This comment will be a long way down the page. At time of writing, there are several comments above all modded to 4/5 saying "hotels have open wifi". Well done.
Did no one read "wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information" ? Clearly the mods didn't read it any more than the commenters.
Whilst I agree it's a bit of a thin piece, the places where the president goes for 'private stuff' matter. If he's doing a press day talking to kids in school or whatever, then there's no benefit hacking a printer to listen in to what he says. However, when he's hosting someone and playing a friendly round of golf and hanging out in the clubhouse as if the two of them are just two guys and not heads of state - then all of a sudden stuff like open wifi and hackable printers and servers starts to matter a lot more. I have no idea if all that stuff gets switched off when the place gets 'secured' though - knowing that would have made this article a lot more useful.
One time a new lecturer started taking but not writing any notes on the board for us to copy. About half an hour in, someone said "are we going to get notes on this?", and was told "you should have been taking your own". Lots of "naar" and "wha..?" from the rest of us and order was restored, with the lecturer duly writing on the board and us copying it.
For what it's worth, I actually found that a good way to learn. For whatever reason, stuff used to 'go in' without my really knowing that it had happened. I'd do whatever tests/homework was required and generally do okay at it. At the end of the year I just used to read through the notes I'd taken and then sit the exams. That seemed like enough revision to do fairly well in just about all the subjects. Any lectures I'd missed (and didn't have notes for) were something of a 'black hole' in my understanding which I didn't seem able to fill by self-study.
If I started using Azure for something important and expensive, the last thing I'd want to do is to tell anyone about it.
"Hey, we're on a discount right now, so it's okay, but we've started using a cloud provider with a shitty reputation for security. Once the discount period ends, we'll be paying more than we could at any number of competitors".
...and who wouldn't want to buy German PV cells, or German steam generators, or German turbines? All those years ago when they started to focus on engineering quality the same things were said, "it's too expensive, we can't do it, it's not sensible" etc etc. But now, it's really looking like rather a good thing.
The whole thing may well have been a fluke, but I challenge any other country to fluke anything close to that number.
I haven't done a proper survey, but I'd say most roof coverings in Europe are teracotta tiles, clay tiles etc. There are a few slate roofs, some thatch and a few other materials. There's no way these tiles would look any good on any of those except maybe the synthetic slate roofs. Then there's the cost... way more than a few flat panels (and probably still more than panels sunk into the roof line). I'm sure I don't need to point out that a lot of European roofs have been up for a hundred years and are still watertight, so we're going to need more than a 30 year warranty.
However, for an "i am rich" statement, these'll do great;-)
...and actually, they need to make a half decent Mac version of OneDrive. Without that, general corporate adoption will always be "yeah, the Windows guys are all done, but the Mac guys keep using local files".
That said, OneDrive doesn't integrate terribly well with Window 7 either, so maybe it'll just always be "well, some people use it for some stuff"...?
Won't happen in the UK either. The prices are quite carefully regulated, but moreover, we have petrol stations that are comfortably in sight of each other. If one puts up the price, then the other just looks out of the window, applies the formula and adjusts accordingly.
Near me we have a Shell station (with a crappy shop, carwash, jetwash, air and water), and next door a BP with M&S shop (sort of like a small super market), nothing much else apart from plastic gloves. The latter always used to be 1p more expensive per litre than the Shell place. These days it's more like 2p. The prices change however often they change, but they always change together.
One time though, the BP place had something like "117.9" out on the street board. I needed some groceries and fuel, so filled up (even though more expensive than the Shell place, at 116.9). I noticed that on the pump it was charging 107.9. If there's any AI involved, someone needs firing - altogether more likely is that it's a (typically British) manual process with someone typing numbers into several different systems (and as I say, looking out of the window occasionally).
Yeah, except I care for my Mac because it's the tool of my trade, and like any craftsman will tell you - keep your tools sharp.
If the Surface becomes equally important to someone, then I'm sure they'll look after it. However, if it's a PoS that got given to you by work and you have to use, then you're probably going to be less inclined to look after it as it fails to give you 'the love' first.
