A question regarding the perception of Microsoft. Is Microsoft being perceived as less evil as of late? Thought this would be a good question for Her Correspondancyness @christina. 
There is also the issue of availability. Specifically as to the financial side. Many want, but cannot have.
Then there are some, like myself, that are tightwads and just cannot justify the purchase of some devices. I resisted a long time even purchasing a cell phone. Why? Because there was always a payphone within minutes of where I was. But, as the cell phone became more common, payphones went by the wayside and so, I was in a position that I had to get a cell phone. Now, I still use a flip phone (snickers are invited! ) because, for me, I just cannot justify the extra expense that comes with a smartphone data plan. It hasn’t become a necessity for me, yet. I’m sure that day is coming though.
being serious for a second, if you don’t need a smartphone and a data plan, certainly don’t have one! It was a masterstroke of marketing that caused basically everyone in the world to start routinely paying £25 per month for a phone rather than £3 per month; that you haven’t given in when you don’t need it is encouraging!
1 Like
Speaking of Luddites, this was from 20 years ago, maybe:
1 Like
Where did the title come from? It’s one of those titles where you read it and think “OK, that’s a Bryan-ism”, but I never heard him say it… Did I miss it?
You didn’t miss it because you never heard it; it was said (by @jeremy!) in the between-recording discussions, and I was highly amused by it. The titles are a combination of stuff I think is relevant, stuff I think is amusing, things we may have said on- or off-stage, and a dive into the murky Langridge psychology 
Hey @oldgeek - you know, I think it’s hard to be considered the evil empire when you are so beleaguered.
Microsoft has been in a decline since Vista and that decline has allowed Mac sales to increase, allowed Google to sweep in with Chrome (which has in turn made education increasingly turn to Chromebooks), etc. Moreover, as technology has increasingly moved to mobile (whether you have a flip phone or a smartphone – and I don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t want to pay a data plan ), that’s an area Microsoft has almost essentially ben shut-out of this generation.
So again, I think it’s hard to be seen as evil when you’re increasingly less relevant. I mean, it’s certainly still possible to be evil, but I think their poor market showing in mobile, coupled by the very stark realities that they have lost an entire generation of upcoming developers (again, because of their lack of existence on mobile) has made them come across as less evil.
And maybe I’m naive, but from my standpoint, they seem like a very different company than a decade ago – let alone 15 years ago. I think as a company, they are culturally less evil.
It’s easy to joke and say that Google is the new Microsoft – but in a lot of ways they are. I think a lot of geeks (myself included) give Google a pass at a lot of things because they were so good so early on, but increasingly, that’s the company that worries me more than anyone else. Not just because they have so much data (everyone has data), but because they are actually competent – which means they can potentially use or exploit that data in scary ways.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that for a lot of my colleagues and friends who are about 10 years younger than me, they don’t even see Microsoft as an entity. It’s kind of like how my generation (I’m 32) viewed IBM. It was like, “oh yeah, I’ve heard of them. Didn’t they used to be really big and then Microsoft took their lunch money?” That’s how I think a lot of people see Microsoft now, only it was Google/Apple/Facebook that took their lunch money in this case.
The situation ‘on mobile’ is a lot better. But what we’re calling ‘mobile’, namely Android & iOS, isn’t just about mobile: it’s more akin to an evolution of the OS altogether:
- A standardized, versioned system-level API/SDK.
- Self-contained applications, with no lib*/dll hell dependencies.
- “Intents” for interprocess communication & application reuse.
- URL-based application maps.
- Image-based system upgrades with hardware variances handled by the hardware distributor.
This is the future of the personal computer, whether our niche-OS-using selves like it or not.
Before anybody rants, yes I know Ubuntu sometimes talks about something similar, with the Ubuntu SDK and image-based upgrades, but let’s face it: Android is the de facto standard Linux distro. Android outpaces Ubuntu the way Ubuntu outpaces, well, any other GNU/Linux-y distro.
Well, that should be plenty of fodder for flames & debate…
Great show guys!
@christina should be on the show more often. Its nice to hear some correspondenty perspective, instead of the usual rabble. Its nice to hear a woman’s voice on the show, instead of all you dudes, even if just from a dynamic-range perspective 
It’s really nice to hear someone who makes the rest of you all shut up for a moment. 
