2x26: Shining Emerald City

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Jeremy Garcia, Jono Bacon, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which our denials fall on deaf ears, nobody is gallivanting around the world, and:

  • [00:02:05] News: 50 Cent lets people buy 2014 album with bitcoin, forgets about it, goes bankrupt, then remembers the bitcoin account and finds it's now worth eight million dollars ... Fractal Audio release the actually-more-interesting-than-you'd-think Axe FX III guitar amp modeller ... Nintendo release Labo, a bunch of cardboard peripherals for a Switch, possibly enabling a whole new community of creators and possibly just enabling people who want to become cardboard Liberace ... elementary OS change how they're handling upgrades for paid apps you didn't pay for, in a new approach as a business model, leading to lots of conversation about money in the world of open source, and what the best direction is ... Intel release Vaunt, a pair of glasses which are smart but don't look like they are, in accordance with the prophecy ... and the EU loosely word proposed law so that anyone who hosts files might have to implement Content ID, causing sighs and/or panic across the tech industry ...
  • [00:41:38] Building computers, not buying laptops: despite the world largely moving to buying prebuilt laptops, it's still possible to build your own desktop machine, and it's actually rather fun, according to us. Here's the story of a venture into this field for the first time in fifteen years!
  • [01:00:45] Deepfakes: software gets released which allows replacing one person's face in a video with someone else's. While this has been possible for years if you're Industrial Light and Magic, now it's also possible if you've got a high-end nVidia card and a few days to let your Windows machine chug away at the problem. Of course, the internet seems to have taken this amazing technology and used it for pornography (and the r/deepfakes subreddit was banned in between us recording the show and releasing it!). What's the deal with this sort of tech? Is it going to undermine our faith in video footage generally? Were we wrong to have that faith anyway?

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Download from http://www.badvoltage.org/2x26/

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So the intel glasses are much more of ā€œa presence thingā€?
With ā€œlike, pop-up notifications for things nearbyā€?

Canā€™t help but think of this:
https://augmentad.surge.sh/

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Regarding the elementary thingā€¦ If I had a ā€œpaidā€ app in there, Iā€™d be switching it to free now.

As weā€™ve seen here, itā€™s not pulling in any money worth mentioning, and even with this I donā€™t think itā€™s going to be going up significantly.

So Iā€™d rather have users use my app in its best form - which obviously Iā€™m going to think is the last version - and have fewer bug reports for the old versions, than have a cup of coffee more.

I can see why Elementary is doing this, and I think theyā€™re trying to do it in a good way, but I donā€™t think itā€™s going to work.

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Quick point for @jonobacon, It sounded like you kept talking as if the funds collected by elementary were for the project themselves. The paid stuff in the appcenter is for the actual developers of the individual third party apps. I donā€™t believe any of that money goes to the project.

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Thatā€™s pretty amusing. :slight_smile:

At the moment as far as Iā€™m aware, the Intel glasses donā€™t have a particular goal in mind at all; theyā€™re a monitor in spectacle form, essentially.

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I was properly impressed by the Nintendo Labo video when I saw it. $70 for the variety kit and $80 for the robot kit feels like a lot of cash for a (well designed and put together) cardboard sheet though.

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Agreed on high Labo prices. This is sorta why I hope that a self-build community might spring upā€¦

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@faho Paying for Libre software - is something that has been muted before in a more pan-utility way.
(well-over a whole LTS ago - but no-one did the homework).

However, elementary needs SALT in a mixture between :-

  • A, HumbleBundle
  • B, Bountysource
  • C, LiberaPay

So lets outline these factors.

A, If there was a system-wide average allotted to over-ride these new methods of (financially-participating) updates, by creating a ā€˜Beat The Averageā€™ unit, then you wouldnā€™t need to waste time with being asked,
Where are your papers ?

B, If you could imagine Salt V2.0 (which is basically Patreon without the bells and whistles),
then a Beat The Average could be a ā€˜Moving Averageā€™ within set upper-limits (the upper limit could be the first question that @danrabbit could request from Users (this is basic prudential accounting - you ask for projections upfront) )
i.e. similar to what ppl do on the download page - they are stating a forecast to how much they are prepared to donate to elementary.
There are other ramifications with suggested donations and other things from an accounting perspective, but I shall not bore you with them at this juncture.

