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Cost of dealing with a dead teller is probably higher than the amount of cash that will satisfy most traditional robbers. If that robber-satisfying amount can be recovered with a certain degree of reliability, the security model is effective in deterring attacks, minimizing attack damage, and ensuring physical safety of team members.

I imagine there are a number of normal conversations that can trigger unexpected behaviors from these smart devices, especially when you consider the thousands of different regional accents, along with the thousands of ways of speaking the same words with various speeds, pitches, and annunciations. The article mentioned they were talking about wood floors:

...Oak in the annex and for the record...

recording begins

...it's just the annex, stop fretting...

recording stops

just send [flooring person] a quick message with samples you like.

sends recording to someone with same name as flooring person

It sounds like the problem is that it was overly confident it understood the user's intentions, and did all of this silently.

Omnigraffle is by far my favorite, unfortunately only available on Mac OSX. I use Windows more lately and struggled to find a comparable offering. Then discovered Lucidchart https://www.lucidchart.com/ and have grown to enjoy it quite a lot. It offers common Cisco and AWS networking icons, and has some nice exporting options and the auto-expanding canvas. There are some quirks but it is cheaper and in my opinion cleaner than Visio.

Did not know about this, thanks for sharing. It almost increases the mystery in my mind. It appears this API is only available for use in Amazon Android apps, it's certainly marketed that way. It's as if they went 99% of the way of having a full map offering, but decided that Maps were somehow going to drive Kindle Fire adoption. Very interesting.

Does anyone know why Amazon doesn't have a maps offering on AWS? I've heard their internal logistics GIS services are pretty advanced and it surprises me they don't have a GIS category on AWS to the point I'm convinced there must some very specific reason they've chosen not to implement. Companies like MapBox and Carto seem to be doing well, Microsoft and Google have map services, demand seems to exist. Additionally it seems they would find value in possessing a list of companies utilizing such services and be able to offer some interesting services. It's puzzling.

Functionally, these all seem very similar:

SpaceX broadcasting from a camera attached to a Rocket

Boeing broadcasting from a camera attached to a Plane

Toyota broadcasting from a camera attached to a SUV

James Cameron broadcasting from a camera attached to a Submarine

Some options:

Hey, you're not on the list, you can't vote.

Hey, you're not on the list, use the computer in the corner to enter your details and see if you're eligible.

Hey, you're not on the list, here is a provisional ballot, we will verify your info and if it clears, your vote will be counted.

You should not get 5 years in prison because the election board is incapable of securing their processes.

User Experience Goal: Amphetamine-Fueled Delusions of Grandeur

I imagine most of it will boil down to this:

Follow OWASP, encrypt in motion and at rest, use key-manager appliance, implement access logging and store separate from systems, backups of data, define lifetime of data, physical controls to data storage facilities, access controls in system, manage multi-tenancy as the situation requires, sensible password policies / multi-factor authentication, background checks on employees, train staff on security, perform regular scans, restrict ports, intrusion detection system, penetration testing, have plans for business continuity and disaster recovery and practice implementing them, be aware when third party libraries are being used and have a policy for applying software/os patches.

> Is it ever possible that (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) could evaluate to true, in JavaScript?

| Ummm...hmm... no...?

> Wrong. Nothing is impossible. Next question. You are unable to use JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(x)), how do you clone x?

| Hmm, I'm actually not sure... its certainly possible...

> Appreciate your honesty, the correct answer is: you don't. Thank you for your time, we'll be in touch.

Seems one solution could be for officers to use loudspeaker to state why they are outside, and give very specific protocols for safely exiting the residence. Possibly offer a communication channel to dispute validity of their arrival. I imagine they have the phone number of the land-line or cells within a certain radius of the residence, along with social media profiles they could examine to 'profile' participants in the situation and assess validity. You can't have a system that solves the problem 100% and is immune to being gamed by criminals, but with data and clear lines for communication it seems you could pretty easily create a reliable 'safety net' for people caught up in fraudulent 911 calls without exposing the responding officers to any risk.

Cboe & CME must have some extensive performance clauses with exchanges used for futures pricing. A few weeks ago, selloffs like this would result in exchanges closing.

Is this the same FCC Commenting System that sent API keys to anyone who asked?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/fccs-...

Have you discovered their e-reader? Stumbled across it accidentally one day and have found it perfect for posting articles on bulletin boards without cutting up my paper, you can print PDFs of individual articles, choosing between text or photocopy: http://ereader.wsj.net/

Remove Windows servers not being used as web servers (active directory, sharepoint, domain controllers, exchange, etc.) and the Linux number is probably near or above 50%. This share will only grow with Microsoft embracing Linux in .NET Core, and many of the next wave of cloud consumers being small to mid-sized orgs looking to move to managed cloud applications vs. simply putting their machines in the cloud.

I remote desktop into my home computers and can turn on the webcams and see what is happening when I am away. Obviously a limited solution in multiple respects, but for just checking in occasionally it works well-enough. There may even be an open source software somewhere that uses your webcam as a security camera and handles archiving, possibly even uploading daily files to a destination of your choosing so you can access while away.

