This is what some people have been saying for over a decade.
I've worked in many schools and lots of them get snakeoil salesmen for everything from solar power to "power conditioners" (that "save money on running your flourescent lights!") and all sorts. The ones who have been approached for solar panels on roofs (and they have a LOT of roof space) have either refused it, or regretted it later.
One school I know has panels that barely pull in enough to run one of their on-site servers. They have it "because it looks good", green credentials and all that.
But while you are subsidising something, it usually means it's not a viable business model on its own. Look at all the other green energy methods and they all have huge subsidies. We are burning cash instead of coal to reduce carbon emissions, not generate power efficiently.
All the large solar panels that I price up for my area are useless and barely pay for themselves within their lifetime. You can't sell that. Not once you include problems with ownership of the roof (is it part of the mortgaged property or not), electrical connection, and so forth.
Sure, I can run a few lightbulbs in a shed from a panel on its roof, for a hundred GBP or so. But apart from that, it's not anywhere near as good as people make out. Even if the technology exists, the commercialised versions on small home scales aren't viable in much of the world.
I once priced up a HUGE wind turbine sold for home use in my local DIY store. If a force-nine gale blew for 5 years straight and it never needed installation, planning permission, maintenance or anything doing to it, it might just pay for its purchase cost before the warranty expired.
People loved it, everyone looked at it, a few talked about buying it. Nobody did. They took it away after a few years and I asked - they sold basically zero of them from that store.
Solar is the same. While subsidies and selling crappy, unreliable, variable, low-voltage, low-power back to the grid exist, they are okay. Just okay. As soon as those things disappear, it's game over. But, hey, "the next generation" will be more efficient, cheaper, etc. etc. etc. as always. Just replace everything you buy every few years.
I'm sure it's possible to live off the grid, to have solar power be "the thing" that you live from. But it's far from easy, not cheap, requires a lot of work, investment and surface area, and involves a lot of sacrifices.
Solar roofs? Only selling to people who happen to be changing the entire roof (which they likely want done quite quickly and cheaply), rather than selling to everyone who already HAS a roof? That just seems suicidal. Solar panels are identical, modular, and can be put onto anything. A solar roof would have to be bespoke, supplied quickly, and be inside the cost of a roof plus a handful of panels. And you can spread the cost of the roof and panels quite simply by buying modules as you can afford them. An all-or-nothing roof would only be put on new-builds, and likely would have to be designed for.
- Can't search. - Can't necessarily even understand (if the audio is muffled, no message at all). - Require audio equipment (can't listen in a meeting, for example - I'm often involved in meetings where we email out for a quick answer and get it back live while we're making a decision). - Much larger data storage. My email is already Gigs, but at least I can keep them all on my phone. - No advantage. Email is deliberately formal to hide the emotional shit and cut to the facts. We need this done, for this reason. Anger can be expressed easily if you want, but it just lengthens and confuses the email. Email from your boss saying "FIX THIS NOW" is quite clear enough, thanks. - Can't be translated, forwarded, quoted, etc. as easily.
Basically, it's a stupid idea. Email works (and we can't change it BECAUSE it's so successful - we'll need to break email so we can reinvent the protocol soon, people!). If you don't think it does, you're not using it properly.
And little voice memos are like the YouTube tutorial. Takes ten minutes longer to record, review, send and listen to, than just writing down what you mean in clear text. The bane of my life is the information I want being locked inside a voice track to a online presentation or video.
I've spend no end of time huddled round a voicemail saying "What the fuck did they say? Was that "smith"?" and it has just reinforced what I've known for year. Voice sucks.
And, yes, if you want to talk to me (especially if you're a salesman), send me an email. I guarantee a response same-day. Don't try to ring me, then ring round all my colleagues, then ask to be put through to me, then finally get through to me and spend 10 minutes getting to the fucking point. You're just wasting everyone's time and I will ask for quotes, invoices, guarantees, promises and contracts in writing anyway. In fact, my response time by phone unless you're my direct boss is literally days sometimes. It'll get put on the helpdesk if you ask, and from there response times are like any other. But email me and tell me what your company does and next time I need you, I can search.
I can't search my voicemail for that critical authorisation, that company that contacted me weeks ago who offer the service I want, or that memo I took on my phone last week.
In order of uselessness, inefficiency, ability to get confused (and thus require more levels of verification because I won't let you get away with just a confusing voicemail alone):
- Voicemail and audio messages. - Handwriting on scraps of paper - Other paper. - Email or stored notes (e.g. Google Keep).
I mean, I have a good job, disposable funds, and I have an "slush" fund that I just put random things into (e.g. a bit of Bitcoin, spare cash, Paypal refunds, stuff from Steam market sales, etc. - it all adds up and there's several hundred GBP in there a year). But that kind of price for one game when I could get ten smaller ones spread over the course of a year?
2) Although I was quite intrigued by the "this won't be multiplayer" aspect, which is unusual nowadays, there doesn't seem to be much at all of how the game actually works, plays or progresses.
(I hate games that focus on multiplayer at the expense of the single player... they are two DIFFERENT kinds of games. CS:GO is obviously only good as multiplayer, and other things are obviously only good as single-player - and some are great single-player games where you think "It would be so cool if" and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't)
Back in the day, Elite could have an infinite procedural map (effectively), but first and foremost it has stuff to do rather than wander around. I see nothing of that. There was a game set on Mars I played that I got for nothing. It was basically wandering around in an empty world, and then you found out that it was on rails because any deviation just let you wander for hours but you couldn't progress until you came back to the right spot. So dull, and despite being a beautiful game, I wasted an hour of my life on it.
3) No demo. No demo, no way to test, no compatibility assurance, no game. People are literally buying and then hoping Steam refunds will work so they get a demo out of it. That's just shit. There's obviously a reason there's no demo of this turd, but come on. Put out demos, people.
4) Indie games, to me, are things that studios wouldn't have developed. I understand that's not the official definition, but no big studio would have put their money behind, say, SpaceChem or Factorio. That's an indie game. Made by people trying to make it on their own with something that they'd never find being made by EA in their local store. This isn't.
5) Value. I'll be honest, I've got hunderds of hours in both SpaceChem and Factorio and wouldn't have paid anywhere near what No Man's Sky cost for them both. If you work out the gameplay-per-cost of things, then up the top are the indie games which draw you in and don't let you leave. At the bottom are the flops of commercial releases, and then the commercial releases just about them. Great fun was had, but only for a handful of hours, and cost a premium.
My friends got into Ark: Survival and it's been great for them. Dozens of hours (a lot for non-gamers), but it cost them a bit. That's okay, they enjoyed it and it was disposable cash and they got a lot back for that. But I can't justify full-price games that last a few hours or are crap or boring and getting reviews this bad. Certainly not against silly casual indie games that cost pence and can entertain a room full of people for the whole night.
6) First-day releases, pre-orders, etc.
Er... no. Unless there's a demo and I know what I'm ordering and that I'll get it.
And promotional material is skimmed by the very first owner only. You can put all the crap you like in there, it's still misleading to name it Autopilot.
Thousands of people die because of stupid, careless driving.
Encouraging you to rely on a system not capable of detecting and avoiding a car that the human in front of you managed to avoid? That's encouraging stupid and careless driving.
