Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which all your credit cards still have magnetic stripes on, there is a disturbing level of coincidental alignment in views of the future, and:
00:03:05 The Bad Voltage team give their predictions for what will happen in the tech world in 2016!
00:31:29 Jono reviews Coin, a credit card which replaces all your other credit cards... in theory. In practice, not so much...
00:46:45 Jorge Castro talks to us about Ubuntu's Juju, software for managing and deploying things on cloud services
The next show will be Live Voltage at SCaLE 14x! See you in Los Angeles!
The only practical thing I heard regarding that Coin credit card is the suggestion that @jonobacon made of getting his grandfathers coin purse. Quite handy those things are. With mine, I can roll up a paper that has my AARP membership number on it, keep a coupon for Ensure or know a handy place for a Geritol tablet. Seems much more useful than a silly card.
I understood one term in the entire interview with Jorge Castro: Legoās
Thanks for this wonderful show. I really enjoyed it!
I liked the predictions, but I strongly disagree with the predictions on Canonical. Especially, the Ubuntu Phone part. I will really go so far as to say that I feel like you guys āStuart (@sil) and Bryan (@bryanlunduke)ā are a little biased against Canonical.
Now that all sounds very harsh, but itās just a feeling I have when listening to your shows.
Before you ask, no I donāt work for Canonical.
Bryan always talks about Ubuntu Phone like he somehow wants it to fail or loves to dismiss it. Again, this is a feeling I have when listening to the show. Itās very likely that Iām wrong.
I suspect it has something to do with Unity in particular. Of course itās all taste. But one canāt just scrap Ubuntu off the list, just because he or she doesnāt like Unity. Actually, I think a lot of people like Unity and WILL try Ubuntu Phone because off Unity 8 (and convergence).
I donāt understand why one would get the notion that Canonical will abandon Ubuntu Phone. Are these predictions just fun guesses or are they based upon āevidenceā, because Canonical might be starting the year showing off a new piece of hardware:
To come back to the Unity thingā¦ For me, a desktop manager should match the following points:
It has to put as much focus, on the program Iām using, as possible.
It has to be User friendly (I want to be able to find my way without using keyboard shortcuts)
It has to look pretty
I use Unity for programming and itās currently the only Manager that does al the above points correctly. Of course, I have to admit that Unity still suffers from bugs and glitches, but those arenāt a big deal really.
First off, all the apps are full screen, thanks to the integrated menuās and the hidden sidebar. I donāt need a separate title and menu bar, Itās just unnecessary. I just donāt want to waste an inch of my screen to information I donāt need. Put the focus on the software Iām currently using!
Secondly, Unity is user friendly. YES the dash is a mess in a few places, but I use it quite a lot. The dash has all the features I need, unlike the other application menuās in the Linux world. Iām always able to find my documents and programs via the search engine, itās easy to search and install new applications, It shows me recent documents and programs, etcā¦
Other than that, the lenses (not talking about the home and application lens) and 3 year old bugs are garbage, but it doesnāt outweigh the positive features.
Also the hud is awesome and very handy in applications like gimp and inkscape.
To end my rantā¦ Unity just looks good. I know a few parts of the Unity 7 desktop look like they were designed in the year 2000ā¦ But take a look at Unity 8, it looks simply gorgeous. I find the different colors, when an application is active in the task bar, to be very distinctive (unlike Windows 10, where I have to refocus my eyes to see which programs are active).
Please, Iām only describing my personal experience with the Linux desktop (I also tried other distroās and Desktop managers). So donāt take it personal yourself!
BRYAN YOU ARE THE REASON WHY I STARTED WATCHING BAD VOLTAGE, so I definitely have nothing against you! I look forward to you next Linux Sucks video. You may have noticed the million views I gave you on the previous one.
The reason why I keep on listening to Bad Voltage, is because I love funny but educated hosts like Bryan and Stuart who are very opinionated and have an entertaining way in sharing their opinions!
Also, good day to Jono and Jermey. Keep up the good work guys!
Iām probably wrong on everything I just said! Beye.
I was pretty excited about this when I saw the kickstarter and signed right up. I dont think Iāve had a single successful transaction with it though. So now it sits in my wallet along side all my other cards. So George Costanza wallet mode still enabled.
