The text message turns 20 today
The first ever text message was sent 20 years ago today, an appropriately festive communique reading "Merry Christmas".
Neil Papworth sent that fateful text, then 22 years old (now 42, maths fans) he sent it from a computer to an Orbitel 901 handset.
To celebrate the text message's 20th, Ofcom has done a bit of research into its illustrious history, finding that we now send around 50 text messages a week each.
In 2011, that added up to over 150 billion texts sent over the course of the year - compared to 51 billion texts sent in 2006, that's quite a leap.
However, texting seems to be on the out - the first half of 2012 showed two consecutive quarterly declines in the volume of SMS messages sent which Ofcom puts down to the rise of instant messaging, email and social networking.
Still, it's not been a bad innings for the little text message that could - James Thickett, Ofcom's director of research explains that, "When texting was first conceived, many saw it as nothing more than a niche service."
And it certainly broke free of those shackles. Happy birthday text messaging. Or, in vernacular it will understand: hppy bday txtmsg.
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Review: Brother MFC-J4510DW
Introduction
This new multifunction printer has a twist. Specifically, it has a 90-degree twist. Instead of feeding the paper through the printer in portrait mode, with the short edge emerging first, the Brother MFC-J4510DW turns it sideways so it prints in landscape orientation. This offers several advantages over the more traditional setup. It can print on A3-sized (11 x 17-inch) paper by taking the page through the printer short end first. A3 pages have to be hand-fed, one at a time through the manual feed slot at the rear of the printer, so it's not suitable for heavy-volume A3 printing. Instead, think of it as an A4 (US letter size) printer that can print the occasional A3 page. Although it can handle A3, unlike its A3 stablemate the Brother MFC-J6910DW, it's no larger than most A4 printers.
Measuring just 48cm (18.9 inches) end to end, 29cm (11.4 inches) tall and 18.5cm (7.3 inches) high, it's clearly designed for the home or small office, where space is likely to be at a premium.
Indeed, the Brother MFC-J4510DW is the first in a series of five J4000-range releases for the small office and home office (SOHO) market, where it's up against printers such as the Canon Pixma MX895 and laser printers such as the HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275.
The Brother MFC-J4510DW has Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking, or you can connect it directly to your computer using USB. It's AirPrint and Google Cloud Print compatible, and you can print directly from USB storage, PictBridge and Media Card ports.
Being an all-in-one machine, it can scan and photocopy as well as print, though the flatbed scanner is limited to A4 in size. It can fax too.
Its 150-sheet paper tray (up to A4 in size) and 20-sheet automatic document feeder (also A4) make it ideally suited to light office work, and automatic Duplex printing and optional high-yield supplies help bring down the overall running costs.
Previous attempts at developing landscape-feed printers have failed due to the paper curling after being output. Brother claims to have solved these long-standing problems using an "innovative rippling process during printing". But does it work? Let's take a look.
Features
The Brother MFC-J4510DW certainly isn't short on features. Connectivity is comprehensive, with Ethernet cabled networking joined by secure Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n). Mobile printing is well catered for too. It's AirPrint and Google Cloud Print ready, and you can download a smartphone app for printing from and scanning directly to your phone. You can print from most portable storage formats too, including USB flash drives of up to 32GB, and SD cards. Its print engine is based on a four-tank system of black, cyan, yellow and magenta.
Brother claims it's the fastest printer in its class, outputting 20 pages per minute in monochrome and 18 pages per minute in colour. These speeds also rise to 35 mono pages per minute and 27 in colour using its fastest print mode. It has automatic two-sided printing, but only using paper of up to A4 in size.
Paper handling is what you'd expect from a home office printer. The paper tray holds 150 sheets, which is enough for home use or in a small office. The manual feeder at the rear can only take one sheet at a time, which is annoying if you regularly print to letterhead, but comes in useful for occasional non-standard printing.
As a photocopier, the Brother MFC-J4510DW can enlarge documents up to 400% in size, or reduce them to 25%, in 1% increments.
It can output up to 99 copies of the original, and has an optical scan and copy resolution of up to 2,400 x 2,400 dpi in colour and mono settings.
