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A very interesting caveat from the paper:

"It is important to note that it is assumed that the victim is wearing the WAD on the wrist of the preferred hand used to interact with keyboards. In fact, in our attack scenario it would be harder, if not impossible, for the attacker to infer keystrokes if the victim is right-handed but is wearing the WAD on the left hand for example."

A WAD is any wearable arm band device.


Which is how most people.wear watches (especially expensive ones).


I don't and none of my friends seem to either.


That's probably a cultural thing. In my country, most people (myself included) wear watches on non-dominant hand.


The reason one would want to do this is to reduce wear on the watch, since the dominant hand is going and doing things the dominant wrist is more likely to be smacked. This goes double for expensive watches.


Personally, I think it's the opposite. I wear my watch on the wrist of my dominant hand. I've never had a problem; in fact I think you are more likely to pay attention to it and not smack it into things.


I am the only right handed person that I know who wears their watch on their right hand. Most people think I am left handed because of it.

I think I started it to be different when I was a teen and the habit just stuck.


I am right-handed and wear my watch on my right wrist as well. I've never ran into any problems doing so, and manipulating buttons on different watches was never a problem either.


You wear your watch on your dominant hand? That feels very unnatural to me. Just manipulating the straps alone seems difficult, so that's a barrier right there...


Not to forget, that most Watches are designed to be worn on the left side. (Position of the Buttons etc.) Smartwatches are improving here, in displaying a rotated screen, but often even these are asymmetrical designed and thus harder to use on the right arm.


> most Watches are designed to be worn on the left side.

Yes, for right-handed people. The opposite is true for left-handed people, and left-handed versions of watches.


I do as well. Even since I was a kid, wearing watches on the wrist of my non-dominant hand felt unnatural. I have no problem manipulating the strap or buttons on my watches.


You grossly underestimate how conservative and risk averse most clients are.

As a consultant I have tried a variation on your approach. I've offered to work for a client for 2-3 weeks. At the end of which THEY get to decide how much I'm worth. I reserve the right not to carry on working for them but for those 2-3 weeks I will accept whatever they pay including nothing.

In over a decade not one client has accepted this deal.


Dunno, not sure this applies. My reaction would be that it is too much to think about. I'd just want to pay a certain rate and be done with it, not load up on ambiguous ill-will.

Now, the GP says he will work first two weeks without pay? Simple to understand and accept.


I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand. Why do "they" decide how much you are worth? Don't you have a daily/hourly rate that you communicate up-front?


The whole purpose of the offer is to let the client decide how much you're worth to them. I provide no up-front rate or fee.

It's always the clients who claim to be 'innovative', 'game changing', 'disruptive' etc. that are the most risk averse. They seem completely blind to the cognitive dissonance.


Maybe it'd require a trip to their (no doubt expensive) lawyers to make sure the arrangement doesn't sound too good to be true and open them up to legal action if you're not happy. Perhaps it's not worth the time/effort/cost for them?


Waterstones also has a click and collect system.

You can order books on-line through their website and pick them up at any store. The on-line price is also lower than the store price.


Absolutely this. While reduced data storage may have been a beneficial side effect the real driver was update consistency.


There's no might about it.

This would definitely be illegal in the UK.


What UK laws are being broken?

EDIT: I'm not saying it's okay. I'm just asking what law is being broken.


It's not illegal to record a conversation between two parties. However if you share this recording with a third party (in this case Facebook) then you have to obtain the consent of the other party.


Under what law?



All of those apply to phone calls. In this situation we have people in a semi-public space (eg, a Pub) talking, and one person using a mobile phone to send background noise (which will include that conversation) to Facebook or Shazzam who process the noise, identify any music, and then discard the noise.

Your law would prevent people in busy offices from making any phone calls.

RIPA http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents

> It shall be an offence for a person intentionally and without lawful authority to intercept, at any place in the United Kingdom, any communication in the course of its transmission by means of—

> (a)a public postal service; or > (b)a public telecommunication system.

That doesn't feel relevant.

Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000 (SI 2000/2699) http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2000/2699/contents/made

Also not relevant. This is about businesses recording calls, and how they can do so and stay within law.

The Telecommunications (Data Protection and Privacy) Regulations 1999 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/2093/regulation/1/ma...

Again, not relevant. And also covers temporary use of data, so if anything it allows the Facebook use.

The DPA isn't relevant unless Facebook is storing the data beyond the immediate identification of music in the background.


Although his comments are accurate there's nothing terrible profound about them.

For quite a while everybody has realized that out sourcing was never anything more than labour cost arbitrage, dressed up with fairly empty "sales" rhetoric.

However he misses a more fundamental way in which clients and outsourcers interest are misaligned. Because outsourcers are essentially selling bodies they have no incentive to become more efficient through labour cost reduction.

I suspect this failure is the real reason for the current "in sourcing" vogue. As software development and delivery becomes increasingly automated the labour cost component will drop, along with the pressure to outsource.

The outsourcers business model is fundamentally broken and it's only a matter of time before this shows up in the bottom line.


> As software development and delivery becomes increasingly automated

How? Software is by definition like _manufacturing_ a single item. Production (copying) is already free and maximally automated.

In two centuries we have made very little progress in automating development. I don't see that changing soon, especially not for software.


We did simplify software development _a lot_ since the dawn of computers. Compilers, IDEs, standard libraries... it's not really automation yet, but a programmer today is much more productive than a programmer forty years ago.


Right, but the definition of a minimum viable product is also fanstastically more complicated today than it was forty years ago...


90% of what startups recently provide is not complicated technically, but only from legal or business standpoints.

Dropbox and Uber, just to name a few, are technically very simply implemented, and had many competitors before and after them.

Especially in the startup scene no hard theoretical issues are solved anymore.

You don’t see a startup develop mpeg-5


Outsourcing doesn't have to be based on pure time&material model. Software houses have huge incentives to become more efficient - using scale to their advantage, becoming experts in technology, etc. - all that to compete with other software houses.


I've dealt with many outsourcers (TCS, Infosys, Accenture, IBM etc.) and WITHOUT EXCEPTION their business model is time and materials.


I know from first-hand experience that this isn't the case.

Obviously T&M is the preferred contract structure for the service provider, but many projects get done on different metrics (fix-price, result-based, T&M with upper/lower bound etc.). It's quite a competitive industry, so a big client can negotiate for a different contract structure if the project allows it (obv. not for bodylease stuff).

Also, your assumption about labour-cost arbitrage isn't completely true. Many external consultants (incl. developers) make better salaries than internal staff.


Nearly all the standard data modelling tools(ERwin,System Architect, Enterprise Architect ...) have a facility for reverse engineering a schema. This produces an ER diagram for the schema. It's worth pointing out however that this diagram gives you structure not semantics. The latter has to come from elsewhere.


Here in the UK "in-store pickup" is known as "click and collect" and it's becoming very popular. In addition the on line price is often lower than the in store price.


Travis Goodspeed had a nice hack using Celestrak data http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.co.uk/


...Often 2-3 candidates could have done the job brilliantly,..

Tell me more about the skills shortage.


In my case, I wasn't interviewing for software engineers.


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