not all change is progress
May 11, 2015
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
With one of the Luddites missing this show, the remaining two decided to fill the void with a look at a piece of namesake FOSS. And whilst Debian may have many strengths, being a newbie-friendly desktop OS has never really been one of them. Has that changed with the release of Jessie?
And what do a home-made CNC router and a musical octopus have in common? They can both be powered by a Raspberry Pi, of course. Bravely venturing outside the confines of the M25, Joe brought us a handful of interviews recorded at the recent Jam event held in Egham, Surrey.
0:05:03 News
RISCy Business
MIPS quietly bares its processor architecture to
universities
PayPal adopts ARM servers, gets mightily dense
ARM: “Microcontrollers Are Better Because There’s No
GPL”
CHIP – The World’s First Nine Dollar Computer
Releases
Ubuntu laptops available for pre-order with
Ebuyer.com
Synfig Studio
1.0
Chromixium 1.0
Debian
GNU/Hurd 2015
Introducing
Xubuntu core
HTTPS
Mozilla Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP
Dangerous And Ridiculous: Facebook Won’t Let Sites Join Its
Internet.org Program If They Encrypt Traffic
Choc Factory finds 84,000 ad injectors targeting Chrome
Microsoft & Convergence
Microsoft brings Android, iOS apps to Windows 10
Why Windows embracing Android and iOS is a bad idea
Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 2 leaps out of the
Microsoft oven
Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, A Free Cross-Platform
Code Editor For OS X, Linux And Windows
Microsoft Shows Off Continuum For Windows 10 Phones
Ubuntu may beat Windows 10 to phone-PC convergence after
all
0:43:52 Egham Raspberry Jam Interviews, Part 1
Joe has some photos of the exhibits up on G+.
Raspberry
Pi Arduino EEG Hack by Albert M Hickey (aka Winkle ink).
Albert also wrote a
short blog post about the entire Jam event.
CNC machine by Stephen Cornes.
Matt Sendorek
was showing off a
Maplin robot arm.
0:55:37 Feedback
A huge thank you to Jeffrey Rollin and Johan Nilsson, the latest recruits to the ranks of our esteemed Monthly Supporters, all of whom we thank for their ongoing support. As we do cocreature and johanv, who kept things ticking over on Flattr. Thanks one and all :)
Following our questioning of Canonical’s claims about Ubuntu user numbers, Nigel Verity offered some thoughts on more accurate ways of tracking those statistics.
We attempted to address a couple of questions posed by Mitlik; and Paddy agreed with Rob Landley that there does appear to be a fundamental difference of opinion between the SFLC and SFC about whether kernel modules constitute legally derived works in licensing terms.
We received a lot of feedback directly, on our website, and on social media about our review of the Entroware laptops last show. Thanks to all who offered their thoughts, and especially to Jerry, Esteban, Cathryne, Neil Wallace and Frank Bell, whose comments we chose to feature as being roughly indicative of the spread that we received. And a special thank you to Anthony Pich from Entroware who, recognising our attempts to be constructive in our criticism, responded in the same vein.
1:11:21 Egham Raspberry Jam Interviews, Part 2
Seven Segments of
Pi, the PiTrol and
the PiDapter from Nevil
Hunt.
Joe spoke to Claire about her knitted musical octopus.
1:21:12 Debian Jessie, Through the Eyes of a New User
Debian makes for a solid server OS, and a terrific base for many other distros. But is it a good choice on the desktop for a new user? Donning our shades of naivety, we attempted to find out.
A 3rd? What about Solaris and its FLOSS decendents (
Illumos, SmartOS, …)?
Even if you count OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Dragonfly
as one I easily past 3: *BSD, Solaris, Linux, Minix
Paddy, if ZFS is to bloated (and btrfs probably too) you should take a look at FreeBSD’s GEOM for RAID + UFS with optional journaling and snapshots in top ;P
Thanks for mentioning the listener feedback from Драгица Ранковић over the ups and downs of the Community (especially linux luddites) focusing too much on mobile, where for any practical sense, they are not actually “computers” for creation of content, but rather, perhaps encouraging a bit too much “brainless consumption”…. very timely.
