not all change is progress
April 4, 2016
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
00:02:48 News
00:54:34 Feedback
01:16:04 Mosh
Ubuntu on FreeBSD, Ubuntu on Windows. At least one of our number thought the latter a great idea, but listen to the news to hear dissent amongst the ranks. We then took a rummage through a bursting postbag, and rounded off with Jesse bravely jumping into a Mosh pit.
0:02:48 News
Red Hat becomes first $2b open-source company
No-Cost RHEL Developer Subscription now available
Debian
Project Leader Elections 2016
UbuntuBSD Brings Ubuntu Atop The FreeBSD Kernel
Redox OS
Stali distribution smashes assumptions about Linux
How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of
projects in 11 lines of JavaScript
‘No
regrets’ says chap who felled JavaScript’s Jenga tower – as
devs ask: Have we forgotten how to code?
Nantes Métropole completes switch to LibreOffice
(numbers)
French publishers join Swedish ‘Block Party’ to pester ad
refuseniks
CloudFlare wants Tor to change or risk roadblocks
The
Trouble with CloudFlare
Internet users don’t understand security or privacy, says
survey
Android rooting bug opens Nexus phones to “permanent device
compromise”
This is Android N’s freeform window mode
GoDaddy launches AWS-style servers and apps to build, test and scale cloud services
Ubuntu on Windows — The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows
Developers
Running
Bash on Ubuntu on Windows!
Linux
Command Line on Windows
0:54:34 Feedback
A huge thank you to Steve Edwards, Christopher Hudson, Lars Falk-Petersen and Nikolaus Brauer for becoming our latest Monthly Supporters — thanks, guys!
Our recent interview with Jonathan Riddell was well received, and encouraged some of you, including Simon, to give Plasma 5 a spin. Blaine is also impressed by the new desktop, but recommended openSUSE Leap over Ubuntu to sit it atop. And Sid Vicious picked up on Jonathan’s comments about packaging, which we discussed a little further.
Ian Barton, Dennis and Will all wondered why we haven’t mentioned Syncthing whilst bemoaning the lack of a FOSS alternative to BTSync. Paddy explained why he’d previously dismissed it, but watch this space…
John flagged up the privacy aspect of the ubiquitous tracking currently employed by web advertising, and wondered if a slightly different approach might be more acceptable.
Kalle Eklund returned to the topic of the ‘TV tax’, and Mark suggested that the WeTek Play might be just what Joe’s looking for to consume his broadcast media.
1:16:04 Mosh
Jesse extolled the virtues of Mosh, an SSH replacement that offers many benefits, particularly for roaming mobile devices.
Great show as always guys! Thank you for explaining the Tor issue. Every time I use Tor it seems I get stuck on a site that makes me enter the captcha over and over till I finally give up trying to access the site. I never really got around to looking into the problem. Thank you for taking the time to explain it. Much appreciated!
He’s using Tor, he must be a hacker, REPORT HIM!!!
Only joking, glad to be of assistance. What is your particular reason for using tor, if you don’t mind me asking?
One of you (I think Jesse) asked why Cloudflare in particular was having this back and forth with Tor. It is mainly because Cloudflare is so big but it is also because Cloudflare created a post title “The Trouble with Tor” to which Tor had to respond (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/ — linked from a couple of the articles in the show notes). Before this episode, I had a fairly negative impression of Cloudflare. I still do, but I do have to give them some credit based on that blog post. Tor is such a small fraction of internet traffic that I would not expect Cloudflare to spend any time studying how to accomodate it (for example, in the post they say that some of their customers would like to be able to completely blacklist Tor traffic but Cloudflare has refused so far and only let them Captcha blacklist it).
Jesse, the success of sleep and hibernate has varied for me across different laptop models and distros. When they don’t work, what usually happens for me is that the machine will appear to sleep/hibernate normally but when trying to resume the machine enters a hung state that no longer responds to input and requires a hard power off. The Arch wiki recommends trying an LTS kernel, so you might try testing hibernate on your laptop with something older than Fedora like 14.04.
I agree with you Jesse, I’d love hibernation to work in Linux. I’ve used various distros over the years with little success even after trying various suggested fixes and different hardware. Currently using arch.