The printer is operated through a 9.3cm (3.7-inch) colour touchscreen, with intuitive swipe controls enabling you to flick through its various options.
It also gives easy access to online sites such as Google Docs, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Dropbox and Evernote, printing from and scanning to these cloud services.
One thing it really lacks is an exciting - or at least interesting - name. Why do printer manufacturers insist on giving their printers barely-comprehensible strings of letters and figures for a title? Couldn't they come up with something more imaginative?
Performance
Brother has definitely solved the problem of landscape-orientated paper feeds curling the paper. Print-outs from the Brother MFC-J4510DW are as flat as those from any desktop inkjet printer - in fact, they're flatter than most. Our 20-page test document printed perfectly, without a hint of a curl or crease. Nor did it suffer that wavy texture that curses some printers' outputs, caused by the paper pausing as it goes through the rollers. You can't fault the Brother MFC-J4510DW for text speed either. The aforementioned 20-page test document printed in one minute, 13 seconds, which is an excellent result for an inkjet printer. Image printing was less speedy. A standard quality photo print on plain A4 paper printed in 43 seconds. Using photo paper and the corresponding printer setting, an A4 photo printed in two minutes, nine seconds. These speeds are about average.
The quality of the Brother MFC-J4510DW's text printing is workmanlike; it gets the job done with few significant faults, but without the style and panache you'd get from a Canon inkjet or HP Officejet.
Bold type lacks the vivid quality of the market-leading inkjets, and the characters tend to bleed a little around the edges. Text gets very flaky at low point sizes. That's not to say it's poor - it's serviceable and readable, but put it next to some of its rivals, and it looks a little tired.
Image quality was a mixed bag. An A4 photo print on plain paper at default settings proved very disappointing, with washed out colours, weak detail and a distinct green hue in the greyscale ramp.
Using proper photo paper and the appropriate printer settings (which are based on the paper used rather than any sort of quality scale), it's much better. Colours are vibrant and accurate, and despite a little speckling, the overall standard is very good for a four-tank inkjet system.
As a photocopier, the controls are easy to use and its scaling features are comprehensive.
Copying a magazine cover in A4 produced a reasonable (if a little speckled) print, but when scaling it up to A3, the print-out was cursed by a horizontal band running across the image every couple of inches. This band also marred some A4 documents printed from PDF.
Like many Brother printers, connection cabling such as Ethernet and USB leads pass under the lid of the printer and into its body before being plugged in, so make sure your lead is at least a couple of feet longer than you imagine you need.
Verdict
Brother's MFC-J4510DW has an excellent range of features. Although primarily an A4 printer, it's quite capable of printing in A3, albeit one sheet at a time. It's AirPrint and Google Cloud Print compatible, and can print from a range of media. With a 150-sheet input tray and a 20-page ADF, it's clearly designed for the home and small office, where its fax facilities and fast text printing speeds will come in very useful. Considering its feature range, the Brother MFC-J4510DW isn't expensive to buy - costing $199.99 in the US (around £125/AU$193) - and high-yield ink tanks keep the running costs down too. Its colour touchscreen is a real boon, especially when it's network-connected, giving shortcut access to a variety of online services such as Facebook and Flickr.We liked
The Brother MFC-J4510DW feeds its A4 paper sideways, printing across the portrait-orientated page instead of the more common landscape printing. This useful innovation means it can print on A3 paper too, even though it's no bigger than a standard A4 printer. A3 pages are fed into a manual feed slot at the rear of the printer in a landscape orientation. Brother has solved the problem of paper curling that hampered previous attempts at landscape-orientated printers; pages output by the Brother MFC-J4510DW are totally flat. Text printouts are very fast, printing the 20-page text document we use for benchmarking in just one minute, 13 seconds. Photo and image speeds are reasonable, if unremarkable. Photo-paper printing is pretty respectable for an office-orientated four-tank inkjet, and its automatic Duplex printing is welcome, as is its colour touchscreen LCD, which enables you to swipe between control screens.We disliked
The Brother MFC-J4510DW's overall print quality is workmanlike, and frequently fails to match the standards set by market-leading inkjet printers. Although entirely serviceable, its text print-outs lack the vibrancy of some of its rivals, especially those that offer a pigment black tank alongside dye-based colour inks. Plain paper images can be speckled or banded. It's not suitable for regular or high-volume A3 printing, because pages of this size have to be fed into the manual feed slot one at a time - you can't load several A3 pages into the feeder and print multiple copies of a document, one after another. But since the Brother MFC-J4510DW is primarily an A4 printer, perhaps its limited A3 capabilities should be considered a bonus.Final verdict
