LINUX Unplugged - Episode 8: Cloud Guilt | LINUX Unplugged 8

Episode Date: October 2, 2013

Should Linux users be anti-cloud? Why do so many of us feel guilty for using the”cloud”?This week will dig into this conundrum and maybe even solve this more and more complex question.Plus a little KDE vs Gnome debate, moral pirates, and even RMS’ workflow.

This is Linux Unplugged, the weekly Linux podcast that slow cooks the Linux topics of the day and then extracts sweet, juicy meat sauce called Linux Unplugged. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. Welcome to Episode 8. Hey, thanks for having me. Now, we're both kind of, we have a Steam hangover because we've been talking and thinking a lot about Steam. And then, of course, even though the federal government shut down today, the Jupyter Broadcasting crew is here.

We're not shut down. Never. Never. Takes more than that to shut us down. Takes more than an, actually, I guess than an action of Congress to shut us down. But it could take an action of Congress, actually, now that I think about it. That could shut us down. Yeah, it could. Well, so we've got some good follow-up from Sunday's Linux Action Show where we covered ZoneMinder, and we also talked a little bit more about Steam.

Also, though, we want to talk about DAT Cloud today. It actually just came up on the pre-show unprompted. People have a little bit of cloud guilt because it's just so convenient. Dropbox, Google Docs, Spotify, Google Plus Images. That happens to be my current weak spot. It's almost like a drug of choice. I feel like it solved my life problems. But at the same time, there's some fundamentals that we have to take into consideration.

These are not free systems. These are not open systems. Sure. there were just a few little spots I wanted to follow up on. Now, we got some good threads going, and of course, what is... I don't know, Matt. It seems to happen more than you'd expect. A lot of times, one of the things we get the most feedback on is not what we made the main topic of the show. Of course. At any time the discussion happens to switch over to, oh, I don't know, KDE or GNOME, that always seems to be a point of feedback. And we always seems to be a point of feedback and we always tend to get so when it's me switching back to gnome then i always get this piece of feedback he says this is from paul furr on the zone minder review thread or feedback thread from the linux action

shows episode he says uh he said by the way i'm talking about my switch to kde one thing about kd it always bugged me is a lack of design philosophy. That's the next comment. It says, much of the low-level things in GNOME are due to input from Red Hat. There was a post a while ago from Aaron Saigo where he envisioned the GNOME guys focusing on low-level stuff and leaving the user experience layer to the Qt technologies. To me, the GNOME UI still makes no logical sense wherever. Now, here's where he goes in for the killing blow, Matt. Stand by.

Okay. Chris also managed to make his KDE setup look rather hideous. So no wonder no one would want to look at that for much longer. Oh! Oh, wow. I see him also blaming KDE for what most likely was the unstable and impractical Fiddler's Distro arch wrecking his configuration. Well, first of all, last time I checked, I've never had my doorbell

ring and had a distro walk into my house and wreck my stuff. I've never actually experienced this. Now, I have experienced something to where I may have installed something and I may have wrecked my stuff, but I just want to put that out there. Yeah, I'll tell you what I did. I'll tell you how I wrecked it. So for those of you, I did wreck it. And for those of you who don't know,

I made a big switch over to KDE and there was so much stuff I liked about it. A few things that actually kind of affect my daily workflow because I encode video files over network NFS shares and actually SFTP shares. And that would be like Dolphin doesn't mount a directory when you browse it on the web. It does like this fancy Dolphin virtual file system, whereas like Thunar and Nautilus or files, actually, you know, they put that sucker in a.gvs folder and Bob's your uncle. You can go get it if you want to.

And then that makes it like Handbrake works with it, and that makes a bunch of other programs work with it, whereas it doesn't in KDE. I would agree with that. I would even go so far as to say my only real honest-to-God hang-up with KDE that really gets my goat is the sound issue and i know that a lot of you guys don't experience that and that's totally okay i get that but outside of that in many ways kde is more attractive to me than the alternative you've

lived this sound problem with me though and i gotta say this problem this is a problem for me because um i have turns out a soundboard right there it is and that soundboard is powered by a linux box and that linux box has multiple sound cards in it it has an hdmi sound out it has two uh audio jack out ports and it also then has a usb sound deck that's what i use for the soundboard and it just happens to be in kde that it doesn't seem to be when i switch the sound device that it actually switches right right right exactly and also with KDE something I think a lot of the chat room has touched on and this is certainly true that it always feels like it's going to be it's going to be better in that next release we're almost there just just need that one tweak oh we broke

that other thing but that's okay we got this new feature let's get excited and it always feels like that you know we always feel like we're two steps forward, one step back. That's true. And to be fair, I totally respect the technology in KDE, the integration, the fact that it let me just create anything I wanted. And I went for a traditional taskbar, system tray, menu launcher UI. I thought, let's go back to what Windows was doing for 25 years and see if maybe they were on to something.

And let's just, you know, or CDE. Let's go back to CDE, basically, and just kind of do a very traditional desktop. Of course, that's what he's saying looked hideous. I don't know. I will come back to, though. The problem is that what I might call instability, you could also call unexpected behavior.

So, for example, Dolphin not mounting a share, the sound system not actually switching when I make the switch. And then the third, this is the thing that bit me, and this is the main reason I went back to GNOME, is Matt, you recall back during the show when I lost my KDE config, right? You like happened on air. I do remember that. I do remember, yes. And I ended up having to nuke my.kde4 directory and kind of starting from scratch. I ended up having to nuke my.kde4 directory and kind of starting from scratch. So this time around, I broke it again. And I mean, I know I did this, and I acknowledge I did this.

And I kind of feel like it should not be this easy to break. And I'm trying to remember the exact command. So mind the dinging as I bring it up here. So I ran the command Plasma Desktop under GNOME. Because I was working on a segment about widgets for the GNOME desktop because there used to be a whole bunch of options to get a photo slideshow on your desktop. And there's, of course, Konky, but there used to be a whole bunch of things that they've all basically been abandoned. Yeah. And I was working on a little spotlight thing I was going to do for last where I was going to show you how you could take some of the great KDE Plasma widgets and actually run them in GNOME. It works just fine.

And to do that, you run the Plasma Desktop command. That starts up the Plasma Desktop shell and then you just add widgets like you would in KDE and you pick your widgets. Super straightforward. So I logged into GNOME just to play with it, to do a little segment on it. And when I ran that Plasma Desktop command under my GNOME session, when I logged out of GNOME and logged back into KDE, everything was gone. It was back to a fresh installed KDE.

You know, that sucks, because I mean, that would be a real disappointment, because then you essentially have to live in a world where you've got to have some recursive backup of your KDE directory. Right, I mean, snapshot or something, right? Yeah. That's not, it's just, I know I told myself I was going to do that, but then I decided, instead of, I mean, snapshot or something, right? Yeah. It's just, I know I told myself I was going to do that, but then I decided instead of worrying about something like that,

I'll just reinstall if something happens. And it turned out to be... No, that doesn't really work, because you've got borked configs. It's not going to happen. And I was like, this shouldn't happen. And, you know, for example, I have ran Nautilus or files under KDE, Plasma Desktop, you know, numerous times.

