whazzmaster

I'm not sure why you were getting downvoted because the one thing that stuck out to me, after saying to myself "Huh, I'd love to get one of those to play around with." was that in the marketing page [1] it said "Go to microsoftstore.com/whatever" to preorder one yet when I poked around that site there was no reference whatsoever to the Surface Pro 3.

It just seems odd to go to so much trouble for the unveiling and then say, "but you can't check out the specs/look at accessories/drool over it" until 12:01am.

[1] http://blog.surface.com/2014/05/announcing-surface-pro-3/

When I read stuff like this I try reeeeal hard to not immediately dismiss it as @hipsterhacker stereotypes, but weird groupthink like this shocks me.

Keeping data that is by it's nature relational in a relational database is, to my mind, obvious. That it isn't for startups that are building their entire business on data foundations (because it's OLD!) is genuinely mind-boggling to me. I guess I'm the one that's old now.

My office also provides VPN phones for remote employees. Plug it into your network, login with your token and you have your full extension, vmail, etc. available anywhere.

I was confused for a moment at the app name as I thought this referred to the excellent CodeBox application[1]; I thought maybe that app had been evolved into a full IDE.

[1] http://www.shpakovski.com/codebox/

For small things ClickOnce is fine, but it's a pain in the ass to automate. For example, there's no way to synchronize the 'version' of the installer with the version of the EXE it's installing. I had to hack[1] it so I could pull the version metadata off the EXE assembly and then force it into the XML of the project file where the ClickOnce settings are stored.

There's also no ability to publish the built installer outside of the UI- my build scripts had to build the /app.publish directory and then just copy the whole shebang to a network location for deployment. I'm not as upset about this being a separate step, but if they indeed allow you to configure and deploy the installer from within the UI why not expose an API to do it as well?

Overall I think ClickOnce is fine for internal, self-updating tools. It's worth noting, however, that I was inspired to create my workflow based on looking at what Github was doing with their windows client.

[1] http://whazzing.com/blog/2013/04/11/automated-clickonce-buil...

Families do exist, you know- even in San Francisco!

For the very overweight this is very likely; running a substantial daily caloric deficit just by eating healthy and drinking water will cause large early losses. This isn't sustainable, however, and really just kickstarts the process. As someone nears a breakpoint (different for everyone) they'll fall into the one pound per week rule.

It's tough to for any author to reduce the concepts of weight management beyond 'calories in' and 'calories out.'

I've been on a weight rollercoaster for the past 10 years, varying between 180 and 230 lbs and I've read many of the same books the author names, and while they all may lead to self-discovery on what makes YOUR body tick, none of them contain the mystical ONE THING that will cause you to lose 20 lbs in one week. In this I agree whole-heartedly with the author.

For those that are very overweight, I do highly recommend the advice to change your diet first, without starting an extensive exercise regimen. Many folks' regular diet is so bad that just eating healthy food and drinking water will cause them to lose 5+ lbs in the first week. You need to buy-in early on to the idea that exercise isn't about burning off the food you ate (as that's impossible) but about raising your metabolism and conditioning your body.

The code is on GitHub; that would be a great pull request!

A couple of thoughts (including some commentary on the article itself- sorry I couldn't help it).

The central idea of this article, which is that slowing DVD sales due to the explosion of streaming options are slashing profit margins, is fascinating to me primarily due to the relative absence of blame-shifting onto 'piracy.' There was a mention of it, but it seems Hollywood has finally moved past the 'Piracy is causing all our woes, DMCADMCADMCA' delusions of the late 90s/early 2000s. As a Slashdotter from back in the day that saw such scolding played out on the front page I find it strange (yet optimistic) that they finally saw the real writing on the wall.

However, even though the central conceit of the article is interesting to me I find the language just goddamned terrible. I guess if you're looking for properly-flavored industry news then sentences like "[h]is first picture was the tentpole smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he already had three television shows on the air" and "[m]ore recently, he released the smash Identity Thief, with Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman" are right up your alley. I'm suprised the author didn't describe some upcoming SMASH deal as BOFFO.

In today's deficit boogeyman environment I can't say that extra revenue isn't a consideration, but really the tax was to attempt to stem a runaway financial system that has become the blood-sucking vampire squid[1] that's taking more and more of the wealth while providing little of value to the country.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/andrew-clark-on-america/2...

I've had several Fitbit's and own the Withings scale; love them to pieces. My early Fitbit's broke when I sat down and caught them on the arms of a chair (once at a beer garden, natch) but the new Flex bracelet is incredibly nice.

Ah; FYI the API now supports Intraday Time Series fetching.

See https://wiki.fitbit.com/display/API/API-Get-Intraday-Time-Se... for more information. You can retrieve data in 1 min or 15 min increments.

What data do they hold hostage?