This feature-rich and innovative printer is good value for money, especially for the small office and home office. It has a lot going for it - especially its text speeds and touchscreen controls - and although it can handle A3 pages fed in single sheets, it's the same size as most A4 printers. High-yield ink tanks are available, and they're accessed via a door in the front of the printer, so there's no need to open the lid and lift the scanner bed every time you need to replace one. And although printers aren't exactly known for their looks, the Brother MFC-J4510DW is reasonably stylish. Unfortunately, the quality of its printouts is merely average, and struggles to match the standards offered by leading home office inkjet printers such as the Canon Pixma MX895 and HP TopShot LaserJet Pro M275.
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Syrian Internet access returns after two-day outage
After two full days of a complete Internet blackout in Syria, service has been restored to the majority of the country, although violence continues.
Internet analysis website Renesys reported that Internet access in Syria dropped sharply on November 29 and was restored almost as suddenly during the middle of the day on December 1.
Further investigation by an on-the-ground BBC correspondent confirms that digital communications services have returned in parts of Syria's capital, Damascus, despite continued "heavy fighting on the main road to the airport."
The U.S. State Department claims that the Syrian government, having been under military and social pressure since March 2011, caused the Internet outage as an act of desperation.
Ongoing unrest
Activists allege that since the fighting against President Bashar al-Assad and his regime began last March, 40,000 people have lost their lives to the conflict. A side effect of the violence and the potential leveraging of infrastructure like Internet access has been the massive exodus of refugees from Syria. The United Nation's (UN) Arab League envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, suggested to the UN General Assembly that the Security Council could draw up a viable peace plan in addition to providing humanitarian relief for the growing numbers of displaced Syrians. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said that by January, Syria's neighbors could be supporting as many as 700,000 refugees.
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EU, US officials to meet over Google anti-trust case
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that "people familiar with the matter" have confirmed an upcoming meeting between U.S. and European Union officials regarding both independent anti-trust investigations into Google.
The source, an EU official according to The Wall Street Journal, said that Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), would be spending time with EU competition chief Joaquin Almunia on Monday to discuss their pending probes into Google's search activity.
Both respective agencies are investigating allegations that Google broke anti-trust laws by using it's overwhelming market share in Internet search services to unlawfully promote its own products and negatively impact its competitors.
The FTC was not able to confirm the existence or nature of the meeting, although Leibowitz is scheduled to be in Europe on Monday.
Exchanges with commission
Speculation surrounding the purported meeting suggests that the talk will be at least partly regarding the timing of the two investigations. The FTC is planning to decide its next move by the end of 2012, just weeks away. At earlier stages in the investigations, it appeared that the EU probes might produce usable evidence for the FTC. However, the EU official who spoke with The Wall Street Journal indicated that the EU investigation doesn't have as ambitious a deadline, and may well extend into next year before transitioning to a trial or conclusion. Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman, clarified the Mountain View-based company's stance on the matter saying, ""We continue to work cooperatively with the Federal Trade Commission and European Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have."
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Tutorial: Listen to your tunes online with Amazon Cloud Player
Android phones and tablets are amazingly capable little multimedia powerhouses, especially when it comes to playing music.
But there's still a digital divide when it comes to getting a huge collection of songs from your computer to the device, especially given the fiddly nature of connecting cables and syncing files.
Fortunately, Amazon's MP3 app makes this process a lot easier. You need to install a small piece of software on your computer, which uploads copies of your music files to the internet.
