From my experience Rails devs tend to care more about the quality of their work/impact of their changes on teammates, read dev blogs/books, go to meetups, care about testing/documentation, ways to source good candidates and working with good people.
Basically they just care more about doing good work. I must underscore though that my impressions are tempered by the fact that I primarily worked in enterprisey Windows-stack jobs, but that's also more typical - you're not going to find many modern startups going w/ .NET or Java. The tools themselves aren't really the problem, it's the implied culture.
Why is this? Probably because of the goals of each. .NET and Java were an outpouring of efforts from the 90s to harness issues of scale on enterprise systems. It's a pre vs. post information age phenomena, open source folks are going to be more of a hobbyist mindset.
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've had many an argument with Randy over HLA and I agree. His point is that it makes assembly and computer programming at a low level easier to understand but I just don't see it.
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 have an older APU1C4 with two WLAN cards (WLE200NX) and it's hosting two physical APs and a few virtual ones (diff BSSID/subnet one running at 2.4 ghz other at 5). I just run vanilla Debian on it... The SD card has finally become corrupted over the years, however. When I reboot it, all my changes that were supposedly flushed to disk are lost. Thankfully I only reboot it occasionally when there are critical kernel updates. I just rsync over the filesystem in memory to facilitate restoring the previous configurations.
Anyway, I run various services on it, aside from hostapd... It acts as my firewall, gateway, access point, and runs some other services like nginx to proxy some services from my LAN across subnets (like plex, etc) and motiond as a security camera monitor. I've used it as an SSH style VPN at times, in a pinch. When our WAN goes down I can simply plug my phone in to the APU via USB and tweak some iptables rules to use the LTE connection from the phone over USB network interface.
I also have a newer APU2C4, along w/ an AC WLAN card and an msata drive... have had it for years just sitting there, grr. I really only got the newer one since it has AES-NI support on the processor and I can do much heavier VPN traffic, but the SD card issues have become annoying, so I think this post has encouraged me to finally set it up this weekend... Thanks :P
Anyway, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on any of the pcengines stuff... Go for it!
Just make sure the WLAN cards you use are well supported via hostapd. :)
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.
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.
You'd need the USB port, hub it's plugged into, all the way to the controller, to be aware of passing this information around, though you could probably use any sort of reporting on total voltage/amperage downstream for detecting it if it reported that information.
(Unfortunately, AFAIK, most USB hubs don't report power draw for devices that are "just" drawing power and don't use the data pins, so you don't get that.)
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?
Alledgedly, the FBI already has the information (via iCloud backup), or at least had access to the information before an FBI made error.
In any case, Apple has already been known to comply requests to hand over data on an iPhone. If it were simply the case they needed the information, Apple may have done the whole thing behind closed doors.
The FBI decided to bring this case out into the open, and given the reports about even more phones that need to be cracked open, you have to consider that this may have been a move made to force Apple's hand.
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.
Document developers and user agent designers are constantly discovering new ways to express their ideas through new markup. In XML, it is relatively easy to introduce new elements or additional element attributes. The XHTML family is designed to accommodate these extensions through XHTML modules and techniques for developing new XHTML-conforming modules (described in the XHTML Modularization specification). These modules will permit the combination of existing and new feature sets when developing content and when designing new user agents.
If your document is just pure XHTML 1.0 (not including other markup languages) then you will not yet notice much difference. However as more and more XML tools become available, such as XSLT for tranforming documents, you will start noticing the advantages of using XHTML. XForms for instance will allow you to edit XHTML documents (or any other sort of XML document) in simple controllable ways. Semantic Web applications will be able to take advantage of XHTML documents.
The old HTML behaviors would be achieved by XML stylesheets, rendering into HTML4 or XML events.
There were then a plethora of standards planned to augment XHTML with application level.
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).
If so, what are your thoughts on why that may be?