irontoby

Really wishing I would have realized that before buying my Sony Bravia TV a few years ago. It's basically just an output device for my Roku, I don't want/need any of the built-in smart TV junk but a recent update now causes it to reboot just about every time I turn it on.

The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so that I won't make the same mistake again.

Just read the original Ars Technica article he "borrowed" all the images from. It's a great article I've referred back to many times; it's better-written and still easy to understand for those not familiar w/ the concepts.

The ECC-specific content begins on page 2.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/a-rel...

Could someone explain the difference between SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19? Is the former the virus and the latter the infection?

I wouldn't count out a company based solely on a poorly-written job description. Those are often put together by less-technical recruiters or the HR department. And yeah, maybe the team that's hiring should be more involved in the actual job posting, but the whole hiring process is such a huge PITA and time-suck that they're too happy to hand off whatever part they can.

I was curious as to why neither C# nor .NET appeared on the "Top Technologies" graph. Then I realized it apparently combines C, C++, and C# into a single bucket, given that the same tag [1] also shows jobs for all three.

[1] https://startup.jobs/c

Awesome. Now what does all that mean in English?

Well, simply put:

  [ccebb 677ce 28f77 86558 2d7cc d67b4 e8f31 8c393 ae867 13593 aa869 3c265],
  [c0021 72510 cee7a 31580 554d3 d49a6 306b9 c1f2c 60c1a 1157c f44c8 31273],
  [682f2 6a4df dc970 3c106 2107c 3dfd5 1506a 6f1b5 af428 829f8 11d06 797dc],
  [d6f84 25e73 76558 6feb0 c67d4 fcc73 b5c8d af4db 2f647 82247 852e7 fc010],
  [f08a8 2ed8f c71bb 12043 5f0f9 190c8 f2ae8 7b30a 4a574 269d0 03be0 a363c],
  [b38c2 10031 37ada 504a8 f2919 3b82b 258fc 5673f c939c a0ef1 46be5 a50d6],
  [93fcd e19f7 0558f e01a6 8beb1 d54b9 9ad20 d6185 adf9b 876a1 a1a94 c9197],
  [92b49 ed290 7a072 fdf1d a61a8 65124 a2025 27153 afa71 a27db 29a2a e5b47],
  [2793f 7171f b18c9 e1945 d31d5 edb66 a1ee0 d9982 e8442 7795d bd4e4 30b41]

Short story: he was a big deal back in the day, has had a couple pretty big stories but these days he's much less influential.

Now he blogs very infrequently, largely concentrating on his slightly-creepy obsession with IBM. The fact that he so easily gets duped by scammers pretending to be Google[1] and then actually blogs about it is quite indicative of how far his finger is from the pulse of technology.

So, no, you're not missing anything.

[1] https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/07/evil-google-waiting-on-l...

Fairly certain that's his wife. He's made a couple mentions of her as "the young and lovely" Mary Alyce and I vaguely recall once that he specifically discussed shooting the photo for that banner and mentioned her.

I’m not married to an editor so much as my bindings.

Agreed, and it's extremely annoying that VS Code has different default bindings on different platforms. I switch between Windows and Linux a lot and there's no simple way to e.g. say "use the default Windows bindings on Linux" or vice-versa.

I have to manually create my own keybindings and then copy them to every machine and then bother with keeping them in sync.

Yes, agreed. In general I guess my point is, I'm not willing to spend several more years of my life while they continually rearrange things that don't matter. I just want a stable, well-supported distro that gets out of my way.

The time cost of switching has still been high enough that I haven't looked elsewhere, but that barrier is approaching...

we'call it ip for ... "internet protocol"? Why is this ip tool managing my ethernet network card?

For CLI tools I use every day, their etymology is far less important to me than their brevity. "ip" suits the bill quite nicely.

Yeah, the name-before-argument thing can be annoying though, but again, at least they're all short.

In other words, they've made a lot of big changes right before an LTS version so that they can get wider usage with those who don't mind being on the bleeding edge. Sounds like they're doing it right :)

I'm putting a lot of hope into 18.04. Been using Ubuntu for over a decade now and my happiness with it has been steadily decreasing. Mostly at this point due to very laggy graphics performance (whether using OSS or closed drivers) on a system that should be very fast.

If 18.04 isn't awesome I'm moving on to something else. So I'm glad to see they're breaking some eggs with 17.10!

I've been using Stackpoint for a while and they do a great job, but be aware that they'll soon start charging $50/mo, which will remove them as a tool for hobbyists.

https://stackpoint.io/#/pricing

They haven't announced a date for when they'll start charging, and I'm not sure how that will affect existing clusters.

Because Kubernetes is a complex beast with many moving parts, and learning about all those moving parts becomes more and more important as your usage grows.

Personally I've used Stackpoint.io to provision some small clusters but I was very excited to see this project because deploying my own cluster from scratch is next on my todo list. Kelsey Hightower's "Kubernetes the Hard Way"[1] is the canonical go-to reference here but it's also very daunting so this looks like a great middle ground.

Let's face it, even today the k8s docs can be quite sparse sometimes or gloss over the details, so knowing how all of the pieces work from the ground up can be a big help. Plus, you prevent vendor lock-in when whatever automated tool you're using doesn't solve your use-case or decides to start charging a lot of money.

[1] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Games updating DLC is nothing new and is not what this is about.

Google did recently change the Android permission model; previously, apps had to request all their permissions at install time and it was all-or-nothing (and frankly, hardly anyone bothered to look them over.)

Now, certain permissions have to be requested when they're needed (at least for recent versions of the SDK) and the user can choose to allow or deny. But an app can't grant itself new permissions without going through the official update process.