From here you can access and download the files on your Android device, with the added bonus that your music is always backed up on the internet.
We're starting this tutorial on a computer, so make sure yours is ready to go.
1. Amazon grace
On your computer, open Internet Explorer or Firefox (the Cloud Player doesn't work with Chrome) and go to amazon.co.uk/cloudplayer. You may be asked to log in to Amazon at this point - if you don't already have an account, click 'No, I am a new customer', followed by 'Sign in…' to create one.
2. Outlook: cloudy
You're now presented with Amazon's Cloud Player. Any songs you've previously bought via Amazon are displayed here, and you can play them from within your browser. You can access this page from any computer, making it ideal for listening to music while you're at work - if you're allowed, of course.
3. Rare imports
Next, click 'Import your music' and you're prompted to get the Amazon Music Importer. Click 'Download Now' followed by 'Run', then click 'Continue' once it's loaded up. Click 'Authorise Device' to enable Amazon Music Importer on your computer. Click 'Start scan' to search your computer for music files.
4. To the cloud
If you have more than 250 music files on your computer, click 'Select music' and click the checkboxes next to your favourite artists, then click 'Import selected'. If you have fewer than 250, simply click 'Import all'. It may take a while, so you might as well fire up your Android device as it's happening.
5. Amazon MP3
Open Google Play and search for 'Amazon MP3'. Tap 'Install' to download it, then 'Open'. Next, tap 'Player'. Choose 'Sign in to Amazon', then enter the email address and password you used in step one. When the Cloud Player starts, you should find all the music you've imported from your computer.
6. Easy listening
You can tap on each artist's entry to see songs on your device, then tap a song to play it. By default Amazon MP3 streams your music, which can rack up large data bills. To make music available offline, long-press on an artist, then choose 'Download all songs by artist'. You can also tap the orange download icon to put the music on your device.
7. Data allowance
It's also a good idea to set Amazon MP3 to only download music over Wi-Fi - this means it won't attempt to download music when you're on a mobile data connection. Tap the menu icon, then 'Settings' and check 'Download only on Wi-Fi'. You can also set 'Automatic downloads' here, so new music is imported immediately.
8. Music to your ears
You should now be able to access some of your favourite songs via your Android device, and you know how to add music from your computer to the Amazon cloud. Don't forget that you can buy music via the Amazon MP3 app, too, and anything that you purchase is automatically added to the cloud
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Buying Guide: Budget Android tablets: which one is right for you?
Google and Asus may well seem to have sewn up the Android tablet world with the very well received Nexus 7 tablet (£160), but there are many Android tablet options out there for much less money.
This is thanks to a vibrant 'white box' Chinese manufacturing scene, which sees wave after wave of super-cheap Android tablets crashing into our shops, and surprisingly, some are pretty good.
While the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity costs a whopping £600, and the majority of other big-name tablets hover around the £200 to £300 mark, some of the smaller 7-inch Android tablets, even those running Ice Cream Sandwich, can be had for around £70 online or £90 on the high street. But for that kind of money, are you going to look like a bit of a mug?
Of course, you don't get something for nothing, and while on paper, at least, budget Android tablets may look as powerful and potent as their big-name, large-price-tagged brothers, there can often be glaring omissions.
One of the first potential pitfalls to beware of is Google Play - the Android app store, which also peddles movie rentals, music downloads and ebooks. Google Play is often unavailable on bargain-basement tablets, which means that you're limited to a handful of badly made, unsupported titles.
The second common trap is the questionable quality of the components that make up your low-priced tablet. The gumph may about boast a high-resolution screen, but this is a common shortcut, which can undermine the whole experience, and really expose your frugal tendencies.
If you're looking for a cut-price Android tablet, read our essential guide to avoiding possible pitfalls and saving money on buying the right device for you.
