The Linux kernel, how it is developed, and how we stay sane doing it | Hacker News Reader

The Linux kernel, how it is developed, and how we stay sane doing it

voicerepublic.com

38 pointspreek45 comments

I really prefer to have a transcript available. This is for users who prefer to get a feeling of the talk (is it interesting enough for me to stay on it for 30 minutes?) and also for accessibiliy. People who cannot hear should be able to read the transcript, even though I can safely the # of deaf users using your service is so low, but still a transcript would be really nice. I don't expect 100% accurate, which means i am okay with it done by a machine (much like Youtube's transcript). Knowing half of the content is good. This surely is a big project but consider it at some point.

I'd really like to listen to that talk. But first it didn't work on firefox 29, it does though on Chromium 34, for me. But the audio quality is HORRIBLE, my ears are bleeding, I had to give up at 1:21.

I tried to search youtube, but no luck so far. If anyone has a better recording, please share.

Edit: Since it seems there are no slides anyway and others are having problems with the site, if it doesn't work in your browser, you can try http://voicerepublic.com/vrmedia/982-clean.m4a with a media player, vlc works for me. still doesn't change a thing about the quality of the recording though.

I was actually surprised by how bad the recording quality was. I had flashbacks to listening to crappy mp3s of HOPE/Defcon presentations in the late 90s and early 00s. I wish there was a nice VLC plugin to clean up audio like this. I imagine an hour with Audacity and one could clean it up, but I have never done anything in Audacity that ended up being as simple as I thought it would be.

Why am I getting a talk on Openstack at Cern, and not the Greg KH talk?

CTO of voicerepublic.com here

All talks have unique URLs, so when you click the link from HN, you shouldn't find yourself at another talk. If you can reproduce that problem, I would be very interested in a detailed bug report, though.

However, we have multiple talks on Openstack[1], if you were interested(;

1. https://voicerepublic.com/search/1/Openstack

Open the link in this page: Select the "download" option, and pick "ogg" https://voicerepublic.com/system/audio/2014/05/16/DQxIXPoh2T...

is the URL I get, and that isn't Greg speaking

Happens to me too. Multiple browsers (Firefox 29 and Chrome 34)

The talk at the URL is about something at CERN for me in both browsers. Its an interesting talk, but I don't think its what I'm supposed to be listening too... although maybe thats the joke and this is how they stay sane developing the kernel.

I just saw the same problem. I just clicked through to https://voicerepublic.com/venues/223/talks/982 and the recording is for OpenStack at CERN (the text etc refer to Kernel development). The talk starts out "We have a few hundred thousand lines of perl code..." That was a nice little start for a talk about Kernel development!

I had the same problem. All I did was follow the link, then I fumbled trying to click on the white "play" triangle in the lower-left corner of the video-rectangle, until I realized that the teal-blue octagon was the way to start the playing...and, after a while, I realized I was listening to the Openstack audio, even though the title displays as "The Linux Kernel..."

for me too, talk is about CERN and openstack for about 21min. btw. that has already been the case for me on wednesday evening ...

Page claims it's on Linux kernel, actual player plays something about CERN.

Also getting this problem in Chrome on Linux.

Everything says "Linux kernel" but I get the Openstack talk. Which, well, I'm interested in what they do at CERN too but is definitely not the kernel.

UPDATE: The correct talk is online now. Thank you very much for this content bug report.

Also big thanks to all reporters in this thread! Your constructive help is much appreciated!

Original Post:

My deepest apologies. The conference LinuxTag (where both talks had been held) had a couple of unannounced room changes. These two talks must have been switched in that fashion.

LinuxTag had six tracks[1], we are currently searching for the right talk to correct this mess!

1. https://voicerepublic.com/users/linux-tag-berlin#venues

Excellent! thankyou

I'm using Chrome on Linux and I got "You are using an outdated browser - You are using an old version of Chrome whis is 28."

That's a little snarky. Chrome on Linux doesn't have automatic updating and I tend to forget to update. Here's a mirror:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LWDDNOb...

CTO of voicerepublic.com here.

Sorry for coming off snarky. We develop and run VR using Debian Stable which ships Chromium 33 right now.

We are a very small team building voicerepublic.com and did launch just last week. To offer a perfect experience, we only allow browsers that we actually could test. Whence the team grows, we certainly will test and support more browser versions.