Canāt speak for the Duke, but for myself, Iāve published three of the top 100 apps on Ubuntu phone and I own three such phones, which I donāt think counts as being biased against it. Thinking itās not gonna work is not necessarily bias
On the predictions, there kind of already exists a bendable phone. It bends only a little, but the LG G flex (2) does bendā¦ So does this count as a prediction?
I myself am personally of the opinion that a āflexibleā display (and a āflexibleā phone) can be bent in half. Being able to tweak it three degrees away from the vertical is not flexibility. The Empire State Building moves more than that in high winds. So anyone attempting to claim that that validates the prediction will be mercilessly mocked.
Fair enough, in that sense it is a rather risky prediction, which is brave enough. I like most of these predictions, makes me look forward to the rest of this year.
I usually listen to the show while commuting, and often laugh out loud to the curious and/or annoyed stares of commuters around me.
Today while listening to the segment on Coin I wanted to yell out loud at not only @jonobacon but @sil too!
First of all, the world is not starting to use chip & PIN (or EMV) - the world has been using chip & PIN for at least 10 years now! Only the USA is now starting to use it. Thereās a delightful Wikipedia article on the subject.
The Coin product is clearly targeting the American market, where mag-stripe is still the prevalent card reader technology. Just like Samsungās wallet is irrelevant outside the USA.
Second of all, check-out the Stocard app on your phone. It holds all your loyalty cards, and for quite a few it can show you your points balance.
In fact, I should probably have been yelling at @jeremy since I expected him to jump in put an end to this non-sense but he never did!!! It was like that show when he was absent and those other three jokers could say what ever they wanted.
There is no way there will be any screen you can fold in half released in 2016 and that was not my prediction. The Flex is a phone that is slightly curved and will not break when you, well, flex it a bit. The spirit of my prediction is somewhere in the middle of those two and if the Flex is the most bendable device of 2016 then my prediction will be a fail.
I worked for two years for a company creating an electronic wallet you can install on your smartphone and use NFC to pay with, and I can tell you there is a tremendous amount of problems to have this kind of project going mainstream:
Too many security options: when you want to store a credit card on a smartphone, there are different ways of doing it: using a special SIM card that contains a secure element, using an external secure element (e.g. a special micro SD card), using Googleās HCE, ā¦
Too many phones: the customer wants your solution to work on every phone. Fine. But Apple forbids you from accessing a secure element, Googleās HCE works, well, only on Google devices (and only ones enabled with a specific version of Android), etc.
@jonobacon mentioned it during the segment, and a lot of potential customers (me included) said it before: if I had a wallet, I would like to be able to store all my coupon cards, as well as my transportation cards and, yes, my bank cards. Personally, I think to get a techno like this started, people should feel comfortable using it for little things such as coupon cards (or the cards you can get in shops such as fill 10 stamps and get 1 item free). Unfortunately, all the customers weāve had while I was in that company were obsessed by the bank side of the thing only. And the problem isā¦
Working with banks is hard. Itās very hard. Itās a bunch of old specifications, old technologies you have to interact with, old stuff that takes forever to validate or respond whereas the end user is expecting an immediate feedback.
Too many partners, too complicated for the end user: in our case, if an end user wanted to install the wallet on his phone, he had to:
have an account in the right bank
have one of the few compatible Android devices
be a customer in a specific Telco
have a special SIM card from that Telco
As a user, would you really endure so much pain to have the beta version of an app that only works with one type of card from one bank? (back then, there was no other coupon cards or things like that)
A lot of end users feel insecure using a smartphone as their bank card(s). In France for instance, people are freaking out just with the Paypass/Paywave debit cards (the cards with an antenna you can use to pay by tapping it on a point of sale), so imagine for them paying using a device that is connected to the Internet all the time!
In the end, I think the mix of technical complexity and partners that are unable to all go in the same direction for the sake of the project make the whole thing very unlikely to success for the time being.
Yeah, I donāt think either Stuart or I are biased against Ubuntu as a phone platform. Speaking for myself, I tend to be rather hard on it because I see so much potential that every misstep and missed opportunity gets me all cranky.
I look forward to you next Linux Sucks video. You may have noticed the million views I gave you on the previous one.