A decent display
Even the cheapest of the generic Chinese Android tablets tend to feature capacitive displays these days, which are a vast step up in quality compared with the older resistive models that we used to see only a couple of years or so ago. Capacitive technology means that the displays are more sensitive to the touch, making the experience of using even the cheapest of tablets, such as the budget Kogan Agora (£119), much more satisfying than trying to poke the wobbly, plasticky resistive screens of previous generations of technology. However, as nice as the newer, cheaper displays might be to touch, you also want to examine the resolution they offer. A 7-inch screen outputting at just 800 x 480 isn't going to look very clear or sharp, because that screen resolution is already a little out of date, even on the smaller screens of Android smartphones nowadays. A decent budget option, however, such as the Archos 70 (available for about £170), offers a 7-inch display running at a more respectable 1,024 x 768, which will make everything from web text to apps appear much clearer than something that's expanding a lower resolution image to fill a 7-inch screen. Another legacy Android issue that still affects some of the cheaper tablets these days is access to the Google Play Store. Some models from lesser known brands, such as the ViewSonic ViewPad 10e (available for about £140) don't have the certification to offer access to Google's official app store on board, although most of today's newer budget models now do. Again, official Google Play access is something to add to your pre-purchase checklist, because you really don't want to be stuck using a terrible, unofficial Chinese app store to access all your apps and games.Power and control
This new wave of cheap Chinese tablet tends to run on versions of the All Winner chipset, coupled with a Mali 400MHz GPU. It works well enough for most apps and general use, but the key thing you want to be looking out for is the amount of system RAM alongside it in the tablet. Some of the cheaper tablets skimp here to save money, and only offer 512MB, which means the multitasking aspect of Android - one of its key boasts - is compromised, and performance is inevitably slower all round. At least 1GB of RAM ought to be the minimum to run Android 4.0 with any degree of success, and that's something that most of the sub-£100 tabs are actually offering today.Brands for less
Thanks to the insane level of competition in the Android tablet world, you don't have to stick with the no-name models if you're looking for a good deal. Samsung's second-generation Galaxy Tab 2 models have been reduced to under £200, while Motorola's Xoom, and its Xoom 2 sequel, can be picked up for around the £150 to £200 mark, giving you some seriously well-made technology for the money.
The problem with Samsung's models, for some people, is the manufacturer's continued use of its TouchWiz interface. While TouchWiz is great when used on a mobile phone, it makes a tablet feel like, well, just an enormous phone. It kind of takes the fun out of owning and exploring a new machine when it's running the same OS as your mobile.
Plus, makers such as Amazon take the skinning of Android even further, with the new Kindle Fire HD (£159), completely hiding most of Android's best features in favour of Amazon's own user interface. Yes, it's an Android tablet, but it's an entirely different experience to the rest of the pack, and something you may or may not prefer.
Also down to personal preference is your display size. For some, a 7-inch screen is more than enough, while others prefer the larger 10-inch option. In practical use, the only real hindrance of the smaller option is having to be a little more precise with your presses around the edges of the screen.
Google hides lots of Android functionality behind software toggles in the corners of the display, so for the big-fingered technology fan, the extra space afforded by the larger models is something to consider.
Cheaper tablets, with their fatter, chunkier bezels, also make getting to the edges of the display a little tougher, too.
Can it be updated?
