HMRC have some particularly complex requirements for logging on to any of their services. You need a magic number and a password. The magic number bears no resemblance to anything you might know, or ever learn. The password has to be so complex that it too is something you'll never know. I forget exactly how these things are supplied to you, but I seem to remember one half is sent via snail mail and the other half is SMS messaged.
In the days before password managers, there was literally no way any human on earth could have remembered those details that they only use once per year. Of course we all wrote them down, and of course that was horribly insecure and yes, I suspect a few of them got stolen along the way. Even with a password manager, you can't log on in an automated fashion because their website somehow stops that from working, but at least you could just write yourself a 'secure note' with the details you need to remember in it.
Then along came biometrics (from the Home Office, who had their strings pulled by MI5, who in turn had theirs pulled by the NSA). They've tried time and time again to get the British Public to sign up to some biometric-based system for tracking the population. It's never really stuck though, so I suspect HMRC got hold of some 'Home Office Surplus' to do their biometric password stuff.
Being the government though, no matter what they implement it'll feel like it'd be easier to break into the Bank of England than to use it, but if you look closely enough you'll see the whole thing is made of cardboard and sticky tape. It seems they didn't disappoint here, by keeping the recordings instead of the fingerprints of them. It's only lucky that they didn't copy them all to a USB stick and lose it on a train or in the back of a cab, I suppose.
I recently tried to make some raised beds in the garden. I figured I'd make them out of plastic so they don't rot - and sure enough, you can buy wood-substitute plastic planks in various widths, thicknesses and lengths. The trouble is, they work out about four times as expensive as the (treated) wood alternative. Even factoring in lifetime and replacements, they're still somewhere close to twice as expensive.
That said, plastic planks do have their uses - one use I have coming up is in a shed which has a concrete floor. I'll use the plastic planks as batten upon which to fix the wall panels. The plastic will provide a DPC and avoids needing a 'sacrificial' wood batten at the bottom of the wall panels (and avoids needing some silicon to seal up the bottom of the batten too).
So... I'd love to see more plastic planks - so many that the price comes down to something in the range of 1.5-2 times (per metre) of the wood equivalent. They're made (I believe) of mixed plastics which get chopped up and glued/melted together.
I used to use Facebook for general purposes for a couple of years. I had it tuned up so it didn't really send me anything, and didn't share more of me than I really needed. When I stopped using it there wasn't a way to actually delete your account (just 'deactivate'), so I didn't bother to do it. I figured after a while they'd get bored and leave me alone. However, I kept getting "A lot's been happening on facebook since you last logged on" emails, with exciting items such as "Julie liked a comment on her post" and "Steve reacted to a comment on Mike's post". Oh, and they consistently told me I had two 'pokes' - even when pokes weren't a thing any more.
I've since fully deleted my account, put the FB blockers in my hosts file and of course marked all emails from them as spam. Now I don't see them any more. I suspect the full deletion of my account was what really did it.
So in short - this guy's got a point - FB do send many, very desperate looking, highly disengaging emails when you don't log on for a while. It's easy to stop them though.
That's a competitive problem for Intel - firstly, it means they'll piss off their government friends. That means less money coming in, which means higher prices for their chips.
All this 'smart' is really just a slighly refined 'Clippy'. Clippy was thick as pig shit because it was only triggered on you writing "Dear" at the top of a document. Pretty much any 'smart' that you see today is better than that, but not by a lot - it's still 'pattern matching' and can only infer intent based on the few words it has to go on.
"intent" is what's missing in all of this - if my intent is to file things a certain way, then that's what I want - it's easy for humans to do this, and yet very hard for computers. As a human it's also super-easy to spot anything that's not been filed correctly. It's also (usually) not that hard to explain the filing system to another human, and yet, millions of dollars of development and hosting time and yet vast computers can't do it.
How any of these companies are going to sell us an actually-smart product after years of abusing the word is anyone's guess. I suppose there's the British English word "clever" which is what Americans use 'smart' to mean. We'll see...