The stats don't add up at the moment because not many people have these things, not everyone that does has this shit turned on, and not everyone who turns this shit on is an idiot. But those are all factors that change radically as it becomes mainstream.
Notice that it's always Tesla, and none of the other manufacturers of cars are getting as bad a press even though my car bought this year had options for lane assist, auto-braking cruise control, and so on. Because they DO NOT encourage you to just let the car drive. Tesla does. Even if they say they don't, calling it what they call it implies it can do things that it can't.
Why do you think the other manufacturers are avoiding that exact thing, when they could easily claim to have the same or superior technology in their cars right now? Why do you think they steer clear of any terminology like that? Why do you think they are all testing it, all using it, but none of them are making any kind of claim about it, or getting anywhere near as much bad press?
It's not the technology. We're a tech site here, we love technology. It's the inappropriate use of technology and encouraging reliance on something that's not perfect.
And, still, legally and ultimately this driver is at fault - Tesla can't take responsibility because their system just isn't good enough to do so. They have to blame the customer. But their customer is saying that the exact feature that's supposed to avoid accidents that they don't notice isn't working. How, with all the fancy tech that Tesla claim to have, was it possible to come into contact with another car at all? Ignoring whose fault it was, who should have had their hand on the wheel, etc. Tesla are saying that their system DIDN'T manage to do what they advertise it can do (even if they can discourage reliance on it, legally speaking).
There was an obstacle, a large obstacle, a visible and detectable obstacle, and nobody is saying this guy was going too fast, or the other guy was going the wrong way down a motorway or anything out of the ordinary. He drove past a car, and the system didn't detect it, and he hit it. Given Tesla's love of this new feature they are selling, how is that possible?
It's possible because the Tesla self-drive / auto-drive / drive-assist feature DIDN'T SPOT THE OBSTACLE, DIDN'T APPLY THE BRAKES IN TIME and therefore DIDN'T DO WHAT IT CLAIMS. This is just one isolated incident, maybe, and maybe the guy was too close (as others have pointed out, why didn't the drive assist increase the gap?), too fast or too stupid in his actions. But the thing didn't do what it needed to.
Extrapolate that to millions of idiotic drivers like there are on the road, millions of such events every day, millions of unexpected cars and obstacles, and it's a potential disaster. And Tesla want to be able to just say "Oh, well, you shouldn't have relied on us", effectively. It's not a good sales technique!
If this tech is to become mainstream, it has to get better a lot quicker, because still the issues of liability are there. If the car is capable of NOT taking action, it's also capable of taking INCORRECT action, and that's just going to open up all kinds of avenues where people will say their car did something that they never intended.
And as these cars age, the system isn't going to improve in capability. As these cars get more prevalent, the number of problems is going to increase. And as people see more of them and get more reliant on them (I've never seen a Tesla on the road in my country, and some models appear to cost FIVE TIMES what my brand-new 2016-model large family car cost, so I don't imagine there are many about and people are being "careful" with them at the moment).
It's not a question of holding back tech. I'm a techie, I love it. It's a question of how that tech is sold ("Hey, this car drives itself!" even if they say they never say that) and how it's handled when things go wrong ("Driver error for relying on us, not our problem").
Pretty much every space mission has been a great driver of technology. We invest in space because it returns science, but it also lets us invest big in technologies needed to obtain that science.
You know how Formula 1 / Rally Driving has absolutely NO BEARING on your life? Apart from the airbags. And the automatic seat restraints. And the ABS. And disc brakes. And speed cameras (invented for race track timing). And gearing systems. And fuel efficiencies. And aerodynamics. And tyre design. And...
Back in my grandfather's day, the Formula 1 engines had the same size, capability, speed, etc. as the car you drive today. (And yet you have ABSOLUTELY NO NEED of that on an ordinary road, your car can probably beat a Formula 1 car of old - because the tech your car has now is better than they had then even with stupendous budgets, all the emissions they were spewing out and specialist fuels).
Now you could argue that it would happen without, but someone has to buy the expensive, stupendous specification hardware that's rare, new, hard to make, etc. before it can become mass-market. NASA have been doing that for decades.
Their investment gives you insight into everything from Earth geology and solar flares, to medicine and air travel. Just as a part of doing what they do, as a side-line to actually testing theories.
Until the Navy was convinced, early GPS satellites had a button to switch off "relativitistic effects". Nobody believed some whacko with funny hair to the point they put in an option to see if he was right. He was. Or now your GPS would be so inaccurate as to be useless. Testing that theory, launching that satellite, letting you see where you are on the Earth have all come about because of the space programme. And the technology used to go around Mars and take photos is no different to that to go around Earth and do the same. The only difference? They invest much more in the Mars one, which filters back to become commodity hardware for you in 20-30 years time and lets you have things like Google Earth.
Visiting planets is really the antithesis of the space programme's science aims. It's not necessary, planned or even cost-effective. We only went to the Moon to show off and haven't been back in 40 years. But the technology to get you there, and the technology to know what to expect when you're there, and the technology to send probes to all these places is giving you a headstart on the next generation of technology.
You've already benefited from it. Your children will benefit from the Mars missions. And, eventually, someone will touch down on Mars. But if we left it until it was easy and never needed any tests before we do these things - lots of people would die, and it would be a lot further off.
The fact is that some experiments on the ISS, on the Apollo missions, and the Mars landers are done purely because we need to make sure. We guess that we know about gravity, effects on the body, composition of minerals, data transmission through space, the particles the Sun is throwing out, the pattern of our orbit and all those other things that do actually matter in your everyday life, whether YOU use them or not. But until we actually get out there and test outside of the Earth, we can never be sure.
And, like the LHC, such simple things, tested in unusual scenarios outside our knowledge, have thrown us a lot of curve-balls that we were never expecting, which means we need to look deeper to actually see what's happening before we can rely on our knowledge and start bigger things.
Nowadays, your PC only operates because of knowledge of quantum-level interactions of the circuits. Without that knowledge, we could guess and do things and then try to compensate for something we don't understand, but it would be expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. Understanding what's happening there requires confirmation of much larger theories, which is what are tested for in space.
Think of the Moon, Mars, the ISS, etc. as science labs.
Roll up, ladies and gentleman, and look at my product. Here, see what we will do for you, we'll do this. Brilliant isn't it? So cool, I hear you say. Just 9.99 and you can see this.
Oh. You bought it. Yeah, that's you're lot.
You need a better lawyer hat - false advertising is basically fraud. You can't claim that the trailer is just there for people to watch the trailer. It's there as a preview of the movie (they even CALL them previews INSIDE the trailer). So, yeah, minor detail changes, a couple of extra sparks in the CGI, that kind of thing changes.
Entire scenes that were used to entice you to buy the movie, never then appearing? Multiple of them? That's a bit different. It's like watching a trailer for an Angelina Jolie movie and then she's not in it. But you got your trailer, right?
I have to agree with the guy. I'm sure the lawyers in court will throw a ton of legal obstacles at his argument and make him fight but he's got a good point.
From my perspective, though: The scene was that good that you used it to show off the movie right through to acting it, filming it, editing it, choosing it for the trailer, making millions of copies of said trailer and pushing them into cinema and TV. And then you remove it? How shit was the rest of that characters involvement with the movie? And then you did it MULTIPLE times? Just how shit was everything else about that character or was he just that for a couple of faked action scenes that never made it into the full movie at all?
