org/.net/.com domains to IB. IB's owned the site for a while, but we've never really had a reason to switch the domains over, so it's gone undone for a long time. And I'm kind of glad. It sucks transferring domains between registrars. wikitravel.org was on Joker. which used to be my registrar of choice, but which has been superseded by Godaddy. Transferring a single domain took 6 Web forms (on two different sites), 3 security codes, and 4 email confirmations. Thankfully, this also gave me a chance to transfer over my speculative domains phonojournalist.com (for telephone photos) and phrygiancap.org, for general freedom issues. I like the phrygian cap, what can I say? All right, so I have a lot of domains that I'm unlikely to ever exploit. If that's so wrong, I don't want to be right. tags: domains ib joker godaddy phonojournalist phrygian cap

A frysk package is ready to test; it's available here. It is targeted for sid and is apt-get'able, just add :

deb http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/frysk/ ./

to your /etc/apt/sources.list. For now you'll also need to install Java-Gnome packages in NEW, also available from:

deb http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/java-gnome/ ./

Last, you'll need libaudit0 from Philipp's private repo. Unless something really weird is found in this frysk package, it will be uploaded to master right after auditd. Update: uploaded to experimental

Even though GCC 4.2 has seen many delays and still hasn't been released (although it's finally getting close), a lot of development has already been done on trunk for the release of GCC 4.3. I started testing 4.3 in March and in addition to finding and reporting compiler issues I have filed bugs on packages that fail to build with GCC 4.3. The idea is to give people an advance warning and to be ready for GCC 4.3 when it will be released. We have almost 500 bugs related to GCC 4.3 already, mostly due to a clean-up of C++ headers in GCC that has exposed sloppy programming in many programs. Fortunately, these bugs are easy to fix. As I'm finding common mistakes in packages, I will document these problems and way to make sure a program is ready for GCC 4.3. Common problems

• Missing #include directives
• Pedantic preprocessor warnings by default in C++ (hopefully a temporary change in GCC)

My new employer pays for an ADSL line for me. A second line, adding a ADSL connection on another copper pair I was told. Perfect I though, let's order it. Little did I know what problems I would get into.

Two days ago our ADSL went dead. No messages, no calls, no nothing. I call the provider (mobistar) who tell me we cancelled the contract and then hang up on me! The day after I contacted the company that does the ADSL stuff for $employer, asking them if this was their doing. Their reply: "search, search... no we have no documents on you, it must be something internal to $employer, we know nothing". Two hours later I get an email from them asking for dates for the installation of the ADSL modem. On the 21st at the earliest.

Coincidence, right? I send an "un-fuck this right now!" email shortly after. 24h later I still have no reply.

No looking forward to 2 weeks without internet we started searching. So after some hacking and a good idea from my wife it turns out skynet "just" re-enabled my account of 2 years ago, same userid, same password. As if I never left.

Not good...

Continuing the theme from my previous post – the first and fundamental thing any distro needs to have, and thus the first and fundamental thing to think about disintermediating, is some way of distributing software. That might be burning CDs and sending them out to resellers or OEMs, or having your stuff available for download, whether by putting it up on your own server, hosting it via a dedicated high-reliability provider like akamai, or maintaining a network of mirror sites and keeping them up to date. And, of course, anyone who wants to distribute their own software has to do the exact same thing – which either means doing it themselves, and not being able to take advantage of the scalability the distributor has already made work, or going through the distribution and dealing with the problems that entails, as well as the benefits. In this case, disintermediation and decentralisation are pretty much one and the same thing: and decentralising content distribution is already a well understood problem: that’s what peer-to-peer is all about, and peer-to-peer distribution of, well, distributions is already very successful – at least when it comes to CD (and DVD) images. Which means that just about anyone can create a CD image, and distribute it to the world in exactly the same way a major organisation like Debian or Red Hat would – upload a torrent file, run a seed, and let the magic of BitTorrent do its thing. Scalability is no longer something you need a distribution organisation to manage, instead it’s built directly into the technology itself. Unfortunately BitTorrent is designed for large static images – not something you update on a daily basis. And for better or worse, my preferred distribution (Debian testing, currently lenny) does update that frequently. Fortunately, though, BitTorrent’s an open protocol and has dozens of open source implementations – so last year I was able to propose it as part of the Google Summer of Code, and was lucky enough to get a few responses and a student to work on it. It didn’t get much further than that unfortunately – the student lost internet access not long into the programme (and for most of its duration), and that was pretty much that. So when this year’s SoC rolled around, I didn’t really expect much, and didn’t put the idea up for consideration again, but lo and behold someone came through and asked if it was still possible and if there was any more information, and when I forwarded on some of the mails from the previous year we ended up with a second chance at the project. So far it’s looking pretty good – we’ve had a lot more success at keeping in touch, and thanks to the extended schedule for the SoC this year we’ve been able to do a much better job of keeping on top of what’s going on. So much so, in fact, that there’s a first (alpha) release out before the SoC is officially due to start! Wonderful stuff! What it does at the moment is allow you to take a Packages file (the stuff “apt-get update” downloads, which includes descriptions of all the packages that are available, how they inter-depend, and so forth), and from that information create a usable torrent from which to obtain the packages themselves which can then be used to share and distribute the packages. There are two crucial steps in that: the first is allowing the torrent to work without requiring huge amounts of extra information to be distributed (which would introduce scalability problems of its own, instead of solving them), and the second is that the pieces that make up the torrent are selected in a way that matches the actual packages, so that when you upload a single new package, you are in fact only making a minor change to the torrent, rather than having it (on average) completely redefine half of the torrent (and again introduce scalability problems rather than solve them). There’s more information on the DebTorrent wiki page and Cameron’s blog if you’re interested. Anyway, it’s just an alpha release at the moment, which means while there’s code that does something, it’s not actually all that useful yet. The current plan is to next add some code to make it automatically prioritise packages based on what you’re actually using – so that rather than downloading all the debs it see, it’ll only download the ones you’ve got installed, or maybe only newer versions of the ones you’ve got installed, which should get us pretty close to the point where it’s actually useful for something. The end result, of course, is to build a tool that you can point at a Debian archive, run it on a machine connected to the Internet, and you won’t have to do anything more to have a reliable, scalable and reasonably efficient means of allowing your users to distribute and update their systems. In this case, scalable means that if you end up with as many users as Debian or Ubuntu, your users will have a comparable experience, as if you’d arranged for a similarly comprehensive mirror network, without actually having to do the leg work. And heck, presuming that works, it doesn’t even matter if no one else actually does that – it’s worth it even if it saves Debian or Ubuntu the effort of keeping track of a mirror network by hand. There are interesting possibilities at smaller scales too, of course. :)

