Sounds like a real use case for Netflix's Chaos Monkey software
Although if everything is that lacking in resilience, it might just be a recipe for unlimited downtime.
104 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2013
I've been using it for a little over two years, and it's been a great app. My and my other half do our shopping using it. Add everything into Wunderlist, and when we get to the shop we each take separate sections and tick it off as we go. Halves the time it takes to do a shop. I wunder what Microsoft will do to recompense Pro users? I didn't pay for my subscription (it came free when I used the app in Germany, thanks Deutsche Telecom!) but I'm sure many did.
It's not impossible. It just moves the security responsibility to you. You can get the delivery in your back garden or another secure location of your choosing. No, if you try and get something delivered in the middle of Piccadilly Circus while you're not paying attention then yes, someone could rob it. But that's on you.
I'd also point out that the delivery driver doesn't know who you are and doesn't care what your signature looks like. Neither of those are security features. They're audit trails for when your package does go missing. Both of which the drone's camera footage will do the same job of.
The only limits are things like blocks of flats, or businesses, where you might not have a space you can either monitor or keep secure. Which is, I imagine, a temporary problem. Imagine, if you will, the postboxes being relocated to the roof of the building, and every flat getting a mail chute. Maybe even with a little LCD screen so it can display today's delivery codes.
Or the drones could do facial recognition. There are lots of ways to add security.
Dunno about this one, but for the Amazon tests, you designate a Landing Zone when you order. Your receipt includes a QR code you have to print out and place in your desired LZ. Once the drone gets close enough, it can presumably pick up the QR code and will land on top of it. If it can't find the specific QR code I guess it goes home?
I agree. But these boxes are like £40 - £50, aren't they? If you don't know how to do your own piracy, is that an acceptable outlay for something that might stop working six months down the line? I just don't see these as being that great a deal compared to the legal alternative.
As a former fan of thepiratebay, I'd normally agreed. But these Kodi things are shite. They make piracy easy enough for the average Joe, but the content quality is frequently "recorded on a featurephone from the back of a Kyrgyzstani cinema" rather than nicely compressed DVD or Blu-Ray rips. And if the site that your chosen piracy app relies on is taken down by the increasingly frequent ISP blocking orders, then you're left with a box that does nowt useful without someone tech literate to point it at a new website.
Piracy is successful when it makes getting quality content easier than the legitimate sources. These things just aren't better than renting the odd film you want to see using iTunes or Google Play.
It's frustrating as it's one of the things I used to recommend.
The idea was that users of the add-on could rate a site's trustworthiness, so if you came across a domain used for phishing or such, then you could warn other users about it. Given a suitably poor rating, the add-on would flag dodgy links with a red traffic light icon, advising you that a click was risky without having to click on it.
It's not a bad concept, the fact the developers couldn't be trusted not to sell your data is disappointing. Maybe it'd work well as a not-for-profit or some kind of open organisation instead.
Is it possibly down to increasing numbers of Windows 10 installs, with users relying on Edge which (until very recently) didn't support ad blocking? W10 did make it a bit more of a faff to make another browser the default.
Of course, if I'm right then as the 1607 update spreads through the userbase then users will be surprised and delighted to discover they can start using ad blockers again.
Most NFC stickers are too weak to work through anything but the thinnest tables. But you are right, there's probably not a lot stopping someone from sticking Ronald McDonald stickers on top of regular NFC stickers and putting them on top of the table, I doubt the staff would see a few stickers and think "obvious security threat".
I mean, technically speaking the University of Queensland has a pile of continuously-flowing pitch, but it doesn't appear to change more than once every dozen or so years. Like Sainsbury's web crypto.
But Microsoft's Status page has been surprisingly good for us (just passed three months on O365). By which, I mean that for the first two and a half months there were yellow alerts everywhere, different ones every week, and they were for the merest trifles, nearly all of which didn't affect us but which were genuinely useful for the few that did. So good that it's a genuine letdown this has been missed off the status page, rather than business as usual.