Like all of the Nautilus icons will show up on the desktop and, you know, you get the Nautilus browser and it's full on. It'll even change the background. It's full on. Nautilus is now controlling the desktop under KDE. That doesn't bork my whole GNOME config. I don't lose all my GNOME settings. All my GNOME extensions aren't wiped out when that happens. I mean know i that to me maybe i shouldn't have done that and i i admit that maybe i shouldn't have done that but to me even if i worst case scenario the expected result

was not to lose all of my config i don't know if maybe something got could have been anything i didn't even i have not even looked at the folder it could have been permissions it could have been anything i just thought on principle, that's ridiculous. Plus, you know, he even stated, actually, it was our next commenter, which I wanted to touch on. Also, this struck me about Gnome. And this was Donnie Eisen. He said, by the way, he feels I'm going to be back to KDE. But he sings, one thing that kd has always bugged me is

a lack of design philosophy and this uh yeah this echoes my sentiments exactly and i think what this comes from is i didn't come to linux from windows i or dos right i came i came from the mac and then later on OS 2. I came from a always graphical – I mean like I went way back. I started like before then. But I mean when I was actually like using a computer, when I had like a hand-me-down computer, they were all Macs. It was all Macs. And about the time Jobs got out of Apple was about the time I stopped giving a crap about Macs.

Exactly. I wanted to play video games and load Linux, right? Yeah, there's all these new things and BIOS and all these things I started getting into. But even then, even then, I did not run Windows, right? I ran BIOS. I ran OS2. I ran whatever the alternative. The only time I ever used Windows was when I was using somebody else's computer.

And that is true to this day. And the systems that have stuck with me the longest are systems that had a great design philosophy behind them. And that is not to detract from what the KDE camp is doing, but they are just not crazy enough to spend almost an entire release cycle focusing on the system menu. They just can't bring themselves to do it because they're too pragmatic. They're not crazy enough. Whereas the known project is crazy enough. And that's the kind of crazy I like. Well, for me, it always felt like that KDE was very much about the features. The design philosophy was kind of a secondary nature thing to them. It always felt like it was much more about features and how can we squeeze them in there from, you know, top to

bottom. That's the way it always felt. And for me, it's kind of kind of like you think it's like give you everything and then if you want to make something from that, do it? But then it's like you never get there. Well, and it always feels like it's been crammed on top of something. I mean like again, it's pretty but it's kind of like Homer Simpson designing a car. I mean it just – it feels very put together. It sounded like a really great idea on paper but then you actually watch it happen. It's like it still looks nice but man, I got menus coming out of the menus here. It's

just, it's really chaotic. I got really, really close on my last, and I don't know, I thought maybe you winced at the UI a little bit, but I had a new theme. I thought you could see it in the last episode of the Linux Action Show. I felt like, oh, no, the episode before that. Yeah, the last episode was GNOME. I felt like I had, you know, if you get the right KDE apps and you have the right theme, that menu spew starts to kind of go away. It's not totally gone yet, but it's a lot better. What's so funny is it's so starkly different under GNOME. It's just so dramatically different under GNOME that it's a bit of a jar.

But I'm almost thinking having fewer options and having the default options be right and then having ways to go in under the hood when I need to is better. That is my philosophy. It's basically turned into such a bad situation to where I can't get beyond XFCE. Every time I try – I mean I run Unity on an Ubuntu desktop just because that's what's available. But my main desktop is XFCE. It probably always will be. I keep coming back to it because I don't, you know, you can sex it up six ways from Sunday with a decent theme,

and it looks great. I'm running it under Manjaro. It looks good. I'm very happy with it. I don't need more than that. Everything's where I want it to be. I run everything from a launcher. Here's the thing, though, is I would argue that in order to really happily use XFCE,

you rely on a ton of technology that the GNOME project and other projects are... Oh, absolutely. So those desktops wouldn't really be fully, would not even be probably half as functional without those parent projects happening. I'm not saying like

they're sharing maybe even... Like, for example... They share quite a bit. Yeah, no, there's no question that GNOME especially is a... Katie, I don't think has much to do with it, but I think GNOME especially

has a lot to do with it. And that's fine. I feel like if the Linux desktop, and I think a lot of people out there feel this way based on emails that we've gotten where people are sort of adrift. They're looking for the desktop that's right for them. And there really isn't one on Linux right now.

GNOME is getting in one direction. KDE is going in their direction. Unity is going in their direction. XFCE is out in their own island. And it's like none of them answer that perfect problem. And the real, I think the real challenge isn't going to be how does Unity compare and all that stuff, but they really have to have a good answer to the Mac. Because until Apple loses it and starts to iOS up the Mac, that's a full-fledged desktop

operating system. I'm not arguing any technical merits, but from a user on shopping, they've got a great hardware offering and they've got a great software offering to go together. And that is a problem that I think GNOME is closer to answering, and especially with its future integration with lower-level Linux services like SystemD and Wayland. I think GNOME has a better shot of answering that question because it still allows you to take advantage of what's great about Linux. What Valve is taking advantage of Linux is the fact that it's this general technology platform that doesn't have any stakeholders that can control it in one direction, right? True. I believe Gnome and KDE are going to be the two main desktops that are pulling ahead that allow you to retain that choice. two main desktops that are pulling ahead that allow you to retain that choice, I feel like GNOME is going to be the right answer for the Linux side if they continue to really

embrace and integrate with this low-level Linux technology. I think that's going to be huge. So for me, it's kind of like I look at the field and I say, well, the Mac doesn't meet my requirements for my day-to-day computing needs. Windows isn't a contender at all because Windows – I have all of the same complaints about Windows that I have with my KDE experience. Yeah. Oh, and I would completely agree with that.

At the end of the day, I mean there's Cinnamon, there's Pantheon, there's all these types of – the elementary Pantheon thing into the mixture. I don't think there's any – I think the problem is that there's not going to be any one solution for everybody. And it's – where OS X, people say, oh, well, I like OS X because I like the whole package. And even to some degree, people probably say the same thing about Windows. I think with Linux is that we have so much choice, so many things to pick and choose from that we do and really should be customizing a solution for ourselves. Give me 10 minutes and I can make anything look like OS X. I'm not going to have the level of integration that OS X has, but I can theme anything. Slap a dock on there, throw some icons up, redo a tool bar, I'm good to go.

It's not rocket science. But I think that as far as the level of integration, I don't know if we're ever actually going to get there unless you start seeing a company become an all-in-one solution provider. Until that happens, I don't think that it will ever quite be that. So that would be the canonical Unity answer, right? Yeah. And I think what GNOME 3.12 and beyond, and 3.10 looks great, but I think it's really starting in 3.12. They are saying, here's your integrated, here's your fully integrated. Okay, so before SystemD, we had a warmed over version of the old Unix system. I mean, it really was like you took the old Unix boot up systems and you just applied it to Linux.

of the old Unix system. I mean, it really was like you took the old Unix boot up systems and you just applied it to Linux. Systemd is this whole new system that allows us to take advantage of brand new features like cgroups in the Linux kernel that allow like GNOME,

if GNOME is taking advantage of that stuff, to resource limit applications, to sandbox applications, to stick them off in their own areas, to do something which I don't even understand called better application matching. And all of this is like, it's going to be, I think, this close to OS X integrated level experience. However,

you get to pick if it's Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo, SUSE Linux, you know, Manjaro, whatever. You get to pick whatever you want. It doesn't have to be where what Canonical's answer is, is you're going to get all that stuff. We might even manage to get you some of it sooner than those other guys, although right now it's kind of a dead heat. But we might even be able to deliver on some of this sooner. However, it's a bit of an island. And I think that negates the benefits of Linux.