Yesterday I hacked asynchronous wrapper for python-gammu. It is start of progress to make Wammu behave better while talking to phone. My plan is that all operations will go through this asynchronous wrapper and will be completely non blocking to Wammu. This means no progress bar will pop up to front, but entries will appear in window as they are being read. Progress will be of course still shown, but only in status bar. The current code is only first step, next thing which has to be implemented in python-gammu are virtual commands. Those will be used for things like getting all calendar events from phone, so all you will have to do for getting all is enqueue GetAllCalendar event and worker will do all for you including progress reporting. If you want to write own application using this new wrapper, you can look at example which is in sources. It shows all current possibilities, but it will be enhanced in future.

Alexander Wirt wrote it to our mailinglist already, there's a etch-backports suite on backports.org since a while. Please read his mail and check the mailinglist archive before contacting me or the mailinglist. Happy backporting. On a related note, I started working on a GNOME 2.18 backport for etch, but didn't find the time to finish it yet.

By clicking on this link you possible violate the DMCA again, it contains yet another 0wned number. But it also has instructions how to make up your own 128 bit number, which noone else can legally use anymore - in countries where the DMCA is valid or can be enforced. So, better don't click ;-) Or much rather, better do.

If I were bored, I would probably play with the vanity gpg key generator, to generate a very special gpg key, but I'm not bored :) Also it's not quite so much fun, to start a script and wait.

Some small impressions of Sunday that made it the happiest of my life: spent the day with a very special person—good indian food for lunch—Spiderman 3 in the afternoon which I enjoyed quite a bit—meeting up with friends in the Metalab, have a nice chat and quick dinner—moved over to B72 for the concert of Grossstadtgeflüster which was absolutely great—received a "Sudoku for Dummies" book from Berk with whom I did Sudokus at lunch at work until he let the company—received a pink-fluffy handbag with matching riveted belt and a mini tartan skirt—received a Mermaid mousepad from Alex—received a Grossstadtgeflüster patch from Raphael.
Hope you don't take the list of some presents as belittling the others. It's just that these meant something special to me, not that I didn't enjoy the others. Some friends were still a bit puzzled about the tickets I bought—they tried to give me the money for it. They weren't aware of the try to at least thank them with them for that they were and are there for me in bad times, giving me support and strength when I need it. And I can say that most of them enjoyed it, even though I was distracted quite a bit... And be sure, this is what you get when you let me do some birthday arrangements on my own. ;)

It seems that we are the second fattest country in the world. We should be proud! Or not.

Well, when Ubuntu started it was said that it aims at the Desktop market. An enhanced Debian distribution for desktop users, so to say. In the meantime Ubuntu released Ubuntu LTS for servers and announced lately Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition.
Apparently Ubuntu becomes a direct opponent to Debian: first the desktop, next the servers and now embedded systems. I wonder when Debian will finally react and make some changes in order to compete with Ubuntu, because Ubuntu is simply that: a competitor.
And a quite successful competitor, I've to admit! I'm recommending Ubuntu instead of Debian now for new Linux users and I'm using Ubuntu on an increasing number of machines (mostly laptops) myself. Such things like packages stuck in new queue for 2 months are driving me away from Debian slowly. I would like to know what the newly elected DPL is going to do about this problem of losing ground to Ubuntu? I'm just curious.... :)

Note: Yes, I know that "universal OS" is somewhat of an urban legend...