6 historic tech items that were rescued from the trash

Image by Brian Dunnette CC BY 2.0All technology, sooner or later, becomes obsolete at which point it’s often simply disposed of in one way or another and forgotten about. Sometimes that piece of technology is a one-of-kind or is historic for some other reason but its importance isn’t recognized at the time and it’s lost for good. Every once in a while, though, a historic piece of hardware or software is saved from such an inglorious fate through the hard work of those who appreciate its historic value or thanks simply to dumb luck. Use the arrows above to read about 6 historic tech items that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, landfill, or recycling center - or were rescued just before they made it into one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 productivity tips for Chromebook power users

Chromebook productivity tipsImage by Koman90 via WikimediaChromebooks are more than toy computers for running the Chrome Web browser. Google’s rapid development of Chrome OS has given the cloud-based operating system a significant set of power-user tools to help make you more productive and to ensure your data is secured.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Go has a debugger—and it’s awesome!

Something that often, uh... bugs1 Go developers is the lack of a proper debugger. Sure, builds are ridiculously fast and easy, and println(hex.Dump(b)) is your friend, but sometimes it would be nice to just set a breakpoint and step through that endless if chain or print a bunch of values without recompiling ten times.

CC BY 2.0 image by Carl Milner

You could try to use some dirty gdb hacks that will work if you built your binary with a certain linker and ran it on some architectures when the moon was in a waxing crescent phase, but let's be honest, it isn't an enjoyable experience.

Well, worry no more! godebug is here!

godebug is an awesome cross-platform debugger created by the Mailgun team. You can read their introduction for some under-the-hood details, but here's the cool bit: instead of wrestling with half a dozen different ptrace interfaces that would not be portable, godebug rewrites your source code and injects function calls like godebug.Line on every line, godebug.Declare at every variable declaration, and godebug.SetTrace for breakpoints (i.e. wherever you type _ = "breakpoint").

I find this solution brilliant. What you get out Continue reading

Anger

"

I suppose that when one hears a tale of hideous cruelty anger is quite the wrong reaction, and merely wastes the energy that ought to go in a different direction: perhaps merely dulls the conscience which, if it were awake, would ask us, “Well, what are you doing about it? How much of your live have you spent in really combating this?”

" C.S. Lewis —

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The post Anger appeared first on 'net work.

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Thursday, June 18

Microsoft hands control of devices to Windows boss Myerson, pushes Elop overboardStephen Elop is leaving Microsoft for a second time, as CEO Satya Nadella hands control of the devices division he ran to Windows chief Terry Myerson, Computerworld reports. Elop previously left Microsoft to run Nokia, rejoining his former employer when it bought Nokia’s smartphone business. Myerson will now run the combined “Windows and Devices Group,” making him one of his own best customers.Uber goes to court in California to deny a driver employee rightsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung wants court to review damages in patent fight with Apple

Samsung Electronics has asked that a full bench of an appeals court should review a damages award in a long-standing patent infringement dispute with arch-rival Apple.Apple sued Samsung in 2011 alleging that Samsung phones infringed on several iPhone patents. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California awarded Apple damages of US$930 million after a jury found that Samsung infringed Apple’s design and utility patents and diluted its trade dresses, which relate to the overall look and packaging of a product.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed last month with the jury’s verdict on the design patent infringements, the validity of two utility patent claims, and the damages awarded for the design and utility patent infringements appealed by Samsung. But the appeals court reversed the jury’s findings that the asserted trade dresses are protectable, and vacated the damages relating to trade dress dilution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LinkedIn says private bug bounty program works for it better

LinkedIn plans to continue closely vetting researchers for its bug bounty rewards program, saying it reduces the number of distracting erroneous and irrelevant reports.The decision to keep its program private “gives our strong internal application security team the ability to focus on securing the next generation of LinkedIn’s products while interacting with a small, qualified community of external researchers,” wrote Cory Scott, LinkedIn’s director of information security, in a blog post.Security researchers with vetted backgrounds are invited to participate, which allow them to have the same experience as if they were on LinkedIn’s internal security team, Scott wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle profit slides 24 percent as customers move to the cloud