And those benefits are what are those types of general technology platform. Nobody has a single interest. And the only problem is when you have a completely integrated solution like that, you have that single interest. Well, that's the exact kind of thing that Valve didn't want any part of. That's why they created SteamOS. They could have just released a set of packages that you grafted onto an Ubuntu install and said, sure, here's a PPA, Bob's your uncle, you're done, use Ubuntu 1204. No, they said, here's SteamOS. Because we're taking this general technology platform, and we're going to bring up our little pillar in that platform.

Canonical's going to bring up their pillar. They're going to do their own thing. But GNOME, GNOME is going to work on any of the general technology platform distributions. Any of them. You just use SystemD, you use Wayland, and you have GNOME 3.12 and beyond, and you've got essentially the same exact desktop experience.

You set the clock the same way on every single system now. It's no longer these backend scripts that detect which version of Linux you have and which distro, and then it sets the clock. No, you just issue this command. And it's, I think, going to be this grand new future. I think KDE is going to be there too. I just think maybe GNOME is going to be there first. I don't know. Maybe not.

I don't – yeah. I hate to say it, but I think the really important underpinnings are working better under GNOME than they are with KDE. So I think from a usability out of the – once you get past the visuals and you just kind of actually use the desktop, I think GNOME is ahead of the game in that respect. No question about it. So Bear454 in the chatroom says, you know, don't you kind of see Steam as that single interest? I think No, they're a niche

interest. Right. They're like, they take the general platform and they build their product on top of it. Just like Android has been built on top of it. You can have these super deep and tall vertical integrations that are, you know, Android for example. But it still moves the whole overall platform forward. And even Canonical, even what they're doing, well, I mean, yeah, even Canonical.

I don't think they know what they're doing. Even what they're doing. I don't know. It's not like when Apple took FreeBSD, right? I mean, it's not the same. There's still more benefit because of the GPL. There's still more people benefiting from it. I don't know.

This is a topic that it just, you know, the comments in the subreddit kind of got me going down. And he continued, Donnie Zarin did. He said, Gnome is becoming beautiful and usable with every release. After giving 3.10 a try for some time, I'm back on KDE for a number of reasons. Gnome should be usable without extensions. Yeah, that's a big one. I counted. I'm using 20 extensions right now. It is crazy

because people in the chat room and in the mumble said that, oh, I'm using one or two. I'm using 20. Users shouldn't have to worry about installing extensions to get basic functionality. No one uses or supports Gnome message tray. It's not been a success in two to three years, and nobody is ever going

to accept it. When Chrome launched an app launcher in Linux, you are left in this terrible fight between GNOME and other developers where users only get to suffer. Dropbox is not going to change for GNOME. Skype is not going to change for GNOME. Hell, GNOME apps like Banshee

or Rhythmbox have not switched to GNOME message tray. I do not want to put all my eggs in the GNOME basket because they will probably remove an important feature that you're used to without notice or reason. I find it really hard to use GNOME on big screens because GNOME wants you to use full-screen apps. It tells you something like,

it tells you something when Red Hat was not confident to ship GNOME 3's interface to enterprise customers after funding it for so many years. So this part, the part that he touched on here where he's like Skype isn't going to change, Dropbox isn't going to change for GNOME. These guys aren't going to redo the way their applications are written. Not in these current releases.

Maybe in the future they will. Whereas like KDE, like notifications are way better. Like the message tray thing is a lot better in KDE. I just honestly, I don't see... Okay, I mean, Skype has gotten a lot better about adapting and changing, oddly enough, since Microsoft bought them out. But I think Dropbox and Skype, I think their approach to it is like, look, we slapped you up a Linux release. This is how we're going to do it. Like it or don't use it.

Tough. We don't care. Your numbers aren't impressive enough for us to care in their eyes. I'm not saying they are or they're not. So I think from that perspective, yeah, I think that gnome is definitely kind of a bite in the boot on that one. But I think at the end of the day,

dome's got the extension problem. KDE's got the audio problem. I'm using another desktop and I just don't care. I get the benefits of gnome without the crap. That's true. That's the nice thing about XMZ. I'll give you a ding on that. So I will just wrap it up and say, you know elementary os has the same problem elementary os has a very specific design

philosophy the way they want things and they're that's one of the reasons they have to go create a bunch of the apps on their own because they can't get people to adapt to their philosophy i think as new releases of skype come out maybe they'll support gnome you know pigeon supports the gnome notification area and dude it is so cool when i get an instant instant message, just a little thing hovers up at the bottom of my screen, and if I click it, it then automatically extends up where I can read the whole message, and I can reply to the message right there in the notification. Just hit enter, and it sends it off. I don't have to alt-tab to a different window or anything like that.

It's actually, when it works, it's a really great system. But, you know, yeah, these guys have to... One more thing. But, you know, yeah, these guys have to... One more thing. I don't think it likely that the GNOME team is going to remove any major feature all of a sudden. And I think you have to look at things like... They're not calling it fallback.

They're kind of twitchy. I don't know, man. They're pretty twitchy. I think it's more like they nuked and paved and now they're rebuilding one thing at a time. Yeah, okay, I'll give you that. I don't know of anything major that's launched in the GNOME 3 series that has been removed.

Things have been changed, like they have a big change coming for the middle click and all that kind of stuff. Sure. I don't know. Which is, yeah, stuff like that's kind of big. It'll be interesting to see how it all pans out. And I think in the end, it will all pan out to do what it needs to do.

But, you know, it is a little scary living in the Linux space, because something like Skype or something like Dropbox that we use and rely on, at any point they may be like, you know what, we're done. You know what, Matt? You just nailed it. Let's flush this topic down because that brings us to the next spot, I think, in this week's show. This is where we'll probably bring the mumble guys in. Wait for the finish. There's the finish. I think you've nailed it. I mean, we are Or the finish. There's the finish. Pretty flush production. I think you've nailed it. I mean, we are so often victims of these cloud providers.

So this week, Google announced what looks to be a really fantastic HTML5 creation tool, like a point-and-click frame-based creation, something like early days of the macromedia creators. Really looks super impressive. I couldn't tell you, Matt. They only made it available for Mac and Windows. Of course. Not available for Linux, right? You mentioned Dropbox. This is a service that has, if you've used Dropbox for a long time, there was a period of time where the Dropbox client introduced a bug where it would then duplicate everything in your Dropbox. And then also, there's a period of time where it wiped everything in your Dropbox. I've lived through both of those. Yeah. So the cloud services propose a big problem. And I want to zoom out before we talk about that, because I think it's even, there's a bigger

problem here. And I want to get some of your insights on this because you've been, you've had a roommate for the summer. I think cloud computing offers us a future where we have, we have to analyze a few fundamentals. And it's not just about, you know, crazy NSA conspiracy theories and things like that. There's a few questions I want to ask. So let's talk about that. But before we do, I want to thank this week's sponsor, and that is Ting.com. Ting is mobile that makes sense, my friends. And let me tell you, Ting is average monthly rate, $21. Now here's how that's even freaking possible. One of the great things about Ting is it's pay for what you use. At the end of the month, Ting is average monthly rate, $21. Now, here's how that's even freaking possible. One of the great things about Ting is it's pay for what you use.