Edits, sure. Total removal of key scenes you've been using to advertise your product? That's just cheating. And seems really stupid.
You might as well show a trailer that's just 10 minutes of explosions and comedian-written jokes, and then put a drama on with completely different actors when people actually buy the movie. Otherwise, where's the line?
Temperature, sure. But is that going to change between the watch and the phone it's tethered to significantly enough for you to care? Likely not. Unless you want to measure something specifically and then you'll need a probe anyway.
3D scanner? You're going to run your wrist around a 3D object? Then what are you going to do with that data? Oh, yeah, ask the phone to do something with it.
Geiger counter? Come on. Cheap $20 sensors in every electronics store. Pointless even 20 years ago except in a "Cor, this is above average" kind of way.
Gas sensors? Much better suited to life-saving equipment designed to life-saving standards... or not at all.
Facetime camera has exactly the problem you suggest, and was my immediate first "Really?!" thought.
I struggle to think of anything vaguely useful for a smartwatch while it's still tethered to the phone that's doing all the work anyway, and if you could miniaturise the phone down to the smartwatch size reliably enough, that's a product in itself and has nothing to do with the applications of watches.
That said, I think I'd still find a watch more inconvenient than a phone. Sure, it's "on you", but it's difficult to have a private conversation without straining your arm, it has to be pulled back from under clothing to look at it for six months a year (my bugbear with watches entirely), and they are in the most inconvenient place to use for any length of time (the reason we put watches in breast-pockets for many years before wrist watches, and wrist watches are - as I've contended for several years - impractical as they are!).
Sod all the fancy stuff. Shrink the phone down to your wrist first so that it's entirely self-contained and yet competitive with the most basic of smartphones. Then you'll find how practical the rest is.
Hell, the BATTERY in my smartphone is larger than any watch I'd be comfortable wearing. We have a long way to go before smartwatches get anywhere close.
What we have is not a smartwatch. It's a bluetooth dongle on your wrist. An incredibly expensive, and impractical, one.
"Proof" is an absolute. It's either waterproof or its not.
Otherwise it's water-resistant.
It might be water-resistant at a greater depth, but if you're claiming water-resistance, it should at least be resistant to any reasonable depth the average (non-diver) might use to in anyway.
"Better waterproofing" just means it wasn't waterproof before.
Everyone to have unique credentials (yep, banks have this). Everyone to be identified before issuing credentials (yep, banks have this) Everyone to have AT MOST one credential (Er... nope). Everyone to have a credential which can be proved to have been used only once (Er... possibly, some of the banking stuff can only be spent "once"). Everyone to have votes that can be verified throughout the process (some of this, but nowhere near the same level of assurance).
The problem is not any of the above. But your bank funds all the above. All of it. Who funds the electoral system? Taxpayer-funded government IT. You seriously just give up when you hear that, in IT.
Issuing millions of credentials to only verified people, with no duplicates, to the point that the person must be verified to be the person using the credentials, and they can only "use" them once, and they all know how to do it, and without just taking things on trust (isn't Amazon's entire credit card functionality based on assuming all the risk from the bank for the sake of simplicity and customer experience?), and being able to prove that everyone voted only once but NEVER what they voted for, and being able to prove who - overall - everyone voted for? It's a difficult, but not impossible task hindered by maths, logistics, practicality, human error, cost and budget-defined shortcuts.
My dad's generation had computers, telephones, and lots more that previous generations didn't - he bought our ZX Spectrum for us.
However, my grandfather was baffled by car seatbelts, anything no wired to a wall, and changing the channel on the television
It's no surprise now that, compared to twenty years ago, the older generations are better with technology. It's not their father's generation, who struggled to keep up, they grew up with all this stuff.
As we go on, the next generation are growing up being taught on iPads, with Kindles in libraries (what are those places?!), mobile phones from the day they are old enough. They won't have trouble adapting.
I call it the "old-people's home" fallacy. My grandmother would have been quite happy playing bingo for the rest of her existence once she retired. But I'm going to need a full-on Internet connection, a bunch of freedom and technology, to operate into my old age. There's no way I'm going to end up in a corner, dribbling, and watching Match of the Day, and it's not even a personality thing.
But are old-people's homes of today actually taking account of that? Not that I've seen. There are 60, 70, 80 years olds out there that are tech literate, can shop online, watch iPlayer, and all the other stuff we younger people do, because they were pioneers and that's stayed with them into old age and now they are the ones being put into homes that still cater only for a previous generation.
Time's change. I have no idea about allotment gardening or crochet or mending mechanical machines. Previous generations did but can't operate a mobile phone. As we go further on, the newer generations will be VR-addicts or whatever and they'll be surveys saying that not enough old people are getting the benefits of VR-space and still cling to their old WWW ways.
You pay one licence per full time member of staff, get unlimited licences for as many computers as you like, for all Microsoft OS, but the condition is that the original PC must have come with Pro or Enterprise on it when you bought it.
Applications and Server are annual recurring purchases as you suggest, but Windows and Office are odd-balls, especially in education when you pay for dozens of copies and yet can legally install thousands of them.
The iMac power adaptor plugs, despite being on-the-whole standard IEC plugs, look shite if you plug a normal plug in as "their" plugs have a grey circular plastic moulding that forms the rest of the case. Same for certain "figure of eight" plugs they use on power adaptors - they all have right-angles and grey mouldings rather than just plug in.
The MacBooks have proprietary magnetic-clasp adaptors.
Need to show an iMac on a projector? Then you need thunderbolt adaptors of some kind.
Mac Minis (their nearest "server" equivalent despite not having any of the hardware of a normal server, like ECC RAM etc.) - they have a requirement in certain conditions for original Apple keyboards. If they crash, for example, booting up often requires swapping out the KVM for a proprietary Apple keyboard (not even sure how it detects that situation, but you can get to the point that things won't boot without the original keyboard, no matter what you try). Hey, at least they have HDMI unlike the iMac, right?
But, then, if you'd ever tried to network this things you'd know this.
I'm sure there are much better ways to "fool" it with much more low-tech items.
How does it distinguish the density of an object it detects? Does a paper bag blowing across the road get marked as something it can drive over or will it take evasive action? Where does it draw the line between running over the paper bag and steering into the car in the next lane to have what it might think is a "softer" crash? And how does it tell the difference between a bag and a child, or even a pigeon?
Isn't most of its autopilot visual rather than actual sensing? So how does it determine whether or not the bag is solid (a paper-coloured rock in the road), or not?
There are just too many scenarios for a blanket rule, and - as in the blasphemous I-Robot movie - the wrong decisions will be made.
Once you start including deliberate interference, these things just get dangerous.
What makes you think you don't have to buy an AV for the Macs too?
And most AV is cross-platform, buy it once and deploy on Mac, Linux and Windows for the same price.
And try finding someone who will set up Macs professionally for you. They might dabble, they might even have them on their network, but big Mac installs need a Mac guy, an Apple partner, or lots of messing - just the same as any proper Windows installs.