Your story highlights the problem with 'devops' and 'agile' and countless other buzzwordy programmes companies implement. Even looking down the comments here, half of slashdot doesn't understand and doesn't agree on what 'devops' actually is. We've all worked somewhere that said "oh yeah, we do agile, we do devops" and that's the example most people seem to accept as being "the correct one". Yours looks like a horrible misintepretation of what 'agile' tries to accomplish.
For me, I'd say 'devops' is more about writing code to setup and deploy systems than anything else. If you're making manual changes on boxes then you're not really 'devops'. There's no requirement to do agile/sprints/kanban or whatever else - it's just about how you solve the problem of making a change. As an old fart, I've been 'devops' since I was ever allowed root. I've always used scripts to solve problems, and latterly those scripts are turning into Ansible/Puppet/Terraform or whatever, but ultimately it's all about the same thing - I describe how the changes should be made and some automation goes and makes the change on however many different systems on my behalf.
Unfortunately, a lot of idiots seem to have heard the 'dev' part of the 'devops' word and assumed it means the developers and operations people are now the same people. That just leads to developers making a horrible spaghetti of insecure systems stuck together in production, or it leads to horrible insecure spaghetti code checked into the git repo. Letting developers do development and ops people do the ops usually works out better. Indeed a separation of responsibilities is an absolute requirement in most financial (regulated) shops.
Just as 'agile' doesn't mean doing waterfall in two week chunks, 'devops' doesn't mean devs and ops doing the same work. Just as managers have bastardised 'agile', so they are bastardising 'devops' into their own image. Still doesn't make it 'devops' though.
I rather of like the idea that if one day I found myself in a ditch with nothing but the shirt on my back that I could actually rebuild my life. That is, wander about a bit and find some casual work on a farm, building site or some such and collect some cash* at the end of the day. Then spend said cash to get some sort of accommodation and food.
I understand the farmer could pop down the local convenience shop and get a pre-paid card for me to pay me, but realistically, they won't as it's not worth their while. Conversely I can understand that the local hostel probably gets 80-90% of its trade electronically, so if I rock up with my small notes and try to get a room for the night, they probably won't have the obvious means to deal with my cash, give me change, etc.
As at least something of a guarantee though, it would be nice to know that (say) the all banks were legally obliged to accept cash and could turn it into a pre-paid card or whatever. It doesn't seem like that creates too much of a burden on them, and means a sort of 'human right' is maintained.
* Cash needn't specifically be paper and metal money. It could be some form of tokens, or electronic money that doesn't require the recipient has anything to 'receive' it, other than an outstretched hand or cap.
Who gives a toss? If Canada doesn't want it, then they can quite reasonably stop it. They're not just stopping it from America - no country can sell them stuff that contravenes their rules. America doesn't get a free pass to do whatever it likes.
As for the FDA having some of the strictest regulations in the world... That gave me a good laugh.
The thing is, we've had a succession of Secretaries of State asking for the same thing going back to at least 2002: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/101... (first "national ID cards', and now a less all-encompassing 'internet ID card').
This guy can just go to the back of the queue of stupid politicians who mostly don't go anywhere important. Theresa May is only PM because so many other people stepped out of the way the party got desperate.
The government is hanging by a thread - Brexit will keep them entertained enough to keep this at bay, although it'll come up again in a year or two. Then again a year or two after that until finally they manage to sneak it in.
FWIW, I'm nobody important, but I already do this with Github. It's got a few bits and bobs of open source on it from me - nothing serious. All my private repos are elsewhere (Gitlab, mainly). Git is the singularly easiest source control tool for moving repos from A to B though - some providers even have 'import' tools because it's so easy to do.
