I'm Roger Stringer, a DevOps engineer, full-stack developer, author, foodie, speaker, dad. Founder of Flybase.
CBC:
Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip frontman who united a diverse array of music lovers with his commanding stage presence and Canadiana-laced lyrics, has died.
He was 53.
Downie had an aggressive and incurable form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, which he discovered after a seizure in December 2015.
He died Tuesday night surrounded by his children and family, according to a statement on the band’s website.
Marco Arment:
I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.
In practice, it’s not even close.
USB-C normally transfers data by the USB protocol, but it also supports Thunderbolt… sometimes. The 12-inch MacBook has a USB-C port, but it doesn’t support Thunderbolt at all. All other modern MacBook models support Thunderbolt over their USB-C ports… but if you have a 13-inch model, and it has a Touch Bar, then the right-side ports don’t have full Thunderbolt bandwidth.
If you bought a USB-C cable, it might support Thunderbolt, or it might not. There’s no way to tell by looking at it. There’s usually no way to tell whether a given USB-C device requires Thunderbolt, either — you just need to plug it in and see if it works.
Much of USB-C’s awesome capability comes from Thunderbolt and other Alternate Modes. But due to their potential bandwidth demands, computers can’t have very many USB-C ports, making it especially wasteful to lose one to a laptop’s own power cable. The severe port shortage, along with the need to connect to non-USB-C devices, inevitably leads many people to need annoying, inelegant, and expensive dongles and hubs.
Marco is right on the money on USB-C.
Neverware, a New York City-based startup with a software platform that converts legacy computers into Chromebooks, announced today that it has raised a new round of investment led by Google. It won’t say the exact amount, but it will likely be more than the $6.5 million it raised in its last round.
The synergy between the two parties is obvious. CloudReady is built on the same open-source technology as Google’s Chrome OS. IT teams from corporations or schools that decide to use Neverware also get to leverage integration with ChromeEnterprise through Google’s cloud-based Admin console, simplifying and unifying remote management of the disparate models in their fleets.
An investment that makes sense.
John Gruber, on the fact that the WiFi and Bluetooth buttons in Control Center no longer act as on/off switches:
This is an interesting feature, but I think it’s going to confuse and anger a lot of people. Until iOS 11, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggles in Control Center worked the way it looked like they worked: they were on/off switches. Now, in iOS 11, they still look like on/off switches, but they act as disconnect switches.
Off the top of my head, I would suggest making them three-way switches: on and connected, on but disconnected, and off.
“I think it is a false narrative,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of product marketing. “It’s true that we like to keep the data as optimized as possible, that’s certainly something that I think a lot of users have come to expect, and they know that we’re treating their privacy maybe different than some others are.”
Joswiak argues that Siri can be every bit as helpful as other assistants without accumulating a lot of personal user data in the cloud, as companies like Facebook and Google are accustomed to doing. “We’re able to deliver a very personalized experience . . . without treating you as a product that keeps your information and sells it to the highest bidder. That’s just not the way we operate.”