I suspect there are going to be some beautiful tech recycling centres quite soon;-)
Just wait until someone starts lobbying to have 'golf course neutrality'. Once deals on the golf course have to have the same scrutiny as other deals, the likes of Cisco and Oracle will meet their demise.
I can see the value of both vendors products, but what I still don't get is why anyone buys more than a modicum of it. With Oracle, the DB is fine, but once you move to RAC then you're on the bandwagon and getting off it is very hard. You'd have been better off re-engineering out your legacy when you outgrew the non-RAC solution.
For Cisco, again, their core switch stuff seems pretty good - it's not really my area, but the specs are impressive. Why we need Cisco top-of-rack or Cisco workgroup switches is beyond me though. In the workgroup case especially, other vendors offer better and cheaper solutions (sure, they don't do all the stuff Cisco can do, but you don't need that in a workgroup switch). For some reason though, if you're not 100% cisco then you're somehow a weirdo and 'not doing it right'.
Then Cisco Call Manager... very capable, but man is it weird - I mean, born in the fires of Mount Doon and then shat on by every ork in Middle Earth. Weird.
IMHO, both companies need to die off - Oracle is already going that way, in so much as all the small databases of the world are Postgres/Maria/MySQL/No SQL or whatever, and not paying Oracle for the privilege. Cisco is a harder nut to crack - no one would dare go up against them, but yet, if someone did, we'd all be better off as a result.
The problem with speech-to-text is that it's awfully poor unless coupled with some sort of natural language processing. People just don't speak like they write, and so you need to do some post-processing to end up with anything resembling a proper sentence. All that processing is hard, and it's not a static problem either - it needs to learn at least gradually.
Without wanting to be a G-Ad, the Google services do all this stuff for you - you just provide them with audio. You don't have to send them 'live' audio if you don't want to either, although of course if you're saving it to disk and then uploading it, you'll have to wait for the speech to stop before you can start sending it, and then you won't get a response until it's all uploaded and processed. But in theory at least, you could do some sort of privacy-enhancing DSP on the audio before Google get their hands on it.
Now, back on topic... This seems like a potentially clever move by Google. It means that any number of new 'assistants' might spring up from all kinds of small companies. New shapes and sizes and new voices, and maybe new ways to interact (as others have noted, perhaps 'press to talk'). The key thing is that they'll all essentially be using "google's gateway to the Internet" instead of Amazon (or Microsoft).
One form-factor I'd imagine could be useful would be attached to a desk IP phone. You press the button to talk to your PA, but actually it's a digital PA who fields the easy stuff or otherwise passes it on to a VA in somewhere like India or China. It'll have to be attached to your IP phone so it can "hold my calls unless they're important", so it'll answer your calls and listen to what the call is about and then determine 'importance'. All this would go really well on a mobile phone, but the integration isn't easy and the mobile nature of it means it'll have problems when your connection is spotty. All that is solved nicely when you're at your desk.
Unless a 'phone' can replace ordinary users laptops (eg. sales, finance, mgmt, marketing even), then it's nothing new and no use. A phone that can be controlled via a 'group policy' type mechanism, that stores all of it's data in 'the cloud' via a background sync mechanism (like OneDrive) and still allows the end user to do some personalisation and install a few apps (presumably from a controlled store, maybe even controlled by the company they work for).
If it's anything less that this, then the world has no use of it. Even if it is this, the average consumer has no use of it, so it'll be a corporate sell first, and if mindset follows then the consumer market can be targeted.
Of course, the giant committee of Microsoft will start with good ideas, and then compromise everything so that the end result is as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Those Windows desktop license revenues have to be maintained, and no new fangled mobile tech can dare to interfere with that decades old business model.
I guess it's possible Apple is going to 'in-source' the final steps of the product build. It might help them out in lots of interesting ways (not least, it obfuscates the import bans on their products). Doubtless this is a PR-play to appear to be reacting to Trumps calls for such things. I suspect Apple will only do half what it says it will, and will cite 'changing economic circumstances' or some such as the reason.