Neither Google nor Apple nor any other game platform is going to stop games from downloading new content. That's just how games work these days.

The reason this type of "hot code push" is more attractive on iOS is because the app review process is much longer, so publishers look for ways to skirt it. Looks like Apple is just starting to enforce it more.

This sounds a whole lot like the Keybase filesystem (in intent, if not implementation): https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

Heh, I thought maybe they were sample collection pouches...

I don't use it often anymore as I am on a Linux machine at home - though I did try running it with Mono some years ago.

I'm on Linux at home also, and am loving the combination of .NET Core and VS Code.

I recently coded up a quick ASP.NET Core Web API for a client, which needed to access a MySQL database and an existing SOAP service. I wrote it on Windows using VS 2017, but then out of curiosity I literally just git cloned it on Linux and ran "dotnet restore", "dotnet test" and "dotnet run".

The whole thing worked flawlessly on the first try. All unit tests and integration tests (connecting to real external services) passed, it ran just as quickly, and I was able to debug it in VS Code along with breakpoints, variable inspection etc.

It was never possible to use Mono that effortlessly. Everything required more work just to get running. With .NET Core, platform specificity is the exception, not the rule.

And VS Code is truly a pleasure to use; IMO it's just the right combination of features and performance with a strong plugin ecosystem, which has been missing from Linux.

I've been using .NET professionally and for hobby projects since version 1.1. While initially sceptical of this new MS platform, I was quickly sold on C# compared to Java

And I'm sure your early inclinations were then confirmed when they released 2.0 and their superb implementation of generics :)

I had been a longtime Perl hacker (it was a thing back then) and was still cutting my teeth on the cost/benefit tradeoffs of strongly-typed languages. I remember being quite frustrated in 1.x while attempting to write a data-access layer and having to use lots of casts to write reusable code.

It definitely took me longer than I'd like to admit to wrap my head around the usefulness of generics, but I certainly remember the "aha" moment I had when I realized how much cleaner they'd make my codebase.

In fact, I ended up completely dropping the code-generation tool I had written -- in Perl, of course :) -- to create the base classes which could work directly with our strongly-typed models.

ASP.Net Webforms with AJAX being a particularly frustrating story

Very much agreed; I avoided using .NET for anything in any way web related until MVC came out. Working with those Microsoft black box server controls was just too much.

like the .NET Core launch and migration-strategy not being all that convincing

I can forgive that, since it looks like their migration strategy with the upcoming .NET Standard 2.0 will be much more solid.

Haha, since Subversion was born in the height of XML frenzy, they figured it was a good idea for the built-in web interface to just output XML and a default XSLT. That way if anyone wanted to customize it, they could do so to their heart's content by just specifying a different XSLT.

I loved Subversion at the time, and so created the TortoiseSVN Menu plugin [1] for Firefox, and an accompanying XSLT to add lots of rich info and styling into the main UI.

It's something that should have been pretty simple but I remember spending lots of my free time back then to get it just right. Funny thing is, since I worked on it at home but mostly used it at work, I really could have used a good distributed VCS at the time :D

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tortoisesvn-m...

Yes, yes, yes. For example I am perfectly okay with Google slurping up every bit of data they can about me, tracking my every move etc. because the benefit I receive (i.e. really spooky-accurate suggestions & info in Google Now) is worth the privacy tradeoff.

Also, based on their past actions and statements, my level of trust with them is very high that they will be transparent with their uses of that data and that they will diligently guard against that data being put to other uses that they or I didn't allow.

But what Vizio has done here makes it perfectly clear that providing any benefit to the end users was never their goal and that keeping the true nature of this program secret was an intentional act. That's enough to ensure I'll never buy a Vizio product in the future.

Couldn't agree more. If .NET Core had been around 5 years ago, I never would have bothered to learn Rails. That's not a knock against Rails (ASP.NET still can't touch their "it just works" asset pipeline), but I've been a C# developer for much longer, and a Linux fan for even longer. So it's awesome that I can finally have my cake and eat it too.

C# has become such a joy for me to work with. The language itself has been progressing at an impressive pace without adding too much superfluous stuff or making it unwieldy. I feel like it's gotten to the point that most of the pain of strong typing is gone without sacrificing any of the benefits.

How else would you propose they give any level assurance that it's real users signing them?

Thanks for this! What a gorgeous photo. Still looks very surreal.

Thanks, I'm obviously letting my video game colored view of the world get the better of me :)

Are those bullet holes to the right of the door? This looks like something straight out of a video game.

Note to Wired: "Enlarge Photo" doesn't mean what you apparently think it means.

But that's part of the promise of USB-C / Thunderbolt 3... interchangeable, standards-based docks that work with a single connection. I'm currently using my Dell XPS 15 (9550) with the Plugable USB-C Docking Station which uses a single cable to power the laptop, drive two monitors (one DisplayPort alt mode, the other over USB), gig ethernet, and a few USB devices.

Granted, it's not as seamless as it could be, but it's still new technology. There are issues with the USB-C connection cutting out when wifi is also on, so I've gotten in the habit of just turning off wifi when I'm docked. We're currently in the "first generation" of consumer USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 devices, so I expect those issues to get ironed out pretty quickly.

It's apparently not meant to be live yet; if you go to "XPS Laptops" from the main product page you're still taken to the 9550.

I sure as hell hope so. Typing this on a 2015 XPS 15 as we speak, and the incessant "chirp chirp chirp" any time it's in a non-horizontal position (such as when docked) drives me insane.

Finally convinced support to take it in for warranty (expires in a few weeks), which means I'll be without it for a while, but hopefully they at least can swap out the mobo with a non-chirpy version...