Grub Flub!
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| Grub Flub! | |
| Number | 3705 |
| Broadcast Date | JANUARY 27, 2020 |
| Episode Length | 31:27 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Rich Stroffolino, Roger Chang |
A recent post from WhiteSource identifies the trends in Open Source software licensing and makes predictions on what shape Open Source software will take down the road.
Quick Hits
- Nintendo announced that after March 31st, it will no longer accept Nintendo Wii units for repair in Japan, citing parts scarcity. The Wii originally launched in 2006 and sold over 100 million units.
- Motorola released a series of videos related to the launch of its foldable Razr phone, one of which is called "Caring for Razr." In it, Motorola advises, "The screen is made to bend; bumps and lumps are normal.” The company also suggests to close the phone prior to putting it in a pocket.
- Earlier this month, Microsoft released the final public security update for Windows 7. Except, it appears that last update causes wallpaper to appear as black when set to Stretch. Microsoft announced a fix available for businesses who had paid for extended updates but then went ahead and said it would release the fix to everyone. But this is it folks. The last one.
- 10 years ago today, Apple announced its "third category" device, the original iPad, with a 1024 × 768 9.7-inch display, single core Apple A4 processor, and a $499 starting price.
Top Stories
- In response to a San Francisco Chronicle investigation, Grubhub stated it began adding some restaurants to its sites for delivery without a formal agreement with the restaurant. These are usually high demand restaurants, and in these instances, Grubhub sends someone to the restaurant to place the order, with a driver coming for delivery. Grubhub did state that it partners with over 140,000 restaurants, and that most listings are with explicit partners. Restaurant owners say in these cases, Grubhub often has inaccurate or out dated listings and prices.
- Thursday, Universal Orlando confirmed that it will build a fourth park featuring characters from Nintendo. A 750-acre park will be located a few miles from the three existing Universal Orlando parks. A Nintendo park is opening in Osaka this year and one is planned for California as well. In Osaka, people in the park can wear wristbands that pair with an app to do interactive things like play games and gather coins. Locations in the park will include Mushroom Kingdom, Peach’s Castle, an incredible Mario Kart ride, Bowser’s Castle and more. In a somewhat related story, Atari announced a deal to create eight Atari-brand hotels in the US with esports studios and gaming playgrounds. Apparently the Atari hotels will also have restaurants, bars, movie theaters and a bakery. The first one will come to Phoenix followed by Austin, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle.
- An investigation by Motherboard and PCMag reports that data collected from computers using Avast antivirus was being sold by an Avast subsidiary called Jumpshot. Jumpshot sells a variety of products based on the info collected, from the top 10,000 domains visited by users, to the "All Click Feed," which shows all Avast user clicks on a particular domain. Avast previously used a browser extension for data collection, but these were removed from Google, Mozilla's and Opera's browser stores last year after security concerns were exposed by AdBlock Plus creator Wladimir Palant. Now Avast is reportedly asking existing desktop antivirus users to opt-into data collection on its antivirus software rather than in the extension. Data is anonymized, with unique IDs hashed by Jumpshot, but they do offer inferred genders and age based on browsing habits, include the full URL string, and device IDs do not change unless Avast is completely uninstalled and reinstalled by a user.
- Patents generally don't mean much as companies file them for any idea that's patentable not on the off chance that it or some competition wants to make it real. But a patent filed by Apple last May seems to have captured the imagination of many. It describes a method of combining the display and input area into a single continuous curved glass surface. It basically looks like an all-glass iMac. Chips and ports would be housed in the support structure. So you'd have a glass keyboard and mouse that bends right up into the display with everything else hidden in the little block that holds the thing up. Another take would have a hole at the bend that you could use to pass a MacBook into to act as a dock, giving you a bigger screen. The glass display could then fold up to be stored.
- Bird announced it acquired the scooter rental company Circ. Circ operates in 40 cities across 14 European countries and the United Arab Emirates. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but were announced as part of a $75 million extension to Bird's latest funding round. In the announcement, the company said it is focusing on improved unit economics, especially the lifespan of each scooter. Bird bought another scooter startup Swoot in early 2019. So does consolidating several unprofitable companies lead to viability?
Discussion
- Microsoft's Chromium based Edge browser has a feature that lets you move multiple tabs to another window. A reddit poster noticed a quiet but in some ways earth-shattering conversation in a Chromium Gerit source code management thread indicating what can happen when Microsoft is working on the same code base as Google. Google software engineer Leonard Grey wrote about the tab moving feature, “If you’re still interested in upstreaming this from Edge, we’d be happy to take it.” Justin Gallagher, a software engineer at Microsoft then responded, “Sounds great! I’ll take ownership of this issue then.” Two weeks later, Microsoft committed the code to make the change in Chromium, meaning any browser using the Chromium code base can now have that feature too. Microsoft is also committing changes to the Chromium project to improve accessibility, performance, and compatibility for both Edge and Chrome.
- Open Source, once the realm of the roguish independent-minded dev (and it still is don't get us wrong), is now being led by big tech more and more. Though often implemented by the roguish independent-minded devs employed at those big tech companies. Take for example WhiteSource's recent report on the most popular open source licenses of 2019. Of the 4 million open source packages and 130 million open source files covering over 200 programming languages that WhiteSoruce surveyed, 67% are permissive licenses like Apache and MIT and 33% are copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL licenses. As recently as 2012 that number was flipped, 59% copyleft 41% permissive. Permissive licenses place fewer restrictions on how you can use the components. They generally allow for use in proprietary derivative works. The MIT license is the most popular, though the Apache 2.0 license has been making gains.
Thing of the Day
- Amateur Traveler
- Hopper to pay for carbon offsets for all bookings, challenges top travel CEOs to follow suit
- Chris Christensen aka the Amateur Traveler has an interesting story on one traveler booker's efforts to be more environmentally responsible.
Mailbag
- While listening to the last DTNS and the discussion about doing something yourself versus paying to have it done you all hit the nail on the head. As I I tell younger coworkers, when you’re young, money is more important than time. As you get older, time is more important than money unless you enjoy spending the time.
And you may have gotten me on the driverless car bandwagon with the idea of long range trips. I’d love to not have to drive the car all the way to Pensacola Beach for our annual trip.
As always DTNS makes me think. - Sent by Allen from the cornfields of southern Illinois
- While listening to the last DTNS and the discussion about doing something yourself versus paying to have it done you all hit the nail on the head. As I I tell younger coworkers, when you’re young, money is more important than time. As you get older, time is more important than money unless you enjoy spending the time.
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| Preceded by: "Post YouTube Stress Disorder" |
Grub Flub! |
Followed by: "Remote Work is so Close" |