P.S. Have you seen the price of Mac Mini servers? And the hoops you have to jump through to get things working without them (e.g. have to have one or all your Macs will start downloading updates individually, swamping your connection to thousands of unique Apple IP's - device supervision, printer sharing, etc. Even Papercut recommend you just use a Mac server rather than try to make them co-operate, and they sell a Mac, Windows, Linux printing product).
It's nowhere near as clear-cut (or even true) to say that Macs have a lower TCO in any sort of non-home environment.
You think the machines weren't horrendously overpriced on day one either?
I have 10 Macs in the next room (I work in schools).
I guarantee you that they get one-hundredth of the usage of any other PC on site. And yet they cost nearly 8 times as much. And we give the kids free-reign, a lot of the staff use Mac at home, our systems are mostly online so support either setup, they are tied into our AD and file storage, they are connected to the same network, etc.
He have several hundred iPads. Those get use. But the Macs? Even the children barely bother to touch them, even when given free time in the room they are in. I've seen the same at many other schools.
The irony is that the only piece of software we regularly use them for used to be Mac-only and is now dual-platform. So they are literally lame ducks. And, no, our volume licensing doesn't allow us to use them via Boot Camp as they were NOT originally purchased with a copy of a Pro or Enterprise version of Windows. Even if it did, why would we do that rather than just sell them off, buy three or four equivalent PC's for each, and then just use those instead?
Mac's aren't anything very special at all. Their hardware is lacklustre, and pretty fixed, and over-priced, and their management is much more complicated than necessary for such "user-friendly" machines.
Honestly, two were stolen on an open day one year. I could have literally bought - there and then - six PC's for the price of the replacement new Macs that the insurance company forced us to have. Do I honestly get three times the functionality out of the Macs than the PCs? Nope. Not even in a school with music, drama (theatre shows, movie recording, etc), etc. departments using the facilities all day every day.
Last time I received a helpdesk ticket for them for something not working, we found out that the machine in question hadn't been switched on for three months (and, no, it wasn't a holiday). Timetabled classes of 20, 10 Macs in the room, you work that out.
I've even run Mac OS in a VM, and I honestly don't get the fuss at all. In fact, it run faster as a resource-limited VM on my Windows-based laptop that was also running over VM's than it did on the original hardware itself.
Don't even get me started on stupid proprietary cables that add nothing but cost, obstructions to centralised management of the machines, and - honestly - if I hear the word keychain one more time I will scream (it tends to be new users, but still, it drives us insane).
Three times I have submitted plans to remove the entire room and replace it with an IT suite with twice the machines and each time the only justification for refusal is how much it had cost to install them originally. I even factored into one of the proposals the ridiculous second-hand price they attract as a way of funding the change entirely.
But, still, they get 1/10th the usage of any other machine I manage. And one of those is in a cupboard.
"4/5ths of people refused a free upgrade to what was traditionally a very expensive piece of software, despite us trying to forcibly install it on their machines for months on end and making it difficult for anyone other than a techy to refuse it".
Amazing how you can change how something reads by just flipping it.
Smart cards are just NFC / RFID cards. You can activate them by inducing any kind of magnetic field and you can do that from across the street.
I'm actually suspicious now that the shoplifting arches at stores are capable of powering them up.
Then they broadcast radio signals on known frequencies.
Yes, tagging them against a mobile with NFC will activate them and read data. So will your passport (there are apps for getting your photo off your passport!).
The problem here is not the activation (that can be done from across the streets, demos all over the web), not the broadcast radio (that can be picked up from miles away once activated, again demos all over the web). It's not even that an app can read the data from the card (that's it's purpose and you'll see that the chip in the card is indeed "smart" and requires authentication and setting up an encrypted session to a bank to actually DO anything that includes private data) - it's that the smartcard has pushed liability to you. If the above goes wrong, on Chip & PIN, you are liable if they think you authorised the transaction.
Now think about the box you enter your PIN into or that you swipe over. Who supplies that? How do you know? What kind of authentication does your CARD do on that device? None. You're typing your PIN into a generic looking box or tagging your card on a generic looking reader that could happily be relaying that stuff to a genuine, bank-supplied box under the counter (thus authorising the immediate transaction) while capturing enough to be able to put in more transactions later when you're not there.
And you'd be liable if you tapped your PIN on some Raspberry-Pi homebrew box that just stored and relayed the number you typed into the real bank card reader.
Smart cards are another step up - the card DOES authenticate to the bank somehow over a communications channel considered insecure (no different to Diffie-Hellman over the Internet) - but the liability is still with you.
And as you say - you have 5 smart cards on you. Any of them could be picked up when you authenticate. London Underground is full of warnings about "card clash" where people are charged on their credit card by mistake when they wave their wallet with their Oyster card over the reader.
The US is behind here and has picked up THE worst technology available, much like we all did. Smart cards and NFC can be secure, in theory. Chip & PIN and mag-stripe can't. Hence why C&P made almost zero dent in card fraud.
However, much more interesting? My bank app now turns my phone into an NFC credit card, as does Android Pay / Apple Pay. Then you're given a whole new virtual credit card on your phone. Now you're completely out of the loop of what happens on that card and can only hope to dispute transactions that might appear on it.
And it's unlikely that people will turn all NFC off until they make a purchase and then turn it back on, so it can be "sniffed" at any time. Chances are slim of that encryption being broken, but we're now just moving to client certificates stored on a passcoded device running a general purpose operating system for security, and broadcasting over open frequencies on activation.
It's not exactly how I'd design a secure payment system.
You can still override and install an unsigned driver on Windows 8.1, let alone 7, and the early versions of 10.
On a domain, you can group-policy it out of being an option, but it's an option on all previous versions of Windows to let the user allow unsigned drivers at will.
1) Unlikely. I've seen lots of WHQL drivers that just crash-and-burn but more likely they are "stable" but atrociously useless. Because of the faffing and back-and-forth on them, lots of simple devices (e.g. printers etc.) get one WHQL driver and then just release unofficial ones for everything else. If you're lucky and it's a big printer, they might update the WHQL one every year or so. With ten other releases between.
2) No. They won't know what's going on and things will just stop working. They won't be able to update drivers when suggested and will still have all the problems that they have now. And everything cheap they buy on Amazon just won't work, it's as simple as that.
Test it with any phone with NFC and a free app (you can "read" the card, you just can't get any important information out of it... put it in the sleeve and you cannot get it to read at all).
Samsung loses despite making twice as much money and/or shipping MORE THAN twice as much product?
Yeah. Strange Appley world you live in.
Sure it's not "as good" an improvement in the year-to-years, but a company with smaller sales can make an percentage increase in sales much easier than a company with already a vast majority of the market.
Meanwhile iPhones are outnumbered 3:1 or more across the globe.
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That guy from "Microsoft" that offers to fix your PC if you just download this program is fake too.
So are the guys trying to sell you that product for your embarrassing sexual ailment by email.
So are the websites that just need you to enter your credit "to verify your age".
Seriously, Slashdot, the mediocre-to-shit ratio (used to be signal-to-noise) has fucking plummeted around here.
This is what some people have been saying for over a decade.
I've worked in many schools and lots of them get snakeoil salesmen for everything from solar power to "power conditioners" (that "save money on running your flourescent lights!") and all sorts. The ones who have been approached for solar panels on roofs (and they have a LOT of roof space) have either refused it, or regretted it later.