Another great show Luddites!
A few thoughts — ad tracking is here to stay because click and view fraud is so prevalent, I’ve seen numbers in the Financial Times around 75% or so, that the only way to be reasonably sure that **most** of the clicks and views advertisers pay publishers for is to have super-cookie, cross website tracking. Tied itself to a known human being on known computers. An example of Gresham’s Law, and why internet ad rates are so low compared to print ad rates which can be reasonably estimated in terms of circulation and views.
As far as Microsoft running Ubuntu command line, that is squarely aimed IMHO at the Rails community. Developing for Rails on Windows is a mug’s game, most give up and move to either Mac OSX or Linux. Paddy is exactly right — this is a play for Microsoft to preserve their big money maker their Azure Cloud services.
I could easily see Microsoft offering their own, integrated Linux with plug-and-play Exchange and SQL Server on the Azure Cloud, along the lines of RHEL. It would probably make money. And there are probably companies that would like the familiarity and remote access ease of use of Linux, with software like Exchange and SQL Server, it would let them consolidate different servers into just one cloud service.
But the interesting possibilities are on the Desktop. Yes I could see Microsoft buying Canonical, and that might not be a bad thing. The only really growth in computer sales is in the cheap, consumer end where netbooks/streambooks/chromebooks of around 2 gb of RAM and 32 GB of SSD or so are attractive propositions. I could see Microsoft offering an Ubuntu type linux on this, probably with a cut-down base system, Fluxbox Window manager, with a Microsoft developed configuration tool that would generate windows, backdrops, the like easily, and sensible defaults.
The manpower and money to do this would be trivial for Microsoft, and they would probably open source it as well, but charge support fees for something like a nominal $10 a month, or $100 a year. They might even offer Microsoft Office on Linux, either as a subscription service or paid download with a certain set number of updates/upgrades. I would probably buy Office if they did, while LibreOffice Writer is much better than Word, Calc is woefully behind Excel, particularly in importing HTML files and lacks the ability to just remove hyperlinks which Excel does easily.
I think the reason Microsoft would offer an open source Linux designed to run on low end computers and port Office to Linux is to compete with Chromebooks in the Education market and retain mindshare. A generation of school kids are going to grow up never using Office or Windows, if Google gets its way. That might be good for Google, but bad for Microsoft. The money spent on staying relevant in the Educational market with a Microsoft Linux and ported, low cost Office is a rounding error in their catering budget, but would offer the only serious competition Google has at the moment.
I would like to see Google and Microsoft go at it, in competition. I like the idea of Chrome books but hate the idea of everything in the Cloud with security I don’t trust — I have sensitive documents and code as a freelancer that can’t and shouldn’t leave my computer. I like my HP Streambook as light and fast to boot up, but installing/removing programs is a near-death experience every time. I am seriously thinking of installing Lubuntu 16.04 when its released and out for a month or three, and maybe running Fluxbox just to see how much performance I can get out the machine. I’m thinking fairly serious for document writing and light Ruby coding (nothing Rails heavy).
I would like to see Office ported onto Linux — I’d still use LibreOffice Writer but Calc is for now inferior to Excel and maybe with competition IBM/Redhat/Google will contribute some significant code and fixes.
I agree with Patty and Floyd, it’s about developers.
But you missed the whole docker spin on this: Some
weeks (or months?) ago Microsoft announced they’ll be
porting docker to Windows.
This is really where you get the current generation
of *cough*”just disable SELinux and `chmod 777`” web
hipsters*cough* who want to bundle their stuff up in
containers and ship them to the cloud. If they don’t
have to go through the trouble of running a Linux VM
they might not feel the need to replace Windows on
their devices.
There’s also the kind of company that let’s you only
use a tightly locked down windows machine. While
they’re obviously not too developer friendly in the
first place they might be able to control their web
folks easier with such a setup. And for money saving
reasons they’re probably not running _all_ their
stuff on windows servers.
Sorry Paddy, it’s just too easy to confuse which
of the nicknames for Patrick and Patricia is
which ^^””
I should memorize it’s paddynotpatty.com…
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