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Never been a better time to start saving. So go over to linux.ting.com, and thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. That's right. Got to love the fact that they make switching easy. Anybody does that is great in my book, you know? That's awesome. Got to love that, guys. I'm also a hermit, and I don't like to talk to people,

so the fact that the website works nice is a benefit. So let's talk about cloud computing. You know, guess who got me thinking about cloud computing this week? Who is that? I'll give you a hint. Now, see if you can place – he is famous. Okay. Do you have any guests yet?

Famous, huh? He's famous. He's famous, so keep going. Okay. Okay. Do you have any guests yet? Famous, huh? He's famous. He's famous. Keep going. Okay. He uses a pretty low-end computer on average. I guess it's a he too. Okay, I know. Yep, yep.

And we're talking famous amongst our people perhaps. Yes, Mr. Richard Stallman, who when we asked him about cloud computing, his response was— Get it out of here. Get it out of here. And he said, by the way, it's negative in the freedom dimension. He listed what he uses as his daily driver. This is a quote from a recent interview that just recently got kicked up in our subreddit, at least. I would ideally like to have a machine.

Oh, so they said hey richard what's your what's your dream setup because he has a yi long like sub netbook man it's like it's not even a netbook right he said i'd ideally like to have a machine with the speed and memory of a laptop and the display size of a laptop too combined with the same freedom i have now on the yi long until i can have them both freedom my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I'm not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer. I do hope to switch to the new model of Yilong

with a 10-inch screen soon. He said, and then he went on to talk about how he's not willing to sacrifice his freedom in order to use hardware that has proprietary blobs or requires proprietary binary blobs and things like that. And I thought, okay, I just could never live like that. But I look at what Richard Stallman's principled stance is with his computer hardware as perhaps a launching off point for our discussion around using cloud services. Because if you are into Linux for any of the aspects of free and open source software, then you have got to be challenged by the fact that a lot of these Linux desktops are just connecting out to closed sourced proprietary locked down cloud systems.

A lot of times running on top of open source hardware and software, open source software. But the end result is a closed source proprietary app now. And so, you know, you have to look at it. So, I ask you, Matt, is it hypocritical? Here's my thing with Stallman, and I'll just kind of summarize it with this.

He's able to do this, and from what I was reading, his work around is when he needs to go to Google, he borrows another person's notebook. Okay? So, you know, he doesn't always Wget his websites, or however he does it. He doesn't always use

Emacs. He has been known, and seriously, go and Google this, guys. He actually has been known to borrow other people's notebooks because it's not logging him. He maintains his privacy, but he doesn't mind putting the other person out there. So it gets kind of fuzzy there for me. I will say that he rolls hard. He's hardcore.

I think that's great. I mean he definitely has dug his feet in and he feels serious about it. But he is willing to go that far. It gets – yeah, it definitely gets a little fuzzy for me. I have a hard time taking that seriously. So Mumblegroom, I want to ask you guys, what do you think? Should a true diehard guy, he's got a GPL flag flying high, is it hypocritical for a true freedom fighter to use cloud-based services like Google Docs, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, we had Identica

come around for a while that was sort of like, here's an open source version of this. No one cared. So what do you guys think? No. No, he's totally fine using that type of stuff. Really? So you don't see a conflict in somebody who advocates for complete free and open source software on the desktop using cloud services? To me, it seems like software is software. And if you need to have free software on your desktop, then you need to have free software in your web services. You would think so.

You would think so. But, you know, I mean, just because it's not open source or free software doesn't mean that it's always technically bad software. I mean, we use Google every day mostly. I mean, most of us do. But, yeah, I think he's okay using with Google and stuff like that. His hypothetical user. All right. So here's where my struggle comes from with the cloud is it's multifaceted.

I can outline it really quickly. The privacy issue, obviously, with the NSA revelations, you never know if you're getting swooped up in some sort of mass surveillance sweep. But, you know, probably not likely. I look at things like Google Reader as the go to, but also just simple things like Google Reader is an example of a service being taken away and shut down without any user say. Like Google Reader is an example of a service being taken away and shut down without any user say. But even something a little more micro like the Gmail compose window, I vividly with a passion hate that. It actually completely breaks my particular workflow because you got to click on a stupid thing, then click on another thing to get the subject line back and the CC thing. And it automatically hides under this weird little button the previous thread, which I often refer to when I'm writing my response. I mean, in every single way that I average on average in responding to emails, this new compose message completely breaks it for me. And I don't want it. I turned it off for as long as I could. But then eventually one day they pushed out the code to every single server. And

now I don't have that and I can never get it back. And as somebody who's elected to use single server, and now I don't have that. And I can never get it back. And as somebody who's elected to use Google Apps, I sure as hell regret that now because I freaking hate that new compose window. So it's not just about like a Google Reader service being turned off, and then I go to tiny, tiny RSS. It's also about changes in that service that to me are about driving an alternative motive than actually providing a good user experience. So there's that aspect to it. But then you also have the aspect of performance, things that are on your own land perform better. So using things like, you know, a local video server instead of streaming from Amazon or Netflix likely means you could do a

higher resolution file. It'll start a little bit faster and nobody's keeping metrics on what videos you'd love to watch, right? This is very true. This is very true. And then lastly, because it's here on my LAN, there's less of a security issue, right? I maybe don't have to use as massively complicated passwords because not everyone and their brother can just log into it because most of these things I don't even open up a port for. It's only on the LAN. And so there's, I think, a higher security potential there. And then lastly, the internet was built around connecting LANs. That is the fundamental nature. It is not about consolidating and moving everything to the top. It is about distributed networking. It is about connecting large networks so they can share information between each other.

It is not about everybody being a bunch of dumb thing clients that connect up to the Google master servers, which, by the way, are running closed source software, which, yes, does bother me. So I look at the cloud as bad from that standpoint. But I will also now pivot from that and say, here's a whole other reason why the cloud is awful and is going to doom humanity. I think that, personally, the internet is awful and is going to doom humanity. I think that personally the internet was supposed to originally be peer-based and that's just because the way the

protocols are made up. Right, yeah. Yeah, I'd agree with that. My look at it is, I use the cloud to a certain extent. I just use Gmail, stuff like that, YouTube, whatever. All my pictures, all my personal stuff, I just use Gmail, stuff like that, YouTube, whatever. All my pictures, all my personal stuff,

I just keep backed up on externals. I never use Dropbox and all that stuff. That being said, I don't have the terabytes of data I'm having to deal with like you are. Well, no, I mean, for me, I can't get off the G Plus sauce

for the photos. I love the fact that I just take some photos on my Android phone, and for me, like I can't get off the G plus sauce for the photos. I love the fact that I just take some photos on my Android phone and they upload and then it does some magic to make them look better. It animates the GIFs. It, you know, selects the best faces like, man, that is just so handy when you want to keep out when you just want to automatically pull out the good images and just be call it a day. Like is great plus the design of the platform kind of leaves me needing a photo management solution and so they kind of conveniently provided one that is kind of hard to put down you know i don't want to really be putting all that stuff up there but damn it's just so great but here's the bigger thing you guys and man i want to i want to ask you a question you don't have to share anything more than you want to sure but you've you've recently had exposure just to a high school-aged person.

