Re: Facebook with brain hacking capability ? Run for the hills.
Facebook? I think you need to look to the future, when they re-brand as Mindbook!
40 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jun 2011
They are not committed to on-prem.
Moving to cloud allows them to lock-in customers and gauge later (and up-front)! Couple that with increasing lack of transparency around their data models for SaaS software and customers are pushed more and more to their consulting services as external consultants are gradually frozen out.
Existing on-prem customers will be encouraged with one hand to move to cloud, and pushed with the other hand by exorbitant increases in licence fees for on-prem.
Plenty of PHBs will buy-in to the benefits of cloud (and there are some) while the sales droids avoid/deny/ignore the disadvantages of cloud (and there are some).
The Amazon Locker service already provides most of this convenience, especially in cities. The question will be the cost. For a while, delivery to Lockers was free, but that was removed in April.
Most likely "FREE for only £79 / year Amazon Prime membership", so really just another attempt to lock users in to a regular revenue stream.
I think the ones you can buy in a shop without any registration process are "Visitor Oyster Cards", which whilst useful for the purposes you outline, they have limitations. Primarily, they can not be loaded with weekly, monthly or annual tickets, which most people who travel regularly in London will use for convenience and price.
This compares to Travelcards (showing old paper type, but similar for Oyster)
http://visitorshop.tfl.gov.uk/help-centre/ticket-comparison.html
There are other benefits such as being able to transfer credit online if you lose a registered card, which I have, and it even refunds the £5 deposit need for the new card.
The Visitor cards are useful for spook-dodging as you described, but as I said, there are limitations.
(TRT beat me to it, but as he/she said, you can also add auto-Top Up etc.) So again, a big trade-of between privacy and convenience.
"America On Line does not track you and sell your information to all kind of wierdos like Gurgle does."
Yes they do. They have used behavioural targeting (including predicitive analytics) through internal systems and external third-parties for many years. No better than any of the others.
(Edit: typo)
As noted, there are several start-ups like these around, but in-memory has already been integrated or is being integrated into the established players. It will be difficult for these one-trick ponies to get a foothold over tools with much wider capabilities such as MS SQL 2012 etc.
Well, apart from the Opera sync which is a small percent of the market, Xmarks (free) already syncs bookmarks and open tabs across FF, IE, Chrome/Iron, Safari:
http://download.xmarks.com/download/all
Also includes possibility for different profiles with standard ones for Home, Work and mobile.
(For mobile, it works with the FF mobile browser, but not Android browser).
Really? It was quite easy for me to find bars in Beijing and other cities that have free Wi-fi that do not require any details. The needed even less than the "free wi-fi" common in the West which require registration.
Still, quite a few of those details they are asking for will be required for our hotel reservation (and visa) in the first place, so the hotels I used needed you to register, but simple enough for any agency to link your hotel room number to reservation details and then visa. That's why I stayed clear of those.
I think most have figured out by now that the best option 3 (for themselves) is:
3. Sell stuff in 1. to third parties (especially advertisers)
Works for FacePalm etc. (sorta).
Of course, what is good for them is not necessarily good for those putting the stuff in 1. into the cloud in the first place Particularly personal details and behaviour.
Most MOS (other than singles of course) are mixed:
http://www.discogs.com/label/Ministry%20Of%20Sound?sort=date%2Casc
Not sure how they can claim that is the same as a Spotify playlist that is obviously not mixed. They may be going for some legal grounds such as "near enough to be damaging" so it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
@Peter2: Stop making sense; this is supposed to be El Reg!
I would also add that in my own case, the potential upgrades to desktop innards over the last 2-3 years have not been sufficient to tempt be, except for a boot SSD. Most other evolutionary advances (CPUs, GPUs) have not been advanced enough to warrant the expense. (CPU changes usually resulting in new motherboard + CPU + RAM)
And don't forget the 5%+ pay rise they are guaranteed each year until 2015:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15149806
Protecting the jobs and pay for the workers is the primary concern for any union, but milk it too much (especially from public funds) and they'll go they same route as the dockers and miners.
"The bad news is robots can do your job now. The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians. The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots- and we do not anticipate any further good news."
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/demotivators/adaptationdemotivationalposter.jpg