Forget Credit Cards, Now Withdraw Cash With Iris Scan Technology

With the ever increasing threat of black hats, after ATMs, the credit cards are at the risk as well. We recently saw a security professor at University of California, Ross Anderson expose the ‘supposedly unhackable’ EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) credit card chip and PIN vulnerabilities.

Now curbing this menace and creating a fully secured plastic money system is nowhere near possible, so engineers are working at a better solution-iris scan biometric technology based ATM.  Resembling a Hollywood style super secure locker, the concept ATM is being developed by Diebold and tested by Citigroup in an effort to bring futuristic money withdrawal machines.

Irving is the screenless, self-service ATM concept which is set to simplify banking and requires your Iris scan and smartphone to dispense cash. The conventional ATM machine would be replaced by a sleek scanner and a mobile device detector. Once identified by Iris scan, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) would be connected via NFC secure wireless technology and the cash dispensed.

Diebold is providing a step towards smaller footprint and secure transaction, but they might have to deal with the apprehensions of the people to get their eyeballs scanned each time they need money.

Diebold has another project running called Janus, which is similar to Irving only dual sided, i.e. it can serve two consumers simultaneously.

Both these concept ATMs will mitigate the meticulous process of cash withdrawal while delivering the cash in just 10 seconds. Janus also features alarm boards, tabletop touch screen for ID scanning and signatures and a video conferencing option for the assistance.

Sounds amazing. The new concepts had debuted at Money 20/20 (Oct. 25-28), in Las Vegas.

Would you be comfortable to let Irving scan your eyeballs? Tell us in comments below.

30 Toughest Questions Asked In Apple Interviews

  If you walk inside an Apple office for an interview and you are asked some of the trickiest questions you’ve ever faced, don’t be surprised. Apple, as an exciting and challenging place to work, grills the job candidates in the best way possible.

Last day, i shared the 29 toughest questions asked in Facebook interviews. Along the similar lines, Apple asks technical questions as well as some brain-scratching puzzles.

We are sharing the 30 toughest Apple interview questions that have been collected from the recent posts on Glassdoor.

Take a look at them and share your views in the comments below:

Question #1

“If you have 2 eggs, and you want to figure out what’s the highest floor from which you can drop the egg without breaking it, how would you do it? What’s the optimal solution?”

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #2

“Explain to an 8-year-old what a modem/router is and its functions.” 

— At-Home Advisor candidate

Question #3

“Describe an interesting problem and how you solved it.”

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #4

“How would you break down the cost of this pen?”

— Global Supply Manager candidate

Question #5

“You have a 100 coins laying flat on a table, each with a head side and a tail side. 10 of them are heads up, 90 are tails up. You can’t feel, see or in any other way find out which side is up. Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile.” 

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #6

“Who is your best friend?” 

— Family Room Specialist candidate

Question #7

“How many children are born every day?” 

— Global Supply Manager candidate

Question #8

“Describe yourself, what excites you?”

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #9

“Scenario: You’re dealing with an angry customer who was waiting for help for the past 20 minutes and is causing a commotion. She claims that she’ll just walk over to Best Buy or the Microsoft Store to get the computer she wants. Resolve this issue.” 

— Specialist candidate

Question #10

“Are you smart?” 

— Build Engineer candidate

Question #11

“You seem pretty positive, what types of things bring you down?”

— Family Room Specialist candidate

Question #12

“There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?” 

— Software QA Engineer candidate

Question #13

“If we hired you, what do you want to work on?” 

— Senior Software Engineer candidate

Question #14

“A man calls in and has an older computer that is essentially a brick. What do you do?”

— Apple Care At-Home Consultant candidate

Question #15

“Tell me something that you have done in your life which you are particularly proud of.” 

— Software Engineering Manager candidate

Question #16

“Are you creative? What’s something creative that you can think of?” 

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #17

“What are your failures, and how have you learned from them?” 

— Software Manager candidate

Question #18

“Show me (role play) how you would show a customer you’re willing to help them by only using your voice.” 

— College At-Home Advisor candidate

Question #19

“How would you test your favorite app?” 

— Software QA Engineer candidate

Question #20

“You put a glass of water on a record turntable and begin slowly increasing the speed. What happens first — does the glass slide off, tip over, or does the water splash out?” 

