not all change is progress
February 2, 2015
Direct download links:
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Neither the weather nor a slickly marketed new Linux vulnerability can hold the Luddites back; like the Beast of Redmond, which features heavily in the News this show, we just keep on coming.
Changing the pace, Joe and Jesse went Off the Beaten Path to bring us a couple of FOSS applications that they frequently find useful; but we soon got back on track with all your Feedback.
Yomping ended, we settled down Over a Pint to discuss the impact that social media has had upon how we see the world and our fellow human beings. It’s broadened our outlook… hasn’t it?
0:07:01 News
Security
BOO! Grave remote-code exec flaw in GNU C Library TERRIFIES
Linux
Sky
to block porn by default to protect children
Odds ‘n’ Sods
Jeff Hoogland’s back
CoreOS Moves From Btrfs To EXT4 + OverlayFS
The Linux Foundation Offers a Self-Paced SysAdmin Course
Mobile
CEO: “Today, Cyanogen has some dependence on Google.
Tomorrow, it will not.”
Microsoft
to Invest in Rogue Android Startup Cyanogen
Microsoft Releases Finished Versions Of Office For
Android
Microsoft continues cross-platform tear, releases Outlook for
iOS, Android
LibreOffice for Android coming soon
#CASHTAGS are a thing: you can now bank on Twitter
Now available in the UK: Send and request money right from
Gmail
Crowdfunding Updates
[show #29] Librem
15 reaches funding goal
[show #30]
UbuTab Indiegogo failed; undeterred, Nikki Wertish is
now selling
preorders
[show #31]
Interview with Andromium CEO Gordon Zheng; Kickstarter
failed to reach goal, but
still pushing ahead
[show #32]
Builder, a Gnome IDE completed its Indiegogo campaign
I’ll believe it when it happ… oh
Smart
things powered by snappy Ubuntu Core on ARM and x86
Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical
0:49:38 Off the Beaten Path
Joe and Jesse talked about a couple of pieces of software that they use regularly, and find really useful: Bombono DVD and Rapid Photo Downloader for Linux.
1:00:52 Feedback
A huge thank you to Aaron Cook for the PayPal donation; and to Stefan Hofbauer and Jason Connerley, who joined our ranks of Monthly Supporters. And thanks to Clemens Gruber, Andrey Panasyuk and Jeremy Wooten for the Flattrs.
We mentioned that it’d really help us gain more visibility if we had a few more ratings and reviews on our iTunes listing… so, if you enjoy the show, you know what to do ;)
We received a fair amount of feedback regarding our look last show at the ZTE Open C running Firefox OS. Thanks to SonOfNed, Firefoxfan2702, Efraim and Aaron for your differing and thoughtful perspectives.
Andrew Kirkpatrick got in touch to remind us of the environmental impact that our computing devices have, and we’ll try to keep this in mind going forwards.
And Issac Carter offered some predictions for 2015 of his own. With GHOST seemingly already fulfilling one of Joe’s – which he failed to pick up on! – it’ll be interesting to look back in 12 months’ time to see how we all fared.
1:15:55 Over a Pint
Have social media platforms broadened our appreciation of the views of others, or simply become a space where we can easily seek out those with our own existing narrow perspectives and prejudices?
Whilst chewing over this topic, we mentioned the worldwide spread of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, how online dating is turning us all into Tamagotchis, how social media can reinforce a ‘spiral of silence’, and how comfortable conformity is all too often the only desire of today’s youth.
Despite being asked nicely, Joe didn’t edit in the chorus from an apposite viral video that Paddy thought would make a good bumper for this segment. So, just for everyone reading, here’s the song in its full glory. Enjoy ;)
Hi,
thanks for another interesting show.
Regarding your comments on Cyanogenmod, I am a bit baffled by what they are up to. The difficulties they have in working with the one OEM they have shipping their OS doesn’t bode too well, and I would for now doubt that Microsoft will ship it (a Linux kernel) on their Lumia (fka Nokia) devices. Added that I am not quite sure what the company Cyanogenmod is doing (how many of the people working on ROM’s do they employ?), I am curious where they will end up.
The segment on non-free software on mobile devices
presented rather too much talk about proprietary stuff,
but that is a problem with the world, not the show…
What I am worried about the movement away from desktops
or laptops that are more less equivalent is that it suits
the ‘war on general purpose computing’ (to take Corey
Doctorow’s phrase). These software and hardware platforms
in this domain are far more locked down. I think, form
this angle, this is one of the prime threats to software
freedom and the political and social principles it is
necessary for, that is ultimately for democracy.