It is very important to have QA people the engineers respect. What makes a QA person respectable? Strong understanding of the business logic. Clear communication skills. Strong awareness that they cannot build the system, but a strong understanding of how systems operate. They work as hard testing as engineers work building, and deliver their findings efficiently. They can accurately evaluate the magnitude of an issue. The analogy I think of is like an offensive line to a quarterback. The engineers get the headlines, but without a solid QA team that doesn't happen. If QA is doing a good job, make sure everybody knows it.

Sounds like some experimental device broadcasts signals that don't behave well with bed springs.

I do not unfortunately. I do think based on what he was describing he would have enough incentive to pay more if that were feasible and resulted in talent that prevented these issues.

I have an uncle who owns a factory in Northeast Ohio. I saw him over the summer and this is easily the number one issue affecting his day to day operations. He showed me a few security camera videos of people coming to work high and literally going crazy, and then a video of someone who had arrived for a job interview, but just sat in the lobby dazed and unresponsive to commands to leave. The videos were shocking, people were like zombies. He can't find people to hire, and he can't keep the people he has, if they don't overdose at work, they overdose at home. I knew it was an issue, but didn't know it was the main issue facing American industry.

I write and distribute a 'weekend update' just about every week and send it to my team on Sundays. It serves two purposes:

1. Clearly communicate project progress and near-term goals to everyone involved, including non-technical people. I outline the features / issues & resolutions in fairly technical detail while tethering it to more accessible concepts. If things were truly easy or exceptionally difficult, I note that. This has helped Sales and Marketing better manage expectations. The times I'm most stressed are when Sales and Marketing have underestimated the difficulty of something they've promised a client. It's typically not frustrating because it's hard or there are time constraints, it's frustrating because they're prioritizing something that may not be aligned with technical or user priorities. Pile several weeks of this and it can be exhausting. The 'weekly update' has helped that.

2. The process of writing the update offers reassurance that whether the week felt productive or not, progress was achieved. This is the piece that makes sitting down to write it feel like a fun activity rather than a chore. My mind may be saying, this week wasn't productive, but by 15 minutes into composing the update, I'm finding things I had already forgotten about. The week may have been less productive than expected, but it's almost always more productive than the mind gives credit, and writing the update forces the mind to acknowledge these small achievements.

Wondering why they structured it the way they did:

1 Ruble spent generates 1 WhopperCoin

1700 WhopperCoin may be redeemed for 1 Whopper

It seems the 1700 will need to change with currency / pricing fluctuations.

Why not structure it as:

1 Whopper purchased generates .25 WhopperCoin

1 Order of Fries purchased is equivalent to purchasing .3 Whopper (.075 Whopper Coin)

etc.

1 WhopperCoin may be redeemed for 1 Whopper

They would need to adjust the reward generation rates of non-Whopper items occasionally to accommodate price disparities between various menu options in relation to the Whopper, but they would not need to alter the redeemable value of the WhopperCoin. This would essentially create a currency backed by food, which is interesting.

It made sense throughout the whole stack. We're right on the edge of small-midsized, so we need to find technologies which our people know or can easily learn.

Database level, our DBAs are very SQL Server oriented and all of our primary data stores are such, the ORM for .NET Core, Entity Framework plays very well with it. This was probably the biggest factor. It has a decent Redis library.

Application Level, it is a managed runtime, strongly typed, performant, with a strong ecosystem of libraries. We're running calculations on data so out of the box performance is important. Scaffolding models into Controllers and Views is handled very well, along with migrations. Strong facilities for serializing and parsing Json & XML. Nice interfaces for integrating email and SMS services. It has a secure, extensible authorization framework (Identity Server). It has a strong debugger, when you make a typo, you know right away, so you can cut out the vast majority of issues by the time you're running it. Easily share class libraries across projects with a private NuGet repository. A nice implementation to get metadata in System.Reflection along with intuitive handling of generics. Support for lambda expressions and functionalish behaviors. Carefully considered implementations of asynchrony and parallelism.

For front-end tools I'm not as up to speed, but browsersync is built in, so that is running without any configuration. They have automatic minification of css and javascript on build, and some tools to work with Angular, Vue, React, etc. as well as an emmet clone which allows you to use emmet shorthand when generating html.

Dev Ops, the Visual Studio IDE is really comfortable for a wide range of people. Strong integration with GitHub & Docker.

Awesome, thank you for sharing, I will check it out!

I have been absolutely loving .NET Core since I started using it this spring. Currently running two applications in production, one on a Windows Server with IIS and another on a Centos 6 server with Docker. Docker was surprisingly easier than configuring Web Deploy to IIS. There have been a few things that are oddly documented, but generally documentation has improved over these months as user base has grown. They have some great videos on Microsoft Virtual Academy. Early on it felt like many packages weren't compatible (particularly PDF & Image tools), but as time has progressed many old packages have been converted to .Net Core. One project I converted was in PHP before, so I can't accurately speak to performance (obviously feels fast), but development speeds have increased greatly with IntelliSense vs a text-editor. Another project, I had a C++ console application that sort of needed to become a web application but wasn't worth the effort of rewriting. In relatively short order, I had a .Net Core web application using interop services to call the dll. I was later chided by some C# purists that it could have been rewritten in C#, but it was still cool to see how easy it was.