It's also possible Apple will build it's own chip fabs. I doubt it though, because for a fab to be profitable it has to run at 100% capacity 24x7, and it has to be pretty big too. Apple could conceivably fill a small fab with just their demands, but then they'd need to get into the business of selling fab capacity to other companies, which would be a huge distraction for them.
I suspect equally likely would be a case manufacturing plant. It takes a load of aluminium in one end and out comes milled cases ready for iphone and mac components to go inside. It would be a big bet on aluminium as the case of the future, but I guess right now it looks like that's how things are going to be across the market for quite a while. I'd wonder why bother making the cases locally if you're not also assembling the product locally, so again, final assembly looks like the most likely 'manufacturing' that will go on in Apple plants.
Turn off your ad-blocker, then you'll see the true horror that is the New Slashdot. Honestly, sans-ad-blocker, it's so terrible it qualifies as "one of those sites that you occasionally hit on google results but you never actually read because the next result in the list doesn't have all the crap on it so is preferable".
If I hadn't been reading slashdot for years, I probably wouldn't start now:-(
When Windows 10 was announced, I'm sure they said "this will be the last version of Windows". However, here we are and they're making an "S" variant. This one's guaranteed to be so insecure that 'the safety of the cloud' will mean nothing at all because your access to it will be riddled with malware.
I'd say they'd be better off giving these away to corporate customers or something to get their market share up. They also need to pay loads of devs to fill up the app store with free apps. Of course, never gonna happen, so we're headed to another fail...
I have a Mac, and I must say I rather like it. However, stuff Apple does really badly IMHO:
- Keyboards. I'm British, why can't I have a regular British keyboard? Putting a pound sign on one of the keys doesn't make it British. Actually, as I'm typing this I'm using a Greek Mac. It's got the exact same layout as my not-British keyboard, except some of the cyrillics are on some of the keys as well. With all the money Apple makes, you'd think they could manage some different keyboard layouts.
- UI. I know everyone loves the minimalist thing Apple's got going on, but it's got so minimalist that you need Google to find out how to do things. I should be able to click a few buttons and look at a few menus to figure things out, I shouldn't need to magically know "press option while swiping three fingers from left to right whilst looking out of the window when a bus goes past"
- Power supplies. I love the mag-safe connectors, they're so good I can't imagine why they aren't copied absolutely everywhere (USB included). However, there's really nothing to tell the difference between the 65W macbook pro power supply and the 85W one. You have to look at some small, grey text on a white device to see the difference. I realise it's all about making it look nice, but since the smaller supply can't really run a 15" MBP, maybe there should be some sort of difference so we can see which one we just picked up.
I suspect Apple may be disappearing up its own backside over the next few years. We've seen a raft of crazy design choices and the OS is getting more 'spyware' built into it and the steps required to turn that stuff off are getting more and more convoluted. However, for a few more years, Apple is a great choice for a laptop. I did think mine was expensive, but then I bought some Lenovo T460s laptops for work, and I saw that actually the Mac was fairly reasonably priced when compared to something genuinely similar.
...so voice-over artists are first to go then. Just train the computer with $actor's voice and then make it speak French/German/Swedish/Elbonian or whatever.
I'll miss watching dubbed stuff when on holiday. I think BA in the A-Team was my favourite dubbed voice;-)
Ladies and gentlemen: How to setup an insecure facing internet server 101: Let's not have a clue and follow some video tutorial! Now I know where the $ came from, it's all the money that will be stolen from any server set up by those who follow your expert advice.
I think what you're describing is exactly how this came about in the first place. Even a modicum of firewalls and proxies would mitigate most of the attack vectors for this exploit, yet we see lots of infections. That sounds like lots of people set things up without properly understanding them.
Right, which is why I'm on O2, even though their data speed is shitty and their coverage on my train ride to work is sketchy. They do, however, have good enough coverage in my house, whereas the generally superior Three couldn't do that but did everything else much better.
depends on your laws - here in the UK, you can't call something a 'sale' item, or state a 'previous price' unless you sold it at that price for a couple of months previously.
There used to be bar in London (and maybe Manchester) that had screens with drinks prices on them. The prices would change during the evening, sometimes there'd be a big 'crash' or a big 'run', which obviously changed the buying habits of the punters that night.