I found the debate on social interactions in the flesh and online interesting. I think that acknowledging the realness of interactions online in mainstream consciousness is necessary and hasn’t happened to a sufficient extent, not least because people should refuse to accept surveillance and censorship online that would provoke outrage in other forms (although maybe not in the Truman Show known as the UK).
Firstly Daniel I think you win the award for fastest post following a show release, your trophy is not on its way to you.
I then had to do some up-to-the-minute research on the state of CM and found that OnePlus have kicked them out because of the M$ payment. Oh dear, things don’t look good, and does make you wonder how CM will make a profitable entry into the market if it doesn’t have even one shipping, purchasable piece of phone hardware to hold up as a success.
Also you make a good point regarding the movement over to phones and how locked down they are. If we do all end up owning a phoneputer (if Leo can coin phablet then watch this space for me coining that word!) and they run OS’s that are as closed as they are at present, then we will indeed be stepping away from pure freedom (as available from an FSF approved OS) to a complete lack of it.
Well, I happened to be about to watch a football match in a video with only russian commentary, so the episode arrived just in time -)
Cyanogen had actually fallen out with Oneplus
last year already over conflicting agreements in
India (in which episode CM didn’t seem to act
very professionally.)
With all of that, like Joe I am in a phoneputer
(it’s catching on, although the german ‘Handy’ is
actually becoming a better word by the minute)
conundrum: I have a Nexus S running CM 11, but it
is showing it’s age, especially in the 386 MB of
RAM which are increasingly annoying. Since I
don’t particularly want / can afford to spend a
lot of money on a new Nexus, I can now already
feel the practical consequences of operating
systems not being generally applicable throughout
a class of devices and the total lack of
modularity in the fitting together of components:
If it was as trivial to install a Trisquel-level
android (Trandquill?) on
$(android-or-even-iphone) as is installing Linux
on a Laptop; or if I could replace the ram or
ram+cpu soc in my Nexus, I’d be fine.
As it is, I am not inclined towards the
open-washed Jolla and left placing my hopes in
Ubuntu Phone. Oh dear.
Showing my Luddite tendencies, I think I’ll be sticking with the term ‘smartphone’ for the time being. ‘Phoneputer’ just doesn’t move me, and ‘Handy’ has a slang meaning with a sexual connotation here in the USA. I suspect that would deter most marketing types from adopting it.
Google has a Project Ara which may foreshadow a possible future for smartphones that could address Daniel’s request. I’d love to see the concept of open component-ized smartphones realized in the market, but I suspect that the major smartphone manufacturers are not so keen on the idea. If Google continues to support Ara, perhaps there is an opportunity for a ‘open friendly’ handset manufacturer to break into the smartphone market? I wouldn’t bet on it but one can always hope.
I just ran across this ‘Android bloodbath gathers pace’ article about the recent sales and profitability trends of the Android smartphone markets. Perhaps the 18 – 24 month smartphone upgrade cycle that the Android smartphone manufacturers and cellular carriers have been feasting off of may be drawing to a close, at least in the Western markets.
It’s interesting to contrast the 2014 End of Year market trends for Android phones with the still booming results for iPhones. Probably some lessons there but I am not confident that I could tease out all the factors.
It will be interesting to see how the Android manufacturers respond. I wouldn’t shed any tears if price wars on handsets were to break out. Slower replacement cycles for new Android models could also extend the effective support life for Cyanogenmod releases.
Hi Guys – You’ve probably seen the news. There’s a new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. Any thorts?
My thorts on the improved Pi are thus; when I first got my R-Pi (the original model B with the lesser RAM) I envisaged using it for a computer on my TV, or as a media hub with XBMC (as it was at that time). I found the Pi too painfully slow to use as a TV browser, and XBMC was also unacceptably clunky. I looked at OpenELEC which was better, but again not great (I note OpenELEC already have a R-Pi2 build). So I only use my R-Pis for headless terminal server type work – for a timelapse mobile PC, SSH server or TV picture frame. I think people wanted it to be a mini PC, but it wasn’t good enough to be that, so everyone dived into making these awesome robots, birdcams, LED pattern makers and all that, and by making it good enough to be an actual PC might take away some of the effort required to make the Pi a cool little box. The struggle against it’s low power is what made it a challenge! Paddy always complains (I’m sure he has a better word for his thoughts on the topic) about the sloppiness of coding and how with all this computing power we don’t produce efficient programs, and the same might happen with the Pi.