On another note, Github must be indirectly responsible for an awful lot of 'code leak' from various companies. That is, you join a new company and give them your github user so they can add you to their private repos. Thus, your personal username is able to access their private repos. If you're so-inclined, you clone a load of their code to your personal laptop (probably in contravention of your employment contract). I'm not sure there's any way in Github to restrict that happening, or even report on it happening. Other providers are as bad, unless you can run it yourself (eg. Gitlab) or they provide specific features for it, but it's probably a gaping hole in most companies security policies. Just a thought...
As for the 'enterprise'... Every shop I've ever worked at that was bigger than a handful of people used a Windows Domain Controller to run all the users and groups, roles and whatnot. I realise that these days you can use AD with Linux, and even with a Mac, but on those platforms you're only getting about 10% of what AD can do for you.
Being able to 'force upgrade' everyone's copy of Firefox, or everyone's copy of $some_random_shit_your_company_uses via Group Policy is a very compelling feature. These days, auto-updates and such like are taking over that space quite a bit, but there are still plenty of applications that don't work that way. Having old versions of apps kicking about on the network are obviously a security problem, especially on Windows - being able to update them by central 'command' goes a long way.
Contrast this to AD on a Mac. It works well enough, although seems to slow down logon somewhat. There's no 'group policy' though, so you can't upgrade any apps remotely. The Mac is inherently more secure than the Windows equivalent, but without that remote update, you can't say that you've definitely upgraded all copies of $app across the company to a version that doesn't have a particular security flaw.
On linux (servers) you can take care of mass upgrades by recreating VMs or just plan-old logging onto each box and upgrading stuff (which you can automate with Puppet, Ansible etc). Linux desktops are more or less like Macs, in so much as they're relatively uncontrolled and hard to manage (although you might treat both a bit like servers, with Puppet or whatever, I guess - not sure that really works so well on laptops, but I'm sure it can be done).
All that, plus the ability to 'lock down' Windows as much as you want is pretty much what 'enterprises' want in a lot of cases. 'lock down' is considerably harder on a Mac if you want the end user to have any ability to actually do very much - for whatever reason, Macs seem to need the administrator password for things they really shouldn't (eg. upgrades of some apps).
The question is... how long with those organisation that feel they 'require' all the central control Windows brings, stick with it? More and more places seem to be allowing Macs for people that want them, and so you could imagine a decline in the Windows desktop over the next few years. I suspect their AD servers are safe for a while longer than that, but if your estate is Macs, then one wonders if there's room for someone to come in with an authentication facility for Macs that doesn't require Windows AD (why Apple haven't done so is something of a mystery to me, if I'm honest).
Either way, this all doesn't look like Windows is "on the up". Pissing off your customers isn't usually a good move, and subscription OSes might work in companies, but I can't see it working at home unless there's really no other choice (and right now, the Mac is a good alternative to windows at home).
I totally agree - making the same films as the last time around, but with a few gender changes here and there wasn't setting themselves up for greatness.
However, anything like you suggest would have required some original thought and risk taking. Both things Disney does none of. They couldn't just buy in a decent plot from an established source, and so we end up with, what is essentially, a remake.
I'm sure Disney will do what they always do... make a good attempt of a film with some really weird, doesn't-fit-in-properly bit about three quarters of the way in that basically ruins it. Oh, and they'll make the good guys good and the bad guys bad - no shades of grey, and no occasioanl slip-ups here and there either.
So in short.. by the time the Boba-fans have seen this, they'll think a lot less of Boba than they used to.
When you can scarcely fart on the Internet without one, single company hearing about it in 3 different ways, then that company looks like a monopoly.
Facebook fits the bill, and so does Google - although right now, they're focussing on Facebook because they were stupid enough to lose some of the data they collected. If Google has a breach, they'll be in the same firing line (and probably more besides).
You don't have to be the only player in a market to look like a monopoly. The fact that everyone "could" switch to Telegram from Whatsapp is irrelevant - the fact is, Whatsapp is dominant in that space, as Facebook is dominant in that space. Joining the two together means the public cannot (reasonably) 'get away' from Facebook Inc.
