DevOps, this is the case. If someone isn't familiar with utilities that came out six months ago, the job interview stops, the person will be showed the door, and that is that. There are trends as well. QA is going away and is being merged with dev, and if someone considers themself a "tester" only... the will be pinkslipped and their job goes to someone who will wear both hats.
Even when not in DevOps, there are core utilities that are a must: Splunk, SCCM, ELK, Ansible, Puppet, Salt, Chef, Jenkins, Git, Vagrant, Terraform, are just a few that are needed. Deploying Windows updates without SCCM is like reimaging desktop PCs with a CD and a hard disk. Great tech for the 1990s, but not workable these days.
Same with cloud services. Learn Lambda or get run over by it, because management in many, many companies is embracing it because they believe that they can fire their server, OS, and ops guys, as well as have a shorter CI/CD cycle. True or not, this is the future, and either embrace it or find a new line of work.
With the drivel coming out from Hollywood, I'd be happy to pay $15 to watch a Chinese-based movie that doesn't follow the same cookie-cutter plot path that every single US movie has, with decent subtitling. In fact, with Hollywood just churning out comic book flicks and not bothering finding new IP has created a market for almost anything else.
All of those are bad for business, which is why OTA radio (and TV) is dying.
What killed radio was the FCC removing the ban on allowing a few companies to own all the stations in one area, as well as a limit on stations owned. This homogenized radio, and turned most stations into basically a 50 song MP3 collection set on shuffle with ads and a DJ announcing a few things. For "rock" stations, any music post 1980-1990 was removed, leaving the same 60s-70s crap playing. Of course, this pretty much moved people to iTunes and other places for new stuff to listen to.
It used to be that radio actually played new stuff, and was a central point where people would actually discuss a new band or a new song. Those days are gone.
The ironic thing is that there are tons of FM radio tuners out there. Most Android phones can do FM radio, if used with headphones. However, with the market the way it is, we likely won't see much change, as the days of independent stations are gone.
Now, the finger pointing. Easy enough -- the FCC. There is a reason there were regulations on keeping one entity from owning stations, and when that was removed, it collapsed the entire industry and created monopolies.
btrfs has been in development a long time. As a filesystem, it is OK. However, as a RAID manager, I'd stay away from it for a while, and leave RAID to Linux LVM or md-raid. It would be great if RAID worked, as that would allow for recovery from bitrot, but in the past 1-2 years, there have been people complaining about complete data loss on their arrays, so I would stay away from it for now.
Of course, in the ideal world, ZFS would be dual licensed under BSD + GPL, so it could be included as a root filesystem for Linux, macOS, etc., and all other filesystems used for specialized purposes (CramFS), or kept for legacy reasons.
My only gripe about APFS is the lack of checksumming. Which means no bitrot detection... which is a really bad thing when storing media for long term. One minor item would be the lack of deduplication.
However, this filesystem was definitely needed. It will change how a lot of things work, and upgrade security. The ability to back up via snapshots makes this very useful. The faster I/O due to copy on write cannot hurt either.
All and all, I think this will be the absolute best feature that 10.13.x comes with.
This. I have yet to need an "assistant", even this many years after Siri has come out. What an "assistant" really means is not just a device listening 24/7, but something actively and constantly sending that info to the mother ship. Does this benefit me? No.
After working with VCs last year, there are only two companies they give a shit about funding. Those that sling ads, and those that suck data. Anything else, they don't care about. The Meitu app did the second part, and look how much it got funding, even though there were many apps doing the same thing in years past.
What the PC industry needs is to look at home servers. A box with a bunch of GPU cards and has the ability to take OpenGL or DirectX video commands and return streaming video. Pretty much OnLive on the LAN. That, and maybe something like a Time Capsule so local machines can backup and sync to it, and the device backs up (encrypted, of course) to a cloud provider if the user wants. That way, if ransomware hits, it isn't too tough for the user to restore and get all their files back.
I have zero interest in smart devices. If a TV requires Internet activation before it will work, it goes back to the store as defective. If I wanted to pay thousands for a fridge, I wouldn't buy a smart fridge. I would buy one that works on natural gas and electric, so if there is a power blackout, my beer is still cold.