Yeah, right. And when I was in school, we had three classrooms packed full of computer nerds. And then we had one classroom that was really the elites. And some of us got like root shell access and domain admin access to the early NT4 domain. We were really like high-level geeks, right?

And this was in high school. And then flashback like 10 or 11 years later i went back as a contract worker to that same school district and i found like they had totally like neutered all of the computer classes and really generalized them they're you know office classes really learning it's all about excel and right and word learning to type and they'd really watered it down and instead of like 30 super passionate nerds, there was three. And only one of those three even had a shell account. And it was like, that guy, yeah, he can help us out with a few things. Where I was like, back in my day, we wired the district with Ethernet. I don't remember if

it was Cat 3 or 5, but we were IT. The kids were so advanced, were it and that's how i got my first job and now i look at the kids today and i think the damn kids on my lawn i think they have no idea of the context behind the screen all they know is how to operate what is on the screen and while yes i have made the argument that this is natural like before computers there was the radio and every kid knew how to build a radio and every there was radio kits that were advertised in magazines and comics and you would get a kit oh yeah yeah nobody knows how to do that anymore all right and there's like oh well now we just buy radios it's no big deal or cars cars another great example cars are a huge part of our of our civilization and i have no idea how to do anything other than i could probably maybe google my way through

changing my oil right right? Right, exactly. As long as I've got Google under the car with me, I should be okay. But computers are so much more invasive. Computers are in every aspect of our life. It's not like radios and cars. Not understanding how computers work is like not understanding that putting your finger in an electric socket can hurt you. Computers run hospitals. Computers run the government. Computers run us. Computers run

everything. And everybody has a computer in their pocket now. And so to not know how that works is a way bigger deal than not knowing how a radio works. It's a way bigger deal. Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, we were generationally brought up in the world, and especially those before us, to where you learn to do things oftentimes couple of things. First of all, we were generationally brought up in a world and especially those before us to where you learn to do things. Oftentimes out of necessity, you get the bug. You're excited about it. And then you want to go learn how to do other stuff. Kids today with smartphones, not only are they not verbally speaking to one another, they'll be texting one another from across a table. I mean it's terrible. But in addition to that, it's, you know, the phones pretty much do it all for them. And so if it's, and like,

to give you an example with my nephew, his world revolves around YouTube and Facebook. He really doesn't stop to rationalize there's an internet out there. It's Facebook and YouTube. Well, what am I going to, oh, and then I introduced him to Reddit, and I'll never see him again. But, you know, I showed him that.

I mean, it's they they don't have the the ability not all kids but a lot of them i'd say i'd even go as far as to say probably the majority of them don't have the ability to go out and want to learn beyond that because that's the environment they're brought up in and we're that's why we're working on here is we're working on you know we basically done undumbing down the undumbing down the kids. I mean that's kind of the whole thing, and it's a task, and it's a task you've got to tackle early. I think you nailed it when you said the smartphones, like the problems are solved. Like I had to learn how to build an instant messenger server because I wanted instant messenger.

Or I had – back in high school, I learned how to create a dial-up server so that way I could get internet connectivity out in my home in the boondocks. Like I had to create – I had to solve these problems. It starts with necessity. And then after a while, it's kind of like, God, this is kind of cool. And it becomes an interest. So here's where the problem is with cloud computing because cloud computing does this to all of us. Even those of us who are extremely technical, who could understand what they're saying, we also have this dumbification given to us. Like we are – without any option option by using like Dropbox.

I really have no freaking idea any of the technical backends. I kind of get bits and pieces over the years and kind of construct a theory in my mind of what it likely is based on how I understand technology works. But most people don't even have that advantage. Yeah. And we're doing it to everyone. We're doing it and we're doing it at both ends. We're doing it at the client side and we're doing it at server side, and we're just chewing in right to the middle. And it is – we're going to leave ourselves like in some sort of dystopian Star Trek world where they come to the planet and the computers run everything.

Well, it's going to literally be like Voyager with the – what the hell do they call Kes? She's part of the Oompa Loompas or some damn thing. The Oompa Loompas. Yeah, the Oompa Loompas. I call them the Oompa Loompas or some damn thing. The Oompa. I call them the Oompa Loompas, but whatever. Basically, they have a caretaker, Google, or Facebook or whatever it may be, and they're basically taken care of. And so, yeah, and I think a lot of the causality for that comes from a combination of parents and schools. Well, the parents figure, well, I'm busy doing my thing, so the schools will take care of this for me.

And the schools are like, honestly, we can barely keep our lights on, so no. We're going to make this as easy on ourselves as we can and do the very bare minimum we can because that's how schools seem to operate nowadays. And it's kind of a lose-lose for the kid. You know, Mail Holler in our chat room points out that people don't even know – this happens in all aspects of life. People don't even know where their milk comes from most of the time. That's true. That's very true. And I – now there is still a world out there –

Or what's in your milk. I mean that's a serious, serious thing. We switched to organic. Both my wife and I, our cholesterol did a nosedive. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. And why is that?

Because of the cows. Because where your food comes from, if they're intaking products and things like that that have things you don't want in your body, you're also intaking it. There's a lot of considerations. I guess though, but there's still a market. There's still a world out there where you can decide I want to know what's in my milk and then go buy something else. So maybe – But it's a premium. It's a premium market because there's not – because it takes more work or more consideration, and the market's not high enough out there.

And it's more of a niche market so they can charge more as we know from the gluten stuff or the anti-gluten stuff rather. You know, Matt, just to point out, you're completely right when you're saying it's the majority of all teenagers that don't understand what's going on in the background. Yeah, it's sad. Yeah, it's sad. I'm 19 myself, and the only reason why I know so much as I do right now is because I kind of was defiant and I was like, no, I want to know how this works. Right, exactly. And I poked, and I just kind of just got into it. I think that takes an exceptional personality type.

It does. I would say it's the new a type personality. There's the old a type where you're just loud and proud and whatever. But I think the new a type personality, someone that wants to take responsibility for their environment, for their skillset, for their goals, for their future, for the whole thing. And I think that that's exactly what you did there. Uh, you're 19 years old and you decided, wow, you know, I, I'm watching the sheeple around me do their thing. And it's like, like, I want to do more. I want to do something different. I kind of laugh when I see other people and they say, oh, Google crashed. That's awesome.

See, for me, like, it's got to do that opposite. Android, like, my phone actually is the one that got the intro when it came out first place. Oh, really? But that's cool. Yeah, because back in the day, I used to have the original MyTouch. It was like the second or third Android phone that came out. And it was so horrible because T-Mobile refused to update it to 1.6. I'm like, God, there's got to be a better way to do this.

And so I rooted it, and I got it updated to 2.2, I believe. And it was just so much better. And then I learned, like, wait, I can do this on my computer, too? Well, that's encouraging. That makes me almost think that maybe there's a positive side to every negative. The fact that the Android phone didn't get updated brought you into Linux. It's kind of interesting.