Uber got into the ride-sharing business, which has sort of morphed into the taxi business. Then along came Google with their plans to make a self-driving car. Uber saw it's future disappearing, and so got into the self-driving car game. They initially did it to give themselves a future, but quickly realised that self-driving cars are actually really, really hard. They then (secretly) pivoted to ensure that SDCs kill a few people so that the public trusts Uber's human drivers a bit longer.
Their wifi stuff isn't so much 'home' kit as it's 'pro'. The admin tool means you can configure a bunch of APs at the same time, put them into groups, aggregate stats and whatnot - it's actually very good (even for home, with maybe 2 APs around the house), but it comes at the cost of needing to run the tool somewhere. I believe they do an appliance for it, although as I say, a Pi is enough if you want it to run 24x7. For home use, you could just start it up on your laptop, do the config and then shut to down until you next need to make a change though.
The Edgemax routers have their own admin interfaces (web/ssh etc) - no additional things required at all.
If you want an Wifi access point then you need an admin tool, which you can either run on the same machine as you use to operate the browser (and shut it down when you're done), or a raspberry pi, or in my case a VM on my Qnap nas.
- Notifications for emails that don't exist (I think it makes a desktop notification before the spam filter has run) - Wrong email details in notifications - Spam filter that's either too aggressive or too feeble and doesn't seem to get anywhere in between, no matter how much training you give it
Don't even get me started on calendar integration;-)
That said, it's still a million times better than the Apple mail thing, which is an abomination. I haven't yet found anything better, apart from, shock horror - Outlook. Although I've only used that with a corporate email server (and even that has lots of things that are terrible too), so I don't imagine it would be plain sailing using IMAP and whatever-calendar.
The research will ultimately recommend a well rounded diet eating lots of fresh veggies, a bit of meat and a few carbs/starches here and there too. By the time it actually gets to patients ill in bed, it'll be:
1) Healthy meal $20 2) Burger and fries: $10 (go large! +$5) 3) Some sort of super-processed meal-in-a-tray $2...and so it won't have the desired effect at all.
Our hybrid car plays a sort of humming noise when you drive below about 5-10 miles an hour - because otherwise it's just too damn quiet for people to hear (even with it, people don't really hear it, mostly because they're not used to it).
I'll ask Mitsubishi if they can change the noise to horses hooves on cobbled streets - that would be way better (and you can bet people would move out of the way, as it's a sound they're familiar with).
You're describing the 'ordinary' features of a bank - and yes, I'd agree that they're mostly automated. The awesomely-good-at-customer-service banks like Barclays and HSBC have done away with most of the humans and just put cash machines in their branches. This allows them to keep paying vast sums in rent and upkeep, yet provide an even more terrible service than they used to.
However, all banks have to deal with 'exceptions'. These are the things that happen all the time but aren't part of 'normal' activity. Take for example, bereavement - Barclays (and others) have a team specifically for this function, fully staffed with humans. You need all those humans to incorrectly assess the situation, incorrectly or unfairly apply the 'rules' to those situations and then to take about 7 months to do what they could have done in a week or less. There's no way AI is ever going to compete with all that.
Our old Honda CRV had bluetooth for phone functionality. It was a mission to set it up because you had to use the incredibly poor voice recognition. Unpairing was so difficult it took me 30 minutes to do the first one, and then maybe 3 minutes per connection after that - and yes, I found the previous owners were still 'paired' too. The GPS was even harder - I deleted the 'favourites', but it still had markers on the roads we'd driven on.
The old mainframe/dumb terminal solution was still owned by the corporation you worked for. Thus, they owned the presentation and the processing, storage, etc.
The cloud, by comparison means someone else owns the processing and storage ("BYOD" on a global scale, if you prefer to think of it like that). This is the key difference, which will (I suspect) end as you say due to privacy and security issues.