3 Likes
It seems there are plenty of ideas out there for innovative ways to use a more affordable GPU-heavy dev board: https://developer.nvidia.com/tk1-vision-challenge
It just seems, to me, that Microsoft has turned a corner. A ways back, it seemed that their mantra was “litigate, litigate, litigate…oh, and turn out some products too.” The fact that they are, instead of litigating against Android, they are going to device manufacturers and saying “hey, give us a percentage of each product made because of these patents we hold, and we’ll all be fine.” This approach has made them billions each year, more than their own phone devices. But, now, it seems that Apple has taken up the old Microsoft mantra and is trying to take Android down, although to a less extent now that Mr. Jobs is gone.
So, I think that my observation is, that, MS must have found that their old model of litigation isn’t that effective anymore, for if it was, they would certainly be doing it. That they are showing more concern for open source is encouraging. I have no fear that they will become irrelevant to the point of nonexistence, for they still have the enterprise market mostly wrapped up. I keep watching their consumer products regarding mobile in hopes that they will have something good. I also wonder that they have figured out that they need to shake the company up a bit, try some new approaches, since their stock values have been relatively stagnate for years, in spite of the profits they show.
By the way Stuart, that’s a cruel thing to do. I would absolutely love a Snickers bar, but have had a peanut allergy since my mid 20’s. Peanuts, beer and the fast acting yeast in pizza all makes my throat constrict. What a burden! I’d love an oatmeal stout about now. But, all is not lost!!
Almonds are just fine for me. 
Well, nobody mentioned anything Windows in regards to scripting. Neigther powershell, nor AHK, nor AutoIt, Python and million other things. And from my experience, it simply dwarfs AS and DBUS at this point. Funny how that came to be.
However the little complaint about people telling mac jokes from the interviewed was funny. Mac users get so religiusly defensive. I have never been so touched about anyone criticising my OS of choice.
We did talk about COM, but your point is taken; powershell/python etc work because apps provide APIs for doing things which those scripting environments can talk to. AHK and AutoIt are a bit different; they’re using the generic OS-level APIs for working with an application. We has those: they’re used by accessibility software, and are called AT-SPI. In general, automating an app by saying “find a button with ‘Energise’ written on it and click that button” is way, way more hacky than calling the app’s explicitly-provided “Energise” API, but it does work (and a couple of people suggested when I originally built “linglish” that it could automate apps which don’t provide an API in this way).
AHK has an operational COM libraries as well. Worked great when i was automating Outlook e-mails at my previous work. However, yes, automating system input is a big part of scripting in it. No idea about AutoIt, but it’s an older scripting tool (i hesistate to call them languages, as writing in AHK would make me a coder, and i’m not one) and as such it probably has it’s libraries written as well.
I actually think now that discussing spripting tools for Windows would make the segment bloated. I much more prefer easy listening to a boring list of possible OS-script tool combinations.
1 Like
@bryanlunduke could you post some screen shots of what the GUI looks like? when you said you used this board as your desktop I was wondering if you used anything like GIMP or other manipulation programs or even libre office…how did these work? have you tried installing any other version of linux on this?
Thanks
1 Like
Regarding the second segment:
I was very pleasantly surprised by the sound quality of Christina’s voice (I later understood why: she’s a podcaster as well!).
I am a little bit torn regarding the current position of Microsoft on Open source.
I remember attending Paris Web conference in 2008 and seeing a conference from one of the tech lead of Internet Explorer back then. You could feel he was trying as hard as he could to make Internet Explorer better, more Web standard-compliant, etc. But he was facing a strong hostility from the audience, mostly Web developers and Web integrators who had to put an enormous amount of work to make their pretty websites available for the piece of shit Internet Explorer was back then (was it IE7? IE8? I forgot, but it sucked… and IE6 was not even dead yet!). And I’m sure he was facing a strong hostility internally from Ballmer-style management who only saw Web standards and open source as a “cancer”.
On the other hand, I don’t know if today’s Microsoft position is just a bunch of naive Microsoft employees who genuinely believe they can make their company change position on the open source thing, or some evil marketers who found a great way to make Microsoft pass for a lovely company spreading love towards developers and open source etc.
For instance, it kills me a little to see all the excitement regarding Windows 10 being available on the Raspberry Pi 2. This is clearly a desperate move by Micrsofot to try to put back their claws on a market they totally lost (much like the music market and the mobile market).
Regarding the NVIDIA dev kit, @bryanlunduke could this be used to create a mini-render farm for 3D studios? Since it has many GPUs, it could be cool…
Brett Terpstra would make a fantastic guest on this show.
1 Like
Just wondering how Google Fi users are getting on with their mobile network ?
@jonobacon said he was on T-mobile.
I re-listened to the show on my way to work, this morning on the bus.