wglass

For me it was "J2EE Development without EJB" by Rod Johnson / Jurgen Holler, published in 2004. In the late 90's and early 2000's Sun insisted you could build industrial scale web applications with Java, but only with complicated frameworks running on heavy application servers that cost tons of money.

Rod Johnson showed how you could code in a lightweight, highly productive fashion with Pojos (Plain old Java Objects) and still scale. The principles were generic but became the foundations of the Spring framework that took over the ecosystem.

"Hibernate in Action" by Gavin King is another that came out around the same time. Again, a book on generic ORM principles, focused on a particular library. It also rejected the old orthodoxy and became the new standard.

Interesting article. Note that many of the clues in the article are mis numbered.

Not sure why. Refer to the original puzzles linked for the correct clues.

It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.

Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.

After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.

I agree this is a good exploit to write about. But name and employer are hardly your deepest darkest secrets.

Love it how covers all the edge cases.

I object to rule 2.1.4 “Shotgun Dictatorship”. In my car, the driver always has final say.

Huh. I was wondering why my auth expired and I had to resubscribe in one of my channels.

Everything has an expiration date it seems. I assumed I just missed a reminder email or message.

Loudoun county in Virginia, near Washington-Dulles airport. Taxes on data centers built by AWS and other firms provide almost 40% of the county budget.

Hah. I grew up when everyone had their names in the phone book with phone number and home address. It matters more to some people than others.

Can someone help clarify this for me?

Is it correct to say that users would only get the compromised version if they downloaded from the website?

Notepad++ has auto-update feature, is there any indication that updates from the AutoUpdate were compromised?

Fair enough! Guilty of that attitude, no doubt. I note the corrections in the message above re emphasis on Woz/Jobs.

I think mostly I was annoyed at the emphasis on how the computer is untouched and unused, which seemed the antithesis of the spirit of those early days.

Having said all that, I really felt an urge to bid, though no doubt it's 10x what I can afford.

Oh man. Both love and hate this video. It’s so slick, which seems the opposite of the late 70s homebrew backer culture.

The video is designed to appeal to nerd nostalgia. However it has problems right from the start when it emphasizes Jobs not Woz (the true nerd hero), including a stylized ascii art.

According to the video, this item is exceptional because it’s fully operational. However paradoxically that’s because it’s never been used. The video praises the owner who bought it and stuck it in a closet, never turning it on. It implicitly puts down the actual users who actually used the machine (burning the paint) and especially those who tinkered with and modifying the machine.

As someone who grew up in the 80s hacking my Apple II+ doing everything from playing Lemonade Stand to building custom coprocessor boards, I salute those who actually used their Apple machines to the max, destroying the collector value.