Yeah, it was XDA. I learned all this stuff from XDA originally. Those forums over here, those guys are amazing. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. Yeah, it seems like it's either going to be intervention from someone that's an interested party, or it's a pain point, such as an Android phone that is just not going to cut the bacon. It's kind of interesting to see how everybody kind of comes into their own world. I kind of look at it as like, I'm going to use

these cloud services until a really good, practical, implementable, if that's a word, solution comes along for me. Like I need something to manage my photos in my network. I really do. Like my wife takes a jillion photos a day. She's got like 500. I mean, it's not that much, but it's going to be by mid next year,

it'll be a 500 gig photo database. You know, I've got a decent size. And it's like, we need something that's free software that is not, you know, like Mac specific. So the problem is she just loves iPhoto. And honestly, every time I've tried to get her to switch to something, she's got a dozen valid points that I can't like,

I mean, you know, it's like- Same here. I'm right there with you. And by the way, I kind of want to do a photo management segment on LAS. I think that would be a good one because that's something I've actually been working on. Maybe we'll do that in the future. My wife went to school for photography and, of course, lives in Photoshop and iPhoto.

So that would be interesting. And so she knows like – she's going through a problem she has right now where she's trying to pick the right camera because her camera is going out on her, and she happens to love this style of camera. And so she's kind of at this spot where she's like, do I buy an older model with lower specs that I know performs the way I like, or do I buy the latest thing and just learn to live with it? Kind of like I'm doing with GNOME, right? That's a tough one. You've taken the other route. You've gone XFCE, and you're like, you know what? I'm just hanging, and I'm good.

And me, I'm like, no, I'm going to go GNOME, right? So I've got the other route. You've gone XFCE and you're like, you know what? I'm just hanging and I'm good. And me, I'm like, no, I'm going to go gnome, right? So I've got the newer camera. I treat my computers the way my wife treats her cameras. Don't worry so much about the camera itself. It's all about the glass and the technique. That's where it goes. Well, you know what happens in these point and clicks now is they have like image processing that they do. And like they're adding like orange to skin colors and things like

that but see oompa loompas yeah exactly um i guess i just wanted to i just wanted to maybe we'll just wrap up the whole cloud services with you know my thought is is i try to use cloud services as minimal as possible but you know also use them responsibly and just i look at it is if i have the technical know-how and means to build my own solution, then the only thing that's preventing me is time and laziness. And I should exercise that ability and that right to do that. So I just plan. I think I'm going to continue this trend over 2014 of just moving everything back home.

And as I move something cool, we'll talk about it. And when I solve this photo problem, we're going to talk about it. It might make your life a lot easier. It's really tough. It might make your life a lot easier. Yeah. Yeah. It's really tough. It is, isn't it? Are you going to be a farmer to grow all of your own crops? Are you going to use a drill to drill your own oil?

There's a lot of necessities that you just live to be thankful for. That's true. Yeah. Or that we just totally take for granted. And you use your own hydroelectric dam to harvest your own electricity? I admit, I... It's very hard for a grid to make your own fire. I have tried to move away from Dropbox now a hundred times,

and I have underestimated how integrated I have worked it with my workflow. And so now I'm just half and half. I'm like, well, I'm more than half and half. But I have almost everything in BitTorrent Sync, but I still have three or four applications and config files and stuff in Dropbox. And it's like, I've got to figure that out. I've got to figure out how to fix that,

but I just haven't had time. Matt, before we move on, I think we should probably read some emails, and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the cloud stuff, too. So go ahead and send us your feedback. You can tag Linux Unplugged in the contact form and it'll tag it just specifically for this show. I also have a link in the show notes. I just grabbed it. I was going to work it in because I was reading this this morning.

So the two things I read this morning were RMS's work setup and then also this ex-Microsoft privacy advisor. He said, I don't trust the company. And he switched to only using open source software. And he says, I don't trust microsoft now he said adding that only he only uses open source software where he can examine the underlying code he said uh he's told this to the to the guardian so i'll link to that in the show notes if you guys want to read about that and i also have a link to the richard stallman setup in there that's also gonna uh talk a little bit about what i was talking about where he uses other people's computers on occasion yeah bear bear Bear found the quote too. And you know, I guess you could kind of say that's a loophole. And I have no problem with it.

Where I get rubbed the wrong way with it is when he gets real high and mighty about it, but yet he's still doing it. But he's putting someone else's privacy at risk for his benefit. I'm not cool with that. It would kind of be like – oh, man. I don't want to get in trouble for saying this. I'm just going to say it would be kind of like if I went on LAS and we got – you and I got on our soapboxes about using anything but Linux. How dare you use anything but Linux?

And then I go – I wrap up the day and I go edit that on a Mac. Right. And we I go – I wrap up the day and I go edit that on a Mac. Right. And we all do it. But the difference is I don't recall you or I ever saying, oh, you're using that. Use what works for you, folks. And that's kind of my philosophy. Even if you do use proprietary software on Linux, hey, if that's working for you, that's OK. But be educated about it.

I think that's the underlying thing that I would like to see Stallman talk more about. It's more about the education and a little less of the finger wagging. I guess maybe now that's the best compromise, isn't it? Yeah, be educated. As a technical user, we can try to make ourselves as knowledgeable about the service as possible. So educate yourself. And then when it seems reasonable, like if you need the performance, you improve security and then improve privacy, and you don't want the service to change on you, then when those conditions are met and you feel like there's a good handoff, move it local

and otherwise just stay knowledgeable. Absolutely. Yeah. Be aware of what your stuff's doing. And if you don't know, you know, that's a decision each person needs to make at that point. But yeah, I just have a real problem when we start getting real finger waggy at folks and telling them what they should or shouldn't use because, you know, it's different strokes

for different folks. And I think we need to remember that. It's also, I think, let's keep in mind, too, people in the community, people out there, and, you know, sometimes they can be a hardliner and then they go home and they're like, oh, well, yeah, can I borrow your laptop? You know, you got to keep in mind sometimes everything. I've seen this in the Microsoft camp. I've seen Microsoft, I won't say who, but I've seen Microsoft employees and their kids

get frustrated trying to do things like connect to Wi-Fi with Windows 7 back in the early days and shake their fist at their own company. And then go and use something that does work like a Mac. Well, you've been to a Linux conference and seen a ton of people show up with MacBooks. Oh, yes. There was a period of time where some of the core

GNOME developers were all using Macs at this conference. I was like, oh, okay. It happens. I was like, oh, okay. It happens. It happens. I go back to write tool for the right job and educate yourself. I think you've nailed it, Matt.

All right, very good. All right, so before we move into the emails, we've got a couple of emails I want to get to, including a comment on the DRM aspect of Steam and how we kind of glossed over that last week, and a new Archer reporting with some tough questions. But first, I want to remind folks, we do have affiliate extensions. And if you grab these for your browser for Firefox or Chrome, and we have even Opera in the works, you know, Opera's kind of, man, they're coming back. Opera Next is out. I got it right now on my Arch box.