Ten years ago when I was starting out, Microsoft wasn't even a consideration when looking at toolsets, it was stodgy, expensive, and didn't run on a MacBook. Now, not only have they completely redesigned, and sold me on their development toolsets, but they've implemented an interesting alternative to AWS, and they've shifted my go-to machine from a Mac to a Windows machine. The turnaround is pretty remarkable (obviously they have remarkable resources, but still). I sort of want Michael Lewis, or someone, to write a book about the last decade at Microsoft.

Definitely late to the game, but finally bought bitcoin this week. I've followed bitcoin since ~2010, but it's volatility and financial constraints had prevented any real action. Here are some notes if there are any other holdouts out there: I used Coinbase and Gemini. It was surprisingly difficult to get money into these places, which was a bit frustrating, but in the same sense reassuring that they are playing by the rules. I actually setup on Gemini because Coinbase kept cancelling orders on my debit card (Schwab), and I was able to setup wire transfer with Gemini, and then transfer that to Coinbase to fund the GDAX account. I set out Saturday morning to buy bitcoin and didn't ultimately have any until Monday afternoon when the wire transfer reached Gemini (standard account for ACH transfer is now approved on both platforms, Gemini took 2 days, Coinbase 4). Coinbase has a nice app to monitor accounts and price charts, but it doesn't seem to link to GDAX (their exchange), so you can't get a unified view of holdings in one spot. Gemini doesn't have an app, but has a web application which is annoyingly secure. It remembers a device for 24 hours, after which it requires 2 Factor SMS verification. Security is great, but it's a bit annoying when all you want to do is check account value once a day. Gemini trading volume seemed a bit low, and their API didn't offer any compelling features over GDAX, which is why I've transferred from Gemini to Coinbase (took about 1.5 hours to go through) and then GDAX (Coinbase to GDAX is instantaneous). Both offer websocket feeds and the APIs are well documented. The C# GDAX sample application was last updated in 2015 interestingly, but it still has many useful pieces. Another bonus for GDAX is their fee structure, which is simpler (and cheaper) than Gemini's, maker orders are 0% fees. I've always been intrigued by automated trading systems, but the barriers to entry are so high in the stock markets (data, platforms, high fees, account minimums, day trading rules), to the point where you can't really just 'try it out.' 6 days into this adventure and I'm maintaining my own order book and programmatically making trades with tiny amounts of money. Next step is to work on strategy.

Have had Safari Books Online for about a year now, got it 50% off last August, love it. There have been several books I started reading in SBO and then ordered physical copies on Amazon. Never even occurred to me to order the books from Safari directly. The books I order are about broad topics and themes (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Enterprise IoT, etc.). Rarely would I order a book about a specific Language or Framework, they have a limited shelf-life, but I'll absolutely reference the online versions to grab the info I need (more valuable format, can have open on monitor, search, etc.). Their process for alerting authors of this change may not have been great, but it seems like a smart business decision (assuming my use case if fairly typical).

The difference being, here we don't let the commoners engage in bribery, it is only reserved for the higher levels, and even then measures are taken to conceal the nature of the transactions. In many developing countries, everyone gives and receives bribes for many things. It is acceptable (and there are limits). I think it's healthy, if the system is corrupt, everyone should be able to exploit its corruption.

Was in a management meeting the other week where HR mentioned they were considering implementing a more official work-from-home policy. What we're trying to get away from is hourly employees 'working from home' when really they're sick, by offering formalized remote work opportunities. Sounded great until they mentioned the 'monitoring systems' they were evaluating. I shared my very strong opposition to the proposed monitoring systems, went home and crafted a Less-Orwellian Remote Office policy. Shared the policy with HR the next day, and they really liked it, agreeing there were ways to accomplish the goals without surveillance.

Writing the policy was trickier than I expected. Started very much with a spirit of 'Hire people you trust,' but thinking about the policy, applied to specific people who have been hired, it brought some more specific guidelines to the policy. Here are the highlights:

Eligibility for Remote Work (pick 4 from: 1 year with company, management status, strong performance record or recommendation from team lead, one department-specific criteria)

Requirements for the Remote Office (minimum equipment, ample space, etc. clearly defined)

Approval Process & Remote Work Guidelines / Contract (lays out guidelines for working remotely and collects employee commitment to adhere)

Saw some commentary that the frequency of working from home shouldn't be a privilege (i.e. if you do a good job, you can work from home for a week), that it should be as routine as possible, so we're making eligibility to work remotely, on a set frequency, an attainable privilege (so it can be revoked if necessary).

For the alternatives to surveillance, we will be implementing some improved communication tools, and departments will be adopting the concept of an ultra-brief daily scrum.

Tried to keep it lean, will be interesting to see where it excels and where it can improve.

this is super cool