Slashdot Mirror
HMRC have some particularly complex requirements for logging on to any of their services. You need a magic number and a password. The magic number bears no resemblance to anything you might know, or ever learn. The password has to be so complex that it too is something you'll never know. I forget exactly how these things are supplied to you, but I seem to remember one half is sent via snail mail and the other half is SMS messaged.
In the days before password managers, there was literally no way any human on earth could have remembered those details that they only use once per year. Of course we all wrote them down, and of course that was horribly insecure and yes, I suspect a few of them got stolen along the way. Even with a password manager, you can't log on in an automated fashion because their website somehow stops that from working, but at least you could just write yourself a 'secure note' with the details you need to remember in it.
Then along came biometrics (from the Home Office, who had their strings pulled by MI5, who in turn had theirs pulled by the NSA). They've tried time and time again to get the British Public to sign up to some biometric-based system for tracking the population. It's never really stuck though, so I suspect HMRC got hold of some 'Home Office Surplus' to do their biometric password stuff.
Being the government though, no matter what they implement it'll feel like it'd be easier to break into the Bank of England than to use it, but if you look closely enough you'll see the whole thing is made of cardboard and sticky tape. It seems they didn't disappoint here, by keeping the recordings instead of the fingerprints of them. It's only lucky that they didn't copy them all to a USB stick and lose it on a train or in the back of a cab, I suppose.
I recently tried to make some raised beds in the garden. I figured I'd make them out of plastic so they don't rot - and sure enough, you can buy wood-substitute plastic planks in various widths, thicknesses and lengths. The trouble is, they work out about four times as expensive as the (treated) wood alternative. Even factoring in lifetime and replacements, they're still somewhere close to twice as expensive.
That said, plastic planks do have their uses - one use I have coming up is in a shed which has a concrete floor. I'll use the plastic planks as batten upon which to fix the wall panels. The plastic will provide a DPC and avoids needing a 'sacrificial' wood batten at the bottom of the wall panels (and avoids needing some silicon to seal up the bottom of the batten too).
So... I'd love to see more plastic planks - so many that the price comes down to something in the range of 1.5-2 times (per metre) of the wood equivalent. They're made (I believe) of mixed plastics which get chopped up and glued/melted together.
I used to use Facebook for general purposes for a couple of years. I had it tuned up so it didn't really send me anything, and didn't share more of me than I really needed. When I stopped using it there wasn't a way to actually delete your account (just 'deactivate'), so I didn't bother to do it. I figured after a while they'd get bored and leave me alone. However, I kept getting "A lot's been happening on facebook since you last logged on" emails, with exciting items such as "Julie liked a comment on her post" and "Steve reacted to a comment on Mike's post". Oh, and they consistently told me I had two 'pokes' - even when pokes weren't a thing any more.
I've since fully deleted my account, put the FB blockers in my hosts file and of course marked all emails from them as spam. Now I don't see them any more. I suspect the full deletion of my account was what really did it.
So in short - this guy's got a point - FB do send many, very desperate looking, highly disengaging emails when you don't log on for a while. It's easy to stop them though.
Being in a hotel, the 'wet' could be due to all manner of different causes - most of which I wouldn't want to get too close to.
That's a competitive problem for Intel - firstly, it means they'll piss off their government friends. That means less money coming in, which means higher prices for their chips.
All this 'smart' is really just a slighly refined 'Clippy'. Clippy was thick as pig shit because it was only triggered on you writing "Dear" at the top of a document. Pretty much any 'smart' that you see today is better than that, but not by a lot - it's still 'pattern matching' and can only infer intent based on the few words it has to go on.
"intent" is what's missing in all of this - if my intent is to file things a certain way, then that's what I want - it's easy for humans to do this, and yet very hard for computers. As a human it's also super-easy to spot anything that's not been filed correctly. It's also (usually) not that hard to explain the filing system to another human, and yet, millions of dollars of development and hosting time and yet vast computers can't do it.
How any of these companies are going to sell us an actually-smart product after years of abusing the word is anyone's guess. I suppose there's the British English word "clever" which is what Americans use 'smart' to mean. We'll see...
