This is good to see. The concept of immutable OS and fallback boots is going to be much more common. I think there are similar concepts being explored in postmarketOS such as https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/duranium
I've tried the silverblue desktop version of this and while I'm not convinced that a mix of OS/Brew/Flatpak/Containers is making things more approachable it's interesting to see these concepts progress and the tools improve.
Feels like this is a reasonable compromise for them. They can release the source for their machines while still remaining in enough control to allow them to stay in business. It's similar to the Business Source licenses that we have seen from software companies recently. Not Open Source or Free but better than a lot of other manufactures. Does this leave the Voron as the only Open and Free design that is being built in quantities?
So the argument is, we have manufactured something to create a noxious goop that we would like to inject into the ground at high pressure. Why are people so scared that this is going to have a long term impact our company has a short term profit to deliver to shareholders.
My understading is that the hackers had a copy of the source code for their app so they had to patch all their outstanding CVE that they where sitting on so the DOJ let them hold back until that was ready. It's not ideal but I suppose there is at least something people can do right now. Feels like they could have been a bit quicker with some of the information though.
They have a post about some of the reasons that the 5 was sustainable. It's not just the repair and modular parts but the whole supply chain.
It' rarely gets talked about here as this is a mostly tech audience who focus on features, which are important, but Fairphone is more focused on the impact of the manufacture.
I think there has been a big uptake in things you don't see like embedded or FPGA cores but as a general CPU it's nowhere near as efficient as ARM/x86 right now is my understanding. So it might be running in the SSD and the Fan controller but not as the CPU.
I think a large part of the cost of a CPU core is not the instruction set but the optimisation of the CPU and ARM/Intel/AMD are still way ahead in those. And so it needs people to optimise the cores, which when they have done that they charge for being a better CPU.
Gnome dropped status icon support as they think it's more consistent for the user to have a window for interacting with the application and do notifications via the notifications system.
I can see how people like a "dropbox" icon, especially Dropbox, as it makes them stand out but also I can see how it does not fit with the Gnome idea of consistency.
I used to be conditioned to using certain apps via their status icon as that was the only way to interact with them but as a long time user of Gnome I don't miss them now and use apps like syncthing-gtk via the app and notifications just fine. So for me, if I was a dropbox user, this would feel like a step backwards.
They showed a video at the end of their broadcast last night comparing what the raw microphone hears and what comes out of the XMOS chip and you can hear a much clearer voice all the time even when there is noise or you are far away from the device. It is also used to cancel out the music if you are using it's speaker output.
I don't think it's doing any voice processing but it's cleaning up the audio a lot which makes the job of the wake word processor and the speach to text a lot easier. Up until now this was missing from a lot of the home made voice assistance and I think why Alexa can understand you from the next room but my home made one struggles with all but quiet conditions.
I would think so in the end. They talked about the case design being open. The software and firmware are all open already and they said that they really wanted people to be able to take these components and make new devices.
It's all open and so should be able to work with OpenHAB as well but it would need somebody to either write a firmware that's compatibale with the OpenHAB endpoints or add ESPHome interegeation into OpenHAB. Somebody might have already done that for their voice stuff.
There is not much yaml in home assistant now unless you want it. I'd give it a go in a VM and see what it finds on your network :)
I don't think they are that easy to jail break but I may be wrong. I think they wanted to create an open device that people could build from rather than just a hacked up alexa.
This device is just the mic/speaker/wakeword part. It connects to home-assistant to do the decoding and automation.
You can test it right now by downloading home-assistant and running it on a pi or a VM. You can run all the voice assist stuff locally if you want. There are services for the voice to text, text to voice and what they call intents which are simple things like "turn off the lights in the office".
The cloud offering from Nuba Casa, not only funds the development of Home Assistant but also give remote access if you want it. As part of that you can choses to offload some of the voice/text services to their cloud so that if you are just running it on a Pi it will still be fast.
Not really sure what the benefit of group buy would be here. Nuba Casa, the company that supports the development of home assistant and developed this product, already has a few products they sell. They had this stocked all over the world for the announcement and it sold out. I assume they had already made a few thousand. They will get more stock now and it will sell just like the other things they make. Any profit from this will go back into development of Home Assistant.
I would imagine this is as much about having the authority delegated to SpaceX who will effectively run the city and so can issue permits and the like for building. Not some desire to make it a better place to work but just a better place to do business. The reason for the move from Cal is probably because of all their "red-tape" and this way they can play fast and loose with the environment and residents lives.