Good answer. And hey, on the bright side, you reminded me to update Chrome!

How are you not getting chrome updates from your distro?

Update: Some stats

After about 4000 hits from HN, about 1% of visitors have a browser older than:

* Chrome/Chromium 30

* Safari 7

* Firefox 24

* IE 10

You shouldn't keep people out that have older browser versions.

Instead, you should prompt the user and warn them that their browser has not been tested and is not supported, but they may continue.

Very shortsighted to block a site visit based on a browser. Guess I'll never see your website.

Chrome on Linux uses the system package manager to autoupdate. The current version of Chrome is 34. Chrome is on a six week release cycle, so your version number indicates you haven't had a system update in something like (34-28)*6 = 36 weeks. Much of the software you're running has known security vulnerabilities.

Neither does it work under OSX 10.8 + Safari 6. I'm used to games asking for latest&gratest in everything, but a website?

Doesn't work at all for me in either Chromium or Firefox (all extensions disabled) on Ubuntu 12.04. I just press play and it tries to load and goes back to a play button.

Is firefox 20 really that old that this should not work?

(ah, well according to you yes, they are now on 28). But is there a reason it shouldn't work? I mean, I understand not supporting I.E6 but it wasn't that long ago I installed this. Or else time is running together on me.

Just a tip from a user perspective. If you can avoid forced browser upgrades it's a good idea. I generally don't go any further unless I really really want to see the content.

https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firef...

Ok, I looked the list of updates. Some of them don't apply to me, many I don't care about, a few I do. So I appreciate the reminder (thanks guys who did the site) and will upgrade ASAP.

Still, I didn't identify any change would prevent the site from working so I'm just curious. Anyone care to shed some light on this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757894

Why on earth doesn't that player have a volume control?

Because most machines these days have volume control built in. You can pause the talk, though, if you want it to shut up for a moment.

I think most people would expect for an audio player to have volume control. I can't think of another web audio player that doesn't offer it.

CTO of voicerepublic.com here.

Thank you for the feedback. We just launched VR last week and are actively improving it. I will put a volume control in the Backlog(;

I believe that should have the highest priority. It's highly unorthodox not to have it, especially for desktop users with a mouse.

I was so annoyed I didn't even listen to the audio and immediately shut down the page.

But they're completely redundant. What would you use it for?

I don't know about you, but I would use it for volume control.

A web page shouldn't act like it has exclusive ownership of system resources like audio; there may be other pages or applications running, and it's often useful to be able to control them independently.

For instance, if I have Gmail open in the background, there's no reason that adjusting the volume of whatever's in the foreground should also force me to change the volume of incoming chat notifications.

You said the same thing that I posted just now, only better. Web pages and applications should never assume that they are being used in isolation and without any switching between them.

On this note, it's annoying that OS X doesn't provide an external per-app volume control like Windows has. For example, Gmail's voice chat doesn't have a volume control; if I'm watching an iTunes video at the same time (along with the person I'm voice chatting with) and want iTunes to be louder than the chat (due to background noise from the latter), the best I can do is turn the iTunes volume up, but setting it to maximum is insufficient. With such a feature, I could just turn down the browser's volume, though I suppose it's still worthwhile to have volume controls directly embedded in video players for convenience.

It would be nice to turn down the volume on the video I'm playing now, but still have my VoIP app ring loud enough for me to notice it if I'm not paying attention.

I know it sounds weird, but sometimes I have more than one thing on my computer at a time! And some of those things have audio. So it's nice to control the volume of a specific thing, like a video, without having to change the audio for everything else on my system.

I would use the volume control to control the volume.

Bandcamp's doesn't.

It is a real pain in the ass on the Mac in my living room. The mini is hooked up to the stereo via SPDIF and for some reason that I have never bothered figuring out there is no volume control for digital out. For every other application vlc/itunes/etc I can manage the volume. I had to dig the remote out of the coffee table for this talk. Granted it would have been less of an issue without the nasty mic feedback/buzzing from the recording.

Applications tend to disagree about how loud volumes 1 to 10 should really be. So I tend to adjust youtube videos, music players etc to certain volumes using their "internal" volume control, so that I don't have to risk bleeding from my ears when I turn off the music to watch a video with a video player that sets the volume to 15 by default.

My exact thought. Some Youtube videos already amplified so I must adjust the system. Some are not so I must max Youtube and then increase system until reaching the comfort level.

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