not all change is progress
May 2, 2016
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
00:01:05 News
00:57:14 Feedback
01:10:04 Ubuntu 16.04
Following the most underwhelming release any of us can recall, what to make of Canonical’s latest LTS and the future prospects for Ubuntu on the desktop? Stick with us after our usual foray into the fortnight’s tech news, and your feedback, to find out.
00:01:05 News
AMD strikes chip licensing deal, which could create more x86
rivals for Intel
AMD Climbs Most in 35 Years on China Chip License
Agreement
Intel Announces Major Workforce Restructuring: 11% of
Workforce to Be Cut Over Next Year
Intel made a huge mistake 10 years ago. Now 12,000 workers
are paying the price.
Intel declares independence from the PC as it lays out a
broader 5-point strategy
Intel is killing off low-power Atom chips
Intel Proposes to Use USB Type-C Digital Audio Technology
Pipo and Vensmile pack desktop PCs into folding
keyboards
Mad
scientist shrinks Arduino to size of an AA battery
Intel Open Sources Arduino 101 Real Time OS
Superbook
IDC: Tablet shipments decline for sixth straight quarter,
leaders Apple and Samsung still losing market share
IDC: Smartphone shipments flat for the first time; Samsung
widens lead over Apple in Q1 2016
Google says the fundamentals of Android security are stronger
than ever
Europe files formal antitrust charges against Google over
Android
European
Commission – Fact Sheet
EC
Statement of Objections on Google’s Tactics in Mobile
Google Play Store may be coming to Chrome OS, with a million
Android apps in tow
How long until we see Google Play on Windows, Mac OS, and
Linux?
Opera bakes a free, unlimited VPN directly into its desktop
browser
Opera browser’s free built-in VPN vulnerable to major
security flaw
Firefox
46 released
Finding a home for Thunderbird (460KB PDF)
big changes: I am leaving ownCloud, Inc. today
GitLab-Digital Ocean partnership to provide free hosting for
continuous online code testing
00:57:14 Feedback
A huge thank you to Riley Brandt for becoming our latest Monthly Supporter, and to everybody else, whose contributions keep this show on the road!
And if you simply can’t get enough of the dulcet tones of one of your Luddites, Joe took the opportunity to plug both The Pi Podcast and his personal show.
Brendan Eich’s latest money-making wheeze came in for some stick, with both Roger and Luddite Fan criticising the Brave browser initiative we discussed last show. And both also offered views on the inclusion of ZFS within Ubuntu 16.04 — thanks, guys.
Dennis thought that we’d perhaps still been a little harsh about Syncthing (it does work, after all).
And Will and John O’Brien got in touch regarding the big WhatsApp encryption news, with John also pointing us towards a FOSS implementation of a messenger using the Signal protocol, which we’ll be keeping an eye on as it develops.
01:10:04 Ubuntu 16.04
Our most scathing comments ended up on the cutting room floor, so what aired was a pretty mild take on the state of Ubuntu in comparison to how we feel. If we can make the effort to produce something at least positive in parts, why can’t Canonical?
Someone remembers “Xscale”? The Intel-build ARM-chip used in PDAs & stuff? The chip you found at the heart of some big multi-port PCI-X Gbit NICs?
I was a bit worried about the bigger Atoms which support
ECC-RAM, too, before I checked the link on Intel killing
of Atom-chips. There are some pretty sweet boards from
SuperMicro using those higher end Atoms. 12cores, AES-NI,
4 times Gbit onboard, 8 SATA ports, up to 32 or 64 gigs
of ECC-RAM… would make a _lovely_ homeserver.
It will take some time for arm64 to reach a point where
you can power your ZFS pools with them I’d think…
Well, OK, Canonical feels confident enough about this to
build a ” zfs-dkms” package for xenial on arm64:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ZFS+arm64 o0
ZFS not worth it?
Easily managed snapshots (just imagine your mum being all
like “OMG, I deleted everything I need for my tax
reports!”) you also can just send to another host?
Protection from bitrot?
No need for powerusers to resize partitions or LVM
volumes?
I understand if transparent compression and not to need
to resync a whole array/disk when a single block in your
RAID failed may be only interesting on the
server/workstation side for most people. But you can get
all those features on a NAS, too, where you even can
access snapshots from a windows CIFS client as “Previous
versions”.