C, The other application is LiberaPay which is where you can set up various accounts to perform a task to a person. Not many do this, but let-us fetter the developerā€™s pot into various boxes, and let people get used to those.
For example, | Box 1, basic hattip | Box 2, Cake fund day | Box 3 server costs | Box 4 Proprietary and/or Open Hardware | Box 5, Medical | Box 6 security | etc etc ā€¦
That way, there can be a conversation through reading the devā€™s blog about the difference between pushing all the wonderous money down a hole & well, it is called trust.

However, due to the complex personalities of the elemtary ā€˜crewā€™ , I believe that devā€™ Rabbit shall ā€˜get these implicationsā€™ whereas cassidyjames shall not.

Just a learned hunch.

It is for this reason, I shall expect a similar stripe-system to be implemented in other numerous distroā€™s within a year to this effect.

but I wish the project well :money_mouth_face:

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Anyone else remember this?

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@jonobacon builds his latest computer. Paulo Constantino builds his own cpu!

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I was confused here. @jonobacon said (paraphrasing) the last time he did Windows was Windows 7 and he hated it, because it was a mishmash of touch and not-touch.

Having recently been forced to Win10 at work, it makes me appreciate how the last really decent - relatively! - version of Windows was in fact Windows 7. Which I was running up until last week. All the pseudo-touch malarkey came along in Windows 8, did it not? I ducked that particular bullet, so havenā€™t seen most of it until recently.

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I have never been a Windows fan-boy but I do have a Windows Desktop as well as a Linux Laptop: I use Ubuntu because it works for me. I mainly use Windows for CAD I use Autodesk Inventor for 3D mechanical CAD, AutoCAD for 2D, it can do 3D but is significantly less good for this than Inventor. I also have PCB and circuit simulation software: I use Altium for this as well as LTspice (simulation only). I would love to be able to use Linux tools for this but I have not found any that are up to the task. While I obviously prefer open-source to closed software I would happily pay the full price for any of these on Linux if only so I could stick with one OS but you have to use tools that work for you and as far as I am aware nothing suitable exists.

It is a pity @jonobacon canā€™t find the tools he needs, for his music, but I use Windows too so I canā€™t blame him here.

Jono: you mentioned there is a picture of your new PC on tā€™ interweb, any chance of a link? Hope it gives you pleasure in creating the music you want.

Found a new idea to fill up, what could have been, a boring night last night. A friend of mine bought over his Stratocaster and his girlfriend had her Telecaster together with a DVD of School of Rock. We fetched the keyboard from my daughters bed room and I grabbed my Les Paul and played along. Any suggestions for other films we we could try next? People may want to include short clips but bear in mind fair use policy we do not want to fall foul of copy-write here.

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elementary gets 30%, while the developer gets 70%. Fairly standard split for app store type places.

Ultimately, I think Jono was a little harsh on it. Theyā€™re taking steps to improve the payment rate, and we know itā€™s a small percentage of users paying for apps. This should help and bring in more money for both developers and elementary. If after this change the payment rate or the money collected is still that low, then maybe they might look at dropping the payment option, but a year in and the first major revision would be too early to do that IMO.

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It depends what you are paying for. Do I believe I should pay Ā£3000 for a 3D mechanical CAD package and Ā£2000 for Circuit simulation and PCB layout?

Thatā€™s what I pay now and Iā€™m not under maintenance so I upgrade every 3 years. Why should I expect a better offer because I like Linux? Many of us like the idea of open source but I doubt @sil,@jonobacon or @ jeremy is happy to work for nothing. I know I wouldnā€™t.

I have a very socialist attitude in this respect: give according to your abilities and take according to your needs. Iā€™m lucky in that my design consultancy has taken off, I have two engineers working for me full time and we have several customers. So I should contribute but new engineers should be working with the proper tools too. Even if they canā€™t afford them

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The elementary system actually works really well in those cases; you pay what you can afford. If thatā€™s 0, you put in 0. Otherwise, you can pay as much or as little as you want. And some of that money goes to the developer(s) who wrote that app.

I donā€™t think there are any CAD or SPICE applications in the AppCenter repo right now, so there arenā€™t any paid options available. But thatā€™s definitely something that could take off soon. And the whole system allows for and encourages a way for developers to make money writing their software without hurting someoneā€™s ability to try it out or use it if they canā€™t afford it.

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Same. Well, not the design stuff :smiley:

Iā€™m now on Win 10 because in our corporate reality itā€™s the only game in town for accessing a bunch of necessary systems. I formerly used Linux because 75% of what I do requires Linux - these days that can be done with WSL or possibly a virtual machine accessed via xrdp.

I like Linux, but mostly I use it because itā€™s a better tool for what I do. Except when itā€™s not. No arguments from principle or religion here.