A potential market (evolving and growing because of the ubiquity of cameras and video cameras) has stated what it wants. A company that can deliver solutions to this market can scale with the the market. The OP's point is that no one (specifically Apple in his situation) seems to be really excelling in this space because of a pre-smart phone and pre-'video cameras everywhere' view of the world.

What you so condescendingly refer to as an 'entitlement attitude' is frustration with the widespread and accelerating ability to create content but the lack of ways to manage and organize it. Full stop.

HN startupers always talk about changing the world; instead of CRUDing more status updates, selling more ads or selling cheese graters online you could aim higher and solve the problems that the changing digital world is asking for. You could even use Node.js to do it!

I don't think these people fancy themselves as journalists.

Wow, that worked incredibly well; thanks for the tip! 1080p videos load extremely quickly now.

U-Verse subscriber here. I have 25Mbps down and I'm glad someone else is noticing this. I first noticed it early of Summer 2012 that 1080p videos were (literally) unplayable; as in no matter how long you waited the video would never start. 720p videos will buffer every 15-30 seconds.

This happens no matter what other bandwidth is being used by other applications or devices. I've actually shut down everything in my house and used the desktop on cat5 to see if it was wireless issues or anything, but the entire rest of the web is snappy and responsive except for HD YouTube.

Thanks AT&T-- the two hundred and forty goddamned dollars a month I'm paying you should defray the cost of the configuration of your service to flirt with the very line of net neutrality.

Dear god please Google Fiber come to Madison.

Cashing out big is a 1 in 50 proposition? Wow! Source?

Did Aristophanes and Shakespeare need to spend $15,000 to $75,000 per year for 4 to 8 years to learn their craft?

My four-month-old rMBP's screen failed last week and now I'm staring at replacing it out-of-pocket, or never using it as a portable machine again and leaving it hooked up to an external monitor. I'm so unhappy with Apple right now.

EDIT: I couldn't find the default warranty (sans AppleCare) and based this comment off of other similar situations (including OP). I found out this morning that it IS COVERED by the default warranty, so I'm not unhappy anymore. This is my bad.

VS2010 implemented much of the C++11 feature set, and VS2012 implements almost all of it. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/hh567368.asp... for a table comparison of C++11 support.

I'm itching to start using this stuff in QuickBooks; I love smart pointers but hate auto_ptr and being able to safely use STL containers with smart pointers opens a new world of entity processing.

Why is that ironic?

I'm not a Gen Yer, but I must respond that the situation you describe really should be a teachable moment to the younger worker; explain to them why their idea may have been tried before and failed, or perhaps it was fundamentally unsound for a reason they hadn't thought of.

QuickBooks Payroll is an add-on whose code lives side-by-side (and is deployed with) the QuickBooks Desktop code. I am the developer that maintains the integration of the TurboTax tax processing code and engines technology with QuickBooks' accounting and payroll functionality.

"Payroll deductions are pretty simple" is not as true when you require nationwide support. The Yonkers residency tax, the Indiana counties payroll tax, etc. are not as simple as getting the employees' states and running calcs. Add in non-tax deductions (401(k), wage garnishments, worker's comp) and you've now found yourself in an interesting world.

No, payroll code must track fed, state, and local tax rules in order to calculate employees' paychecks and payroll taxes due.

I'm a developer on QuickBooks for Windows.

Code bases where fundamental aspects (models, database interaction, custom UI libraries, etc.) were developed and solidified far before unit testing was the norm or expected are a tough nut to crack, but we are making improvements every day. Within the last three months I've solved compilation and linker hurdles and we're now integrated with googletest and googlemock, which are fantastic libraries!

Also, while our list of C++ unit tests is small but growing now, the use of NUnit, etc. was championed from Day One on C# projects stretching back to our usage of .Net 1.1.

It's interesting how much working with Ruby the last 7 years has affected my C++ development. I'm dual-wielding Avid Grimm's Objects-on-Rails and Michael Feather's Working Effectively with Legacy Code with great results.

Most of them grudgingly bought smartphones within the last year and now wouldn't give them up. I yell at them about it but they do fail as often as they succeed. On the other hand, one of them is doing a home birth... so there is that, I guess.

Many of my closest friends adhere to the "A2K" philosophy (Amish 2000) where they try not to use any tech released more recently than 2000. They fail as often as they succeed, but social networking is one area that they have largely succeeded in staying away from. In a stunning revelation (and a large dose of sarcasm), they found you do not need Facebook to remain close with your friends.

I left Facebook a year ago because of THEIR haranguing; if my closest friends refuse to use it then my news feed is just filled to the brim with useless noise from high school (non-)friends and distant cousins.

Don't extrapolate anything from this or try it at home; this is what happens when you go to school for computer science and work at a silicon valley tech company yet every single one of your close friends was an english major in college.

That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.