The majority of the cheaper Android tablets under the £100 mark will arrive with an unskinned vanilla version of Android, untouched by the maker. While this is a good thing for most, because you're getting the purest vision of what Google and its team think Android should represent, it probably means you'll be stuck using the same version for life. The advantage of spending a little more money on a branded machine from a western company means you should at least see some updates to the tablet's OS when Google releases a new version. That's one big reason people are plumping for the Nexus 7 in such large numbers, because with Google's official backing, it ought to be first in line to see upgrades to future versions of Android, while it's unlikely there will be any such easy upgrade path for your random £70 Chinese SuperTab 7G XL. Some companies have shown they're in it for the long term, and have won over fans with their approach to OS upgrades. Asus, for example, is continually releasing updates for its excellent Transformer series of machines, but those are high-end devices for which you'd expect a little more support. In terms of the budget Android tablet makers, little French company Archos leads the pack in rolling out upgrades and supporting users, with owners of its cheaper machines benefitting from quite a few updates, including the newer versions of Android and minor bug-fixing repairs. So don't just look at the hardware alone. Cheap tablets shouldn't be disposable and you have every right to expect some level of support from the manufacturer over the next year or two. And that's worth paying a little extra for.3G and connectivity
Another consideration is whether you're the outdoorsy type or not. To save money, most of the cheaper tablets, and even Google's Nexus 7, ditch 3G connectivity, so you're stuck with using Wi-Fi to assess online features and download apps. If you've got used to piggybacking on friends' and pub Wi-Fi, that won't be an issue for you, but it's one of the reasons the cheap tablets are so very cheap, so bear it in mind. Finally, something of an Android hot potato at the moment is support for upgrading the onboard storage. Many of the phone and tablet makers seem to be moving away from offering SD card support, with even the Nexus 7 failing to include it. Ironically, that's one area where the cut-throat super-budget Chinese tablet scene always emerges as a winner, with virtually all of the cheapest Android models including an SD card slot. Again, as with 3G, it's down to personal choice, and whether you want or need the ability to shuffle around your media on SD cards.
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Interview: The future of Ubuntu revealed
Canonical is pushing Ubuntu in so many different directions. On the desktop, it has introduced Unity; on the server, it's pursuing state-of-the-art ARM and cloud platforms; and it's even trying to get Ubuntu on to mobile phones and televisions.
Trying to keep track of how all this is going, how it all fits together and what's coming next is a full-time job… which is why we spoke to Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, whose job it is to keep track of everything.
Linux Format: Let's start with Ubuntu on the desktop. The big development is Unity, and a lot of its development has been driven by user testing. Could you talk about the motivation behind that and how you've gone about finding the people to do it? It's certainly not something a lot of free software projects have experience doing.
Jane Silber: No, you're right and I think it's one of the areas where we've really innovated and pushed the envelope in terms of that approach in the free software world. We didn't invent user experience testing in any way, but we are believers in a user-centred design ethos.
As we decided to really raise the bar in terms of user experience in Ubuntu and in free software, that user research and user testing became a core plank in our approach to the design. So, from the beginning of Unity development we've done a variety of different user testing and research.
From exploring initial concepts with paper prototypes to actually getting people in and having them use the software - both during development and afterwards. Even after something's been released, we continue to test it and do milestone checks by repeating some of the same testing.
LXF: Ubuntu is a free software project done in the open, but with the testing how much do you try to do in the open?
JS: We absolutely release results of user testing, and will continue to do that. A lot of it comes up first on our design blog, design.canonical.com, so if you're interested go there first.
But we're quite public in those. There are some things we keep private in the early stages of development for competitive or customer reasons, but in general we'll do as much of that design work in the open as possible, and release the user testing results as well.
One of the other things that we've done is helping other projects learn how to do that kind of thing. At UDS, the Ubuntu Developer Summit, we'll run surgeries where people can come in and say, "this is my favourite open source project, this is what I work on, but I'm not really a designer. How can I make it better?" And these design surgeries will both give design ideas and do a little bit of user testing on their own projects.
LXF: The other big thing on the desktop for Ubuntu is the Software Centre, which is one of the things that really makes you stand out against other distributions. How is getting third-party application developers on board going, and how successful have paid-for apps been?
JS: It's going very well. We don't have 100,000 applications like some other platforms do, but it's growing at a healthy pace and we're seeing it really being a draw for the app developers.
For example, some of the big names - such as EA releasing games on Ubuntu, and just the other week we did a co-marketing, co-launch event with Humble Bundle. I don't know the stats right now for that, but in the first 72 hours after release, we saw 10,000 downloads from the Software Centre.
But that's our biggest first-72-hour launch of a new title. And new titles are coming in there all the time. We still have work to do. It's too early to declare it a success and go home. There's work around providing a more coherent SDK to allow people to develop for the platform.
LXF: That's a challenge on Linux in particular, with goalposts often moving.