One school I know has panels that barely pull in enough to run one of their on-site servers. They have it "because it looks good", green credentials and all that.
But while you are subsidising something, it usually means it's not a viable business model on its own. Look at all the other green energy methods and they all have huge subsidies. We are burning cash instead of coal to reduce carbon emissions, not generate power efficiently.
All the large solar panels that I price up for my area are useless and barely pay for themselves within their lifetime. You can't sell that. Not once you include problems with ownership of the roof (is it part of the mortgaged property or not), electrical connection, and so forth.
Sure, I can run a few lightbulbs in a shed from a panel on its roof, for a hundred GBP or so. But apart from that, it's not anywhere near as good as people make out. Even if the technology exists, the commercialised versions on small home scales aren't viable in much of the world.
I once priced up a HUGE wind turbine sold for home use in my local DIY store. If a force-nine gale blew for 5 years straight and it never needed installation, planning permission, maintenance or anything doing to it, it might just pay for its purchase cost before the warranty expired.
People loved it, everyone looked at it, a few talked about buying it. Nobody did. They took it away after a few years and I asked - they sold basically zero of them from that store.
Solar is the same. While subsidies and selling crappy, unreliable, variable, low-voltage, low-power back to the grid exist, they are okay. Just okay. As soon as those things disappear, it's game over. But, hey, "the next generation" will be more efficient, cheaper, etc. etc. etc. as always. Just replace everything you buy every few years.
I'm sure it's possible to live off the grid, to have solar power be "the thing" that you live from. But it's far from easy, not cheap, requires a lot of work, investment and surface area, and involves a lot of sacrifices.
Solar roofs? Only selling to people who happen to be changing the entire roof (which they likely want done quite quickly and cheaply), rather than selling to everyone who already HAS a roof? That just seems suicidal. Solar panels are identical, modular, and can be put onto anything. A solar roof would have to be bespoke, supplied quickly, and be inside the cost of a roof plus a handful of panels. And you can spread the cost of the roof and panels quite simply by buying modules as you can afford them. An all-or-nothing roof would only be put on new-builds, and likely would have to be designed for.
- Can't search.
- Can't necessarily even understand (if the audio is muffled, no message at all).
- Require audio equipment (can't listen in a meeting, for example - I'm often involved in meetings where we email out for a quick answer and get it back live while we're making a decision).
- Much larger data storage. My email is already Gigs, but at least I can keep them all on my phone.
- No advantage. Email is deliberately formal to hide the emotional shit and cut to the facts. We need this done, for this reason. Anger can be expressed easily if you want, but it just lengthens and confuses the email. Email from your boss saying "FIX THIS NOW" is quite clear enough, thanks.
- Can't be translated, forwarded, quoted, etc. as easily.
Basically, it's a stupid idea. Email works (and we can't change it BECAUSE it's so successful - we'll need to break email so we can reinvent the protocol soon, people!). If you don't think it does, you're not using it properly.
And little voice memos are like the YouTube tutorial. Takes ten minutes longer to record, review, send and listen to, than just writing down what you mean in clear text. The bane of my life is the information I want being locked inside a voice track to a online presentation or video.
I've spend no end of time huddled round a voicemail saying "What the fuck did they say? Was that "smith"?" and it has just reinforced what I've known for year. Voice sucks.
And, yes, if you want to talk to me (especially if you're a salesman), send me an email. I guarantee a response same-day. Don't try to ring me, then ring round all my colleagues, then ask to be put through to me, then finally get through to me and spend 10 minutes getting to the fucking point. You're just wasting everyone's time and I will ask for quotes, invoices, guarantees, promises and contracts in writing anyway. In fact, my response time by phone unless you're my direct boss is literally days sometimes. It'll get put on the helpdesk if you ask, and from there response times are like any other. But email me and tell me what your company does and next time I need you, I can search.
I can't search my voicemail for that critical authorisation, that company that contacted me weeks ago who offer the service I want, or that memo I took on my phone last week.
In order of uselessness, inefficiency, ability to get confused (and thus require more levels of verification because I won't let you get away with just a confusing voicemail alone):
- Voicemail and audio messages.
- Handwriting on scraps of paper
- Other paper.
- Email or stored notes (e.g. Google Keep).
1) I can't justify that amount for one game.
I mean, I have a good job, disposable funds, and I have an "slush" fund that I just put random things into (e.g. a bit of Bitcoin, spare cash, Paypal refunds, stuff from Steam market sales, etc. - it all adds up and there's several hundred GBP in there a year). But that kind of price for one game when I could get ten smaller ones spread over the course of a year?
2) Although I was quite intrigued by the "this won't be multiplayer" aspect, which is unusual nowadays, there doesn't seem to be much at all of how the game actually works, plays or progresses.
(I hate games that focus on multiplayer at the expense of the single player... they are two DIFFERENT kinds of games. CS:GO is obviously only good as multiplayer, and other things are obviously only good as single-player - and some are great single-player games where you think "It would be so cool if" and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't)
Back in the day, Elite could have an infinite procedural map (effectively), but first and foremost it has stuff to do rather than wander around. I see nothing of that. There was a game set on Mars I played that I got for nothing. It was basically wandering around in an empty world, and then you found out that it was on rails because any deviation just let you wander for hours but you couldn't progress until you came back to the right spot. So dull, and despite being a beautiful game, I wasted an hour of my life on it.
3) No demo. No demo, no way to test, no compatibility assurance, no game. People are literally buying and then hoping Steam refunds will work so they get a demo out of it. That's just shit. There's obviously a reason there's no demo of this turd, but come on. Put out demos, people.
4) Indie games, to me, are things that studios wouldn't have developed. I understand that's not the official definition, but no big studio would have put their money behind, say, SpaceChem or Factorio. That's an indie game. Made by people trying to make it on their own with something that they'd never find being made by EA in their local store. This isn't.
5) Value. I'll be honest, I've got hunderds of hours in both SpaceChem and Factorio and wouldn't have paid anywhere near what No Man's Sky cost for them both. If you work out the gameplay-per-cost of things, then up the top are the indie games which draw you in and don't let you leave. At the bottom are the flops of commercial releases, and then the commercial releases just about them. Great fun was had, but only for a handful of hours, and cost a premium.
My friends got into Ark: Survival and it's been great for them. Dozens of hours (a lot for non-gamers), but it cost them a bit. That's okay, they enjoyed it and it was disposable cash and they got a lot back for that. But I can't justify full-price games that last a few hours or are crap or boring and getting reviews this bad. Certainly not against silly casual indie games that cost pence and can entertain a room full of people for the whole night.
6) First-day releases, pre-orders, etc.
Er... no. Unless there's a demo and I know what I'm ordering and that I'll get it.
"Buy our new car with DrivesItself* technology"
And then in small-print:
*car does not actually drive itself.
See the problem? Just change the fecking name.
And promotional material is skimmed by the very first owner only. You can put all the crap you like in there, it's still misleading to name it Autopilot.
Thousands of people die because of stupid, careless driving.
Encouraging you to rely on a system not capable of detecting and avoiding a car that the human in front of you managed to avoid? That's encouraging stupid and careless driving.