Your story highlights the problem with 'devops' and 'agile' and countless other buzzwordy programmes companies implement. Even looking down the comments here, half of slashdot doesn't understand and doesn't agree on what 'devops' actually is. We've all worked somewhere that said "oh yeah, we do agile, we do devops" and that's the example most people seem to accept as being "the correct one". Yours looks like a horrible misintepretation of what 'agile' tries to accomplish.
For me, I'd say 'devops' is more about writing code to setup and deploy systems than anything else. If you're making manual changes on boxes then you're not really 'devops'. There's no requirement to do agile/sprints/kanban or whatever else - it's just about how you solve the problem of making a change. As an old fart, I've been 'devops' since I was ever allowed root. I've always used scripts to solve problems, and latterly those scripts are turning into Ansible/Puppet/Terraform or whatever, but ultimately it's all about the same thing - I describe how the changes should be made and some automation goes and makes the change on however many different systems on my behalf.
Unfortunately, a lot of idiots seem to have heard the 'dev' part of the 'devops' word and assumed it means the developers and operations people are now the same people. That just leads to developers making a horrible spaghetti of insecure systems stuck together in production, or it leads to horrible insecure spaghetti code checked into the git repo. Letting developers do development and ops people do the ops usually works out better. Indeed a separation of responsibilities is an absolute requirement in most financial (regulated) shops.
Just as 'agile' doesn't mean doing waterfall in two week chunks, 'devops' doesn't mean devs and ops doing the same work. Just as managers have bastardised 'agile', so they are bastardising 'devops' into their own image. Still doesn't make it 'devops' though.
I rather of like the idea that if one day I found myself in a ditch with nothing but the shirt on my back that I could actually rebuild my life. That is, wander about a bit and find some casual work on a farm, building site or some such and collect some cash* at the end of the day. Then spend said cash to get some sort of accommodation and food.
I understand the farmer could pop down the local convenience shop and get a pre-paid card for me to pay me, but realistically, they won't as it's not worth their while. Conversely I can understand that the local hostel probably gets 80-90% of its trade electronically, so if I rock up with my small notes and try to get a room for the night, they probably won't have the obvious means to deal with my cash, give me change, etc.
As at least something of a guarantee though, it would be nice to know that (say) the all banks were legally obliged to accept cash and could turn it into a pre-paid card or whatever. It doesn't seem like that creates too much of a burden on them, and means a sort of 'human right' is maintained.
* Cash needn't specifically be paper and metal money. It could be some form of tokens, or electronic money that doesn't require the recipient has anything to 'receive' it, other than an outstretched hand or cap.
Who gives a toss? If Canada doesn't want it, then they can quite reasonably stop it. They're not just stopping it from America - no country can sell them stuff that contravenes their rules. America doesn't get a free pass to do whatever it likes.
As for the FDA having some of the strictest regulations in the world... That gave me a good laugh.
The thing is, we've had a succession of Secretaries of State asking for the same thing going back to at least 2002: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/101... (first "national ID cards', and now a less all-encompassing 'internet ID card').
This guy can just go to the back of the queue of stupid politicians who mostly don't go anywhere important. Theresa May is only PM because so many other people stepped out of the way the party got desperate.
The government is hanging by a thread - Brexit will keep them entertained enough to keep this at bay, although it'll come up again in a year or two. Then again a year or two after that until finally they manage to sneak it in.
FWIW, I'm nobody important, but I already do this with Github. It's got a few bits and bobs of open source on it from me - nothing serious. All my private repos are elsewhere (Gitlab, mainly). Git is the singularly easiest source control tool for moving repos from A to B though - some providers even have 'import' tools because it's so easy to do.
