randomf1fan

Yeah, I did watch those, but haven't kept up with the latest news - not sure if they have announced any progress.

Thank you, I didn't know this wasn't actually announced.

Question for you - I have created a few (okay, two) UWP apps, but the limited success of the store has made me look to using Xamarin. Only thing is, Xamarin's XAML is sufficiently different from UWP's XAML that I got disoriented and gave up.

If I want to target cross platform apps (including Linux and Mac), should I wait for Xamarin Forms 3 or will UWP eventually expand to cover Mac & Linux?

I'm only a hobby programmer so I don't want to waste hours learning something that will be a dead end.

Any insight you might have would be very useful! thanks

"I was working in games, and testing a 3d game while walking was often disorienting and would cause me to trip on myself or walk off the treadmill."

I chuckled when I read that! I hope you didn't get hurt, of course, but it must have been quite funny for your coworkers.

Cheers for the post-lunch laugh :)

Thanks, that was a good read.

I'd be really interested in hearing from someone who uses this on the floor. Is it really all they say it is? The marketing and PR looks good, but do mechanics really love it?

To be fair to the author, he does say this

"I don’t ask for or expect any sympathy. I am responsible for my quagmire—no one else. I didn’t get gulled into overextending myself by unscrupulous credit merchants. Basically, I screwed up, royally. I lived beyond my means, primarily because my means kept dwindling."

Yes, exactly. That's why I don't get it. I can understand going through a rough patch where you pay the minimum cause you can't afford it, but I cannot understand constantly paying the minimum when you can afford to pay much more

I'm always baffled by one thing in these sorts of articles - the belief that paying the minimum due on your credit cards is the right thing to do.

I'm not going to pontificate about living within your means or whatever, obviously people have reasons for doing what they do. But I don't understand how so many people are cheerfully paying the minimums and treating credit as basically an extension on their salary.

I have seen this at work as well, people making low six- figure incomes paying minimums. I've even had someone tell me that paying in full is bad for your credit score.

Is this a generally held belief? Do most people pay the minimum?

This was inevitable. I wonder how Blue Apron is planning to compete.

Microsoft Azure has "Functions" which is their name for serverless

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/

The Register has a few more details - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/17/ibm_latest_mainfram...

It features the next generation of IBM's CMOS mainframe technology, with a 10-core CPU chip using 14 nm silicon-on-insulator technology, and running at 5.2GHz, claimed to be the fastest processor in the industry. Each core has hardware accelerated encryption implementing a CP Assist for Cryptographic Function (CPACF). The CPU also has 1.5 times more on-chip cache per core compared to the z13. There can be up to 32TB of memory, three times the z13 maximum, and its IO is three times faster as well.

While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile)

I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)

That's not really fair. The data should speak for itself, and I for one found the argument cogent. Did you find any errors or bias?

Otherwise you might as well say the CDC saying something about Disease is invalid.

I think this depends a lot on two people - your immediate manager, and their immediate manager. I've been lucky to have great management, and I've been able to do a lot of stuff that the article talks about, and I work in a stodgy BigCo (old school tech co).

I once went to 99Designs and paid $2000 for a designer to redo a certain set of pages on our corporate site. Start to finish, the project took 27 days. This is insanely fast in our context - the usual process would have taken 6-8 months, and at least $100,000. The large agency we work with would have dedicated a team, spun up a project, set up a series of meetings...

To be fair, I get the need for process and I totally get the value of working that way, but it's nice to have management that backs you up when you really need to get something done fast. And yes, once the need for those pages was over (conference related), I made sure they were handed over to the right team for long term management, and not just abandoned as orphan pages.

At first I thought this was silly. But on reflection, it seems like a great idea - why not make your solar grid more attractive? Imagine flying over that happy panda and the free publicity for solar energy. You'd probably never notice a rectangular grid, but this sounds like the kind of thing the pilot would tell you to look at.

Australia should build a kangaroo shaped one. Or, even better, a koala!

Unfortunately I'm not authorized to publicly speak for the corporation, so I can't really give you any more details. Sorry about that.

Sure - this was in reference to my top level comment, but I see that this dropped lower down the page.

I work for a large Fortune 150, one that you've heard of, and we have a security team that is constantly scanning our network for weaknesses and potential exploit vectors. They will kill (firewall off) any sites that might compromise the network and tell the application owner to fix the issue before they allow it back on the public net.

