The burden should not be placed on the consumer to "solve" the problem.
Consumers are the best party to solve this problem - by not purchasing stuff they don't want.
Nope. It's been proven that the "vote with your wallet" world leaves you in a world where your money is no good, and or it gets astronomically unlikely to find a local store carrying a "classic" good like 4:3 screens, 3 inch smartphones (old people aren't social media junkies and even they got along just fine on even 1 and 2 inch displays) and non-smart TVs
You have 2 cases: 1) you buy the device. there is no warning because there are no labels or even online mentions of the cable it forces on you. You sigh and purchase a new power strip to place perpendicular to your existing one since the new fat plug doesn't fit in your 1-1-1 setup with 2 too-narrow empty plugs. 2) you rent the device. The cable box only comes with one type of cord. You cannot switch cords, boxes or cable companies. You sigh.
It would be nice if the cords were interchangeable a-la USB phones, but even those have a myriad nonstandard wallwarts delivering to the last-...mile^H^H^H inch near your wall;)
The problem here is that this watch is very close to useless without the middle man, as evidenced by its utter inability to tell time. The problem isn't the pairing, but the ill-intent behind the design causing the need for users to pair it: Why does the WATCH lack an actual internal clock battery so it won't just forget the time when the charge dies? Sometimes a smart watch is just a watch --why should the power to tell time be torn away from you and I with nary a watch-related failsafe?
What am I using the smartwatch without pairing it, AC? Nobody is complaining when others here admit to having a useless tablet bought with promises of yesteryear that was condemned to be repurposed to the living room or kitchen. Besides, pairing to the phone is cumbersome, requires an app that phones home on us and is the equivalent of those mandatory presence checks that required your CD game to take up the CD drive as proof of purchase before the game could be played.
I actually disable text and app notifications and eventually just keep the watch disconnected. Bluetooth actually chews thru the battery on both the watch and phone. I have 2 phones that know of the watch and it's a pain to have them fight for control of the watch. The company is turning off the servers and the forced registration / login and pairing process is now a pain, so I tend to disable the app and it's a bother to have to reenable it just to set the clock.
But going back to my reason and use cases... besides telling TIME, a watch has alarms we might employ as a wakeup call for our jobs. But most people don't have a watch these days. Smartphones aren't advised to be left laying near our heads under under the pillow overnight. So if choose to move the smartphone away from my head at night, I'll lose the utility of the vibration option. I'd need to wake up the rest of the bedroom with an audible alarm. Why must I do that, when the Pebble "smart" watch has this handy vibrating function and might be nice and useful as a cheap, non-smart timepiece?
Besides traveling a few years back in time to cancel my Pebble purchase, I have no other options with the watch other than making use of it. If someone is forced to settle for a smart TV due to lack of other options, there's nobody forcing him to make it "smart" and let it do unknown things on their network by acquiescing to reveal the home Wifi password
UX teams at Microsoft, Google and Apple started this downward trend. Junk slowly destroyed our multidimensional interactions by hiding options from our (or, should I say "their") property by removing a visual dimension at a time.
We're devolving from the already-poor web3.0 husks of Menus, Toolbars, and local help files so revered in the eighties and nineties to a place where none of them exist even when a screen is present (your phone is less and less likely to have physical buttons so when on fullscreen you end up pixel hunting, long-pressing the screen looking for hidden popup menus, and quitting a program because settings option only appears from certain hidden contexts... )
So now it's common for the only option to be a blank screen with an ill-placed hamburger menu and minimal output and they're killing even that.* We've fallen a long way down from the days when a rich menu had a Preferences entry that led to a dialog with a multiple rows of tabs.
The commercial world is basically hiding all help files, menus, toolbars and buttons behind a blackbox, offering screenless products that are forcing users to move their vocal cords to trigger little more functionality than a linear command-line. They're stepping back into the DOS days, except worse... those times used to gift us with keyboards and a screen, and obligatory user training on usage and error correction back then. You end up with situations like everyone slashdot who on this week's Google Home outage may have thought of visiting the store because the "Sorry, something went wrong" error for all commands and even involving local alarm clocks or casting. It's the ultimate blackbox-ification since the product is broken without the net (there was really no help or GUI indication of what to do, so it's not hard to empathize with the guy).
We now have the Pebble "smart" watch where the date/time menu makes it impossible to actually SET the date and time. When the device is discharged it resets to 12:00 of some obscure day. A watch with such a reasonable set of hardware buttons shouldn't have to be paired with an app on a phone just to tell it the time, man! Chromecasts and Fitbits are worse, with no screens. I see more "convenient" Wifi features from printers and recent dedicated cameras that want to roam free on our home networks (along with IoT garbage and Windows 10 and our Sony smart tvs ) and demand installation of an always-on app. There used to be a time when we do a one-time wired setup where a CD installer took care of everything, and then some http maintenance config option would remain for convenience without having the company spy on you.
We even have this little-used WPS button that could get adapted precisely to get past the issue of inputting a Wifi password on a screenless device. Heck, all bluetooth devices avoid the App trap by having a pairing button and a clear default pin... but no, people just want to plug something in, install an app that will snitch on them, and then be locked out of their verbal command line when the service hiccups.
* And like their Google map page does when you visit blocked scripts "When you have removed the javascript, what remains must be an empty page". Infuriating, considering 20 years ago the word ran maps oblivious to javascript settings, so this "must" is self-imposed, and with ill intentions knowning today's greed for analytics crimes.
Nope, they don't have mine because I'm not a consumer whore like y'all.
Must not live in the USA then. Look up Equifax's 2017 leak of 143+ million records on US dwellers if you need your memory refreshed about systematic collection that is dispassionate about YOU taking any consumer-ish steps. The big financial system is set up so they go straight to all your financial entities, which then happily leak YOUR data in the form of unhideable credit reports available to anyone with the right background. I believe this is supported by governmental edicts (think, public court records and not so public loan and default information) in exchange for who knows what.
When I saw the 340m number, I thought "wait, are they even in the US alone?" Lo and behold, as of tonight, http://worldpopulationreview.c... estimates 320 million US inhabitants. Either we have tons of foreigners inadvertently caught in the web (ouch, you poor Europeans in practice were too late with your GDPR) or the data is replete with dead weight (almost 10% being dead North Americans).
I posit there is a healthy mixture of both, with a sprinkle of fake and inaccurate data in there... Credit reports from a decade ago were full of discrepancies between the big 3 credit reporting agencies wrt the accounts they were tracking, plus inaccurate addresses / Dates of birth / mixed data that belonged to a relative. I saw this same trend with my name under Spokeo et al as recently as 3 years ago, so I won't hold my breath that a greedy firm with more records than feasible US householders will actually have accurate data.
Think "number padding". Just like Facebook's "1 billion active users!!!!!!111!!" claim fails to clarify what percentage was bots, fakes and well-meaning sockpuppet / alt accounts you guys all have for discreet stalking:)
This camera is already connected to a different account. Would you like to * Disconnect from all other accounts and connect it to this account * Leave the camera connected to other accounts and also to this account * Do not change this camera's connections
I've seen people get really nervous when the choice isn't "yes" and "no". Computer users and choice do not mix well, though I hate how UI design has taken this to extremes.
In my experience, giving people detailed explanations triggers the attention deficit disorder unless they're heavily familiar with the product and confident in light of freedom rather than hand-holdy.
Slashdot recently had a GUI discussion where we gleaned that legacy MacOS designs heavily leaned on action verbs like "Save" "Discard" "Cancel" or "Save" "Cancel". Writing this, I seem to recall an age around Windows 95 or so where 3-choice dialogs were common... nowadays it seems devs are lazy and just hook in the System API that automates all dialogs to OK/Cancel.
In decades past many a program written like this had the pleasant unintended consequences when an otherwise English-only prompt with a long english question shows buttons with appropriate language translations for those buttons.
Today's lazy dev mentality. Every fiscal quarter a certain dev or other will delegate a dangerous bug into the realm of "one-off". I am tired of this mentality of waving bug tracker reports away and closing them. We know they never get to the bug if it's delayed as a "corner case", improbable, right off the bat. They often close 'em when long enough has passed that we've stopped posting new leads, reports and requests for updates. Worse, many bug reports remain as "NEW" for years even after several different weeks of our trying to escalate them. It's intentional cruft.
Devs are saving face when they mess up. "One-off" is PR made to alude to some lottery-winning odds... a quantum soup with flukes so infinitely improbable that "NEVER GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN because the user will go away if we hide and we can pretend it never happened in the first place!" is the lie we're expected to live with and to spread to the users.
Helpdesk staff and programmers are supposed to follow logical thinking, fully aware that computers are powered by deterministic processes. A certain set of conditions will ALWAYS railroad an input from every single user who mounted the minecart right into a hard brick wall. It's just a matter of having the cart placed visibly enough for the conditions to be met over and over. Yet the people with the power to fix it deem the report as worthless due to negligence and shiny-chasing desires. The tech industry's drive is painfully shifting to a realm of stupid^W willfully hostile decisions the likes of Firefox, KDE4, Gnome3, Windows Metro and 10, SystemD proliferation and the Tracking + Analytics + Ad wars.
I've seen cases of severe bugs waved away by either hiding the feature that led to the bug or just giving an inaccurate warning that eventually comes back when some other related component is inadvertently not obfuscated with the same malice. Today's companies only "change" when something horribly high-profile happens and the reputation lands an egg on its face. The low-wage guys at the bottom were unable to change things when there was time and ample focus on the problem and reasons to fix it. Until tech makers --not tech *users* become the focus of today's court retribution worldwide (ie: being arrested for stupid stuff like breaking in when you're reporting an authentication / login breach as a user, but never seeing arrests of developers who create the breach to abuse the back door, let alone policy-makers... closed-door conspirators and knowing CEOs --think internet of things and remote power plant insecurity, while you're at it), things will continue this way.
I refuse to do any banking over the Internet. If I need to know a balance I go to an ATM or a real human teller. I get printed statements every month in the mail.
Anybody can refuse web banking. It's not difficult.
Not sure if you include "credit card payments" here but it's becoming impossible to use the internet without a credit card and an email address. Trusting trust --if you want to have some kind of paypal account then you need to provide a credit card (or a bank account IIRC --and there's no offline way of populating that, so you're effectively doing banking by proxy)
But I digress. The reason I replied was to remind you that no matter what you do, your information will be leaked --if it's not YOU, it will be one of the companies you choose to use... But it doesn't stop there --if you live in the US, a coinflip chance determines whether scammers already got your information last year. So in a crowded stadium, one in two is a considerable amount to leave to random chance... half of the people you see are statistically likely to be one of those 150 million people out of 300 million total population attacked by the Equifax hack. Even if you never walk thru their corporate headquarters doors --you have no choice. Funny, I put the wrong name in a websearch and saw news that Experian (the other non-optional credit union out of now 4 standard bodies) also got hacked, though that one went under my radar -- https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
That one was "only" 15 million marks. Sad to think that something that large is discounted to the point of never being mentioned during Equifax's raking over the coals last year, just because it reduces the stadium illustration from 50% to a 10% of those 50% odds, which is still a respectable 1 in 20 people in that stadium instead of 1 in 2.
We are in deep trouble. If someone got your social security number and you keep it for life with no exceptions, then it's game over --we just don't know when or how we're going to get the surprise once the credit union hackers start trickling the data to high-payers. Worse yet, even legit companies share our data with impudence. It's only a matter of time before "private" data from that breach ends up tainting muddy sources like those gossipy involuntary aggregation | blackmail sites of the likes of Spokeo Inc.
Thanks for your thread. One AC child post mentions the term "scambating" and my ddg searches were immediately useful. A result was titled "419 Eater - The largest scambaiting community on the planet!"
I've got mixed feelings about realizing there are online communities doing this! If only we did something more to educate instead of fighting what isn't our war...
Anyway, I would worry their potential for exposure to retaliation after each volunteer eventually starts appearing in logs repeatedly. I know nothing about Doxing or the volunteer scambaiters' armor / proxies. Maybe the IP addresses and telco details can give away the well-meaning folks to scammer-initiated swatting if the scammers pool a few of their own resources for black ops teams or something --it is more profitable for them to organize versus the anti-scam volunteers and the might even burn a little of their non-zero ill-earned profits to outsource their hero hunts...)
Another led to a subreddit with this couple-day old post https://www.reddit.com/r/scamb... it says there is preliminary (unofficial) signs that VMware can be detected and glitched, but I would take these anonymous reports with a grain of salt till I learn more. I've heard of host VM exploits but not of who might use them outside of a security research lab till now
At the end of the process [...] he attempted to delete My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and proceeded to swear at me for wasting his time.
It is disappointing and scary that scammers don't just hang up in the safety of their spoofed caller ID.
The potential harm is deleting hundreds or thousands of pictures or your college papers / thesis or taxes just because their only goals are defrauding your for $$$ or destroying years of your digital memories. That this seems widespread among the scammers is worrying, and you'd almost believe that scammer-college is teaching this same type of retaliation to all scammers:)
I've seen this kind of retaliation in a video where a techy guy on Youtube was documenting an attempt at scamming him.
It is easy to picture many a senior citizen somewhere getting a scam call to go sour. You can imagine a catalyst being unexpectedly running into a declined credit card transaction, as if the scammer felt he had a right to feel indignant for having had a waste-of-time for an evil deed he failed to complete.
The lack of automated local data redundancy thru file versioning on Windows is disturbing, especially given how popular ransomware is at achieving similar loss of both data and money.
"Absence of evidence is not proof of absence" Let's keep this paraphrase and this story close at hand when the apologists continue professing how Apple absolutely protects your privacy.
Apple is more guarded with privacy and has done some commendable things standing up for privacy, but if they are willing to extract "other people's" private data from Facebook without our consent... how difficult could it be for us to be one of *those* "other people"? how appealing could it be your user's own data to be closely guarded if you are the borrower/keeper of that data, like Facebook happened to be in this case?
No "mistakes" are made when these costly / profitable data-sharing alliances are forged, except for getting caught, that is:) It boils down to our picking the lesser of 2, 3, 4 evils, but every company ultimately ends up painting itself into a corner as the evidence slowly trickles in over the years.
we spent a long time trying to explain where the 'share screen' button is, and the person unable to find it, because we forgot he was not a presenter and so the UI elements are missing, not disabled with a tooltip explaining why it wasn't usable. Wouldn't want to clutter the guest UI with controls they can't use anyway, right?
I had an annoying surprise helping someone important but not very tech-savvy 3 days ago. A couple, actually, since I'm not normally helping remote users and knowledge of these gotchas is "tribal". After the call I confirmed the Mac version just does not allow a PC user to take control of the mouse and keyboard control. MS always silently ignores features in their ports to mac even when version numbers are the same --as true in the IE5 port of 20 years ago as in the latest Office 2016 port. I connected and the share button was present, but nothing advertised how he could yield control (or how we the technicians might "request" it, which Joinme makes a bit more obvious). This is a pain because of the travesty guess-heavy minimalistic design of the past decade. It prevents techs from saying "Click on X button, Y menu or Z dropdown". Many icons are hieroglyphs with no labels, and despite ample experience providing phone support in a more descriptive era of UI of the late nineties we end up wasting time describing these moon runes and how to click them even in cases where we're already seeing a read-only screen in someone else's control. The call was exploratory in nature rather than a "X is broken" call, and I would have had to poke around on webpages to trigger some dialogs as well as click a few programs --plus the person was not on Windows, which always adds a layer of mental conversions.
On the screen sharing glitches, have lost count of how many times someone has said "uhh, the screen is all black" to someone else who then would stop and restart sharing and it magically worked then.
We've had 2 mandatory all-hands screenshares over Skype for Business for HR-related stuff. I wasted most of the first one assisting one of our users who had a black screen. This involved troubleshooting, describing slides and sending screenshots until the person finally gave up. The other time, I was the one impacted (I can't recall if I was seeing all black or just having no sound).
Skype is not alone. Slack has group calls and 7 of us had a frequent meeting with same-room screenshares where each person had a different thing to demo informally... one to three people would randomly roll bad dice and be unable to join properly. Some shoulder-surfing was needed and if you were remoting in that day, you'd sometimes be impacted and miss that part of the meeting. I hate that Firefox dropped their v40-something project to support screensharing. At one point mac users at our sites were on a 5-year-old version of Lync (Skype for Business) and it was a pain figuring out their options for a quick share anyway (sometimes we had to instruct them to use the little-known Office365 web install portal and use a login they weren't aware existed to download Lync or the new version of Skype), but FF was always there. Shame that FF also never supported change of control or one-to-many shares.
In a way, this is analog to the saying that the best camera when the moment is fleeting isn't the expensive DSLR glass that you left stashed elsewhere, but the cheap pinhole one you already have in your pocket.
Not a theological scholar, but my understanding is that Allah is technically, the same God as the one found in the old Testament of the Jews and New Testament of the Christian faith. Ergo, he did condemn Allah.
Hi, there. I agree with the sentiment. Still, there are reasons the technical similarity is superficial. Apologies for the long post this late at night.
Both religions agree that there is a single god. However, at best, Allah and the religion around him represents a fork of the Abrahamic god. Saying both are the same is inaccurate similar to how certain words are hijacked beyond the original intent: "hacker" does not accurately reflect the context of "cracker". Not being a Muslim, finding this article for my reply was interesting: http://www.truthortradition.co.... One of the point is that Muslims do not believe in Jesus being the son of God. Some muslims present Jesus as just another prophet.
Considering bitrot, I'll paste some bullet points here though I do not agree with all the points:
God’s only begotten Son is Jesus. Allah has no begotten son.
God made salvation available by sacrificing His Son and promises salvation by grace to those who believe. Allah sacrificed nothing, and only saves if sufficient works are done.
God has a payment for sins—Jesus Christ. Allah has no payment for sins.
God’s Christ paid for the sins of mankind. Allah paid for nothing, and all men pay for their own sins.
God’s salvation is through Christ’s work. Allah’s salvation is through people’s works.
God’s saving work is, “Come to Christ.” The major part of Moslem salvation is to believe Mohammed was the sum and seal of the prophets.
God’s book is very different from Allah’s book. They contradict each other, so they cannot both be true. For example, the Bible says Christ was resurrected from the dead. The Moslems reject that as a lie.
God says his Son is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Allah says Christ is “only a messenger” (Chap. 5, “The Food” sect. 10, par. 75).
God treats men and women equally. Allah does not.
God says marriages today (Christian) are to be monogamous. Allah allows more than one wife.
There is no marriage in God’s Paradise. Faithful men get many virgins in Allah’s.
God says it is not necessary to have special days. Allah does: for example, Ramadan, the Moslem holy month during which Moslems fast during the day.
God does have a personal name mentioned thousands of times in the original manuscripts. The original Jewish Tetragrammaton spelling of God's name has been largely replaced by misinterpretation of a commandment to respect the name. You see titles like "Allah" ("The [true] god"), "Lord" or the Jewish "The name" shaping tradition in ways God would not approve, considering his very liberal use of "God" alongside the characters for his name. Considering that we do know the names for mythological gods like Zeus and Apophis, it is funny that a name so important would be so uncharacteristically buried by his enemies. In modern faiths, the original Jewish name still survives in a few bible translations. The King James bible includes one of them, where it's survived the replacement largely customary within that translation and the name appears as Jehovah:
And what the heck is up with that someone is sitting on you or holding you down as you transition from sleep to being awake.
You're not alone... The sleep paralysis wiki page caught my eye some time ago. The picture is very appropriate for the unusual sensation of an outside force, when the unexpected lapse exerting our "inside" force is more accurate.
I've heard the threshold of sleep can come with the experience of auditory and visual hallucinations as the brain is countering sensory deprivation.
Panic attacks can happen at night at the waning edge of sleep, and instances of all three (paralysis, hallucinations and panic attacks) are mentioned on this source https://www.livestrong.com/art...
The standard for HTML was developed as a way for scientists to communicate with each other, and against a background of Usenet norms which were hostile to advertising. I don't think it's really fair to blame Berners Lee for failing to foresee what the WWW would become.
Berners is not to blame --agreed! However, there is no real power to prevent the current WWW committees and browser implementors from doing stupid things (feels like the sinking ship that was the adoption of KDE 4.0, Gnome Shell, Windows 10). Power Users Who Care are facing a losing fight. Most can't just fork Firefox every time it drops a feature nor expect Palemoon and Waterfox to support it forever, or at all. At some point an annoying standard is introduced that will not be reflected by these forks I do follow, or the browser just makes one up despite the obvious ill-will.*
We the users should be making the W3C and browser implementors responsible for crap standards and policy decisions. "Just switch!" isn't working when the 4 major browsers are an illusion of choice. It's almost like 2-party political voting, or broadband's "vote-with your wallet", or using iOS to run Safari skins that are marketed as non-Safari browsers.
* W3C was OK with a standard "Battery Status API" that eventually got canned for allowing mobile device fingerprinting - https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com... There has been some stuff that seems to favor advertisers rather than regular folks (tracking beacons, localstorage tracking) are more often than not used by the enemy than corner cases of the likes of Flash games.
Most new phones out there where on 6 this past fall, despite the comfortable availability of 7, and fresh release of 8.
It takes 2 to 3 years for current versions of Android to reach the mainstream in a reasonable percentage. Till then, we're left with old devices that [sensible] people have little reason to shut off, barring physical breakage and battery degradation.
Degradation nicely segues into an interesting conversation on Hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318191) about what can be considered a reasonable slow support death for a long-lived device... the hardware looks new and hasn't failed, but the software from 5 years ago is no longer re-install-able in the event of a reset. There's a scary appy situation equivalent to link-rot that ultimately will get everyone off the old OS's... not going to be pretty
MP3 is MPEG-1, not MPEG-2. Known MP3 patents expired sometime last year (specific date appears to depend on who you ask).
Will this MP3 and MPEG-2 combo result in finally getting US distros like Red Hat derivatives to build in support without incantations for alternative repositories and Lame (ha) combinations of gstreamer names?
I miss the wild, valiant days of Mandrake 7, where apparently nobody cared for scary patent click-thru warnings yet.
I would hope it would be hard to make that argument. Who would be dumb enough to fall for it? Basically what you are saying is "bet your business on me, and once you pay me you are on your own".
"I'll document it and show you how to fix everything yourself" pretty much means "besides the documentation, I have no special knowledge or skills that could help you if/when something goes wrong, but trust me, this is the best thing ever". Do you really expect anyone to fall for that?
Sounds a lot like our expectations as consumers of cellphones. Modern software, even for the likes of free and open source (Firefox, Chromium, Android OSP) takes a particular cynical twist on that whole "if something goes wrong when we deprecate X for no good reason..."
With trillions of unpatched holes. Maybe one day they will invent Windows Update.
I bought a gift a year ago and it was even worse with tablets on physical stores or Amazon. The asymptotic Android 4.4 version apparently just dropped off the map, but it dragged results down for years. Most worrysome is that its old Dalvik runtime is dog slow at best, and infuriating under load. 5 makes things better, but I wouldn't bet on finding it for cheap.
A few hours ago tonight I coincidentally ran into https://www.cnet.com/topics/ta... where Samsung tablet's video says "best one it's ever made". It's a serious 500 bucks which I find offensive after having purchased other Samsungs for $200 before. That is the golden price point for Android in my eyes. Despite the 500 bucks, the OS is declared to be 7.
The Google tablet isn't reported with a specific version, so a search led to finding 6.0 and 7 https://arstechnica.com/gadget... (we can assume auto-updates given that Google's name is involved but it's almost like 8.0 wasn't even a dream in the reviewer's mind.) More likely the builds just don't exist yet.
The Huawei tablet is only on 6. These are reviews that will hang around for the whole year, so it is worrysome that they don't even mention 8.0 even though it's been available on Browserstack's test suite for several months.
It's odd that the cheap $125 Chinese smartphone I bought around September, despite its serious storage planned obsolescence, came with 7.1 when so much premium stuff out there was still on 6 (and serious offerings already had version 8). It's a pain just number-wise, and features even within the same Android build are shamefully inconsistent across manufacturers... this causes many people to go see things as "iPhone versus non-iPhone" if they are ever disappointed.
Plenty of people have similar complaints the newer SSDs and complaints about coil whine have existed for ages.
Yes! It's good seeing I'm not the only one. For other/.ers who think we're crazy, I think there are two things in play 0) Somewhat healthy hearing and not having reached the 40's.
1) SSD noise. Work refreshed the HDD laptop with an new SSD system from the same maker (Dell's Elitebook) around 18 months ago. I'm surprised I stopped noticing it a few months after resigning to my fate. It took me about 5 months of hearing the coil whine from up to 6 feet away whenever the drive is spinning up.
2) Scrolling whine. It sounds like a mix between white noise from radio stations and the SSD noises. It doesn't affect every brand of PC I've used, and it's only been present when using headphones as I scroll. I've experienced it on PCs as far back as a 386. Most recently on a Pentium 4, IIRC. It rarely comes out thru the speakers, if at all, so I'll second tepples in the issue being leaking from shoddy electronics.
Many connections are so fast now, there's no need to do MITM caching
Every time a fool advocates for changes for everyone because the internet appears to be fast enough at his personal ivory tower he must be reminded of what it looks like in the suburbs. And third world countries. And mobile browsers basically worldwide.
On mobile devices the effect is componded. Devices forever loading megs and megs of third party javascript tracking code, useless css and images in very improper amounts of ram (and how quickly the OS decides the page needs to be swapped out and fully reloaded from scratch yet again, for added pain) waste unknown man-hours because the web has been crippled as a tracking delivery platform rather than the humble beginnings as an information delivery one.
A page view with a dam providing the proper non-trivial adblock and hostfile fixes might load in a second, but it takes several times that much for everyone else even if much data is "cached" by your browser, router's DNS or ISP. A lot of code out there is made so it'll check for new content on every load (how else do you think they'd give us changing ads for every rotation, if not for dynamically reloading content we don't really need?)
On mobile, even HTML loaded from file:// still can take an unacceptable second or two loading *in AIRPLANE MODE*, because parsers are braindead. So, NO. If things on airplane mode are this bad for a non-trivial part of the modern world (almost 40% of traffic is smartphones, which is normally not going to be flying at the comfortable speeds you may see at home)
Your information is several years out of date. On "newer" versions of Android (basically any phone made in the past 3-4 years)
Let's correct a common misconception to help open a few eyes; there's a few grim reasons for the "out of date" statement... it's not that out of date. Here's the gist of what turned out to be a long post: "Android has had granular permissions for a while" only affects people on Android 6 (Nov 2015) and newer. It's just December 2017. Most people repeating the factoid also don't tend to consider that there's only a near-coinflip chance (46 versus 54 per hundred) that their Android-wielding listener lacks that assumed protection due to grim realities in Android version penetration issues.
I can't find numbers on whether Android phones for most non-tech folks are OEM-upgraded flagships phones. Apparently Apple and Samsung (and HTC) dominate the vast majority of phone purchases, so perhaps things aren't too bad given the first 2 are known for expensive flagships. Flagships are important because other phones in Android land usually get stuck with no updates, and even dare ship with the Android version from a year or two PRIOR to their release date.
I bought an LG G3 phone in May 2015, (it had been LG's newest flagship 12 months earlier and had already been phased out by the G4 when I bought it). It runs a version 4.4 build that I did not bother upgrading to v5. Apparently version 6 did get released over the air for my carrier, but today is first I've heard of it. That release was in May 2016. Marshmallow, Android version 6 came out in November 2015.
We're STILL in 2017. This permissions empowerment is slightly over 2 years "new", not 4. The number TWO is also associated with the years a US contract lasts out there*. There are probably a thousands of US consumers out there that are still tied to that contract with a phone built with the old all-or-nothing permissions model, or just got a new phone with that model, living under 2 years of app tyranny.
Versions 6 and 7 of Android have this model, but only make up 46 percent of Android phones as of September, but this leaves a whopping 54% of Android users in the all-or-nothing world. Here's a chart from Sept 2017
It feels good denying random crap to apps. Maps wants "Contacts" "Location" "Phone" and "Storage". It freezes when I deny it location access, but the funny thing is, it then lies about this: "This app won't work properly unless you allow Google play services' request to access" Calendar, Camera, Contacts, Microphone, Body Sensors, SMS, Storage. Notice that even with the new model, that shows a clear, dubious discrepancy be
The rest of us can simply disable "security.insecure_connection_icon.enabled" in about:config.
Oh? Just like Firefox's extensions fiasco where some similar about:hack "allowed" your unapproved extensions to continue running if it wasn't publicly vetted by the mozilla version of an app store? That respite, like many Firefox moves was killed on v48 a year ago and blew away a Firefox extension that was developed in-house and had no business being available to the world. And just a year earlier? the Chrome and Safari side grenade exploded with a different "security" feature that cost us man hours, training and bug stabilization time. Browserwise, there is nowhere safe of these whims.
When Mozilla is saying the http sites will work "for a while" for local printers / routers, they're taking the haughty tone appropriate for someone saying we'll be allowed to be beggars at their house until they tire of taking pity on us... as if browser makers were paying US for using THEIR products. One reason open source projects aren't taken seriously, mind you, is present in that vacuous statement: unlike closed source companies like MS and Oracle, the statement of EOL comes with no hard dates. That's a red flag right there, considering Firefox has more or less had "courage" in announcing pulling the plug on other features or forcing unwanted garbage as well.