This. I would recommend actually making at least two USB boot drives and setting them aside, or even make a bootable DVD just to have hardware media squirreled away somewhere. It also is wise to copy off the application directory as a backup.
I would say that APFS earned its bones earlier this year when Apple pushed out iOS 10.3. This is actually the first time in history a vendor has actually converted this many people from one filesystem to another, with pretty much zero complaints on various forums. Had even an outlier even happened with more than 1-2 people affected, there would be people in the streets yelling about a "filesystem-gate".
I would dare to say that migrating to APFS on macOS will be relatively painless.
What gets me are products that don't abide by the laws of physics of thermodynamics, such as battery powered, compressor air conditioners. The concept is cool, but when looking at the photos of the prototype units, they have no exhaust hose (or pair of hoses for decent efficiency in blowing warm air away.) Or they expect 500-1000 BTUs to actually do much.
What blows my mind is that these items get crowdfunded in days, then the people who paid into it wonder why they are getting something other than "oops, we are late in production" notices... if that.
It depends on the coding application. If it is yet another ad-slinging and info slurping app, the #1 priority for the devs is to get features out in the next sprint, no matter how ugly the code base and no matter how buggy it is. Commodity stuff like this doesn't require much, as this can be easily offshored to the battalions of coders overseas.
However, there are many coding applications which need CS skill:
1: FPGA programming. 2: Embedded programming with a very limited architecture. Some applications really don't need much in hardware to do a certain task (like sit on a pipeline, measure a thermistor, and if the thermistor goes past a certain threshold for too long, turn on a wire to signal an alarm) For tasks like this, you want as simple as possible. 3: Security programming. Eventually, businesses will leave the "security has no ROI" model, especially with governments starting not to tolerate it (China, the EU), so we will see basic CS stuff used for this. 4: CPU design. Especially CPUs designed from the ground up, up to and including mask design, to deter modifications by an offshored fab. 5: Designing things for companies that are designed not to fail, be it a realtime OS, to a bullet-proof hypervisor, and so on.
I have had five HTC phones as well (HTC Wizard, HTC One X Plus, HTC Desire HD, HTC A9, and a HTC M8.) All performed perfectly, the only reason I upgraded was just for speed. All the Android models were easily unlocked and a new ROM put on. I've done a lot of modding on those, and they are surprisingly brick resistant. Worst case, hold down volume-down and power, boot into HBOOT, and flash a RUU.
I'd definitely recommend them, as an alternative to Samsung.
Worst case, give the TV a generic SSID to connect to, which leads to a separate VLAN that gets proxied out somewhere well away from your physical location.
If I had to have a smart TV, probably the best matter of course would be having it have its own SSID and VLAN, with a connection going through a VPN so geolocation registers some other place, and so it can't find anything useful on the LAN it sits on.
Ironic that modern IoT devices have to be treated as hostile network entities in order to have decent security.
That's when it gets returned. Not working because it isn't given a connection to slurp from, is just the same as not working due to a manufacturing defect.
No clue what caused it, but I used it to authenticate to some local sites, and after a crash, it would not allow access to the stored items. I erased and reinstalled the app, and it would not allow me into my account after that.
Security applications, when they fail, they fail hard. I highly recommend, if you use Authy, to use another app that not just stores tokens, but can back them up to your desktop as a plain text file, so if worse comes to worst, you can type them in.
This. A speaker really doesn't do much that requires "smart" crap. All one really needs is the ability to pair via Bluetooth, A2DP compatibility, a good DAC, and a solid physical speaker (or speakers.) Add a good power supply that is isolated to prevent ground loops, and that's that.
There are some ways to back up Google Authenticator codes. After Authy bit me (not just purged the codes on my main device, but decided not to restore the ones synced [1]), I use more than one program. When a site shows a QR code, I fire up one app, add it to that, then another app, same.
So far, enPass, 1Password, and Authenticator Plus have been good, allowing restores. All three allow export of the OTP seeds in plain text as well.