I'm not sure it was based on anything especially clever though - I suspect the manager just used to push the 'up' button a bit when it was busy and 'down' when it was quiet.
...and no more "Hey Google - call an ambulance as this guy's having a heart attack" either.
We're really at version 0.9 of this sort of tech. First they need to distinguish between a few known voices per device. Then they need to distinguish *every* voice, and not sorry which device those voices were heard on. Then they need to be able to act intelligently for any unknown voices - of course, one man's 'intelligent response' is another's 'complete bollocks'. After all that, they need to actually be able to do something useful - really useful like "Hey Google, hold my calls unless they're important" - a human can do that quite easily, but it'll be a while before computers can. When they can though, we might be at v1.0. It's okay, I can wait;-)
If crap I buy from Amazon can have a way to recycle it, then I'm pretty sure the millions we spend on satellites can stand a small increase to cover the costs of cleanup/recovery/de-orbit or whatever.
I know it's a dirty word, but some minor regulations here would solve this problem in short order. That only requires that the countries with launch capability agree to it (yeah, easier said than done).
Years ago I had a Motorola K1. It's a little flip phone that could (in theory) connect to the Internet via a dialup connection. Because Motorola wanted to push all that crappy dialup stuff, they put a whole button (on a crowded keypad) for getting onto the Internet. It was so absurdly slow to load the browser, much less dialling up that I found it easier to go online in other ways than to ever use it. Some of the other buttons could be remapped - but not that one. Shame, I could have used that real-estate to do something useful.
I still have that phone - I use it as an alarm clock. I've remapped all the keys to make it as 'fat finger friendly' as possible, but even though it's in aircraft mode, and had a dead sim in it, one little press of that button still tries to load up the browser. It still annoys me some 10 years after they came out with that phone.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment will be a long way down the page. At time of writing, there are several comments above all modded to 4/5 saying "hotels have open wifi". Well done.
Did no one read "wireless printers without passwords, servers with outdated and vulnerable software, and unencrypted login pages to back-end databases containing sensitive information" ? Clearly the mods didn't read it any more than the commenters.
Whilst I agree it's a bit of a thin piece, the places where the president goes for 'private stuff' matter. If he's doing a press day talking to kids in school or whatever, then there's no benefit hacking a printer to listen in to what he says. However, when he's hosting someone and playing a friendly round of golf and hanging out in the clubhouse as if the two of them are just two guys and not heads of state - then all of a sudden stuff like open wifi and hackable printers and servers starts to matter a lot more. I have no idea if all that stuff gets switched off when the place gets 'secured' though - knowing that would have made this article a lot more useful.
I thought Windows was just like that by default - little did I know I was being hacked by the CIA. I'll be more careful in future ;-)
I've got a whole degree based on 'photocopying'.
One time a new lecturer started taking but not writing any notes on the board for us to copy. About half an hour in, someone said "are we going to get notes on this?", and was told "you should have been taking your own". Lots of "naar" and "wha..?" from the rest of us and order was restored, with the lecturer duly writing on the board and us copying it.
For what it's worth, I actually found that a good way to learn. For whatever reason, stuff used to 'go in' without my really knowing that it had happened. I'd do whatever tests/homework was required and generally do okay at it. At the end of the year I just used to read through the notes I'd taken and then sit the exams. That seemed like enough revision to do fairly well in just about all the subjects. Any lectures I'd missed (and didn't have notes for) were something of a 'black hole' in my understanding which I didn't seem able to fill by self-study.
If I started using Azure for something important and expensive, the last thing I'd want to do is to tell anyone about it.
"Hey, we're on a discount right now, so it's okay, but we've started using a cloud provider with a shitty reputation for security. Once the discount period ends, we'll be paying more than we could at any number of competitors".
Doesn't sound too bright to me ;-)
...and who wouldn't want to buy German PV cells, or German steam generators, or German turbines? All those years ago when they started to focus on engineering quality the same things were said, "it's too expensive, we can't do it, it's not sensible" etc etc. But now, it's really looking like rather a good thing.