On another note, Github must be indirectly responsible for an awful lot of 'code leak' from various companies. That is, you join a new company and give them your github user so they can add you to their private repos. Thus, your personal username is able to access their private repos. If you're so-inclined, you clone a load of their code to your personal laptop (probably in contravention of your employment contract). I'm not sure there's any way in Github to restrict that happening, or even report on it happening. Other providers are as bad, unless you can run it yourself (eg. Gitlab) or they provide specific features for it, but it's probably a gaping hole in most companies security policies. Just a thought...
As for the 'enterprise'... Every shop I've ever worked at that was bigger than a handful of people used a Windows Domain Controller to run all the users and groups, roles and whatnot. I realise that these days you can use AD with Linux, and even with a Mac, but on those platforms you're only getting about 10% of what AD can do for you.
Being able to 'force upgrade' everyone's copy of Firefox, or everyone's copy of $some_random_shit_your_company_uses via Group Policy is a very compelling feature. These days, auto-updates and such like are taking over that space quite a bit, but there are still plenty of applications that don't work that way. Having old versions of apps kicking about on the network are obviously a security problem, especially on Windows - being able to update them by central 'command' goes a long way.
Contrast this to AD on a Mac. It works well enough, although seems to slow down logon somewhat. There's no 'group policy' though, so you can't upgrade any apps remotely. The Mac is inherently more secure than the Windows equivalent, but without that remote update, you can't say that you've definitely upgraded all copies of $app across the company to a version that doesn't have a particular security flaw.
On linux (servers) you can take care of mass upgrades by recreating VMs or just plan-old logging onto each box and upgrading stuff (which you can automate with Puppet, Ansible etc). Linux desktops are more or less like Macs, in so much as they're relatively uncontrolled and hard to manage (although you might treat both a bit like servers, with Puppet or whatever, I guess - not sure that really works so well on laptops, but I'm sure it can be done).
All that, plus the ability to 'lock down' Windows as much as you want is pretty much what 'enterprises' want in a lot of cases. 'lock down' is considerably harder on a Mac if you want the end user to have any ability to actually do very much - for whatever reason, Macs seem to need the administrator password for things they really shouldn't (eg. upgrades of some apps).
The question is... how long with those organisation that feel they 'require' all the central control Windows brings, stick with it? More and more places seem to be allowing Macs for people that want them, and so you could imagine a decline in the Windows desktop over the next few years. I suspect their AD servers are safe for a while longer than that, but if your estate is Macs, then one wonders if there's room for someone to come in with an authentication facility for Macs that doesn't require Windows AD (why Apple haven't done so is something of a mystery to me, if I'm honest).
Either way, this all doesn't look like Windows is "on the up". Pissing off your customers isn't usually a good move, and subscription OSes might work in companies, but I can't see it working at home unless there's really no other choice (and right now, the Mac is a good alternative to windows at home).
I totally agree - making the same films as the last time around, but with a few gender changes here and there wasn't setting themselves up for greatness.
However, anything like you suggest would have required some original thought and risk taking. Both things Disney does none of. They couldn't just buy in a decent plot from an established source, and so we end up with, what is essentially, a remake.
I'm sure Disney will do what they always do... make a good attempt of a film with some really weird, doesn't-fit-in-properly bit about three quarters of the way in that basically ruins it. Oh, and they'll make the good guys good and the bad guys bad - no shades of grey, and no occasioanl slip-ups here and there either.
So in short.. by the time the Boba-fans have seen this, they'll think a lot less of Boba than they used to.
When you can scarcely fart on the Internet without one, single company hearing about it in 3 different ways, then that company looks like a monopoly.
Facebook fits the bill, and so does Google - although right now, they're focussing on Facebook because they were stupid enough to lose some of the data they collected. If Google has a breach, they'll be in the same firing line (and probably more besides).
You don't have to be the only player in a market to look like a monopoly. The fact that everyone "could" switch to Telegram from Whatsapp is irrelevant - the fact is, Whatsapp is dominant in that space, as Facebook is dominant in that space. Joining the two together means the public cannot (reasonably) 'get away' from Facebook Inc.