The stats don't add up at the moment because not many people have these things, not everyone that does has this shit turned on, and not everyone who turns this shit on is an idiot. But those are all factors that change radically as it becomes mainstream.
Notice that it's always Tesla, and none of the other manufacturers of cars are getting as bad a press even though my car bought this year had options for lane assist, auto-braking cruise control, and so on. Because they DO NOT encourage you to just let the car drive. Tesla does. Even if they say they don't, calling it what they call it implies it can do things that it can't.
Why do you think the other manufacturers are avoiding that exact thing, when they could easily claim to have the same or superior technology in their cars right now? Why do you think they steer clear of any terminology like that? Why do you think they are all testing it, all using it, but none of them are making any kind of claim about it, or getting anywhere near as much bad press?
It's not the technology. We're a tech site here, we love technology. It's the inappropriate use of technology and encouraging reliance on something that's not perfect.
And, still, legally and ultimately this driver is at fault - Tesla can't take responsibility because their system just isn't good enough to do so. They have to blame the customer. But their customer is saying that the exact feature that's supposed to avoid accidents that they don't notice isn't working. How, with all the fancy tech that Tesla claim to have, was it possible to come into contact with another car at all? Ignoring whose fault it was, who should have had their hand on the wheel, etc. Tesla are saying that their system DIDN'T manage to do what they advertise it can do (even if they can discourage reliance on it, legally speaking).
There was an obstacle, a large obstacle, a visible and detectable obstacle, and nobody is saying this guy was going too fast, or the other guy was going the wrong way down a motorway or anything out of the ordinary. He drove past a car, and the system didn't detect it, and he hit it. Given Tesla's love of this new feature they are selling, how is that possible?
It's possible because the Tesla self-drive / auto-drive / drive-assist feature DIDN'T SPOT THE OBSTACLE, DIDN'T APPLY THE BRAKES IN TIME and therefore DIDN'T DO WHAT IT CLAIMS. This is just one isolated incident, maybe, and maybe the guy was too close (as others have pointed out, why didn't the drive assist increase the gap?), too fast or too stupid in his actions. But the thing didn't do what it needed to.
Extrapolate that to millions of idiotic drivers like there are on the road, millions of such events every day, millions of unexpected cars and obstacles, and it's a potential disaster. And Tesla want to be able to just say "Oh, well, you shouldn't have relied on us", effectively. It's not a good sales technique!
If this tech is to become mainstream, it has to get better a lot quicker, because still the issues of liability are there. If the car is capable of NOT taking action, it's also capable of taking INCORRECT action, and that's just going to open up all kinds of avenues where people will say their car did something that they never intended.
And as these cars age, the system isn't going to improve in capability. As these cars get more prevalent, the number of problems is going to increase. And as people see more of them and get more reliant on them (I've never seen a Tesla on the road in my country, and some models appear to cost FIVE TIMES what my brand-new 2016-model large family car cost, so I don't imagine there are many about and people are being "careful" with them at the moment).
It's not a question of holding back tech. I'm a techie, I love it. It's a question of how that tech is sold ("Hey, this car drives itself!" even if they say they never say that) and how it's handled when things go wrong ("Driver error for relying on us, not our problem").
Pretty much every space mission has been a great driver of technology. We invest in space because it returns science, but it also lets us invest big in technologies needed to obtain that science.
You know how Formula 1 / Rally Driving has absolutely NO BEARING on your life? Apart from the airbags. And the automatic seat restraints. And the ABS. And disc brakes. And speed cameras (invented for race track timing). And gearing systems. And fuel efficiencies. And aerodynamics. And tyre design. And...
Back in my grandfather's day, the Formula 1 engines had the same size, capability, speed, etc. as the car you drive today. (And yet you have ABSOLUTELY NO NEED of that on an ordinary road, your car can probably beat a Formula 1 car of old - because the tech your car has now is better than they had then even with stupendous budgets, all the emissions they were spewing out and specialist fuels).
Now you could argue that it would happen without, but someone has to buy the expensive, stupendous specification hardware that's rare, new, hard to make, etc. before it can become mass-market. NASA have been doing that for decades.
Their investment gives you insight into everything from Earth geology and solar flares, to medicine and air travel. Just as a part of doing what they do, as a side-line to actually testing theories.
Until the Navy was convinced, early GPS satellites had a button to switch off "relativitistic effects". Nobody believed some whacko with funny hair to the point they put in an option to see if he was right. He was. Or now your GPS would be so inaccurate as to be useless. Testing that theory, launching that satellite, letting you see where you are on the Earth have all come about because of the space programme. And the technology used to go around Mars and take photos is no different to that to go around Earth and do the same. The only difference? They invest much more in the Mars one, which filters back to become commodity hardware for you in 20-30 years time and lets you have things like Google Earth.
Visiting planets is really the antithesis of the space programme's science aims. It's not necessary, planned or even cost-effective. We only went to the Moon to show off and haven't been back in 40 years. But the technology to get you there, and the technology to know what to expect when you're there, and the technology to send probes to all these places is giving you a headstart on the next generation of technology.
You've already benefited from it. Your children will benefit from the Mars missions. And, eventually, someone will touch down on Mars. But if we left it until it was easy and never needed any tests before we do these things - lots of people would die, and it would be a lot further off.
The fact is that some experiments on the ISS, on the Apollo missions, and the Mars landers are done purely because we need to make sure. We guess that we know about gravity, effects on the body, composition of minerals, data transmission through space, the particles the Sun is throwing out, the pattern of our orbit and all those other things that do actually matter in your everyday life, whether YOU use them or not. But until we actually get out there and test outside of the Earth, we can never be sure.
And, like the LHC, such simple things, tested in unusual scenarios outside our knowledge, have thrown us a lot of curve-balls that we were never expecting, which means we need to look deeper to actually see what's happening before we can rely on our knowledge and start bigger things.
Nowadays, your PC only operates because of knowledge of quantum-level interactions of the circuits. Without that knowledge, we could guess and do things and then try to compensate for something we don't understand, but it would be expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient. Understanding what's happening there requires confirmation of much larger theories, which is what are tested for in space.
Think of the Moon, Mars, the ISS, etc. as science labs.
Roll up, ladies and gentleman, and look at my product. Here, see what we will do for you, we'll do this. Brilliant isn't it? So cool, I hear you say. Just 9.99 and you can see this.
Oh. You bought it. Yeah, that's you're lot.
You need a better lawyer hat - false advertising is basically fraud. You can't claim that the trailer is just there for people to watch the trailer. It's there as a preview of the movie (they even CALL them previews INSIDE the trailer). So, yeah, minor detail changes, a couple of extra sparks in the CGI, that kind of thing changes.
Entire scenes that were used to entice you to buy the movie, never then appearing? Multiple of them? That's a bit different. It's like watching a trailer for an Angelina Jolie movie and then she's not in it. But you got your trailer, right?
I have to agree with the guy. I'm sure the lawyers in court will throw a ton of legal obstacles at his argument and make him fight but he's got a good point.
From my perspective, though: The scene was that good that you used it to show off the movie right through to acting it, filming it, editing it, choosing it for the trailer, making millions of copies of said trailer and pushing them into cinema and TV. And then you remove it? How shit was the rest of that characters involvement with the movie? And then you did it MULTIPLE times? Just how shit was everything else about that character or was he just that for a couple of faked action scenes that never made it into the full movie at all?