Short note on no innovation in Ubuntu xenial: No change means nothing to complain about for you luddites ;)
Oh, right, you need sudo to even list ZFS datasets on Linux and there are no delegations either… :P
On the snap stuff: I’m sure it’s technically possible to dedup/delta out parts of the pkg you already got on your system. Not a real failure if Canonical just hasn’t implemented this but if not…
And a reason for shared libraries is not to need to update every binary using, say, libssl. Even with delta updates for the single snaps(?) it’s a waste of bandwidth or even volume of your data plan.
At 38:45 you were discussing monopolies and whether consumers can simply choose not to pay, and Patty said people can always just collect rain water. Is this allowed in the UK? Here in Washington State, USA it is illegal to collect rain water for the purposes of drinking.
Hi Some One,
Rainwater harvesting has been actively encouraged (as
has the use of greywater) by government agencies in
the UK for many years. However, its use for drinking
is discouraged, and there are hoops to jump through
if you’d like to use potable rainwater — the main
ones apparently being the installation and testing of
purification systems to provide compliance with ‘The
Water Supply (Water Quality) Regulations 2000’, and
the air-gapping of supplies should you wish to run
both harvested and mains-supplied services in the
same property. TBH, I don’t know of anyone who
actually does this (and I can’t imagine that without
filtering, UV treatment etc. straight rainwater would
be particularly healthy today, considering the state
of the atmosphere), but plenty of folks in more
remote parts of the UK still rely on their own wells
(and septic tanks for waste); albeit that they
provide water filtered the way nature intended!
Paddy (not Patty ;)
We quite often stay at a place in Wales that collects its drinking water from a stream. It goes through a settlement tank and is sterilized using UV. At home we have a borehole, in addition to the mains water supply. The water from the borehole is used for washing down the diary. Apart from the fact it has slightly too high manganese content, it’s perfectly potable. It saves us several thousand pounds a year compared to using water from the mains.
As Paddy says in order to use it for drinking water, we would have to jump through too many regulatory hoops to make it worthwhile. I would be quite happy to drink rain water in most places. In fact when I become Benevolent Dictator for Life one of my first decrees would be to ban the environmentally damaging and hugely wasteful sale of bottled water.
On the subject of Google’s monopoly,
I own a Lenovo 2010a and google’s apps are the only ones
that I actually use day-to-day because they are well made
and are also incredibly useful. All the Lenovo and
Telenor garbage that is also on there is just a poor
version of what Google is already providing you with the
Android.
If European Commission wants to be of any use whatsoever
they should force Google to let us uninstall ANY app we
want from the phone (complete wipe out and not just
uninstalling the latest updates) regardless of who put
those apps on the phone. This, in my opinion, addresses a
far more fundamental problem than anticompetitiveness –
users freedom to do whatever THEY like with a phone THEY
bought with THEIR money.
I agree with Joe.
Google has the right to put anything they want on your
phone – they built the OS that’s running on it.
Manufacturers have the right to put anything they want on
your phone – they built the phone.
Carriers can also put stuff on there – for whatever
reason… :)
HOWEVER, WE have the right to choose what apps we want on
our phones and what apps we want gone.
I should be able to have only apps that I
need/like/thrust on my phone.
Sadly Joe’s rant on the Ubuntu tablet is spot on. I felt somewhat betrayed (and sad to have wasted the money) when my Ubuntu phone didn’t live up to the marketing material on the Canonical site. Had I spent that cash on getting a decent desktop OS out of Canonical (y’know one that installs on a laptop without bother for example) I’d have felt a whole lot better about it.
I’m appalled at Joe’s preference for the new digital audio jack. Perhaps some musicians and the RIAA like it, but everyone else knows that it’s all about Digital Rights Management (copy protection) and hardware lock-in (looking at you Apple).
Hi Mike. I’ve just listened back to this and I can see why you think I’m for this change because my sarcasm didn’t come across very clearly at all.
I’m very much against the move away from the 3.5mm jack. That doesn’t change the reality that the industry is moving that way.
Paddy’s comment about company growth expectations is so very wise. I know so many US companies, especially large corporations that think they can have exponential growth when the products produced have already reached saturation. Why can’t the “business teams” figure this out in corporations?
Comments are now closed.
The content of this website, and that of the podcasts produced by the website owners, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.