[1]: I have an iPod Touch, whose sole purpose is to store authenticator codes as backup. Using this, I was able to get into all the sites and services using 2FA and reset the codes. Had I not done this, I would have been SOL with a number of places.
I had an Android device that did face unlocks (HTC One X Plus) a few years ago. The facial recognition was pretty quick -- lift phone up, and it recognized and unlocked. One could even set an option to blink the eyes as well.
If this was doable on a phone back in 2014, I'm sure that Apple can do a better job of facial recognition with all the money they can throw at a technology to improve it.
Part of it is an attitude I've seen with a number of smaller companies is the "lets get this on AWS no matter what." Part of it is that they feel that with no physical operators coupled with a "results oriented" DevOps process, they can completely toss all IT people, except for 1-2 coders present, with the other devs are offshored. Their idea of production is a testing environment after their unit tests, or perhaps after their push into Git.
Of course, this starts to show when stuff like this happens. Did they even think about it? Maybe for a second, but they were more concerned with finishing their sprint than actual security work, because it is better to drop the ball and get the code done, just so they are not repeatedly yelled at by the PM for the same Jira items.
In these environments, security has no ROI, so it gets tossed to the wayside.
If a bank hires a third party security service and the vault gets robbed, the blame will rest with the bank. Same thing. Just by offshoring to the lowest bidder doesn't mean that one's responsibilities are taken care of.
What I want is an Android phone that has as at least as many years as an iPhone. For example, iOS supports back to the iPhone 5s. That is four, soon five generations, back to 2013.
Are there any Android phones still getting updates from that vintage? Unless it is supported by LineageOS, the phone isn't getting updates at any Android OS level, much less the latest.
Of course, an unlockable bootloader is a must as well, so if there is a community willing to build a ROM for it, they can.
These are not world-shattering features here. People actually use their phone past the release date of the next model. Four to five years is not unreasonable, especially for a device that is used that often and can be a pain to upgrade.
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DevOps, this is the case. If someone isn't familiar with utilities that came out six months ago, the job interview stops, the person will be showed the door, and that is that. There are trends as well. QA is going away and is being merged with dev, and if someone considers themself a "tester" only... the will be pinkslipped and their job goes to someone who will wear both hats.
Even when not in DevOps, there are core utilities that are a must: Splunk, SCCM, ELK, Ansible, Puppet, Salt, Chef, Jenkins, Git, Vagrant, Terraform, are just a few that are needed. Deploying Windows updates without SCCM is like reimaging desktop PCs with a CD and a hard disk. Great tech for the 1990s, but not workable these days.
Same with cloud services. Learn Lambda or get run over by it, because management in many, many companies is embracing it because they believe that they can fire their server, OS, and ops guys, as well as have a shorter CI/CD cycle. True or not, this is the future, and either embrace it or find a new line of work.
With the drivel coming out from Hollywood, I'd be happy to pay $15 to watch a Chinese-based movie that doesn't follow the same cookie-cutter plot path that every single US movie has, with decent subtitling. In fact, with Hollywood just churning out comic book flicks and not bothering finding new IP has created a market for almost anything else.
All of those are bad for business, which is why OTA radio (and TV) is dying.
What killed radio was the FCC removing the ban on allowing a few companies to own all the stations in one area, as well as a limit on stations owned. This homogenized radio, and turned most stations into basically a 50 song MP3 collection set on shuffle with ads and a DJ announcing a few things. For "rock" stations, any music post 1980-1990 was removed, leaving the same 60s-70s crap playing. Of course, this pretty much moved people to iTunes and other places for new stuff to listen to.
It used to be that radio actually played new stuff, and was a central point where people would actually discuss a new band or a new song. Those days are gone.
The ironic thing is that there are tons of FM radio tuners out there. Most Android phones can do FM radio, if used with headphones. However, with the market the way it is, we likely won't see much change, as the days of independent stations are gone.