The whole thing may well have been a fluke, but I challenge any other country to fluke anything close to that number.
I haven't done a proper survey, but I'd say most roof coverings in Europe are teracotta tiles, clay tiles etc. There are a few slate roofs, some thatch and a few other materials. There's no way these tiles would look any good on any of those except maybe the synthetic slate roofs. Then there's the cost... way more than a few flat panels (and probably still more than panels sunk into the roof line). I'm sure I don't need to point out that a lot of European roofs have been up for a hundred years and are still watertight, so we're going to need more than a 30 year warranty.
However, for an "i am rich" statement, these'll do great ;-)
...and actually, they need to make a half decent Mac version of OneDrive. Without that, general corporate adoption will always be "yeah, the Windows guys are all done, but the Mac guys keep using local files".
That said, OneDrive doesn't integrate terribly well with Window 7 either, so maybe it'll just always be "well, some people use it for some stuff"...?
Won't happen in the UK either. The prices are quite carefully regulated, but moreover, we have petrol stations that are comfortably in sight of each other. If one puts up the price, then the other just looks out of the window, applies the formula and adjusts accordingly.
Near me we have a Shell station (with a crappy shop, carwash, jetwash, air and water), and next door a BP with M&S shop (sort of like a small super market), nothing much else apart from plastic gloves. The latter always used to be 1p more expensive per litre than the Shell place. These days it's more like 2p. The prices change however often they change, but they always change together.
One time though, the BP place had something like "117.9" out on the street board. I needed some groceries and fuel, so filled up (even though more expensive than the Shell place, at 116.9). I noticed that on the pump it was charging 107.9. If there's any AI involved, someone needs firing - altogether more likely is that it's a (typically British) manual process with someone typing numbers into several different systems (and as I say, looking out of the window occasionally).
Yeah, except I care for my Mac because it's the tool of my trade, and like any craftsman will tell you - keep your tools sharp.
If the Surface becomes equally important to someone, then I'm sure they'll look after it. However, if it's a PoS that got given to you by work and you have to use, then you're probably going to be less inclined to look after it as it fails to give you 'the love' first.
I suspect there are going to be some beautiful tech recycling centres quite soon ;-)
I'm not an American, but I'm not really sure 'Trumpcare' is what I'd like covering me under any circumstances.
Just wait until someone starts lobbying to have 'golf course neutrality'. Once deals on the golf course have to have the same scrutiny as other deals, the likes of Cisco and Oracle will meet their demise.
I can see the value of both vendors products, but what I still don't get is why anyone buys more than a modicum of it. With Oracle, the DB is fine, but once you move to RAC then you're on the bandwagon and getting off it is very hard. You'd have been better off re-engineering out your legacy when you outgrew the non-RAC solution.
For Cisco, again, their core switch stuff seems pretty good - it's not really my area, but the specs are impressive. Why we need Cisco top-of-rack or Cisco workgroup switches is beyond me though. In the workgroup case especially, other vendors offer better and cheaper solutions (sure, they don't do all the stuff Cisco can do, but you don't need that in a workgroup switch). For some reason though, if you're not 100% cisco then you're somehow a weirdo and 'not doing it right'.
Then Cisco Call Manager... very capable, but man is it weird - I mean, born in the fires of Mount Doon and then shat on by every ork in Middle Earth. Weird.
IMHO, both companies need to die off - Oracle is already going that way, in so much as all the small databases of the world are Postgres/Maria/MySQL/No SQL or whatever, and not paying Oracle for the privilege. Cisco is a harder nut to crack - no one would dare go up against them, but yet, if someone did, we'd all be better off as a result.
The problem with speech-to-text is that it's awfully poor unless coupled with some sort of natural language processing. People just don't speak like they write, and so you need to do some post-processing to end up with anything resembling a proper sentence. All that processing is hard, and it's not a static problem either - it needs to learn at least gradually.
Without wanting to be a G-Ad, the Google services do all this stuff for you - you just provide them with audio. You don't have to send them 'live' audio if you don't want to either, although of course if you're saving it to disk and then uploading it, you'll have to wait for the speech to stop before you can start sending it, and then you won't get a response until it's all uploaded and processed. But in theory at least, you could do some sort of privacy-enhancing DSP on the audio before Google get their hands on it.