Edits, sure. Total removal of key scenes you've been using to advertise your product? That's just cheating. And seems really stupid.
You might as well show a trailer that's just 10 minutes of explosions and comedian-written jokes, and then put a drama on with completely different actors when people actually buy the movie. Otherwise, where's the line?
Almost all of those sensors are useless.
Temperature, sure. But is that going to change between the watch and the phone it's tethered to significantly enough for you to care? Likely not. Unless you want to measure something specifically and then you'll need a probe anyway.
3D scanner? You're going to run your wrist around a 3D object? Then what are you going to do with that data? Oh, yeah, ask the phone to do something with it.
Geiger counter? Come on. Cheap $20 sensors in every electronics store. Pointless even 20 years ago except in a "Cor, this is above average" kind of way.
Gas sensors? Much better suited to life-saving equipment designed to life-saving standards... or not at all.
Facetime camera has exactly the problem you suggest, and was my immediate first "Really?!" thought.
I struggle to think of anything vaguely useful for a smartwatch while it's still tethered to the phone that's doing all the work anyway, and if you could miniaturise the phone down to the smartwatch size reliably enough, that's a product in itself and has nothing to do with the applications of watches.
That said, I think I'd still find a watch more inconvenient than a phone. Sure, it's "on you", but it's difficult to have a private conversation without straining your arm, it has to be pulled back from under clothing to look at it for six months a year (my bugbear with watches entirely), and they are in the most inconvenient place to use for any length of time (the reason we put watches in breast-pockets for many years before wrist watches, and wrist watches are - as I've contended for several years - impractical as they are!).
Sod all the fancy stuff.
Shrink the phone down to your wrist first so that it's entirely self-contained and yet competitive with the most basic of smartphones.
Then you'll find how practical the rest is.
Hell, the BATTERY in my smartphone is larger than any watch I'd be comfortable wearing. We have a long way to go before smartwatches get anywhere close.
What we have is not a smartwatch. It's a bluetooth dongle on your wrist. An incredibly expensive, and impractical, one.
"Proof" is an absolute. It's either waterproof or its not.
Otherwise it's water-resistant.
It might be water-resistant at a greater depth, but if you're claiming water-resistance, it should at least be resistant to any reasonable depth the average (non-diver) might use to in anyway.
"Better waterproofing" just means it wasn't waterproof before.
Voting systems require:
Everyone to have unique credentials (yep, banks have this).
Everyone to be identified before issuing credentials (yep, banks have this)
Everyone to have AT MOST one credential (Er... nope).
Everyone to have a credential which can be proved to have been used only once (Er... possibly, some of the banking stuff can only be spent "once").
Everyone to have votes that can be verified throughout the process (some of this, but nowhere near the same level of assurance).
The problem is not any of the above. But your bank funds all the above. All of it. Who funds the electoral system? Taxpayer-funded government IT. You seriously just give up when you hear that, in IT.
Issuing millions of credentials to only verified people, with no duplicates, to the point that the person must be verified to be the person using the credentials, and they can only "use" them once, and they all know how to do it, and without just taking things on trust (isn't Amazon's entire credit card functionality based on assuming all the risk from the bank for the sake of simplicity and customer experience?), and being able to prove that everyone voted only once but NEVER what they voted for, and being able to prove who - overall - everyone voted for? It's a difficult, but not impossible task hindered by maths, logistics, practicality, human error, cost and budget-defined shortcuts.
My dad's generation had computers, telephones, and lots more that previous generations didn't - he bought our ZX Spectrum for us.
However, my grandfather was baffled by car seatbelts, anything no wired to a wall, and changing the channel on the television
It's no surprise now that, compared to twenty years ago, the older generations are better with technology. It's not their father's generation, who struggled to keep up, they grew up with all this stuff.
As we go on, the next generation are growing up being taught on iPads, with Kindles in libraries (what are those places?!), mobile phones from the day they are old enough. They won't have trouble adapting.
I call it the "old-people's home" fallacy. My grandmother would have been quite happy playing bingo for the rest of her existence once she retired. But I'm going to need a full-on Internet connection, a bunch of freedom and technology, to operate into my old age. There's no way I'm going to end up in a corner, dribbling, and watching Match of the Day, and it's not even a personality thing.
But are old-people's homes of today actually taking account of that? Not that I've seen. There are 60, 70, 80 years olds out there that are tech literate, can shop online, watch iPlayer, and all the other stuff we younger people do, because they were pioneers and that's stayed with them into old age and now they are the ones being put into homes that still cater only for a previous generation.
Time's change. I have no idea about allotment gardening or crochet or mending mechanical machines. Previous generations did but can't operate a mobile phone. As we go further on, the newer generations will be VR-addicts or whatever and they'll be surveys saying that not enough old people are getting the benefits of VR-space and still cling to their old WWW ways.
Ever dealt with some of the education licences?
You pay one licence per full time member of staff, get unlimited licences for as many computers as you like, for all Microsoft OS, but the condition is that the original PC must have come with Pro or Enterprise on it when you bought it.
Applications and Server are annual recurring purchases as you suggest, but Windows and Office are odd-balls, especially in education when you pay for dozens of copies and yet can legally install thousands of them.
The iMac power adaptor plugs, despite being on-the-whole standard IEC plugs, look shite if you plug a normal plug in as "their" plugs have a grey circular plastic moulding that forms the rest of the case. Same for certain "figure of eight" plugs they use on power adaptors - they all have right-angles and grey mouldings rather than just plug in.
The MacBooks have proprietary magnetic-clasp adaptors.
Need to show an iMac on a projector? Then you need thunderbolt adaptors of some kind.
Mac Minis (their nearest "server" equivalent despite not having any of the hardware of a normal server, like ECC RAM etc.) - they have a requirement in certain conditions for original Apple keyboards. If they crash, for example, booting up often requires swapping out the KVM for a proprietary Apple keyboard (not even sure how it detects that situation, but you can get to the point that things won't boot without the original keyboard, no matter what you try). Hey, at least they have HDMI unlike the iMac, right?
But, then, if you'd ever tried to network this things you'd know this.
I'm sure there are much better ways to "fool" it with much more low-tech items.
How does it distinguish the density of an object it detects? Does a paper bag blowing across the road get marked as something it can drive over or will it take evasive action? Where does it draw the line between running over the paper bag and steering into the car in the next lane to have what it might think is a "softer" crash? And how does it tell the difference between a bag and a child, or even a pigeon?
Isn't most of its autopilot visual rather than actual sensing? So how does it determine whether or not the bag is solid (a paper-coloured rock in the road), or not?
There are just too many scenarios for a blanket rule, and - as in the blasphemous I-Robot movie - the wrong decisions will be made.
Once you start including deliberate interference, these things just get dangerous.
What makes you think you don't have to buy an AV for the Macs too?
And most AV is cross-platform, buy it once and deploy on Mac, Linux and Windows for the same price.
And try finding someone who will set up Macs professionally for you. They might dabble, they might even have them on their network, but big Mac installs need a Mac guy, an Apple partner, or lots of messing - just the same as any proper Windows installs.
