tolger

Yes, Windows 7 was the sweet spot. Clean, uncluttered and functional.

I second this. WSL2 is very well integrated. You just open a terminal and have your Ubuntu (or Debian or whatever you set as default) environment ready to go. Even though it's running in a VM, whenever I start Tomcat, I can access it from the Windows side using http://localhost/... It's that well integrated. VS Code opens my projects inside WSL as if they were local.

I second the Garmin Instinct Solar as a really good everyday watch. I got tired of charging my Apple Watch everyday and getting annoying notifications all the time. I just wanted something to keep track of my walks, track my sleep and give me basic watch functions such as alarms, timers and stopwatch. The Instinct is perfect for that.

I also have it set so that the backlight turns automatically on when it's dark and I flip my wrist. I wear it to bed (sleep tracking) and I can always check the time if I wake up in the middle of the night.

He was one of my favorite authors. I remember reading "Eon" many years ago. I thought it was the best book I had ever read. Then I read "The Forge of God" and found it even better.

No one is forcing you to upgrade. I still have a 2008 Mac running El Capitan and I can do everything I need to do on it.

Yes, I hate the trend to apply mobile paradigms to a desktop OS. I will stay on Monterey for as long as I can.

I am one of those people who still have a lot of PostScript files. I have many scientific papers from college in my collection. I know I should convert them to PDF, but it sucks that they quietly removed support for a file format that's been around for a long time.

This is a very cool use for a watch. You can use any watch, but some watches, like the Seiko Alpinist, even have a rotating bezel with the compass points. This makes it a lot easier to find the other directions. One thing the article forgot to mention, is that the trick works only for standard time. If you are on daylight savings time, the direction will be off.

I also work from home. I only use my laptop when I travel once or twice a year. I much prefer my desktop computer.

Very useful. Thanks!

I say this as a Java developer, but I hate UIs written in Java. Native UIs are always superior. IntelliJ comes to mind. I used it for many years, and it always felt "different". There were weird inconsistencies in rendering, focus and behavior that were annoying. Same with NetBeans.

On the other hand, I think server side Java is still great.

As the article states, many developers have degrees other than CS. I have a BS/MS in Mathematics and have worked as a developer for the past 20 years. Interestingly, back in the early 2000s, it seemed that having a degree in Math was actually an advantage for me. I think I got a lot of interviews because of that.

This makes me sad. I thought the Microsoft Store at the Domain in Austin was very cool and I visited from time to time. There was also an Apple store in the same location so I could visit both! And there was a Borders Bookstore, which I loved browsing in, and is also closed now :-(

I can say the same thing about a legacy Java codebase that I had to work with at a big "enterprise" software company a few years ago. The code was so convoluted, with some files over 12k lines long. You can write spaghetti code in any language.

That's good to know. I will definitely check it out. Thanks!

This is great news! I was really excited about Perl 6, until I realized it was a different language, and it never quite jelled into a usable thing. So I kept using Perl 5. I write mostly modern Perl code, so this is exactly what I wanted.

I learned Perl back in the late 90's when it was the best way to do web programming. As a C programmer, it was a breath of fresh air. It was a higher-level C for me and I used it for prototyping all kinds of things before writing the production level C code. Nowadays, I still use it for system maintenance and prototyping. It's a great language and very powerful tool.

I'm in a similar situation. As a UNIX, command-line user I've noticed that every release they make things harder for us. Yeah, Homebrew is great, but Apple doesn't support it and they could break things anytime.

Lately, I've been doing most of my dev work on a Windows 10 machine using WSL. It's come a long way and is very usable now.

I really like the Windows 95 UI. That's why Windows 2000 was my favorite version of Windows, ever. It was very consistent and functional throughout.

Interesting write-up, but it sounds like he didn't want to succeed. I have been using WSL for two years now as my primary development environment and it works great. Yes, file I/O is slow, but unless you do a ton of I/O it really isn't that big of a problem for dev work. I like having access to Ubuntu repositories and I actually prefer it to MacOS/Brew.

He also spends time complaining about Edge when it just takes a few minutes to download and install Chrome as your default browser.

Finally, Linux is pretty good these days. I have a System76 laptop running Pop!_OS and it's super nice, everything works out of the box. Why he decided to use Windows if he wanted a *nix environment is a little strange.

Why?

I agree with the article, I hate infinite scrolling. It just doesn't feel natural, and sometimes the performance is bad which makes everything feel sluggish.

I agree. Sensationalist trash. The article claims that Ive’s design decisions affected not only Apple, but other brands like Samsung and HTC as well. Really? If they were terrible decisions then other companies wouldn’t have been forced to adopt them and the market would’ve punished Apple, right? The fact that other brands adopted them means that the market wanted slim, sleek and overpriced products. So blame the public, not Ive.

This kinda sucks for me, as a Linux based developer who’s also a gamer. I’ve been gaming on Steam with the Proton compatibility layer, and most of my Windows-only games work flawlessly. If future Ubuntu upgrades break this, then I won’t upgrade until I find another solution.

I remember running A/UX on a Mac IIsi. It was a quirky UNIX, based on SysV r3. I remember the first thing out of the box was to compile GCC with the included non-ANSI C compiler. Then you could actually start compiling everything else, like Emacs, LaTeX, Ghostscript, GNU binutils, etc.

The best part is that you could run a lot of productivity Mac software such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I used it during my last two years in college and was really sad when it was discontinued.

I have a 2018 Mazda CX-9 with the touchscreen. I almost never use the touchscreen, because there's a much more convenient scroll-wheel positioned in the center console and within my right hand's reach. There are also controls in the steering wheel for audio, phone and cruise control.

This move by the US to sabotage Huawei will, in the long term, harm American competitiveness. I haven't yet seen or heard any concrete proof that Huawei poses a "threat" to national security. The fact that Trump mentioned their fate could be "negotiated" as part of a larger trade agreement with China points in the other direction. Either way, this is bad for free enterprise and free commerce.

As someone who studied Voronoi diagrams in college, I find this really fascinating. It's a really cool way of visualizing the data.

That was definitely worth reading. I feel the crunch as a software engineer. I am still able to max my 401k, but after taxes, insurance premiums, mortgage, and a few nights out with the wife, I have little, if any, to invest.

I feel like I should be saving more, but somehow the cost of living is rising while our incomes are staying flat.

I agree with this article. The Touch Bar is a useless gimmick. Not only that, but it removed the actually useful Esc and F-Keys. Oh, and it made MacBook Pros more expensive.

I admire the author for finding ways to make the Touch Bar somewhat useful, but to me it's just too much work and just reminds me how stupid and ill conceived it is. When you remove useful things and replace them with useless crap, it will make people angry. Don't get me started with the port situation.

What would you say are important features missing in C++11 that are in the current standard? I ask because I'm trying to get back into C++ development after many years and even C++11 seems like a new language to me.