— Mechanical Engineer candidate

Question #21

“Have you ever disagreed with a manager’s decision, and how did you approach the disagreement? Give a specific example and explain how you rectified this disagreement, what the final outcome was, and how that individual would describe you today.” 

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #22

“Describe a humbling experience.” 

— Apple Retail Specialist candidate

Question #23

“When you walk in the Apple Store as a customer, what do you notice about the store/how do you feel when you first walk in?” 

— Specialist candidate

Question #24

“Why did Apple change its name from Apple Computers Incorporated to Apple Inc.?”

Question #25

“What’s more important, fixing the customer’s problem or creating a good customer experience?”

— Apple At Home Advisor candidate

Question #26

“If you’re given a jar with a mix of fair and unfair coins, and you pull one out and flip it 3 times, and get the specific sequence heads heads tails, what are the chances that you pulled out a fair or an unfair coin?”

— Lead Analyst candidate

Question #27

“Given an iTunes type of app that pulls down lots of images that get stale over time, what strategy would you use to flush disused images over time?”

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #28

“What was your best day in the last 4 years? What was your worst?”

— Engineering Project Manager candidate

Question #29

“Why do you want to join Apple and what will you miss at your current work if Apple hired you?”

— Software Engineer candidate

Question #30

“How would you test a toaster?”

— Software QA Engineer candidate

29 Toughest Questions Asked in Facebook Job Interviews

Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook 11 years ago with an aim to connect the college students. Today, apart from connecting the college students and obviously many others, it’s one the favorite places to work at in the tech industry.

The interns working at Facebook make $25,000 more than the average US citizen. Also, the employees on Glassdoor voted Facebook as the #1 company to work for. But, getting a job there isn’t an easy job. To accomplish that, you’ll have to answer some tricky Facebook interview questions to prove your caliber.

Most of the questions are inclined towards the technical side. We have collected some of the toughest questions asked from Glassdoor and many of these are extra-challenging.

Let’s take a look at these Facebook interview question for different jobs:

Question #1

There is a building with 100 floors. You are given 2 identical eggs. How do you use 2 eggs to find the threshold floor, where the egg will definitely break from any floor above floor N, including floor N itself.

(Data Scientist candidate)

Question #2

If you were going to redesign an ATM machine, how would you do it? 

(Product Designer Candidate)

Question #3

How many birthday posts occur on Facebook on a given day?

(Data Scientist Candidate)

Question #4

Do you think that Facebook should be available to China?

(User Operations Analyst candidate)

Question #5

How much do you charge to wash every window in Seattle? 

(Online Sales Operations Candidate)

Question #6

Describe how the website works. (That’s the whole question, with no context.)

(Technical Project Manager Candidate)

Question #7

How much money is spent on the internet?

(Account Manager Candidate)

Question #8

How would you design a simpler TV remote control?

(Product Designer Candidate)

Question #9

How do you deal with communicating less than favorable information?

(Training Candidate)

Question #10

You’re at a casino with two dice, if you roll a 5 you win, and get paid $10. What is your expected payout? If you play until you win (however long that takes) then stop, what is your expected payout? 

(Data Scientist Candidate)

Question #11

You have two light bulbs and a 100-story building. You want to find the floor at which the bulbs will break when dropped. Find the floor using the least number of drops.

(Software Engineer Candidate)

Question #12

How would you set up an interview in this room? 

(Content Producer Candidate)

Question #13

How many vacuums are there in the USA?

(Risk Analyst Candidate)

Question #14

What options do you have, nefarious or otherwise, to stop people on a wireless network you are also on (but have no admin rights to) from hogging bandwidth by streaming videos? 

(Production Engineer Candidate)

Question #15

How many Big Macs does McDonald sell each year in the US?

(Data Scientist Candidate)

Question #16

How would you build Facebook for blind people?

(Product Manager Candidate)

Question #17

Tell me your plan of action if you saw that photo uploads suddenly dropped by 50%.

(Operations Associate User Intelligence Candidate)

Question #18

A Russian gangster kidnaps you. He puts two bullets in consecutive order in an empty six-round revolver, spins it, points it at your head and shoots. *click* You’re still alive. He then asks you, do you want me to spin it again and fire or pull the trigger again. For each option, what is the probability that you’ll be shot? 