JS: Yeah, and it's the embarrassment of riches. You have all these toolkits you can use, as opposed to the narrow selection that other platforms give. It's great, but sometimes that creates a barrier to entry where people just don't know where to start. And that's what we've done some work around, not limiting choice but providing a narrow on-ramp that app developers can follow. Things like Quickly, and http://developer.ubuntu.com.
LXF: Looking towards the server, I know recently that you increased your support life cycle to five years…
JS: Our LTS releases used to be three years on the desktop and five on the server, and we made two changes. One was bringing the desktop up to five years, and that was in response to enterprise demand.
And the second change we made was to make a stronger commitment around making those LTS versions available on new hardware as it comes out, so that people can get hardware refreshes and still maintain a stable software platform across the enterprise.
So we'll make the 12.10 kernel work with 12.04 and the 13.04 kernel work with 12.04. So if you need that kernel for hardware support, it will be available.
LXF: Red Hat recently announced it was increasing its server support cycle from, I think it was, seven years to 10 years; does Ubuntu feel any pressure to match that?
JS: We're not seeing that right now. I think the reason is the different use cases in terms of people who use Red Hat and people who use Ubuntu. And, interestingly, we're seeing pressure almost in the opposite direction.
One of the things that's happening in the server world is that everything cloud-related is so fast moving, it's not realistic to think you're going to do something now and want the same tools and software in 10 years. What we see is people wanting the stability of the base OS, but wanting new hardware support for one, and newer software for cloud-related activities.
So, they want the new OpenStack, for example, on a 12.04 LTS base, so that's another thing we've committed to do with 12.04. In six months' time, you'll be able to get the newest OpenStack. 12.04 shipped with OpenStack Essex; but when Folsom comes out, the next version, people are going to want that not just on Ubuntu 12.10, but also on 12.04, which is for stable production.
LXF: This week you're at Computex, and one of your big announcements is that you're demoing Ubuntu on an ARM platform. Are there any real-world deployments of that yet? Where has the demand come from?
JS: The motivation for it comes from scalable, power-efficient, low-cost energy drivers. There's real customer interest in it too, but it's very early and there's not… hardware doesn't exist in production environments yet. There are no case studies yet, it's that early.
People are excited about the promise of it, and hardware is starting to show up. Calxeda has demonstrated some hardware at UDS a few weeks ago, MiTAC is the company in Taiwan that we've demonstrated an ARM server with in Taipei, and HP has announced its project Moonshot, which will be its ARM server. So there's real hardware, and it's being used in largely test and development areas, where people are exploring the workloads, are exploring how to optimise for it, but it is very real. But it is very early days.
LXF: Could you give us an idea of how many people are working on Ubuntu on ARM?
JS: It's hard to identify a specific number because there are people across the company, it's an integrated piece of the company.
Some people on the Ubuntu server team, Robby Williamson, work to ensure that Ubuntu works both on Intel and ARM hardware… we don't have a dedicated ARM team, we as much as possible treat it as another architecture that we have to support. So it's part of our QA team, automated builds, automated testing, etc.
LXF: I know you said you had no case studies on ARM, but are there any Ubuntu case studies, on the server or desktop, where you're really proud of what's happening?
JS: Oh, there are loads! Some of the more recent ones have been on the cloud. We've just released a case study with Mercadolibre, which is a South American cloud provider, which built a cloud with 1,000 Ubuntu nodes - so a good-sized Open Stack, Ubuntu-based cloud.
On the desktop side, we've recently done a very large deployment in South Africa in an education setting, which is in 1,600 schools - 50,000 Ubuntu desktops, which combine to reach two million learners. It's a shared resource. Basically, it's providing connectivity and a cloud-managed desktop across the Gauteng province.
We've done it in conjunction with a South African partner, and I think it's the largest open source deployment of its kind in the southern hemisphere. So we continue to see good, interesting growth, both on the server side, which is largely cloud, big data, web server scaling operations; and on the desktop it's large enterprises, government and private.
LXF: Moving on to Ubuntu 'elsewhere', on TVs and mobile phones… I guess one of the big questions is, everyone's sure you can get the software together, but the challenge most open source projects have is getting the hardware partners and the software distributed to customers. Could you tell us about your efforts to get partners on board?
