1x30: He Saved Every One Of Us

Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which sales pitches are not our thing. Jono Bacon attempts to also attend and is let down by the unreliability of the perfectly reliable Transport Control Protocol. We also manage to discuss:

  • Jolla, the company behind Sailfish OS, crowdfund a new Sailfish tablet device and get triple their goal in the first week. This is great. Right? Are we getting one? (1.52)
  • Google Inbox: the new mail app for the modern age, or a revision that nobody needed and which you can't get an invite for? Stuart reviews Inbox (20.45)
  • Bryan is Wrong In 60 Seconds, about planes (37.48)
  • Adobe Flash: we all hate it. But should we? It works on the open source desktop, and we lose hundreds of thousands of games the day it gets turned off (39.56)

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Sounds like Jono got the last word. Good for him.

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Discussion about Jolla and SailfishOS, woohooo :smiley:
Surprise surprise, of course I ordered a Jolla tablet. And I’m very excited about it.
I love my Jolla phone so I know I will love the tablet too. I’m looking forward for the SDK update to adopt the BV app.
The reason why I like Jolla is because they are really different. they are going their way, no matter what others do. Nobody realizes it but exactly these guys brought many of the most innovative features to mobile devices. Back in 2009 the Nokia N900 with Maemo5 had true multitasking, widgets, multiple desktops and much more. Than the Nokia N9 brought swipe gestures and pull-down menu. Even today there’s no other mobile OS that offers better multitasking than Sailfish.
EDIT: Jolla added three stretch goals to the campaign. I would like to have build in cellular data but It seems to be unlikely to reach $2.5M.

I use gmail almost exclusively via Thunderbird or my (Jolla) phone.
Today I had to open a mail in my gmail account on another computer than mine. So I opened gmail.com and expected the mail to be there in the in-box. But it wasn’t. Google decided to put in another category. I immediately disabled that “feature”. I think there is no way they can filter my mails a way that suits me. When I want them filtered, I define the rules myself. I don’t know if it’s just me but when you do not get all in google, all their automated magic context stuff is just annoying. I would say Google Inbox isn’t for me.

Ha! Dammit. I hadn’t noticed that :slight_smile:

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Too bad that last part Jono added would have been funny in mashed voltage if someone could use it but since it is creative commons :smiley:

Jono de la Tourette syndrome: you can’t help yourself and have to say the word “Community” all the time.

Am I the only one who’s just a wee bit disappointed http://thewordjonosaysalot.badvoltage.org/ doesn’t link here (yet)?

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I would continue being disappointed if I were you. The person who runs the DNS and therefore gets to create new subdomains is: @jonobacon :slight_smile:

I think the reason we used to look forward to the death of Flash is because we always thought that a post-Flash world would be a plugin-free utopia where everything was based on standards that allow us to do everything Flash did and more, in a cross-browser and cross-platform way.

The reason that the death of Flash looks so scary now is that while we have HTML5 with new Javascript and CSS goodies, what’s supplanting Flash is a mixture of Silverlight, Encrypted Media Extensions, Chrome-specific gubbins and other proprietary plugin-based technologies, most of which see cross-platform/browser support as an even less important than Adobe do. Rather than replacing a de facto standard with a de jure one, it’s being replaced with a bunfight of competing technologies.

I wholly agree with this. @bryanlunduke made the point that even if this is the case, it is still a good thing that Flash is going away, which I think is a reasonable point of view, but it is undeniably the case that from the point of view of the open source desktop, Flash going away will cost us something in terms of number of supported things…

This is true. :wink:

It’s pronounced YOLLa btw. Stress on the first syllable and “j” is pronounced like the “y” in “you” and the “ll” is like a long lllll. Not too long of course. :slight_smile:

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I think they’re happy with either pronounciation.

Also, great show. And Transport Control Protocol… is that the one that specifies not commenting on your significant other’s driving ability?

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Was wondering who’d be the first to spot it :slight_smile:

Regarding the Jolla tablet: IMHO it is certainly a great device and it will work and it will be delivered. That is more than can be said about other contenders in the space of Open Source tablets. That said, it is just a shame, that there is so much duplicated efford behind the scenes between Jolla and Canonical. Both are Linux based tablets, both need something as a replacement for X11, both are based on Qt / QML. I guess we could have had a working tablet last year if both companies weren’t so keen on doing it their way.

You could say the same for Andrid and Apple. This is the nature of competition.

I hate to skew the due prominence of Jolla phones in this thread, given the relative ratio of them out there, but I do know someone who owns one. Not the other guy in this thread either :slight_smile: He was enthusiastic enough to often wear his “I am the first one” T-shirt from the crowdfunded campaign for it many casual-Fridays in the office. I think he’s happy enough with it now but if I picked up correctly, and also totally my experience with crowdfunding, it did arrive late and there were still a few (fairly standard albeit less used basic phone) things he couldn’t do for a while.

I had a N900, loved it and still want that keyboard experience back but decided a mostly freedom-hating Android experience was my most usable choice after that. Flash worked great on the N900 for a good while btw… And video Skype calls (before it did anywhere else) - those people at Nokia realised the importance of getting core apps on the phone, and I think the SailfishOS folk do too; but lack of Google Play services might cause a lot of friction for users and even more so as Google move that way to allow upgrades to roll out to older devices. They don’t state that issue in the indiegogo campaign and it will really bite anyone who hasn’t done any further reading and expects All their favourite apps to work. Like Google maps (iirc), freemium games etc.

Despite loving the idea of more open source/ish systems out there and wishing them best of luck I still would rather (based on device spec) take a regular tablet and install their/other Linux OS(eg. Ubuntu) on it.

Products taking longer and changing spec before release is all part of usual development process but most people aren’t used to that in products they buy into as a consumer, and don’t know how to evaluate the team’s ability to deliver, especially hardware. The crowdfunding bubble will continue to expand but that realisation across the general public will take a while to settle in. It’s a big gamble.

PS I wrote more cos I didn’t have time to make it less, and I need more sleep. Tl;dr: crowdfunding sucks as a buyer experience but Jolla did an ok job before, considering other crowd funded projects. Still wouldn’t ‘buy’ their tablet.

After listening to this episode, I immediately deleted Inbox from my Android. You guys are so evil.

Wow. I feel an awkward sense of power. :slight_smile:

Hey, we weren’t that horrid to it. :smile: