The first Outlast gained a quick reputation for terror when it arrived in 2014, and three years on Outlast 2 is here to mess us up even more.
Once again you take on the role of an investigative journalist caught up in some nasty stuff - this time a community of violent religious sorts deep in the American wilderness. You can run, you can hide, and you record what happens on your trusty night vision camera, but you can never fight back - meaning the terror never really lets up.
Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, we've got five copies of Outlast 2 on PC to give away, and you could get one absolutely free of charge by following the instructions below to enter our competition.
We're also giving away five copies of Little Nightmares, so make sure to enter that too, and if you're looking for more horror titles to round out your collection, check out GOG.com's Haunted Horrors sale this weekend, which has a huge selection of horror titles at up to 79 percent off.
To win, you'll need to use the giveaway form below. Simply log in to Gleam to use the entry options. You can choose to enter just once by picking one of the options after signing up below, or you can increase your chances of winning by choosing two or more options. If you already follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, that'll count too. Simply press the +1 button and follow the instructions provided.
Outlast 2 – PC Advisor
The competition will end at 11pm BST on Sunday 30 April. The winner is chosen completely at random by the Gleam widget.
You may know them for the lovable LittleBigPlanet series, but Swedish developer Tarsier Studios have darker things lurking in the back of their minds. They've now come out in the form of Little Nightmares, which pairs the cutesy aesthetic of LittleBigPlanet with a rather darker world of things that go bump in the night.
Echoing the likes of last year's Inside, Little Nightmares sees you control the helpless young girl Six in a side-on puzzle platformer as she tries to escape from a string of distorted monsters that look like they might have come from Jim Henson's Silent Hill. The game's only just come out, but we already reckon it might be one of the best horror games around.
Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, we've got five copies of Little Nightmares on PC to give away, and you could get one absolutely free of charge by following the instructions below to enter our competition.
We're also giving away five copies of Outlast 2, so make sure to enter that too, and if you're looking for more horror titles to round out your collection, check out GOG.com's Haunted Horrors sale this weekend, which has a huge selection of horror titles at up to 79 percent off.
To win, you'll need to use the giveaway form below. Simply log in to Gleam to use the entry options. You can choose to enter just once by picking one of the options after signing up below, or you can increase your chances of winning by choosing two or more options. If you already follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, that'll count too. Simply press the +1 button and follow the instructions provided.
Little Nightmares – PC Advisor
The competition will end at 11pm BST on Sunday 30 April. The winner is chosen completely at random by the Gleam widget.
Online grocery shopping is more popular than ever, with huge names like Amazon even getting in on the action. With so many options to choose from, we take a look at what's on offer and help you decide which service is best for you.
Which stores offer online grocery shopping?
There is quite a range of supermarkets and other retailers offering online groceries in the UK, as listed below.
Tesco
Asda
Sainsbury’s
Ocado
Waitrose
Morrisons
Iceland
Amazon Pantry
The big hitters all feature developed sites that are well laid out and offer comprehensive ranges of fresh food, drinks, and household goods. Most offer apps for iOS and Android, too.
Functionality is pretty much the same across the board, with all the sites proving easy to use, search and understand. You'll also find that you are able to save items and lists for future orders, which is a huge time saver.
Loyalty schemes are worth taking note of, as there are some good deals available to regular shoppers. Tesco’s Clubcard is a real jewel in the crown for the supermarket giant, as the points shoppers accrue for spending money online, physically in-store, or at Tesco petrol stations, all go towards rewards. These include restaurant vouchers that can be quadrupled in value - so a £5 Clubcard voucher transfers into £20 at Pizza Express.
Sainsbury’s offers Nectar points for its customers, and again this applies to online, in-store, or at the petrol pump.
Waitrose has a range of benefits that change on a regular basis, but an interesting one is that MyWaitrose card holders are entitled to a free cup of tea or coffee when they visit a store. Very civilised.
One of the newest and most interesting additions to the mix, though, is Amazon Pantry. This is exclusive to Amazon Prime members and has a unique approach to deliveries. Each order goes into a 20kg box, and when you add an item you’re told how much space it takes up.
The first box costs £2.99, and additional ones in an order go for £0.99. At the moment the food is restricted to tins and packets rather than fresh, but there is still a decent range on offer and if you want to stock up on cupboard essentials or pet food in bulk then it can work out surprisingly cheap.
There is a huge range of items available, from tins and cans to bottles and cleaning supplies. If you want to stock up on cupboard essentials or pet food in bulk then it can work out surprisingly cheap.
What are the advantages of online shopping?
If you enjoy slowly browsing the aisles of Waitrose looking for something to inspire your culinary imagination, then online grocery shopping might not be for you.
On the other hand, if the thought of marshalling a couple of toddlers past inconveniently placed confectionary shelves, all while trying to steer a determinedly wayward shopping trolley fills you with horror, well, online grocery shopping is probably going to be the best choice.
Most of the time, delivery will only be a few pounds, and when you consider how much time and stress that'll save you we think it's well worth it.
Having your shopping delivered to your door has a strong appeal for most people, especially when booked into specific slots which can be almost any time of day or evening.
Due to intense competition between supermarkets there are often deals to be had online.
Then there is the added benefit of being able to set up regular shopping lists, so you don’t have to start with a blank slate every time you begin your order. Plus you can do the big shop while sitting on the sofa binge-watching Netflix. The future is beautiful, and slightly unhealthy. Just remember to order some fruit.
How to use an online grocery shopping service
It will come as no great surprise that shopping for groceries online is little different to that of any other retail experience, with the exception that there will be more items in your basket at the end.
Once you’ve set up an account with an online supermarket the first thing you’ll need to do is book a delivery slot. This will usually be either one or two hours long, and will be priced differently according to demand so peak times (typically weekends) are more expensive. It’s a general rule that £6 is the most you’ll have to pay, with some slots costing as little as £1.
Most supermarkets now offer 'season pass' options for delivery, so you can pay a set amount for a period - say £35 for six months - then have as many deliveries as you want for no extra cost. There are some restrictions though, as all the major outlets require a minimum order amount before you can have an order delivered. These change over time, so be sure to check them out before you begin.
There are some restrictions though, as all the major outlets require a minimum order amount before you can have an order delivered. These change over time, so be sure to check them out before you begin.
Depending on the location you might find that a supermarket won’t actually deliver to your address. Thankfully this isn’t necessarily the end of your online adventures. If you’re happy to pick up your shopping from the store itself, then Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose offer a free Click and Collect service where you order online, pay for the items, then have them bagged up and ready to go when you reach the store. Not quite as convenient as a delivery, but at least you avoid the queues.
The online shopping process itself is simple, you just visit the various sections - fresh food, frozen food, drinks, snacks, etc. - and add items to your order. You’ll see suggestions for complementary products or current promotions, and there are often sections that include recipes for healthy living or seasonal meals. Once you’ve finished your order the site will save the items into a
Once you’ve finished your order the site will save the items into a favourites section so you can quickly access them next time.
Make sure you take advantage of incentives
The chances are you have probably already developed some kind of affiliation with a supermarket brand and shop regularly at one location. This could be due to the fact it’s nearby, offers good parking, has the foods you prefer, or you align yourself with its values.
Online portals are simply extensions of the physical shops, so if you shop at Waitrose because you perceive it to offer higher quality produce than its rivals, then all you are changing by going online is your delivery method. If this is the case then it’s probably sensible to continue your allegiance as you may well already be in some kind of loyalty scheme.
If you’re willing to break ranks though you could find it advantageous as there are some good incentives available to new customers of other outlets including big discounts and vouchers for first-time shoppers.
How to compare online grocery shopping prices
With many supermarkets offering very similar core products, it’s wise to use price as an indicator of which is best for you. MySupermarket is a price comparison site that allows you to see which outlet currently offers the best deals for your weekly shop and boasts that its users regularly save 30 percent off their bills.
The idea is that you create a free account then enter a shopping list from your preferred supermarket. The site then checks to see if other outlets offer better value, or suggest alternatives products that are on offer. If you’re willing to take a little time setting up the service and don’t mind switching allegiances often, then it could prove a very frugal choice.
Which store is right for you?
As you can see from the range available there isn’t really a definitive answer. All of the major supermarkets offer a huge range of produce which mirrors that of their physical stores. With a quarter of all grocery shopping in the UK now conducted online it’s obvious that the brands see how important this market has become, hence the excellent websites on show. So really the choice comes down to your personal preference.
That being said, we strongly suggest that you take advantage of the new customer deals offered by the sites. Not only will this save you money, but you’ll also be able to sample the various outlets and decide for yourself which one has the best balance of products, rewards, and service for your needs. Before you give your loyalty to one brand, you owe it to yourself to sample the wares on offer, and make a few savings along the way. As someone once said, every little helps.
WiGait uses wireless signals to continuously measure a person's walking speed, which may help predict cognitive and motor function decline, and even certain cardiac or pulmonary diseases.
Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
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Left to right: Zach Kabelac, MIT Wireless Center Director Dina Katabi, Chen-Yu Hsu, and Rumen Hristov led the development of WiGait.
Photo: Tom Buehler/CSAIL
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We’ve long known that blood pressure, breathing, body temperature and pulse provide an important window into the complexities of human health. But a growing body of research suggests that another vital sign – how fast you walk – could be a better predictor of health issues like cognitive decline, falls, and even certain cardiac or pulmonary diseases.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to accurately monitor walking speed in a way that’s both continuous and unobtrusive. Professor Dina Katabi’s group at MIT’s __computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has been working on the problem, and believes that the answer is to go wireless.
In a new paper, the team presents “WiGait,” a device that can measure the walking speed of multiple people with 95 to 99 percent accuracy using wireless signals.
The size of a small painting, the device can be placed on the wall of a person’s house and its signals emit roughly one-hundredth the amount of radiation of a standard cellphone. It builds on Katabi’s previous work on WiTrack, which analyzes wireless signals reflected off people’s bodies to measure a range of behaviors from breathing and falling to specific emotions.
“By using in-home sensors, we can see trends in how walking speed changes over longer periods of time,” says lead author and PhD student Chen-Yu Hsu. “This can provide insight into whether someone should adjust their health regimen, whether that’s doing physical therapy or altering their medications.”
WiGait is also 85 to 99 percent accurate at measuring a person’s stride length, which could allow researchers to better understand conditions like Parkinson’s disease that are characterized by reduced step size.
Hsu and Katabi developed WiGait with CSAIL PhD student Zachary Kabelac and master’s student Rumen Hristov, alongside undergraduate Yuchen Liu from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Assistant Professor Christine Liu from the Boston University School of Medicine. The team will present their paper in May at ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Colorado.
How it works
Today, walking speed is measured by physical therapists or clinicians using a stopwatch. Wearables like FitBit can only roughly estimate speed based on step count, and GPS-enabled smartphones are similarly inaccurate and can’t work indoors. Cameras are intrusive and can only monitor one room. VICON motion tracking is the only method that’s comparably accurate to WiGate, but it is not widely available enough to be practical for monitoring day-to-day health changes.
Meanwhile, WiGait measures walking speed with a high level of granularity, without requiring that the person wear or carry a sensor. It does so by analyzing the surrounding wireless signals and their reflections off a person’s body. The CSAIL team’s algorithms can also distinguish walking from other movements, such as cleaning the kitchen or brushing one's teeth.
Katabi says the device could help reveal a wealth of important health information, particularly for the elderly. A change in walking speed, for example, could mean that the person has suffered an injury or is at an increased risk of falling. The system's feedback could even help the person determine if they should move to a different environment such as an assisted-living home.
“Many avoidable hospitalizations are related to issues like falls, congestive heart disease, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which have all been shown to be correlated to gait speed,” Katabi says. “Reducing the number of hospitalizations, even by a small amount, could vastly improve health care costs.”
The team developed WiGait to be more privacy-minded than cameras, showing you as nothing more than a moving dot on a screen. In the future they hope to train it on people with walking impairments from Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis, to help physicians accurately track disease progression and adjust medications.
“The true novelty of this device is that it can map major metrics of health and behavior without any active engagement from the user, which is especially helpful for the cognitively impaired,” says Ipsit Vahia, a geriatric clinician at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “Gait speed is a proxy indicator of many clinically important conditions, and down the line this could extend to measuring sleep patterns, respiratory rates, and other vital human behaviors.”
Google caused a stir when it open sourced its TensorFlow software back in November 2015, and the technology is starting to make its way into the mainstream.
The machine learning software library is the next generation of DistBelief, which was internally developed by the Google Brain team at the search giant for a multitude of tasks such as image search and improving its speech recognition algorithms.
TensorFlow is a deep neural network, so it learns to perform a task through positive reinforcement and works through layers of data (nodes) to help it determine the correct outcome.
Read next: How Google plans to bring AI and machine learning to the enterprise
By open sourcing the TensorFlow library of machine learning code, Google is facilitating the simpler construction, training and deployment of complex deep neural nets. TensorFlow doesn't exactly give every developer the ability to harness machine learning but it does provide both a Python and C/C++ API to link into a developer’s program.
This sort of machine learning work used to be exclusively in the realm of research, but with the open sourcing of software like TensorFlow the enterprise is increasingly able to utilise its powerful capabilities on their own data, operating it on cheap cloud computing.
The TensorFlow libraries make it far easier to incorporate self-learning elements and AI features like speech recognition, __computer vision or natural language processing into applications.
Read next: Machine learning APIs and frameworks 2017: 14 machine learning tools for data scientists and developers
TensorFlow certainly isn't the only deep learning library out there, but just as there are other search engines besides Google, it is widely regarded as the best out there. As alternatives go there is Torch, built by Swiss researchers, and Caffe, which came out of The University of California Berkley and has been built on by Facebook for its recent release of Caffe2.
In terms of limitations Google still only allows TensorFlow to be deployed on a single machine, granted with multiple GPUs, which can limit the scale businesses can use the tool. There are naturally workarounds for this, but they require expertise, time and money.
TensorFlow case study: Ocado
According to the TensorFlow website some of the biggest companies in the world are using the software library, such as Airbnb, Airbus, Dropbox, Snapchat and Uber (although they might not be using it in the most appropriate way).
However, finding actual case studies can be an uphill battle. One company that isn't shy about its use of TensorFlow is UK online supermarket Ocado.
The data science team there is using the libraries for everything from routing algorithms for its robots to move around warehouses, to improving its existing features like demand forecasting, which is currently based on decade-old linear regression models, and predictively suggesting items to add to your basket depending on past shopping habits.
Ocado actually first used TensorFlow to manage the flow of emails coming into its contact centre. Before TensorFlow the contact centre was dealing with emails on a first-in basis, with no sense of prioritisation. This would become an issue if bad weather hit and the volume of emails went up by three to four times and where issues with delivery would be much more pressing than something like website issues.
Dan Nelson, head of data at Ocado Technology told Computerworld UK: "So the business wanted to solve how to get a better grasp of what emails to deal with first, and that presented itself as a natural language problem," Nelson said. "So we wanted to intercept email as it arrived, understand the sentiment of it and also what they were talking about."
He says that the problem was too bespoke for Google's off the shelf natural language processing offering, so they turned to the TensorFlow library to solve the issue.
Ocado is a Google shop anyway, using the search giant's Big Query in the Google Cloud for much of its query and storage needs. Nelson said that deploying TensorFlow with Google certainly makes things far easier. "If we didn't use any cloud provider you would have to provision some pretty serious hardware, but they will still execute there. You don't have to use Google, but the fact that Tensor came out of there certainly helps for that process," he said.
Read next: Ocado to replace barcode scanning with AI 'vision' to speed packing processes
Speaking about the tool more generally Nelson had a dose of realism to offer: "Essentially TensorFlow allows you to access through the libraries different learning models. You need to train and adapt them, but it accelerates your learning.
"TensorFlow doesn't solve the problem, but gives you the toolkit to abstract away from academics of a convolutional neural net and use one to solve your problem," he said.
After years of lagging behind other industries, cloud computing projects are now becoming commonplace in the finance sector. But while such initiatives have generally centred around non-critical systems such as email and customer relationship management (CRM), banks are set to start entrusting core systems to public cloud providers too.
According to John Schlesinger, chief architect at Temenos - which sells banking software to some of the world’s largest lenders - the majority of new core banking projects launched by the end of this decade will be in the cloud.
“We think that by 2020 most core banking initiatives will be in the cloud,” Schlesinger told Computerworld UK at the Temenos Community Forum in Lisbon this week. He claims it is a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ banks adopt the technology at the heart of their business. Temenos itself has already made headway with a small number of regulated and lightly-regulated micro-finance banks that are currently using its software as a service platform.
At this stage the number of banks running core banking in the cloud is small. But while adoption is currently low, it is an increase from just one percent the previous year, and Schlesinger expects that this will grow quickly.
“We believe that by 2020, which will be after PSD2 and after Instant SEPA, that the trickle will become a tsunami,” he said.
The first steps are already being made in the UK. Newly launched OakNorth was one to be the first UK bank to run its Mambu core banking systems in the cloud last year, migrating the platform to Amazon Web Services. Digital retail challenger bank Monzo, which built its core systems from the ground up using modern infrastructure software tools such as containers, also moved its core systems. Meanwhile, Metro Bank recently migrated its core infrastructure into a private cloud managed by Rackspace.
The approach makes sense for smaller challenger banks, lowering infrastructure costs and helping removing one of the barriers to entry in the market. “What cloud does is make everything cheaper. The on-premise story dramatically would lose out to the cloud story, given the economics of manufacturing of machines.”
“A new initiative today like Atom Bank or Starling Bank may not be in the cloud, but by 2020 it would be,” he added.
For the UK, regulation is no longer a barrier that prevents data from being held in the data centres of AWS, Azure and others, with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority publishing guidance for lenders last year. “We don't think in the UK there is a regulatory problem, the problem is we are a very consolidated banking market, and for a bank to be in the cloud it would have to be a new initiative.”
Big Four held back by legacy infrastructure
For the Big Four UK banks the situation is different. Should they wish to move core systems out of their data centre in future, the main barrier is their reliance on complex legacy infrastructure, built up over decades in many cases.
“The big banks have a huge problem because for them it is a huge project to move their core banking,” Schlesinger said. “I think the only way they can do it is a build and migrate strategy and what they build should be built on top of infrastructure as a service. So over a fifteen-year period migrating core banking into the cloud.
“They’ll start the process in a couple of years’ time and they won’t finish it for a decade. So the data centres will be there running the existing systems but on a legacy basis.”
Cloud flexibility
There are a number of potential benefits of moving core banking to the public cloud, alongside lower costs. The flexibility of cloud computing helps lenders move more quickly to compete with nimble finch competitors, rather than relying on legacy infrastructure. There are also benefits around security for many banks, with the hyper scale cloud providers able to employ huge teams of security specialists that dwarf the number available to all but the biggest financial firms in order to protect system.
There are also numerous options in terms of routes to the cloud - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and public, private, managed - and these will appeal to different banks depending on a range of factors, said Schelsinger. This includes the individual bank’s size and the geographies they operate in.
“I don’t think all the banks will do the same things,” said Schlesinger. “So for a tier one initiative, they will buy infrastructure and they will build platforms and software as service on it. That is the Tier 1 bank at home - so Chase in the US, or HSBC in the UK [for example]. But a Tier 1 bank out of geography looks more like a Tier 2 bank. I see Tier 2 banks renting platform as a service, and actually we are seeing that already in some of the RFPs we are getting.
"For all other banks, that's the Tier 3, 4 and 5, they will be buying software as a service, running very, very low entry costs."
In other news at the Temenos’ 18th annual European customer event, the Swiss vendor announced an update to its MarketPlace platform, launched last year to help connect bank and fintech firm services ahead of the PSD2 regulations.Temenos has added new functions to the MarketPlace such as a Sandbox platform as a service non-production environment to make it easier to test MarketPlace services.