P.S. Have you seen the price of Mac Mini servers? And the hoops you have to jump through to get things working without them (e.g. have to have one or all your Macs will start downloading updates individually, swamping your connection to thousands of unique Apple IP's - device supervision, printer sharing, etc. Even Papercut recommend you just use a Mac server rather than try to make them co-operate, and they sell a Mac, Windows, Linux printing product).
It's nowhere near as clear-cut (or even true) to say that Macs have a lower TCO in any sort of non-home environment.
You think the machines weren't horrendously overpriced on day one either?
I have 10 Macs in the next room (I work in schools).
I guarantee you that they get one-hundredth of the usage of any other PC on site. And yet they cost nearly 8 times as much. And we give the kids free-reign, a lot of the staff use Mac at home, our systems are mostly online so support either setup, they are tied into our AD and file storage, they are connected to the same network, etc.
He have several hundred iPads. Those get use. But the Macs? Even the children barely bother to touch them, even when given free time in the room they are in. I've seen the same at many other schools.
The irony is that the only piece of software we regularly use them for used to be Mac-only and is now dual-platform. So they are literally lame ducks. And, no, our volume licensing doesn't allow us to use them via Boot Camp as they were NOT originally purchased with a copy of a Pro or Enterprise version of Windows. Even if it did, why would we do that rather than just sell them off, buy three or four equivalent PC's for each, and then just use those instead?
Mac's aren't anything very special at all. Their hardware is lacklustre, and pretty fixed, and over-priced, and their management is much more complicated than necessary for such "user-friendly" machines.
Honestly, two were stolen on an open day one year. I could have literally bought - there and then - six PC's for the price of the replacement new Macs that the insurance company forced us to have. Do I honestly get three times the functionality out of the Macs than the PCs? Nope. Not even in a school with music, drama (theatre shows, movie recording, etc), etc. departments using the facilities all day every day.
Last time I received a helpdesk ticket for them for something not working, we found out that the machine in question hadn't been switched on for three months (and, no, it wasn't a holiday). Timetabled classes of 20, 10 Macs in the room, you work that out.
I've even run Mac OS in a VM, and I honestly don't get the fuss at all. In fact, it run faster as a resource-limited VM on my Windows-based laptop that was also running over VM's than it did on the original hardware itself.
Don't even get me started on stupid proprietary cables that add nothing but cost, obstructions to centralised management of the machines, and - honestly - if I hear the word keychain one more time I will scream (it tends to be new users, but still, it drives us insane).
Three times I have submitted plans to remove the entire room and replace it with an IT suite with twice the machines and each time the only justification for refusal is how much it had cost to install them originally. I even factored into one of the proposals the ridiculous second-hand price they attract as a way of funding the change entirely.
But, still, they get 1/10th the usage of any other machine I manage. And one of those is in a cupboard.
"4/5ths of people refused a free upgrade to what was traditionally a very expensive piece of software, despite us trying to forcibly install it on their machines for months on end and making it difficult for anyone other than a techy to refuse it".
Amazing how you can change how something reads by just flipping it.
Smart cards are just NFC / RFID cards. You can activate them by inducing any kind of magnetic field and you can do that from across the street.
I'm actually suspicious now that the shoplifting arches at stores are capable of powering them up.
Then they broadcast radio signals on known frequencies.
Yes, tagging them against a mobile with NFC will activate them and read data. So will your passport (there are apps for getting your photo off your passport!).
The problem here is not the activation (that can be done from across the streets, demos all over the web), not the broadcast radio (that can be picked up from miles away once activated, again demos all over the web). It's not even that an app can read the data from the card (that's it's purpose and you'll see that the chip in the card is indeed "smart" and requires authentication and setting up an encrypted session to a bank to actually DO anything that includes private data) - it's that the smartcard has pushed liability to you. If the above goes wrong, on Chip & PIN, you are liable if they think you authorised the transaction.
Now think about the box you enter your PIN into or that you swipe over. Who supplies that? How do you know? What kind of authentication does your CARD do on that device? None. You're typing your PIN into a generic looking box or tagging your card on a generic looking reader that could happily be relaying that stuff to a genuine, bank-supplied box under the counter (thus authorising the immediate transaction) while capturing enough to be able to put in more transactions later when you're not there.
And you'd be liable if you tapped your PIN on some Raspberry-Pi homebrew box that just stored and relayed the number you typed into the real bank card reader.
Smart cards are another step up - the card DOES authenticate to the bank somehow over a communications channel considered insecure (no different to Diffie-Hellman over the Internet) - but the liability is still with you.
And as you say - you have 5 smart cards on you. Any of them could be picked up when you authenticate. London Underground is full of warnings about "card clash" where people are charged on their credit card by mistake when they wave their wallet with their Oyster card over the reader.
The US is behind here and has picked up THE worst technology available, much like we all did. Smart cards and NFC can be secure, in theory. Chip & PIN and mag-stripe can't. Hence why C&P made almost zero dent in card fraud.
However, much more interesting? My bank app now turns my phone into an NFC credit card, as does Android Pay / Apple Pay. Then you're given a whole new virtual credit card on your phone. Now you're completely out of the loop of what happens on that card and can only hope to dispute transactions that might appear on it.
And it's unlikely that people will turn all NFC off until they make a purchase and then turn it back on, so it can be "sniffed" at any time. Chances are slim of that encryption being broken, but we're now just moving to client certificates stored on a passcoded device running a general purpose operating system for security, and broadcasting over open frequencies on activation.
It's not exactly how I'd design a secure payment system.
You do not "need".
You can still override and install an unsigned driver on Windows 8.1, let alone 7, and the early versions of 10.
On a domain, you can group-policy it out of being an option, but it's an option on all previous versions of Windows to let the user allow unsigned drivers at will.
1) Unlikely. I've seen lots of WHQL drivers that just crash-and-burn but more likely they are "stable" but atrociously useless. Because of the faffing and back-and-forth on them, lots of simple devices (e.g. printers etc.) get one WHQL driver and then just release unofficial ones for everything else. If you're lucky and it's a big printer, they might update the WHQL one every year or so. With ten other releases between.
2) No. They won't know what's going on and things will just stop working. They won't be able to update drivers when suggested and will still have all the problems that they have now. And everything cheap they buy on Amazon just won't work, it's as simple as that.
Buy an RFID blocking wallet or card-sleeve.
Test it with any phone with NFC and a free app (you can "read" the card, you just can't get any important information out of it... put it in the sleeve and you cannot get it to read at all).
Entering Chernobyl (the town) isn't instant death.
People have been working there almost every day since the disaster.
People are working there now.
People are building the shells over the plant itself still.
So long as you monitor your exposure levels and don't spend weeks at a time close to the place, you're fine.
Samsung loses despite making twice as much money and/or shipping MORE THAN twice as much product?
Yeah. Strange Appley world you live in.
Sure it's not "as good" an improvement in the year-to-years, but a company with smaller sales can make an percentage increase in sales much easier than a company with already a vast majority of the market.
Meanwhile iPhones are outnumbered 3:1 or more across the globe.
And in this cinema there were, at maximum, ten people.
Every cinema near me in the city is packed to the rafters for every possible showing, even late at night.
It doesn't add up. The rural ones should be more expensive.