JS: It is a significant effort for Canonical. Luckily, it's something that we've been doing for years now. A large part of what we do as a business, that we can provide to help Ubuntu, and that the community can't do, is improve those commercial partnerships and relationships.
We've been working in that industry, particularly in Taiwan and China, for many years and have very good relationships across the board with all of the major players. So we are working hard to bring both Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android to market.
Our go-to-market plan is absolutely through a hardware vendor. We're not going to start making and selling hardware ourselves. We are working to line up those engagements to bring us to market, and because it's their product and not ours, I can't give accurate timelines on that.
LXF: This is a direction Canonical's pushed for in the past, in partnership with Dell on Desktops, and on Netbooks with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and your efforts didn't pan out quite as you'd hoped. Do you feel you've learned from that and developed relationships that are helping you now?
JS: Yes, I think we have. We've learned a number of lessons. I think the industry has changed, the dynamics have changed. I think netbooks were a good idea that was overtaken, hampered by the hardware itself, and struggled to find its appropriate place in the market.
Was it a low-cost? Was it a highly mobile laptop? And aiming at those different markets would drive you to different hardware specs and different software loads on there.
I think one of the things we learned from the Netbook experience was the value of defining the software experience, and it was around then that we started defining Unity as a product and taking more control of the user experience… not control of it, but defining our vision for the user experience for the software experience on top of that, and being more opinionated. And I think that's led to a more compelling user experience and suite of Ubuntu products.
LXF: On the topic of being opinionated, with Unity and the community as a whole - there was a split. Do you think that what happened with Gnome 3, Gnome Shell and Unity was partly a result of your desire to be more opinionated about the interface and to have more control? That's not to sound negative, but you had a vision that you wanted to implement…
JS: I think that's absolutely part of it. It's unfortunate how things played out - things turned into a split, and we simply seemed to be unable to come to an arrangement to keep the communities together. I think it's easier for a community to move forward with a driving vision, and in general that's how Ubuntu works.
It's an effective community, and it is a relatively cohesive, goal-orientated community, but when there are different goals it becomes difficult to hold things together, and we found at an individual level there were different goals with what was happening with Gnome 3 and what we felt Ubuntu needed.
LXF: And do you hope in the next few years you might see other distributions picking up Ubuntu's work on the desktop and helping with the burden of that?
JS: I don't know if contributions will flow back in terms of code - we've always measured contributions beyond just code - documentation, mentoring new users, etc - and so if those other projects in time influence us in terms of design and best practice, that's an equally valid contribution.
LXF: Do you run the company as a whole on open source software and Ubuntu, or are there systems where you can't?
JS: We run the whole company on Ubuntu. This is a side annecdote, but we've just moved office. In the old office, at the entry there was a hand-scanner run by a Windows machine, and we hated it. We had to have a Windows licence! And there's no hand-scanner here, so now we have Windows licences for testing, but not as a piece of our infrastructure.
And our software infrastructure, it's largely open source. We use OpenERP for our financial system. We do use some proprietary cloud-based services; we use Salesforce.com, Google Apps for Calendar Sync, etc. We're not anti-proprietary software. But in terms of the software we run ourselves, it's open source. We have an internal OpenStack cloud that anybody can get access to and spin up any workloads they want.
LXF: Wow, so if people want to build some software, they can just use it?
JS: Yeah, and it's generated a lot of innovation in the company, and given people that agility to move quickly. Somebody will have an idea about how to do some automated testing, they can try it out and if it's successful, they can get it deployed through our normal procedures.
LXF: On Canonical's finances, how is your drive to profitability going?
JS: We're very comfortable with where we are. Our revenue is growing at a healthy pace. We don't talk about our numbers publically, being a privately-held company.
But we continue to grow, and are seeing interest in Ubuntu grow in the enterprise, particularly in emerging workloads and cloud environments, at the desktop level, and in the device space driven by the upswing in mobile devices and convergence of platforms.
That line between desktops down to phones is getting blurred, and Ubuntu as a platform can move elegantly up and down that.
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