(Internet Marketing Analyst Candidate)

Question #19

Should Facebook continue to add features or rely on 3rd party apps?

(Product Designer Candidate)

Question #20

If you were an animal what kind would you be and why?

(User Operations Analyst Candidate)

Question #21

What are you least proud of on your resume?

(Media Solutions Specialist Candidate)

Question #22

Given access to all the data Facebook collects, what would you do with it?

(Product Analytics Candidate)

Question #23

Pre-IPO, they asked me to write a paper on the valuation of Facebook. They also asked me what I thought the greatest technological advancement was in the past 20 years.

(Software Engineer Candidate)

Question #24

If you have 100 credit card numbers (and all info) how would you make as much $ possible in 24 hours using only online transactions? (Many follow-up questions of how to get around certain fraud deterrents.) 

(Ads Risk Associate Candidate)

Question #25

You are trying to rob houses on a street. Each house has some amount of cash. Your goal is to rob houses such that you maximize the total robbed amount. The constraint is once you rob a house you cannot rob a house adjacent to that house.

(Software Engineer Candidate)

Question #26

The most difficult question was the 8-hour test, which involved deriving a novel and fairly-involved algorithm, significant CSS/HTML/JS coding, and plenty of opportunities to get something subtly wrong.

(User Interface Engineer Candidate)

Question #27

25 racehorses, no stopwatch. 5 tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.

(Software Engineering Summer Intern Candidate)

Question #28

What is the process you would go about in spotting a fake profile?

(User Operations Analyst Candidate)

Question #29

You’re about to get on a plane to Seattle. You want to know if you should bring an umbrella. You call 3 random friends of yours who live there and ask each independently if it’s raining. Each of your friends has a 2/3 chance of telling you the truth and a 1/3 chance of messing with you by lying. All 3 friends tell you that ‘Yes’ it is raining. What is the probability that it’s actually raining in Seattle?

(Data Scientist Candidate)

Apple Now Has $200 Billion Cash, Thanks to iPhone sales and China

Apple recorded phenomenal growth in its profit by  38%, due to the extensive sales of iPhones in China. China has never been the biggest market for the US tech developers. Apple’s iPhones seem to be breaking the jinx. Amidst all the speculations about the growth in smartphone industries getting slowed down, Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook refuses to believe that Apple and its product sales have reached the ceiling.

Apple has managed to convince the users to switch from Android based smartphones to their iOS.  Apple has other products like Apple Watch and iPads that are doing good business too. Apple Watch was one of the most sought after accessory by the customers and the recent survey showed that 97% of Apple Watch users are more than satisfied.

The demand for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus doubled in China. The iPhone sales in greater China (includes China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) rose 87% as compared to a growth of 5% in the world market.

Apple has left its competitors like Microsoft and Google far behind in amassing the cash and reserves for the fiscal. As new brands surge into the smartphone market with target features as Turing’s cipher phone that claims to be unhackable and unbreakable or  Marshall’s Rockstar smartphone, Apple’s expanding iPhone sales are commendable.

Apple’s growth can be attributed to the fact that with every new product of their they bring new innovations and make their device classy. Also, the ease of flow of information between all the Apple devices ( Mac, iPhone, iPad) affects customers choice. The extended warranty, FaceTime and the fact that Apple products are more resistant to bugs and malware as compared to other devices play an important role in increasing the company’s iPhone sales.

In the sea of smartphones, you can also see the iPhones’ superiority as unlike other smartphones, iPhones get you better deals when you resell them.

2 Billion Lines Of Code For Google’s Internet Services And Its All In One Place

Google’s Internet Services Has 2 Billion Lines Of Code, Which Is 40 Times Size Of The The Windows

According to Google Engineering Manager, Rachel Potvin at an engineering conference in Silicon Valley on Monday estimated that the software required to run all of Google’s Internet services from Gmail to Google Search to Google Maps extends to about 2 billion lines of code, in comparison to Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which is likely around 50 million lines of code. This means that the size of the software required for the Google service is 40 times the size of the Windows.

These 2 billion lines of code that support Google services include running Google Search, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google+, Google Calendar, Gmail, YouTube, and any other Google Internet service, all sit in a singular formula repository accessible to all 25,000 Google engineers.

