cpswan

It would be even more successful if it was possible to actually buy the boards.

I got one early on, and I would have more, but every time I've looked since they've been out of stock. A big part of the RPi success story is that they figured out early on that supply chain would be a problem and got the right partners involved to deal with that.

I landed at a large bank in 2000 just as J2EE was exploding onto the scene. Looking back it was the app servers that mattered more than the language (though the language made the app servers possible).

BEA Weblogic was particularly popular. Its text (later XML) based configuration made it easy to get going (more so than IBM's competing WebSphere, where somebody had been too clever and used entity beans for config, so you needed to work with a DBA just to get started).

Weblogic also came with really good samples and examples, which covered pretty much all of the useful areas of the J2EE frameworks. Just about every app that made it to production started out with the sample code and got modified until it was doing what was needed.

There were of course other app servers. Cold Fusion had a loyal following for a while, but never escaped out of web apps and into line of business apps.

The move of J2EE and accompanying app serves from web to line of business (starting in the back office) was mostly down to productivity and skills. The main alternative was generally C++, which was viewed as harder to do and harder to hire for. There were of course many arguments over performance, but eventually the JVM got plenty fast enough and people learned to avoid the 'Bitter Java' anti patterns.

The polling interval for POP (there is no IMAP) can be up to an hour, which I find sufficient reason not to be happy with that approach.

The Ultrabook segment was defined as a response to the (original) MBA, and I've yet to see an Ultrabook that truly competes with the MBA on performance/price.

Despite all of the sponsorship from Intel, it also wouldn't surprise me at all to see Ultrabook OEMs trailing Apple by weeks/months getting Haswell based stuff out the door.

I can live without Retina. I can live within 512GB SSD. But I really need 16GB RAM... fingers crossed.

Haswell demos at IDF last year were pretty awesome, so I think longer battery life at the same travel weight (and better overall performance) is pretty much a given.

It's good to see that they've found something useful to do with the resources previously committed to Reader.

It's an illustration that prosecutors have discretion that could be applied differently in this case.

I was thinking the other day about Bitcoin using proof of work (which uses energy), which makes it an energy proxy. It therefore seems to make little sense that one would pay for energy to be used with energy that has been used. Or is time arbitrage of energy something really useful?

Strong (hardware PKI based) authentication for mobile banking (user and transaction auth by touching phone to bank card).

Just like the religious fanatics in the open source software world there seem to be some that want every piece of open source hardware to become some sort of toaster project. The RPi has never even claimed to be OSH, it's just a cheap thing to run OSS on, and there's plenty of educational benefit (in plenty of settings nowhere near schools) to be had from that.

The DWP aren't alone in this pointless waste of IPs - it's just the scale of their squandering that's worse than usual. I know of many companies doing the same with (multiple) class B ranges. Far too much of the IPv4 space is dark for this reason - an early land grab followed by ignorant deployment. Perhaps only now we're getting to the right level of scarcity and open market value for something to be done about it.

Customs don't normally call the special branch, and whilst being detained for hours is now normal practice in the US it's still (thankfully) pretty unusual in the UK.

Here's what happens next:

1. Drones become more and more popular as kids/hackers toys

2. Eventually a drone is used in a real terrorist plot

3. Our politicians over react and ban drones

4. We all write tweets and blogs about what clueless morons our politicians are because the whole thing has been widely understood since (before?) Scott Adams wrote 'The Religion War'

5. Drones don't get unbanned for use outside of police/law enforcement because of whining from the hacker community

It's crazy how the whole movie plot driven security industry has been able to associate naked electronics with bomb making. A friend was commenting last night that the bare PCB of the Raspberry Pi could be seen as dangerous/threatening, and I was speculating about how much trouble I'd get in if I tried to take Arduino based home made toys on a flight.

I'm now feeling lucky that the OSHUG meeting last night, where the topic was drones, didn't get raided - http://oshug.org/event/20

The industry has been working on software SIMs for some time. I had a telco talking to me about the initiative years ago.

The problem is that the soft SIM provisioning process will become like DRM for phones. The users desires and the service providers desires are fundamentally misaligned here. Users want to be able to choose freely from the best tariffs available to them in a given location. Service providers want to lock people in and keep roaming expensive.

It's funny that some of the areas that he touches on are also things where Windows requires local admin. Clearly a messed up privileged action model seems to be common across OSes.

It would be nice if the inspired by line actually linked to the essay.

a shame that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to subscribe for future parts

I've found the TI MSP-430 fairly good as a cheaper/rawer alternative to Arduino. It comes with Eclipse based tooling to program the microcontrollers in C or assembly.

I've often wondered about the sucky pay issue - particularly for those working in London. I can only hope/guess that there are some benefits like subsidised housing that make these roles tenable.

Indeed. Perhaps I have been unlucky, but of 5 SSDs that I've ever touched 2 have had catastrophic controller failures.

Let's not forget the education angle here. Most quants these days come through similar sausage machines, and C++ is de rigueur.

I'm relieved to see that this doesn't affect the Ribbit Mobile service (which I use daily).

This leaves me wondering what BT will now do for an API layer to its network? Buying the Ribbit developer platform was the excuse for killing off the 21CN SDK. On the other hand most telcos seem to get by fine without an API/SDK.

27" models at 2560x1440 are becoming more affordable. My brother pointed me at Hazro, which he's using in his iPhone dev shop. I've also seen a substantial fall in price for the Dell U2711.

I've been looking at this a lot recently as I consider moving away from the 2 screen setup I've had for years. My main motivation is that my laptop docking stations only have one digital output. VGA just doesn't cut it for a clear screen.

The drop in price on the 27" models has me hoping that the 30" 2560x1600 ones will also come down. I've wanted one of those for ages, though when I once used an Apple cinema screen at that size/resolution it felt kind of weird.

Title updated.

'no data available', but as I said I don't especially care about SEO, so I didn't have the tools configured.

If the search terms had dropped the post from page 1 to page 2 then no big deal, but there seems to be more to it than that. Terms that were frequently bringing visitors aren't now showing up anywhere near where near where things were before.

The general tone of feedback seems to be that this is normal, nothing interesting to see, move along. I was just hoping for a better explanation than that.

I made the implication because something seems to have changed fairly fundamentally, and although it may be ridiculous to extrapolate from such limited data I wouldn't be at all surprised if other Wordpress.com users are affected.

There's a pretty good howto for that at http://www.mnxsolutions.com/security/two-factor-ssh-with-goo...