And it's kind of great. It's not bad, really. Of course, it's not Firefox. I'm putting all my effort in these days. I had some browser issues, so I'm kind of doubling down on Firefox. And I really wanted to kind of highlight these browser extensions we have for Chrome and Firefox because we had some recent modifications in the way that the Chrome browser reads the URL. That requires a reauthorization, and that caused a big drop-off. And the timing's bad because we're sort of ramping up for some big plans for 2014. So I'm making a special plug. If you'd like to support all of the shows on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, go over

to the Jupiter Broadcasting site, scroll down to the bottom, and then down there we have links for a bunch of sites. And then at the end of that link list, we have Chrome and Firefox extensions. You can grab those, and then every site you shop at that we have support for, like Audible and Amazon and Woot and Newegg, including multiple country versions. Like a lot of times we only have the US country linked to the bottom, but we have other countries in the extension. Those will automatically be enabled when you shop at those certain sites. We just added Woot.com, for example. And then a portion of your shopping session is contributed to the Jupyter Broadcasting Network, but it doesn't cost you anything more. So while you're

getting yourself something nice, you give us a little something. And then in the aggregate, it's very small, but in the aggregate, it helps out quite a bit. So we really appreciate that. I want to remind you guys that now would be the time to activate that, especially as the holiday season is approaching. This is true. And it's so easy to do.

I mean, it's literally either install and or activate or update. And it's passive. You don't do anything extra. Yep. And we really appreciate it. And't have to do anything extra. Yep. And we really appreciate it. And they're open source. Right. You know why they're open source?

Why are they open source? Because I figured if we're going to be loading software on people's computers, they have the right to go see what it's doing. And that is a good argument to have. And that's, again, it's all about being educated. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, I go back to something I kind of thought about maybe we'd talk about today, but it just didn't really seem to fit, is I love BitTorrent Sync, and those guys have just announced BitTorrent Chat.

Oh. And it's a peer-to-peer chat system with no central chat server, but it's all closed source. Oh, no. And it's super light on the details. I just, you know, if you want me to trust it. The underlying problem with open source stuff is that you become wildly successful. Your open source project becomes your marketing arm, and then you got that closed source stuff that basically makes you the money. And I think that's kind of where a lot of these projects end up.

I see like Google is a good example of that. They use lots of open source stuff, but they're making their money with the closed source stuff. They really are. Yeah. Like ads. Well, okay. Well, so yeah. Okay. I was going to get – that's actually – I was thinking we could actually have a whole show about this because Red Hat just had their 20 years. Yeah, like ads. Well, okay. Well, so, yeah, okay.

I was going to get... That's actually... I was thinking we could actually have a whole show about this because, you know, Red Hat just had their 20 years and they're making a ton of money, but maybe that might be a future topic. Let's get to our first email, Matt. And this is a subreddit thread. It came in from Dexinox.

He says, So after six years of using GNU slash Linux, I have finally defeated my laziness and I installed Arch. My thoughts before Arch. Better take a whole day off and prepare for some chill pills so I don't give up halfway. Yeah, I like to have a few drinks and get ready.

Then after 30 minutes of installing Arch, his thoughts, what the? Is that it? Well, that was unexpectedly easy. Even when I had network and Bumblebee problems after install, I was able to solve it without even looking at the Arch wiki or forms. Wow, good job. He says, I'm giving Arch a 10 out of 10 rating. Can we really see why where it's users so passionate in all those flame wars?

I can see why users are so passionate in all those flame wars. He asks if anybody else in the last crowd is using Arch for production. And, you know, I am actually using Arch for production. Yeah, I was going to say you use it for production. I still actually have an unused partition of Arch that is still there. I just haven't done anything with it. I would agree in that it really is not that hard to get set up. I'd say probably the hardest part is honestly just kind of deciding what themes you want to use and what desktop you're going to choose.

There's a lot of choices. There's a lot of choices. And so I'd say the customization part is probably the most time-consuming. But yeah, the setup itself is pretty much just dirt, dirt, dirt, you know, just follow along with the wiki. But yeah, but for me personally, the customization thing, honestly, I'm just not that vested into it. So I'd almost rather have it done for me, you know, and that changes from time to time.

As the XFCE user. Hey, you know what? Manjaro does it all for me. You know, and that changes from time to time. As the XFCE user. Hey, you know what? Manjaro does it all for me. Oh, that's true. Manjaro makes a damn nice looking... I was in it for Pac-Man anyway, so it's like, eh. They make a good looking XFCE setup. So I thought I'd just...

Anybody in the Mumble room here, you guys, anybody here have art like on a server in production somewhere? I have it in the traditional production sense. Like I use it to generate sounds and talk to you guys and create showed stuff. So, and encode, I suppose. And, you know, I really have not been bit by this mythical, I don't know how long it's been now,

but I've had a few things happen here and there where I've had to restart, where I had like a problem that like didn't fix until like maybe I updated the video driver and updated the kernel or something and I'd have to restart before things are right. So I think maybe under Arch I restart more than I did under other Linuxes.

Could be. But I don't think other than that I've had any surprises. It doesn't sound like anybody in the mumble room is using it in production. I know it's all because everybody in here is a bunch of Red Hat Enterprise users. Right, exactly. No, they're all using Windows.

No, I think for myself, I think as long as you're, whether it be any type of rolling distro like that, but Archer, Bungero, whatever, read the release docs every time there's an update. You're fine. You know what's going on. You know what I say?

You know. SUSE Enterprise Edition. There you go. SUSE Enterprise Edition. Play it safe to a fault. Yes. I actually really like SUSE Enterprise. It depends on the venue.

In the right venue, it's awesome. Well, I mean, if you're going to say, hey, Chris, you've got to load CentOS or Sousa Enterprise. Oh, yeah, there's no question. You can load Sousa Enterprise. Yeah, CentOS makes me want to punch things. I hate that. But we love you guys. All right, so John wrote in.

He said, hi, Chris and Matt. I have some comments from last week's Linux Unplugged. He said there was feedback where one user was looking for an iTunes replacement but felt stuck with the program due to buying a lot of content attached to that dang DRM. The discussion also turned into the convenience of getting content via file shared networks.

But the problem is that such networks are labeled as cheap pirates. Users of such networks are labeled as cheap pirates. In reality, most of them do not get access to the otherwise denied. My wife and I are fans of British television, with the most recent favorite being Downtown Abbey. As a viewer in the U.S., the only real legal way to watch the show is to wait six months after the U.K. version airs on PBS.

Due to this time restriction, it forces many users to download the U.K. version from file-sharing sites if they want to keep up with the show. version from file sharing sites if they want to keep up with the show. Are these people considered bad if they want to consume content and work around the restrictions of selfish corporations? Or are we meant to be punished? A few months back, there

was a story about GameStop requiring a critically acclaimed and unfortunately very rare Wii game called Xenoblade Chronicles. The game was never meant to be bought over in the stateside, but when it was, GameStop became the only reseller and had a limited run. As with many types of these games,

the value was high on auction sites, and many gamers who wanted it paid a high price. All of a sudden, large amounts of games were available at GameStop were sold at $90. The issue with these copies is the employees were forced to remove the plastic and sell it used to no longer be forced to pay a $50 MSRP. From that perspective, GameStop was being unethical against the consumer, and if the consumer wanted to experience the game, they would have to turn to piracy to play it, or 90, for a new version of the game.