Oracle has reported a sharp drop in profit for the quarter just ended, with customers spending more on its cloud services but less on software that runs in their own data centers.Chairman Larry Ellison portrayed the shift as a positive one and said Oracle can make more money selling cloud services over the long term. But the change didn’t seem to help it much last quarter, when its results were also battered by the strong U.S. dollar.Oracle’s revenue and profit for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year, missed the forecasts of financial analysts, and its stock fell almost 7 percent after the results were announced Wednesday.Oracle’s cloud business seems to be growing strongly. Revenue from software sold as a service climbed 29 percent from this time last year, to $416 million, the company said. But that’s a relatively small part of Oracle’s business, and it wasn’t enough to offset mediocre performance elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FCC to AT&T: “Unlimited means unlimited”

AT&T Mobility, in common with many other service providers of all kinds, uses the word “unlimited” to describe their consumer wireless data offerings. Unfortunately, for consumers, AT&T is using a totally different definition of the word because to the company, “unlimited” has meant “until you reach a threshold of service usage after which we’ll throttle back your performance.”The FCC, in their usual slow and lumbering way, has finally got around to doing something about this blatant and devious redefinition of “unlimited” (it’s taken them four, count ‘em, four years) and proposes to fine AT&T … wait for it … a record $100 million for misleading customers on the grounds that the company violated the 2010 Open Internet Transparency Rule that required ISPs to clearly and transparently inform their customers about their network management practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Message Queues: RabbitMQ in Go and Python

I’ve been playing around with various message queue implementations for a few projects, and wanted to write a quick post on some basics.

Message Queues

Before we get into the detail of RabbitMQ, it’s worth briefly defining exactly what a message queue is, of which RabbitMQ is just one implementation.

You may have heard message queues described as a “Publish/Subscribe” system, or “Pub/Sub” for short. This is a style of communication between software elements, where some components publish messages onto a queue, and others subscribe to that queue and listen for messages published on to it.

We’ll use Twitter as an illustrative analogy. I sent a link to this blog article within a tweet this morning. I did not address this tweet to anyone in particular, I just put it out there, assuming it was useful to at least somebody. Those that follow me saw this tweet, and made a decision to do something with this information or not. In this scenario, I was the publisher, and my followers were subscribers. Message Queues work very much the same way, but they also provide a much greater level of granularity for how to publish messages and subscribe to them.

Application developers Continue reading

Message Queues: RabbitMQ in Go and Python

I’ve been playing around with various message queue implementations for a few projects, and wanted to write a quick post on some basics.

Message Queues

Before we get into the detail of RabbitMQ, it’s worth briefly defining exactly what a message queue is, of which RabbitMQ is just one implementation.

You may have heard message queues described as a “Publish/Subscribe” system, or “Pub/Sub” for short. This is a style of communication between software elements, where some components publish messages onto a queue, and others subscribe to that queue and listen for messages published on to it.

We’ll use Twitter as an illustrative analogy. I sent a link to this blog article within a tweet this morning. I did not address this tweet to anyone in particular, I just put it out there, assuming it was useful to at least somebody. Those that follow me saw this tweet, and made a decision to do something with this information or not. In this scenario, I was the publisher, and my followers were subscribers. Message Queues work very much the same way, but they also provide a much greater level of granularity for how to publish messages and subscribe to them.

Application developers Continue reading

AT&T, WhatsApp get low marks from EFF for data disclosure policies

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released the latest version of its annual “Who Has Your Back” report on tech companies’ data disclosure policies Wednesday afternoon, giving perfect five-star ratings to companies including Apple, Adobe, Dropbox and Yahoo.This year’s publication is the fifth edition of the EFF’s reporting on tech companies’ policies around disclosing information to governments in response to data requests, and it brings major changes to the organization’s framework.“The criteria we used to judge companies in 2011 were ambitious for the time, but theyve been almost universally adopted in the years since then,” the EFF said in its report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, WhatsApp get low marks from EFF for data disclosure policies

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released the latest version of its annual “Who Has Your Back” report on tech companies’ data disclosure policies Wednesday afternoon, giving perfect five-star ratings to companies including Apple, Adobe, Dropbox and Yahoo.This year’s publication is the fifth edition of the EFF’s reporting on tech companies’ policies around disclosing information to governments in response to data requests, and it brings major changes to the organization’s framework.“The criteria we used to judge companies in 2011 were ambitious for the time, but theyve been almost universally adopted in the years since then,” the EFF said in its report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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