Now, back on topic... This seems like a potentially clever move by Google. It means that any number of new 'assistants' might spring up from all kinds of small companies. New shapes and sizes and new voices, and maybe new ways to interact (as others have noted, perhaps 'press to talk'). The key thing is that they'll all essentially be using "google's gateway to the Internet" instead of Amazon (or Microsoft).
One form-factor I'd imagine could be useful would be attached to a desk IP phone. You press the button to talk to your PA, but actually it's a digital PA who fields the easy stuff or otherwise passes it on to a VA in somewhere like India or China. It'll have to be attached to your IP phone so it can "hold my calls unless they're important", so it'll answer your calls and listen to what the call is about and then determine 'importance'. All this would go really well on a mobile phone, but the integration isn't easy and the mobile nature of it means it'll have problems when your connection is spotty. All that is solved nicely when you're at your desk.
I agree :-)
Unless a 'phone' can replace ordinary users laptops (eg. sales, finance, mgmt, marketing even), then it's nothing new and no use. A phone that can be controlled via a 'group policy' type mechanism, that stores all of it's data in 'the cloud' via a background sync mechanism (like OneDrive) and still allows the end user to do some personalisation and install a few apps (presumably from a controlled store, maybe even controlled by the company they work for).
If it's anything less that this, then the world has no use of it. Even if it is this, the average consumer has no use of it, so it'll be a corporate sell first, and if mindset follows then the consumer market can be targeted.
Of course, the giant committee of Microsoft will start with good ideas, and then compromise everything so that the end result is as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Those Windows desktop license revenues have to be maintained, and no new fangled mobile tech can dare to interfere with that decades old business model.
I guess it's possible Apple is going to 'in-source' the final steps of the product build. It might help them out in lots of interesting ways (not least, it obfuscates the import bans on their products). Doubtless this is a PR-play to appear to be reacting to Trumps calls for such things. I suspect Apple will only do half what it says it will, and will cite 'changing economic circumstances' or some such as the reason.
It's also possible Apple will build it's own chip fabs. I doubt it though, because for a fab to be profitable it has to run at 100% capacity 24x7, and it has to be pretty big too. Apple could conceivably fill a small fab with just their demands, but then they'd need to get into the business of selling fab capacity to other companies, which would be a huge distraction for them.
I suspect equally likely would be a case manufacturing plant. It takes a load of aluminium in one end and out comes milled cases ready for iphone and mac components to go inside. It would be a big bet on aluminium as the case of the future, but I guess right now it looks like that's how things are going to be across the market for quite a while. I'd wonder why bother making the cases locally if you're not also assembling the product locally, so again, final assembly looks like the most likely 'manufacturing' that will go on in Apple plants.
Turn off your ad-blocker, then you'll see the true horror that is the New Slashdot. Honestly, sans-ad-blocker, it's so terrible it qualifies as "one of those sites that you occasionally hit on google results but you never actually read because the next result in the list doesn't have all the crap on it so is preferable".
If I hadn't been reading slashdot for years, I probably wouldn't start now :-(
When Windows 10 was announced, I'm sure they said "this will be the last version of Windows". However, here we are and they're making an "S" variant. This one's guaranteed to be so insecure that 'the safety of the cloud' will mean nothing at all because your access to it will be riddled with malware.
I'd say they'd be better off giving these away to corporate customers or something to get their market share up. They also need to pay loads of devs to fill up the app store with free apps. Of course, never gonna happen, so we're headed to another fail...
I have a Mac, and I must say I rather like it. However, stuff Apple does really badly IMHO:
- Keyboards. I'm British, why can't I have a regular British keyboard? Putting a pound sign on one of the keys doesn't make it British. Actually, as I'm typing this I'm using a Greek Mac. It's got the exact same layout as my not-British keyboard, except some of the cyrillics are on some of the keys as well. With all the money Apple makes, you'd think they could manage some different keyboard layouts.
