華碩接手 Intel NUC 的維護與後續研發

Intel 發新聞稿,說跟 ASUS 簽了約,讓 ASUS 接手 Intel NUC 的維護與產品研發了:「Intel and ASUS Agree to Term Sheet to Take Intel NUC Systems Product Line Forward」。

Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs.

不過 ASUS 這邊網站上還沒看到新聞稿...

前幾天 Intel 宣佈要停止 Intel NUC 產品線,但當時沒看到接手的消息:「Intel Exiting the PC Business as it Stops Investment in the Intel NUC」。

有可能是消息出來後 ASUS 才去談的?或是一開始 Intel 就有找 partner 談,但談到一半消息先走漏了,但外面只聽到 Intel 不做?

Anyway,這樣 ASUS 算是官方指名的繼承人,讓後續要買的人可以過去看看;以 ASUS 本來就有自己的便當盒產品線 (像是 PChome 24h 上面的「ASUS-特規/改機專區 品牌館」),就是讓現有的團隊接手一個知名的產品線,不過本來跟精英 & 和碩的代工不知道會出現什麼變化...

Heroku 公佈了廢止免費方案的時間表

打開 Hacker News 看到的第一名,Heroku 公佈了廢止免費方案的時間表:「Removal of Heroku free product plans (heroku.com)」,文章在「Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ」。

沒在用的帳號會在 2022/10/26 開始刪,既有的帳號會在 2022/11/28 終止:

Focus on what's mission-critical: Removal of free dynos, hobby-dev Heroku Postgres and hobby-dev Heroku Data for Redis plans starting November 28, 2022 and inactive account deletion starting October 26, 2022.

取而代之的是針對特定團體條件性的開放,分成三類:學生、非營利組織以及 open source 專案。但前兩個目前方案都還沒出來,要晚點才會公佈;後面的 open source 專案則是要寄信申請。

不過現在好像沒什麼人在用 Heroku 了,大多都是因為以前有在用的人就繼續用,如果要講 "sexy" 的產品 (玩新東西的感覺),Fly.io 應該是比較常見的方案?

Algolia 從 Heroku 搬到 GKE 的故事

Algolia 是一個搜尋引擎服務,他可以幫你 index 資料後,你直接 query 他取得結果。

在這篇文章裡 Algolia 決定從 Heroku 搬到 GKE:「The Challenging Migration from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine」。

在文章只單純就產品與技術面上的需求在討論,像是一開始討論 IP 白名單的問題:

A good example of this complexity is with IP Whitelisting. One of our customers wanted us to crawl from a fixed IP address so that they could whitelist that IP for high-rate crawling without being throttled by their load balancer. Only two engineers were developing the crawler, so we asked other colleagues to set up an HTTP proxy with a fixed IP address. Yet, as the number of customers grew, many more started asking for the same thing, and our infrastructure team told us it was time for us to take care of it ourselves.

不過我更想知道搬過去後的各類成本差異... 省了多少平台費用,以及多少維護人力的差異,不過看起來沒提到 XD

Mastercard 對實體物品提供免費試用後的訂閱條款

Mastercard 規定在免費試用後 (實體物品),需要另外再讓使用者再同意一次才能開始收訂閱費用:「Free Trials Without The Hassle」。

The rule change will require merchants to gain cardholder approval at the conclusion of the trial before they start billing. To help cardholders with that decision, merchants will be required to send the cardholder – either by email or text – the transaction amount, payment date, merchant name along with explicit instructions on how to cancel a trial.

新聞一開始出來時其實讓蠻多人關注的,因為一堆網路服務都是靠這招... 所以 Mastercard 在文章後更新說明,目前只有實體物品套用這個規則:

*This blog was updated on January 17, 2019 to clarify that the rule change is applicable to physical products such as skincare, healthcare items etc.

Cloudflare 推出 Argo Tunnel

Cloudflare 推出了 Argo Tunnel,可以將內部網路與 Cloudflare 之間打通:「Argo Tunnel: A Private Link to the Public Internet」。

Cloudflare 在去年推出了 Wrap (可以參考「Cloudflare 推出的 Wrap 讓你不用在本地端開對外的 Port 80/443」這篇),這次其實只是改名:

During the beta period, Argo Tunnel went under a different name: Warp. While we liked Warp as a name, as soon as we realized that it made sense to bundle Warp with Argo, we wanted it to be under the Argo product name. Plus, a tunnel is what the product is so it's more descriptive.

看起來沒有什麼新的玩意... 純粹改名字 :o

創業的點子

在「Startup idea generator: find spreadsheet tasks and build something better」這邊看到很有趣的想法 XDDD 原討論區出於 Hacker News 上的 id=14631031 這則。

找到還在用 spreadsheet (或者說,Excel?) 的用途,然後設計新的產品 XDDD

1) Pick an industry
2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for
3) Build something better

算是一種很有趣但是也還蠻實際的想法 XDDD

CMU 推出 Product Management 的課程

CMUCS (Computer Science) 發的新聞稿:「Carnegie Mellon Offers New Master's Degree in Product Management」。

副標也清楚寫出是一年的課程:

One-Year Program Turns Computer Professionals Into "CEOs of the Product"

除了 CMU CS 外,也結合了 CMU 的 Tepper Business School 一起開:

A joint program of the university's School of Computer Science (SCS) and Tepper School of Business, the Master of Science in Product Management (MSPM) program will start January 2018.

另外一個不同角度的 Product Management。

SQL 的各種 JOIN

SQL 的各種 JOIN 其實是個很好玩的主題,不是很難,但沒有仔細練習過一次通常只能答出常用的那幾種... 而且過一陣子又會忘記 XD

這幾天不知道哪邊看到的舊文章「Say NO to Venn Diagrams When Explaining JOINs」,這篇作者大聲疾呼不要用 Venn diagram 解釋 SQL 的 JOIN,把比較特別的 JOIN 拿出來舉例...

因為 Venn diagram 是講集合交聯集這類的操作,但 JOIN 不僅僅是如此... 舉例來說,CROSS JOIN 對應到 cartesian product 就沒辦法用 Venn diagram 簡單的表示出來,而必須畫的更「具體」:

為 Open Source Hardware 發放 USB Product ID 的 pid.codes

pid.codes 的說明就很清楚了:「Welcome to pid.codes」。

由於 USB-IF 對每個 vendor 收 USD$5000,而且不可以跟其他單位共用:

If you’re a maker, hobbyist, or startup company producing your own USB device, you’ve probably discovered that you need a USB Vendor ID and Product ID to uniquely identify your device to computers. The USB-IF’s position is that the only way to do this is for each organisation to pay $5000 for a unique Vendor ID, which they may not share with other individuals or organisations.

所以就造成很多人惡搞 Vendor ID 與 Product ID:

For many makers and small companies, this is a prohibitive amount of money, and forces them to resort to workarounds, such as using other organisations' VIDs without permission, or simply making up a VID and PID. These solutions make things worse for everyone, by damaging the assumption that a VID/PID combination is unique to a given device.

而他們尋求解決方案,取得了一份在 USB-IF 禁止共用前的 Vendor ID,從而解決這個問題:

pid.codes seeks to solve this issue for anyone producing open-source hardware. We have been gifted a Vendor ID by a company that was issued one by USB-IF and has since ceased trading; they obtained the Vendor ID before the USB-IF changed their licensing terms to prohibit transfers or subassignments.