Yes, that's a fair point.

However, it's still better than having expired certs and a team trying to figure out who owns the app, trying to get in touch with them, asking them to update the cert, finding out that they are no longer with the company...

It's even worse when the service is something that a small team created as a POC - which then became customer facing and mission critical, with the team having moved on to something else.

And it's funny how often this happens over a holiday weekend.

Yes, I know that the issues are deeper and more to do with large company process and bureaucracy than anything technical. But at least you can have secure services that don't fall over.

And a quick follow up - our security team does not allow rogue * .company.com wildcards - they hunt down those sites and boot them off the network.

They do, however, allow *.<service>.company.com.

This is great news for organizations. I work at a large Fortune 150, and there are lots of services that require wildcard certs. We have a process to get these from our internal CA as well as a third-party - the internal CA is automated, but the third-party (for external services) can be slow and cumbersome, to the point where many departments just buy their own cert. And then a year later, they move on, forget, etc, and suddenly we have services that have expired certs and there's a scramble to fix them.

This move by Letsencrypt should hopefully make them the standard for any external service that doesn't require an EV cert.

Your comment reflects what I heard last week from a friend. He's a PE (Professional Engineer) working with a large power utility company, and his company uses software that, in his words, "really sucks".

He was telling me this because he got a job offer from a startup, where they wanted him to be the subject matter expert for an application they were developing for power utilities.

It's a good offer, and he's tempted, but he's not sure if he can fit into the software/startup culture. In addition, he felt that the developers were looking to use him like a reference book - he got the impression that the founders saw software as the answer to everything, and that they didn't see power engineering as a particularly hard domain. There was (in his words) a distinct whiff of "developers are the cool guys".

This turned him off somewhat. So he's not sure if he'll take the offer, and I'd say he's leaning no.

Just an anecdote to illustrate the clash of cultures.

That's really terrible news. My condolences to the Kalanick family in this difficult time. I hope his dad recovers soon.

I'm going to call my mom today and tell her I love her.

How does one realistically protect against these new attack vectors? It's all become so quick - the malware infects your machine, and seconds later your repos are cloned.

Most computers are always connected to the internet when they're on, even if they don't necessarily need to be. Airgapping isn't really used outside of very sensitive networks, but I'm starting to think we need to head towards a model of connecting machines only when really needed.

Of course the cloud based world doesn't allow for that, and perhaps I'm a luddite, but I increasingly find myself disabling the network connection when I'm working on my PC. Kind of like the dial-up days.

No, Firefox.

I did that. It took me two years to move everything over (email took the longest time), but it's been totally worth it. I still have my @gmail address, but it's only there to forward email to my real address, and I never log in or send email. Besides junk mail and spam, I am now at a point where I get maybe 1-2 real emails on my @gmail account, and then I tell the sender to use my new address.

My google usage is now

1. Occasionally watching Youtube videos in an incognito window

2. Very rarely using !g to search Google via DDG

3. Using Gmaps in an incognito window a couple times a month

and that's it. I don't find that I miss it at all. If I had to stop using Youtube and Gmaps, I won't miss 'em.

Yes, you're right. My uncle calls him by a nickname (it's a Bengali thing - you have a public name and a private name, and your private name is only used by family and close friends),hence the error.

Are Imgur links accepted?

https://imgur.com/a/ydsjw

My uncle and Satyajit Ray's son were (and still are) great friends. I met Mr. Ray (senior) a few times, and I remember him as a wonderfully gentle man, who took the time to talk to a six year old me as if I was an adult. He didn't talk down to me, he sat and told me stories.

I didn't know then that he was such a famous man. I just knew him as the sweet man who told great stories - and he did tell great stories! He also asked me about my life (my six-year-old life), and genuinely listened to everything I said. He was just a great guy.

One of my prize possessions is a sketch he did for me - he saw me reading a comic book (Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn), and asked me to name my favorite character. I pointed to a panel showing Snowy (Tintin's dog) running. He whipped out his pad, and sketched that panel for me. I remember watching with amazement as Snowy came to life!

I still have that sketch, carefully framed. I wish I had been older and gotten to know him better, but I'm glad I met him. My uncle grew up with Sanjit (Ray Junior), and has a treasure trove of stories, but I can't share those.

If you like WoT, try the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.