Now, the finger pointing. Easy enough -- the FCC. There is a reason there were regulations on keeping one entity from owning stations, and when that was removed, it collapsed the entire industry and created monopolies.
btrfs has been in development a long time. As a filesystem, it is OK. However, as a RAID manager, I'd stay away from it for a while, and leave RAID to Linux LVM or md-raid. It would be great if RAID worked, as that would allow for recovery from bitrot, but in the past 1-2 years, there have been people complaining about complete data loss on their arrays, so I would stay away from it for now.
Of course, in the ideal world, ZFS would be dual licensed under BSD + GPL, so it could be included as a root filesystem for Linux, macOS, etc., and all other filesystems used for specialized purposes (CramFS), or kept for legacy reasons.
My only gripe about APFS is the lack of checksumming. Which means no bitrot detection... which is a really bad thing when storing media for long term. One minor item would be the lack of deduplication.
However, this filesystem was definitely needed. It will change how a lot of things work, and upgrade security. The ability to back up via snapshots makes this very useful. The faster I/O due to copy on write cannot hurt either.
All and all, I think this will be the absolute best feature that 10.13.x comes with.
This. I have yet to need an "assistant", even this many years after Siri has come out. What an "assistant" really means is not just a device listening 24/7, but something actively and constantly sending that info to the mother ship. Does this benefit me? No.
After working with VCs last year, there are only two companies they give a shit about funding. Those that sling ads, and those that suck data. Anything else, they don't care about. The Meitu app did the second part, and look how much it got funding, even though there were many apps doing the same thing in years past.
What the PC industry needs is to look at home servers. A box with a bunch of GPU cards and has the ability to take OpenGL or DirectX video commands and return streaming video. Pretty much OnLive on the LAN. That, and maybe something like a Time Capsule so local machines can backup and sync to it, and the device backs up (encrypted, of course) to a cloud provider if the user wants. That way, if ransomware hits, it isn't too tough for the user to restore and get all their files back.
I have zero interest in smart devices. If a TV requires Internet activation before it will work, it goes back to the store as defective. If I wanted to pay thousands for a fridge, I wouldn't buy a smart fridge. I would buy one that works on natural gas and electric, so if there is a power blackout, my beer is still cold.
This. I would recommend actually making at least two USB boot drives and setting them aside, or even make a bootable DVD just to have hardware media squirreled away somewhere. It also is wise to copy off the application directory as a backup.
I would say that APFS earned its bones earlier this year when Apple pushed out iOS 10.3. This is actually the first time in history a vendor has actually converted this many people from one filesystem to another, with pretty much zero complaints on various forums. Had even an outlier even happened with more than 1-2 people affected, there would be people in the streets yelling about a "filesystem-gate".
I would dare to say that migrating to APFS on macOS will be relatively painless.
What does happen if you look at them in the eyes? They blink?
What gets me are products that don't abide by the laws of physics of thermodynamics, such as battery powered, compressor air conditioners. The concept is cool, but when looking at the photos of the prototype units, they have no exhaust hose (or pair of hoses for decent efficiency in blowing warm air away.) Or they expect 500-1000 BTUs to actually do much.
What blows my mind is that these items get crowdfunded in days, then the people who paid into it wonder why they are getting something other than "oops, we are late in production" notices... if that.
It depends on the coding application. If it is yet another ad-slinging and info slurping app, the #1 priority for the devs is to get features out in the next sprint, no matter how ugly the code base and no matter how buggy it is. Commodity stuff like this doesn't require much, as this can be easily offshored to the battalions of coders overseas.
However, there are many coding applications which need CS skill:
1: FPGA programming.
2: Embedded programming with a very limited architecture. Some applications really don't need much in hardware to do a certain task (like sit on a pipeline, measure a thermistor, and if the thermistor goes past a certain threshold for too long, turn on a wire to signal an alarm) For tasks like this, you want as simple as possible.
3: Security programming. Eventually, businesses will leave the "security has no ROI" model, especially with governments starting not to tolerate it (China, the EU), so we will see basic CS stuff used for this.
4: CPU design. Especially CPUs designed from the ground up, up to and including mask design, to deter modifications by an offshored fab.
5: Designing things for companies that are designed not to fail, be it a realtime OS, to a bullet-proof hypervisor, and so on.
