The Bad Voltage team are half away this week. Fortunately, the good half remain. Since there's only Stuart and Jeremy we decided to not do a "standard" show; instead, it's a riff revisiting a bunch of previous topics and seeing what's happened to them now. Bryan and Jono should be back next time, and meanwhile the smart half present:
00:01:24 Things. Many things. The beautiful things of the shop. Jeremy and Stuart's wide-ranging conversation, containing the Brave web browser, finding ways to get paid on the internet, the Moto 360 customer service saga, what's happening to the Motorola name, smartwatches, Mycroft, the absence of a Mycroft, Mycroft's existing commercial rivals, Lancia's in the UK, phones that are too big, the Note 7 exploding, the box to contain the explosion, four billion dollars...
Hi, I’m using Brave. I’ve been contributing a few chunks of code and reported a bunch of bugs. The project is kind of flawed. On Linux, I have to restart the browser several times per hour because it stops rendering pages entirely – and the bug is reproducible with two steps and have gone unfixed for months.
I’m using Brave side-by-side with Firefox, and my usage varies from day to day depending on how patient I am with their many bugs. I read my feed reader in Brave, and that pretty much ensures I open my favorite websites in Brave rather than Firefox.
Brave aren’t signnig up publishers yet. The systems for that aren’t ready yet.
Brave hopes users will be willling to deal with the complicated bullshit that is BitCoin and pay websites directly with funds from their Brave Wallets (a BitCoin wallet address).
So they still have quiet a way to go. Their main problem will of course be user adoption. However, I think they’d be much better off if they would ship it as a browser extension rather than forcing their system (which is already implemented as a WebExtension) into it’s own browser/product. The barrier to adoption would be much smaller if they simply shipped a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Edge (all support variants of WebExtension). Scaling down their ambitions, at least to start, would also mean they’d possibly get a revenue source that could fund other projects like their mobile browser and their stand-alone browser.
Thanks for the show However, in the stage world they’re called understudys and it’s becoming clear the show needs one. I’d recommend Ken Fallon.
Any other recommends ?
@jeremy brought out an interesting comparison with the Note 7 to the Ford Pinto. In hindsight, it was media coverage, starting with an article in Mother Jones magazine, that whipped up emotional angst against Ford and how the whole situation was handled, for statistically speaking, the rate of fires and death in the Pinto was really not different that that of other sub compact cars.
However, in the stage world they’re called understudys and it’s becoming clear the show needs one. I’d recommend Ken Fallon.