Uber got into the ride-sharing business, which has sort of morphed into the taxi business. Then along came Google with their plans to make a self-driving car. Uber saw it's future disappearing, and so got into the self-driving car game. They initially did it to give themselves a future, but quickly realised that self-driving cars are actually really, really hard. They then (secretly) pivoted to ensure that SDCs kill a few people so that the public trusts Uber's human drivers a bit longer.
Their wifi stuff isn't so much 'home' kit as it's 'pro'. The admin tool means you can configure a bunch of APs at the same time, put them into groups, aggregate stats and whatnot - it's actually very good (even for home, with maybe 2 APs around the house), but it comes at the cost of needing to run the tool somewhere. I believe they do an appliance for it, although as I say, a Pi is enough if you want it to run 24x7. For home use, you could just start it up on your laptop, do the config and then shut to down until you next need to make a change though.
The Edgemax routers have their own admin interfaces (web/ssh etc) - no additional things required at all.
If you want an Wifi access point then you need an admin tool, which you can either run on the same machine as you use to operate the browser (and shut it down when you're done), or a raspberry pi, or in my case a VM on my Qnap nas.
I'll add (on OSX):
- Notifications for emails that don't exist (I think it makes a desktop notification before the spam filter has run)
- Wrong email details in notifications
- Spam filter that's either too aggressive or too feeble and doesn't seem to get anywhere in between, no matter how much training you give it
Don't even get me started on calendar integration ;-)
That said, it's still a million times better than the Apple mail thing, which is an abomination. I haven't yet found anything better, apart from, shock horror - Outlook. Although I've only used that with a corporate email server (and even that has lots of things that are terrible too), so I don't imagine it would be plain sailing using IMAP and whatever-calendar.
The research will ultimately recommend a well rounded diet eating lots of fresh veggies, a bit of meat and a few carbs/starches here and there too. By the time it actually gets to patients ill in bed, it'll be:
1) Healthy meal $20 ...and so it won't have the desired effect at all.
2) Burger and fries: $10 (go large! +$5)
3) Some sort of super-processed meal-in-a-tray $2
Our hybrid car plays a sort of humming noise when you drive below about 5-10 miles an hour - because otherwise it's just too damn quiet for people to hear (even with it, people don't really hear it, mostly because they're not used to it).
I'll ask Mitsubishi if they can change the noise to horses hooves on cobbled streets - that would be way better (and you can bet people would move out of the way, as it's a sound they're familiar with).
You're describing the 'ordinary' features of a bank - and yes, I'd agree that they're mostly automated. The awesomely-good-at-customer-service banks like Barclays and HSBC have done away with most of the humans and just put cash machines in their branches. This allows them to keep paying vast sums in rent and upkeep, yet provide an even more terrible service than they used to.
However, all banks have to deal with 'exceptions'. These are the things that happen all the time but aren't part of 'normal' activity. Take for example, bereavement - Barclays (and others) have a team specifically for this function, fully staffed with humans. You need all those humans to incorrectly assess the situation, incorrectly or unfairly apply the 'rules' to those situations and then to take about 7 months to do what they could have done in a week or less. There's no way AI is ever going to compete with all that.
Our old Honda CRV had bluetooth for phone functionality. It was a mission to set it up because you had to use the incredibly poor voice recognition. Unpairing was so difficult it took me 30 minutes to do the first one, and then maybe 3 minutes per connection after that - and yes, I found the previous owners were still 'paired' too. The GPS was even harder - I deleted the 'favourites', but it still had markers on the roads we'd driven on.
The old mainframe/dumb terminal solution was still owned by the corporation you worked for. Thus, they owned the presentation and the processing, storage, etc.
The cloud, by comparison means someone else owns the processing and storage ("BYOD" on a global scale, if you prefer to think of it like that). This is the key difference, which will (I suspect) end as you say due to privacy and security issues.
So if a self-driving car can work in America, it'll probably do just fine in Germany. It'll probably struggle in Russia though.