I have had five HTC phones as well (HTC Wizard, HTC One X Plus, HTC Desire HD, HTC A9, and a HTC M8.) All performed perfectly, the only reason I upgraded was just for speed. All the Android models were easily unlocked and a new ROM put on. I've done a lot of modding on those, and they are surprisingly brick resistant. Worst case, hold down volume-down and power, boot into HBOOT, and flash a RUU.
I'd definitely recommend them, as an alternative to Samsung.
There has been one smart TV which has been implemented well. It is called an iMac.
Worst case, give the TV a generic SSID to connect to, which leads to a separate VLAN that gets proxied out somewhere well away from your physical location.
If I had to have a smart TV, probably the best matter of course would be having it have its own SSID and VLAN, with a connection going through a VPN so geolocation registers some other place, and so it can't find anything useful on the LAN it sits on.
Ironic that modern IoT devices have to be treated as hostile network entities in order to have decent security.
That's when it gets returned. Not working because it isn't given a connection to slurp from, is just the same as not working due to a manufacturing defect.
No clue what caused it, but I used it to authenticate to some local sites, and after a crash, it would not allow access to the stored items. I erased and reinstalled the app, and it would not allow me into my account after that.
Security applications, when they fail, they fail hard. I highly recommend, if you use Authy, to use another app that not just stores tokens, but can back them up to your desktop as a plain text file, so if worse comes to worst, you can type them in.
The copy of Accuweather I use is paid... Definitely not a freebie. In any case, the app is history for now.
No VC will touch a business unless it sucks data, slings ads, or both.
This. A speaker really doesn't do much that requires "smart" crap. All one really needs is the ability to pair via Bluetooth, A2DP compatibility, a good DAC, and a solid physical speaker (or speakers.) Add a good power supply that is isolated to prevent ground loops, and that's that.
There are some ways to back up Google Authenticator codes. After Authy bit me (not just purged the codes on my main device, but decided not to restore the ones synced [1]), I use more than one program. When a site shows a QR code, I fire up one app, add it to that, then another app, same.
So far, enPass, 1Password, and Authenticator Plus have been good, allowing restores. All three allow export of the OTP seeds in plain text as well.
[1]: I have an iPod Touch, whose sole purpose is to store authenticator codes as backup. Using this, I was able to get into all the sites and services using 2FA and reset the codes. Had I not done this, I would have been SOL with a number of places.
I had an Android device that did face unlocks (HTC One X Plus) a few years ago. The facial recognition was pretty quick -- lift phone up, and it recognized and unlocked. One could even set an option to blink the eyes as well.
If this was doable on a phone back in 2014, I'm sure that Apple can do a better job of facial recognition with all the money they can throw at a technology to improve it.
Part of it is an attitude I've seen with a number of smaller companies is the "lets get this on AWS no matter what." Part of it is that they feel that with no physical operators coupled with a "results oriented" DevOps process, they can completely toss all IT people, except for 1-2 coders present, with the other devs are offshored. Their idea of production is a testing environment after their unit tests, or perhaps after their push into Git.
Of course, this starts to show when stuff like this happens. Did they even think about it? Maybe for a second, but they were more concerned with finishing their sprint than actual security work, because it is better to drop the ball and get the code done, just so they are not repeatedly yelled at by the PM for the same Jira items.
In these environments, security has no ROI, so it gets tossed to the wayside.
If a bank hires a third party security service and the vault gets robbed, the blame will rest with the bank. Same thing. Just by offshoring to the lowest bidder doesn't mean that one's responsibilities are taken care of.
What I want is an Android phone that has as at least as many years as an iPhone. For example, iOS supports back to the iPhone 5s. That is four, soon five generations, back to 2013.
Are there any Android phones still getting updates from that vintage? Unless it is supported by LineageOS, the phone isn't getting updates at any Android OS level, much less the latest.
Of course, an unlockable bootloader is a must as well, so if there is a community willing to build a ROM for it, they can.
These are not world-shattering features here. People actually use their phone past the release date of the next model. Four to five years is not unreasonable, especially for a device that is used that often and can be a pain to upgrade.