That all said, it’s only gone up 3x-6x so it’s hardly going to set the world alight. And faster is always better….right??
Not rewriting android apps for windows phone?
I didn’t know there’s a JVM written in .net to run
Java-code on windows phone ;)
Hi Gents,
I’ve recently started listening to your show since the
demise of LO and I’m enjoying the episodes, so thanks for
all the time and effort you’re all putiing into producing
them.
I was interested in your discussion about re-using old
systems with Linux in order to reduce environmental
impacts, but as part of the evaluation I think you should
also take into account the amount of power used and heat
generated by older systems and the corresponding
enviromental deficits accruing from those. One 200w
clunker or 40 5w Raspberry Pi’s, which is best?
Keep up the good work!
Good point Tony. I recall the question of power consumption of older systems being touched on briefly in comments from a previous LL episode.
For those of us that live in areas with expensive electricity, this hidden cost of running older systems can really add up (in addition to the environmental impact).
My Luddite tendencies has always compelled me to milk older hardware for as long as possible, but one year I evaluated the electrical consumption of all the Pentium 4 systems in my house at that time. I was shocked, they were idling at 75 – 95 watts. I quickly swapped out my home P4 based file server with an ARM based system that idles around 18 watts, and upgraded the other P4 systems over the next couple of years.
Since then, the options for better performing low energy motherboards have improved significantly. I’m currently looking at upgrading my ARM based home server with something like a Intel i5 based NUC D53427RKE based system. A full headless D53427RKE system idles at 13 watts according to these tests. Being a 64 bit x86 based system with support for VT-x and VT-d, it also really opens up the possibilities for hosting VMs.
An R-Pi based system can drop the power draw at idle well below 10 watts (assuming 1 spinning disk), but the drop in performance would be enormous. Of course, the initial cost of a NUC D53427RKE motherboard is considerably higher than an R-Pi.
Just a quick shoutout to Charlie Ebert. I had noticed the disappearance of Zen Floater over on the LL G+ page at the start of the year, so I was glad to see Charlie’s reveal about the Zen Floater nom de plume. I enjoy most all of Charlie’s posts over on the LL G+ page, but I don’t have a G+ account so I can’t reply there.
Perhaps a small example of how the constantly churning plethora of social networking sites may be fragmenting communities as well as enabling them, as touched on in episode #34.
On Joe’s recommendation, I installed Bombono DVD on my Fedora 21 system and thought I would be able to put together a quick DVD. I was wrong. The Bombono UI is horrible. I’m sure there is a way to add individual video files and create a DVD-player-compatible menu that can be accessed via the player’s remote control, but nothing about the process is clear or easy.
While Brasero can ostensibly do this same thing, it never works for me because it’s always complaining that the videos are in the “wrong” format. Bombono is supposed to take care of the conversion of the files, but between the hard-to-unravel documentation (which doesn’t match the Bonbono UI I see on my screen very well) and the fact that my 4.8 GB DVD was listed as “full” with only an hour and a half of video, I’m not terribly hopeful.
I unfortunately have to agree with Andrew Kirkpatrick on the environmental (and financial) impacts of running old hardware. One of the reasons I parted with most of my old hardware, aside from the sheer space it consumed, was the fact that I could neither justify nor pay for the cost of running those old Sun workstations and Apple G4 towers, especially given that they were so poorly supported for running most of the desktop tasks I wanted to use them for — even with OpenBSD on the Sun boxes and Debian on the G4. I keep a few old laptops around as curiosities, but anything that doesn’t run off a battery (even if said battery has been dead for a decade) went to the recycling center.
Regarding Jeff Hoogland’s return to the helm of Bodhi, I expect you’ll be spending more than a few minutes on the next show talking about @corenominal’s retirement of CrunchBang. Though I booted up both a few times, I never really used either one. But I’m sure CrunchBang will be missed, and it’s far from trivial to go from vanilla Debian to what CrunchBang has to offer. Maybe a detailed CrunchBang “recipe” can help those who don’t want to stab in the dark at building up their own Openbox desktop from scratch.
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