The odd experimental film is great and will help film-makers slowly figure out what they have to do to build a market. But it's video games that will get money out of wallets and headsets on heads to start with. 3D games are already doing most of the work to generating a 3D environment, it's just up to the devs to do that extra chunk of work to make it look right in VR. I don't know much about the Gear VR, but if it doesn't have a few games on par with those working with the Rift and HTC Vive, it'll not take the market by storm.
Edit: well, games and porn. But if games aren't there, then people might not be prepared to shell out for a multi-hundred-£ wanking helmet.
They're also missing the obvious - children taught with computers to hand are then tested in rooms without computers, so can only use stuff they've committed to their actual memory. That's not how most people in the modern workplace are going to behave. If you can remember how to do calculus or getting the volume of a sphere after a quick google search, you're going to be only marginally less effective as someone who learned it by rote unless you're trapped somewhere you can't do a quick google search. And you can do that from the International Space Station.
Unless they're going on to do any more maths-based subject, what's the point of trying to get kids to memorise it perfectly when familiarity with the concepts is all that they need?
What a coinkydink. One of our guys asked me, today, where his wife (a primary teacher) could learn how to do stuff with a raspberry pi. They'd had a load of pis dumped on them with no hints as to what to do. I was lost as to what to even suggest - mentioned it could be turned into anything from a mini desktop to a weather station to a file server to a robot.
In the end she settled for learning a bit of Python that she could pass on to the kids. Will hopefully help them create a few games and similar.
In most places in the UK, there's WEEE recycling companies who are happy to take the stuff away for free. We've got a local one who'll pick up anything more than 10 PCs at no charge, Presumably they're turning a profit on it, but they also support local charities and that's about as good as it gets for small scale operations.
I imagine if you had a whole data centre that needed melting down you'd think about it differently, but for small businesses with not much, the value generated probably doesn't pay for the time and effort of sorting it yourself. Specialisation of labour and all that.
Genuine question. The only place that springs to mind as a genuine alternative is Tesco's Direct, and they're not exactly angels who only fart rainbows. Where do you buy stuff you'd go to Amazon for, where they pay tax and don't abuse their staff and you still get an alright deal and can get it delivered cheaply and reliably?
Given the intensely beefy PC specs that Oculus Rift requires, and the limited view window on Microsoft's HoloLens, how are Sony producing this Rift-like setup on the limited hardware of the PS4?
Are they running a much lower quality image than the Rift? Oculus seemed to think that anything less than what they're offering is going to either look terrible or cause horrific nausea. Are Sony going for that anyway? Or are they running everything off insanely-specced development PCs, meaning that the average PS4 gamer won't see anything this good? Or have they got some magic sauce that nobody else has figured out?
The only other thing I can think of is that all the hardware is in the headset, but that's got to mean it'd cost more than a PS4 by itself.
Don't know if our correspondent has had a go on the other products to offer a comparison?
Given the problems caused for everyone by people who don't update (the users, the DDOS victims, anyone who has to share USB thumb drives with them), you'd better have a damned good reason for not wanting to update. If you're a business who uses strange/unsupported/fragile stuff then fair enough - this gives you time to work around it. But this is an OS that's going to IT illiterate children and grandparents, and everyone in between. If you want an OS you have total control over, get a Linux.
So going from two channels that shut down overnight and a handful of radio stations to ten channels, most of which are 24/7, the iPlayer, a dozen or so radio stations as well as everything else on their website, plus all the odds and sods that come along with that? A mere 55% higher doesn't seem to do that much justice, regardless of what you might think of the quality. Pish!
I was at SpiceWorld London last month, and during the Microsoft talk on Windows 10, one of the speakers said that there definitely will be subscription services for Windows 10. He seemed to think that security updates would be free forever, but additional features (whatever that might comprise of) would require subscriptions eventually.
The audience was quite hostile towards Microsoft, over that and over things.
Moneysavingexpert linked to http://www.curiua.com/ the other day, which checks other EU Amazon stores to see if they're selling stuff cheaper. Apparently a lot of the time, they are. Hurrah for the single market, boo to Amazon for bilking us more than our neighbours.