nerraga

Can you elaborate you that last statement? Are Rails developers less terrible than the C/C#/C++ people with whom you’ve worked?

If so, what are your thoughts on why that may be?

Is TLPI available for free now? It's a great book and I hope that people will continue to support both NoStarch and the author.

The second edition introduces high-level assembly (HLA) though. I never found HLA to be that appealing. I'd be curious to know if anyone who has read the book found it to be useful in learning assembly. I used "Assembly Language for x86 processors" by Kip Irvine, and I thought it was pretty good.

I installed OpenBSD on my apu and picked up a Ubiquiti AP AC Pro for wifi. I also picked up a couple wifi nics that I'd intended to use with hostapd as you suggested. However, I had some spare amazon pts to throw at the Ubitquiti hardware, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It was all super simple to set up, and I'm more than happy with it so far.

Previously I was using an ASUS RT-N66U with tomato/shibby, but it had been acting a little flaky for a while - 5ghz would stop a few times a week, eth connections would drop, overall wifi connectivity was mediocre at best. The performance was pretty similar before flashing with tomato.

My new solution is likely drawing a little more power, but I've had no problems with it. Also, I'm impressed with OpenBSD's simplicity. I've tinkered with FreeBSD in the past and found it a little complex. OpenBSD has proven to be significantly more straightforward and easy to configure.

Thanks for the encouragement!

I picked up a couple of these and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. They're pretty inexpensive little machines and they ship quick from pcengines.

I have openbsd on one and ubuntu on the other. I'm using the openbsd one for dns, tftp, and a handful of projects. I was thinking about making the ubuntu one into an ap but I'm not sure about what kind of performance to expect vs my current off the shelf router. Have you used it as an access point?

I do agree that you can pick up a good linux laptop that will run circles around today's MBP (system76 fully spec'd lemur or gazelle) but, imo the overall industrial design leaves a bit to be desired.

I have a Dell XPS Developer edition - I definitely think it's a step in the right direction. I agree with you in terms of screen and build quality. The battery life is mediocre at best. The trackpad isn't terrible but it's certainly not something I'd compare to my MacBook (even a 2010 model). OS complaints aside, mac trackpads really stand out.

Interesting project but it looks to me like it's solving an entirely different problem. "usbkill is a simple program with one goal: quickly shutdown the computer when a USB is inserted or removed."

The article is referring to a USB cable that has been modified to phone home using either RF or some other covert channel. I'd think that USB Kill would be completely unaware of any such compromise given that it's only looking for a disrupted connection.

Your Apple engineers smuggling code example seems a little out of left field.

I haven't been following this super closely but as the recall the FBI is essentially asking Apple to provided them with a backdoored OS that lets them get around the passcode attempt limits. Apple is concerned that this both sets a precedent while also providing the FBI with a way to get around any passcode on any iOS device they possess. Cook has stated repeatedly that there is no way to guarantee that a backdoored OS would only be used for this one instance.

You say you're in favor of the FBIs request as long as the firmware isn't handed to them - but isn't that exactly what they're asking?

I'd really appreciate an invite if you still have any. It's wild to see just how in demand these are right now.

Source? I always took XHTML to be an effort to make html into a stricter more parse-friendly format. Xhtml lets you use an xml parser to pull apart a page rather than having to deal with some kind of markup tag soup (which also makes it a great target for tooling within an IDE). XAML is concerned with layouts and binding in ways that, I don't believe, were ever intended for Xhtml. I could be wrong but they've always seemed to be worlds apart.

That only addresses the language component though, right? You'd still be stuck with HTML and CSS. I'm okay with javascript although I'd love to see another language supported in a similar first class fashion. It's HTML and particularly CSS that feel too overloaded, document-centric, and just plain hacky. I think something a little closer to XAML, or possibly like AML, would be a great addition. It'd be great to have support for a responsive layout without having to deal with responsive design as it exists today (amazing as it is).

I think it's coming. There was a HN post about MS working on bringing Obj-C to MS without any kind of emulation layer simply by leveraging llvm and the existing MS C++ compiler. It's called Project Islandwood (https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges/project-islandwood) and in a video presentation about it there was also mention of work on Swift (although Swift support wasn't official). MS is really moving in some interesting directions these days and I'm all for it.

I think the debugging experience is the same as just about any other platform that I've worked on. It's not significantly better or worse (I work mostly in C++/VS/Win have recently started work on a mobile project that required me to get acquainted with Xcode).

I'm comfortable with Objective C but I can certainly see the allure of Swift. Having said that, I'll bet that it's less XCode/Swift that is preventing newcomers from iterating quickly as much as the platform itself. Rather than really learn the platform, quite a few devs seem content treating it like browser and leaning on a webview.

I'm thrilled to see where React Native takes us but something tells me I'd have a hard time getting it past the lawyers based on some of the licensing comments I've read here.

The fact that the article is mentioning MemGC as a defense against use-after-free attacks (something I don't believe managed languages need be concerned) and the way Control-Flow-Guard is described leads me to think it's primarily C++. Probably a mix of native/managed, but I suspect that any managed code is kept to a minimum given the emphasis on native protection and countermeasures. If this is the case then I'd be interested in their rationale in deciding not to go 100% managed.

At approx. 26min he mentions four processors that their code generator has to target: ARM32, x86, x64, and a new one coming out in the fall. What would that be? ARM64? *edit - never mind. Last five seconds they hint at it as arm64. MS is definitely doing some interesting stuff these days.

I agree that the government can do a lot worse and that governments certain have in the past. That said, the more comfortable the relationship between government and a corporation the more likely one is to benefit from the resources and pull of the other.

A corporation won't bust down your door when they can just have LE do it on their behalf. The iPhone 4 leak comes to mind... http://www.fastcompany.com/1628188/police-raid-gizmodo-edito...

The iPad air is less than 10" diagonal (9.7?) which seems like a bit of a difference from 13". I've got a late 2010 MBP 13" and it's pretty large compared to the iPad. I'd love to see a 12" MBP with or without a retina display. It reminds me of the old iBook G3 12" I fell in love with years ago.

It's interesting that you'd say this as I've found myself doing the same thing for very much the same reasons. I'm actually a little hesitant to use Chrome at all except in those cases where I need flash (I don't tend to install flash and usually rely on Chrome's bundled plugin).

Chrome is a great browser and the built-in developer tools really seem to be raising the bar but for casual browsing I've pretty much switched to Firefox or Safari (depending on the platform).

I think you'd be hard pressed to run Win8 on a 32Gb drive with 4Gb Ram (although, admittedly, my Surface Pro runs Win8 adequately on 4Gb so it's the tiny drive that will get you).

If you compare the base 1299(wifi) Pixel to a 1299MBA(13") they look about equal as far as I can see.

The Pixel gives you a higher resolution display (2560x1700 vs 1440x900) and a slight bump in processor speed (i5/1.8Ghz vs i5/1.3GHz). The MBA also has an intel HD Graphics 5000 vs the Pixel's HD 4000.

The drawback to the Pixel imo is that there is no 8GB ram option and it's stuck with a 32 GB drive (even if it is an SSD). Also, the MBA has a longer battery life (8h vs 5h) and USB3 ports instead of USB2.

It's actually the battery life that pushes me towards the MBA. I picked up an XPS13 "Sputnik" in an effort to move away from Apple hardware and was immediately disappointed with the battery life. The Pixel doesn't appear to be any stronger on this front.