Google treats a formula like a very large handling system within the company. “Though we can’t infer it,” Potvin says, “I would theory this is a largest singular repository in use anywhere in a world.”

Only coders inside Google have access to its enormous repository. With the internet at large, in some way, it is similar to GitHub, the public open source repository where engineers can share enormous amounts of code.

“Having 25,000 developers, as Google does, means it’s sharing code with a diverse set of people with diverse set of skills,” says Sam Lambert, the director of systems at GitHub. “But, as a small company, you can get some of that same advantage using GitHub and open source. There’s that saying: ‘A rising tide raises all boats.’”

On the down side, it is no simple task to build and run a 2-billion-line monolith. “It must be a technical challenge—a huge feat,” Lambert says. “The numbers are absolutely staggering.”

The best thing about GitHub is that it lets coders to easily share and work jointly on code. While GitHub spans millions of projects without housing any software project, Google combines many projects into one. This might look a little foolish due to the difficultly of juggling that much code across that many engineers. However, it works, according to Potvin.

Listen to the Piper

To juggle all this code, Google has built its own “version control system” called Piper, which runs across the immense online infrastructure it has built to run all its online services. The system spans 10 different Google data centers, according to Potvin.

This system gives Google engineers a different freedom to use and combine code from across countless projects. Further, any single code change made by the engineers can be immediately deployed across all Google services. One update everything gets updated.

However, the flipside to it, as Potvin points out, is the highly sensitive code such as Google’s PageRank search algorithm that are present in separate repositories only available to specific employees. The code for Android and Chrome also gets stored in different separate version control systems. Google code for the most part is a monument that allows for the free flow of software building blocks, ideas, and solutions.

The Bot Factor

Building and running such a system needs not only know-how but very large amounts of computing power, points out Lambert. Piper spans about 85 terabytes of data (aka 85,000 gigabytes), and Google’s 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits (changes) to the repository each day. While Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week, the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files.

Simultaneously, Piper must work to get rid off most of the burden from human coders. It must make sure that humans can cover their heads around all that code without stepping on other’s toes with code changes and also remove unused code and bugs from the repository, making life easier for humans. By Google switching to Piper from its previous version control system—a tool called Perforce, it has started generating a lot of the data and configuration files required to run the company’s software.

Potvin explains that humans not only maintain the health of the code to ensure changes are made and bugs removed, but also bots.

Piper for Everyone

It seems that many of today’s high-tech internet companies run their business similarly. Facebook treats its main app as a single project, as it spans upwards of 20 million lines of code. The same is done by others on a smaller scale. But, dthe logistics can become a hindrance, when companies becomes as big as Google or a Facebook. However, Google and Facebook are searching for ways to change that for everyone.

Currently, they both are working on an open source version control system that can be used to juggle code on an exceptionally large scale by everyone. It’s based on an existing system called Mercurial. “We’re attempting to see if we can scale Mercurial to the size of the Google repository,” Potvin says, pointing out that Google is working in tandem with programming guru Bryan O’ Sullivan who assists in supervising coding work at Facebook.

Very few companies today juggle as much code as Google or Facebook do. However, they will in the near future.

How Microsoft’s Project X-Ray and HoloLens Converts Your Room Into a Game Stage

At its Windows 10 device launch event, Microsoft showed off its first-ever laptop called Surface Book. As expected, the company moved ahead on its virtual reality journey with HoloLens and a collective Windows 10 device experience.

HoloLens is my personal favorite Microsoft product to date. At today’s event, the company revealed a new mixed reality game called Project X-Ray for the HoloLens headset.

“Holograms behave just like real objects; they can interact with environments and with each other,” said the Microsoft representative on stage about Project X-Ray.

I was watching the event live and the HoloLens demo blew me away. It was all about the live games where you hold a stick in your hand and your HoloLens projects a gun around your head that fires at the robots and objects in the room. You can also project a shield around you to project you.

However, the headset is still isn’t available for the consumers. From today, for developers, the company has released the HoloLens development kits, that will be available from the first quarter of 2016. The kit will be costing $3,000.

In the past, the company has also teamed up with NASA and planned to send HoloLens to the space.

Microsoft is betting big on HoloLens and CEO Satya Nadella wants the device to be promoted as a business as well an entertainment device.