- UI. I know everyone loves the minimalist thing Apple's got going on, but it's got so minimalist that you need Google to find out how to do things. I should be able to click a few buttons and look at a few menus to figure things out, I shouldn't need to magically know "press option while swiping three fingers from left to right whilst looking out of the window when a bus goes past"
- Power supplies. I love the mag-safe connectors, they're so good I can't imagine why they aren't copied absolutely everywhere (USB included). However, there's really nothing to tell the difference between the 65W macbook pro power supply and the 85W one. You have to look at some small, grey text on a white device to see the difference. I realise it's all about making it look nice, but since the smaller supply can't really run a 15" MBP, maybe there should be some sort of difference so we can see which one we just picked up.
I suspect Apple may be disappearing up its own backside over the next few years. We've seen a raft of crazy design choices and the OS is getting more 'spyware' built into it and the steps required to turn that stuff off are getting more and more convoluted. However, for a few more years, Apple is a great choice for a laptop. I did think mine was expensive, but then I bought some Lenovo T460s laptops for work, and I saw that actually the Mac was fairly reasonably priced when compared to something genuinely similar.
...so voice-over artists are first to go then. Just train the computer with $actor's voice and then make it speak French/German/Swedish/Elbonian or whatever.
I'll miss watching dubbed stuff when on holiday. I think BA in the A-Team was my favourite dubbed voice ;-)
Ladies and gentlemen: How to setup an insecure facing internet server 101: Let's not have a clue and follow some video tutorial! Now I know where the $ came from, it's all the money that will be stolen from any server set up by those who follow your expert advice.
I think what you're describing is exactly how this came about in the first place. Even a modicum of firewalls and proxies would mitigate most of the attack vectors for this exploit, yet we see lots of infections. That sounds like lots of people set things up without properly understanding them.
Right, which is why I'm on O2, even though their data speed is shitty and their coverage on my train ride to work is sketchy. They do, however, have good enough coverage in my house, whereas the generally superior Three couldn't do that but did everything else much better.
depends on your laws - here in the UK, you can't call something a 'sale' item, or state a 'previous price' unless you sold it at that price for a couple of months previously.
There used to be bar in London (and maybe Manchester) that had screens with drinks prices on them. The prices would change during the evening, sometimes there'd be a big 'crash' or a big 'run', which obviously changed the buying habits of the punters that night.
I'm not sure it was based on anything especially clever though - I suspect the manager just used to push the 'up' button a bit when it was busy and 'down' when it was quiet.
...and no more "Hey Google - call an ambulance as this guy's having a heart attack" either.
We're really at version 0.9 of this sort of tech. First they need to distinguish between a few known voices per device. Then they need to distinguish *every* voice, and not sorry which device those voices were heard on. Then they need to be able to act intelligently for any unknown voices - of course, one man's 'intelligent response' is another's 'complete bollocks'. After all that, they need to actually be able to do something useful - really useful like "Hey Google, hold my calls unless they're important" - a human can do that quite easily, but it'll be a while before computers can. When they can though, we might be at v1.0. It's okay, I can wait ;-)
If crap I buy from Amazon can have a way to recycle it, then I'm pretty sure the millions we spend on satellites can stand a small increase to cover the costs of cleanup/recovery/de-orbit or whatever.
I know it's a dirty word, but some minor regulations here would solve this problem in short order. That only requires that the countries with launch capability agree to it (yeah, easier said than done).
Years ago I had a Motorola K1. It's a little flip phone that could (in theory) connect to the Internet via a dialup connection. Because Motorola wanted to push all that crappy dialup stuff, they put a whole button (on a crowded keypad) for getting onto the Internet. It was so absurdly slow to load the browser, much less dialling up that I found it easier to go online in other ways than to ever use it. Some of the other buttons could be remapped - but not that one. Shame, I could have used that real-estate to do something useful.
I still have that phone - I use it as an alarm clock. I've remapped all the keys to make it as 'fat finger friendly' as possible, but even though it's in aircraft mode, and had a dead sim in it, one little press of that button still tries to load up the browser. It still annoys me some 10 years after they came out with that phone.