I object to this creation/consumption dualism which crops up some time. If creating content is good, then there must be some consumers (and therefore appropriate modes of consumption). If everyone is a creator but not a consumer, that makes us rather narcissistic, does it not?
Hello!
About Let’s Encrypt: As far as I understood from their 31c3 talk and webseite, it’s about easier deployment of HTTPS. Wouldn’t this mostly bring less tech-savvy domain owners on board the “crypto train”? Or do you think Let’s Encrypt tries to make a better economic offer than other certificate authorities to people who already have one?
In the former case, the overall use of encryption should simply increase, making mass surveillance more difficult & costly. Mission accomplished, despite Let’s Encrypt itself of course joining the pool of CAs that may be targeted. Or, did I put on too little tinfoil?
Cheers, and thanks for your as always educating and entertaining show :-)
I really enjoyed the 31c3 talk on ‘Let’s Encrypt’, thanks for the link. Albeit the problem remains of CAs being compromised by state level security actors, LE does look promising for making web traffic encryption more pervasive. That would still yield many positive side effects IMHO, such as handicapping the ISPs and network operators ability to censor/exploit the public’s web traffic and position themselves as Internet ‘gatekeepers’ who can extort web content providers.
The NSA are not “totally fucking awesome left-handers” and their intentions are not “totally fucking awesome things a left-hander” might do. Please stop referring to their intentions as “sinister”.
P.S. Kill Righty
As a user of ZFS on Linux I was a bit surprised about everything that was said about it in the show. Sure ZFS has a lot of features which most users at home will never need, but that does not mean it is automatically bloated. If you do not need the features you should not be using ZFS in the first place. The fact that ZFS is both a file system and a volume manager and all the features are integrated in one place has a lot of advantages. Examples of this are the efficient backups with send/receive, efficient raid resyncing and the removal of the raid 5 write hole from which classic raid setups suffer. You could attempt to provide a similar experience by mashing together multiple independent software packages that all provide one feature each, but the result will be inferior when it comes to functionality.
Thanks for responding to my questions from the last episode. I’m sorry to hear that Joe’s notes are unpublishable. I will assume that even though Jesse couldn’t defend his, that they were similarly so. The break down of Paddy’s view of ZFS was much appreciated, and better understood after I went to investigate the feature set . Even after reading the comment by A_Noniem, I understand Paddy’s point of view. If one wants a CoW FS, the two major offerings come with the extra overhead of raid, lvm, etc. that aren’t necessarily wanted/needed. And on most distributions, removing those bits (if that’s even possible) would presumably require compiling the fsutils. Maybe Gentoo’s portage system has use flags for that!
Thanks again and I always look forward to the next show.
On the new xubuntu-core package, I’m with Paddy. I
install a lot of test systems and some for new Linux
users who freak out with too much choice. This package
does fill a feature hole as most other Ubuntu DEs have a
‘minimal DE’ metapackage.
BTW the package has not been backported to 14.04 LTS but
installs just fine on it. I installed a bare system from
the mini.iso, wget the xubuntu-core .deb from the mirror
of choice and used gdebi to install. No critical errors
were seen, but it is odd that no browser, synaptic,
software center or whisker menu plugin are included by
default.
In the last two shows you have reviewed two Linux laptops
one from Entroware and one from Ebuyer. Can I suggest
that the price difference is simply due to the buying
power of the two companies Entroware may make an order in
the tens and Ebuyer in the hundreds possibly thousands
which will mean that the unit cost of buying them will be
much lower. it is a real shame that Ebuyer has not
utilised the expertise of a company such as Entroware to
produce a better machine and in return Entroware possibly
could use the buying power of Ebuyer as leverage to put
out a cheaper better quality laptop?
By the way this is being written on a HP laptop running
Linux which apart from lemming mode (when the battery
goes below 3% it turns the fan up to high until the
battery is exhausted and it inelegantly turns off) it
works fine.
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