So in a nutshell, there are many people who turn to piracy to do it as a way to get around unfair restrictions on the consumer and are not just being cheap and do not care about art. You know, it's interesting because I reflect on the first time I pirated TV. It was Star Trek Enterprise. Shocker, right? I totally saw that coming. No. I thought it was Downton Abbey. I lived in an area where our local affiliate, UPN11, made a big stink about going HD.

And they had Enterprise. And Enterprise Season 3 was also recorded with HD cameras. And I thought, and this was still Season 2 when they made the announcement. And then when the Season 3 stuff came out, I was like, okay, I got to do this. So I thought, all right, well, KCBW, whatever it was, I can't remember, whatever. They're going to get HD TV. Enterprise is in HDd nothing on tv is more important to me than enterprise and i've been thinking about getting an hd tv anyways this is really before even 1080p was big on the market like 720p and i paid like 5500 for my hd and i was you know like you know i was a single guy but

so i had some money to burn but uh and i'm still have the TV to this day, but, uh, nothing was in HD, nothing. And there wasn't Blu-ray players, right? I don't even think the 360 with the HD DVD drive had come out yet. No, I don't think it did. I was like, cause I remember when that happened and I kept thinking, well, that'd be nice. But yeah. And I, and I spent, I blew my money all on the surround sound system I had at the time. Yeah.

I was, I inherited the surround sound system, so I'd save money there, so I just needed the HD part. And then about three months after I got the setup all in, the local cable channel, local affiliate announced they were canceling their HD migration, which of course, BS, they eventually migrated. So I just said, you know what? Screw it. Oh, and also at this point, SyFy had launched in HD, but my local cable provider didn't have SyFy in HD. And I was watching Battlestar Galactica, I think, or something. Yeah, I think it was the new BST. So I was just like, I'm going to keep paying for the cable service, but screw these guys.

They told me I was going to get HD. I went on Bada TV to watch my Enterprise in HD. I'm going to watch Enterprise in HD. And it's not that I wasn't paying for the TV service. I just also pirated it. And I think that's what a lot of people have to really come to grips with when they wrestle with the morality of something like that is that a lot of stuff like that, even DVDs to a certain extent, Blu-rays, whatever they may be, you're almost leasing or being lent the contents. You may own the disc, but do you really own the content? According to the movie industry, you don't own squat because they do a state animal, please.

And so that leaves us with that moral dilemma. How do we approach this? And I think that more and more people are thinking, you know what? Piss on you. I bought this. I'm going to watch it my way. I've already contributed my funds to it. The other thing, too, is I think people are

savvy enough to realize that it is not the content creator. Because as a content creator, as somebody who's making a show, you want as many people as possible to see that because that's why you're making it. That's going to get you renewed next season. But then these corporations

who make profits based on a limited quantity model, and instead of taking advantage – like our type of show takes advantage of a widely distributed model, right? It's a completely different approach, whereas their model takes advantage on limiting quantity on purpose so that way they can sell it to advertisers at a massive premium, at a massive premium. And when you go outside that system, you devalue what they can charge the advertiser. And the thing is, I think a lot of us are – maybe we don't fully understand this paradigm, but we're savvy enough to know that it's the middlemen that are getting screwed and not the creators that are getting screwed. And the middlemen are screwing the consumers. are screwing the consumers. And I think you totally nailed it there. I think also the other issue too is that we're not dealing with gatekeepers. We are the gatekeepers. And with TV content, someone creates this really great show.

Under the Dome is a great example. And yeah, sure, it's available for Amazon Prime folks to enjoy on Amazon and whatnot. But it's also being distributed through television. And that happened because the gatekeepers that the creators of this show made the contract with allowed that to happen. And when you give control of something like that, you as a content creator really are left getting what they allow you to get. And we don't have to deal with that sort of stuff because of the fact we don't deal with the gatekeeper stuff. So that's kind of the big thing. It's going to be an interesting future to watch where these guys kind of pull out all the stops they can. And that includes things like leaning on the administration for SOPA and all other kinds of nasty things.

Well, they found that the whole suing people out of existence thing has kind of been a flop. So they decided, well, you know what really works? Let's make this criminal. So we'll buy us some congressmen because you just go to the exchange for that. Except for during the shutdown. Except for the shutdown. Well, they're out panhandling right now. They'll still take money, yeah.

They'll still take money, yeah. Record levels of it, actually. I'm sure. It's going to be a huge unfilter this week, Matt. That's actually just one aspect is funding for these guys is at record highs right now. Wow. That's crazy. Well, zero-sum game.

You're right. So it's going to be an interesting model to see how far they can play it out. And in the meantime, I think I don't want to say it is our right to pirate. I just want to say I don't have the biggest moral hang-up

if somebody's downloading a television show. Exactly. My preferred solution to this problem, and I know this sounds crazy, but my preferred solution is just don't watch it. Right. Support content that is not dealing with these games. Exactly.

You know what that means? That means I haven't seen Breaking Bad. And I realize it sounds like it's one of the greatest television shows ever created. But eventually, somehow, that will be made available to me in a way that I can consume it on terms that I'm comfortable with. And I don't know if that means there's going to be zero DRM, but I do know it means I'm going to be able to watch it on my Linux box. Oh yeah, there's ways of doing that.

But there's certainly ways of doing that. And you kind of have to come to grips with the best way to do it. Because shows like that, I would love to see something like that on Kickstarter, but quite honestly, I don't know if we're probably 10 years out from that because of how deep and how well done it was. I mean it's interesting.

The thing we're both dancing around is how Netflix totally changes this whole thing up. It does. Because Netflix is sort of the best model where it's like we're not selling to advertisers. We just want as many subscribers as possible, so we're going to make the best content possible. That's right. The only problem with Netflix, and we both know what it is, is they are – they're assholes when it comes to Linux. Linus needs to go give Netflix the middle finger. But what's ironic about it is the fact that they are supported on Roku, which in theory is embedded Linux.

And the boxy box. And the DRM chip. And the boxy box. And millions of Android devices. And they do have most of the Breaking Bad seasons on Netflix now. Just pointing that out. You know, screw Silverlight. Although I just read that they had a job posting

that sounded like it was converting some of their backend systems from Silverlight to something else. So what they want is they want to have an HTML5 DRM standard. They want everybody to adopt that and then they want to start delivering it that way. They'll call it a golden shower or something.

I'm sure they'll have some really great name for it. They don't realize what they're saying, I'm sure. Golden shower. Yeah, does it come with that golden shower DRM? I'd like to get that golden shower DRM. Wait, no, no, no, not the real thing. All right, Matt. Well, I think that'll wrap up this week's episode of Linux Unplugged.

Now, don't forget we are live on Tuesdays. Go over to jblive.tv at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Now, you can also go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. The calendar will auto-update now with your time zone, or you can manually choose a time zone. And if you're a Jupiter Signal subscriber, dang it, go check your inbox. The new Signal's in there with the artwork from Albert. Did you see that, Matt? How great was that?

I did. That was awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely awesome. As a matter of fact, I shared it on the subreddit. Yeah, oh, that's right. You guys can find a link if you want to see it, if you didn't get the signal. Well, Matt, have a great week. I'll see you on Sunday. Sounds good. See you then.

All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. you