I'm tired after seeing the bleakness of all the bug threads with complaints of business burdens produced by these changes that just keep falling on deaf ears: All browsers do this deprecation game on a whim without any standards emporium behind the stupidity (though sometimes the W3C is part of the problem.) The only winning move is NOT to upgrade, because freedoms imaginaryly lost n% of the time to some unseen enemy in a potential hack are less concrete than the freedom lost right now for 100% of the time in the form of loss of value and features.
I am glad to see comments about the Milky Way's beauty, which I only experienced once on an country road trip in college.
For slashdotters who haven't had the chance of running into it, here are a few minutes of timelapse clips of the Milky Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Astrophotography posts on reddit may have more info if you're curious about implementation, and in my limited knowledge you'd need good DSLR lenses, software post-processing and rotation mounts to follow stars and planets well enough, capturing several seconds per "frame."
Anyway, parts of the video prior to that 3 minute timestamp aren't immune from a bit of obvious light pollution. Even that kind of star visibility would be desirable and impossible anywhere I have lived.
My neighborhood is in a major city and seems better than most nearby ones. That still amounts to very bright *gray* night sky backgrounds that obscure almost all the stars. There's virtually no visibility except for some tree-dominated spots like the front of my own block, and sometimes I need to look out of my peripheral vision to see any stars. It's worse after snow accumulates and the bright gray sky becomes an odd shade of pink for some reason.
Living here for 10 years, I had noticed for the latter half that I can barely follow the stars that used to be somewhat more visible, like the constellation of Orion. Now in my mid-thirties I have wondered whether the problem is my night vision degrading "naturally" (as happens with hearing) or of the pollution problem was supposed to be noticeable over one's lifetime (2% a year doesn't seem to matter).
One of my dreams is being in an area that is dark enough to watch the Milky Way with friends again. I don't own a car nor have any business near towns 2 hours away that would offer that chance. Here is a dynamic light pollution map that I found with a quick search - https://www.lightpollutionmap....
I somewhat satiate the physical problems for filling that thirst for astro-philia by using software. Before I knew of open source, I started with a demo of Starry Night (just found the current pro version is $150).
Now I use free multi-OS options like Stellarium for Windows and Linux. It is a looking glass to the sky, sensitive to your local latitude where you can remove the atmosphere or accelerate time or zoom into stars and planets).
Celestia allows traveling in space and time with nice planet models of the solar system and beyond. It was handy for roughly tracking the eclipse "shadow" above North America in real time at work. It can also show let you track the ISS. I have a blast when fixing perspectives to watch Earth from the ISS (I recall an earlier version back when MIR had stopped floating around), or using it to better understand retrograde loops in planet motions (http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com)/movements.htm) and syncing up with the pole and letting earth spin a time lapse to watch the polar shadow to grok the seasons without thinking of flashlights shining on basketballs.
Would love to get a dialer option to reject the low-hanging fruit that is (xxx)yyy-nnnn with a single checkbox. Unfortunately phone companies make some cash on blocking features such as autoblock hidden numbers (aka private callers) and that's something I've only seen on landline providers anyway. My cell company used to have a web-customizable SMS spam blacklist but it mysteriously went away
Sucks that I also can't blacklist numbers until AFTER they've called... Regex functionality would be nice, and the best I can do is create a single contact to pile up unwanted numbers after the fact, then block the contact once. This fails on account of the (xxx)yyy-nnnn system because nnnn gives them almost 10000 random numbers that I can't be expected to manually block ahead of time
Slashdot Mirror
The burden should not be placed on the consumer to "solve" the problem.
Consumers are the best party to solve this problem - by not purchasing stuff they don't want.
Nope. It's been proven that the "vote with your wallet" world leaves you in a world where your money is no good, and or it gets astronomically unlikely to find a local store carrying a "classic" good like 4:3 screens, 3 inch smartphones (old people aren't social media junkies and even they got along just fine on even 1 and 2 inch displays) and non-smart TVs
You have 2 cases:
1) you buy the device. there is no warning because there are no labels or even online mentions of the cable it forces on you. You sigh and purchase a new power strip to place perpendicular to your existing one since the new fat plug doesn't fit in your 1-1-1 setup with 2 too-narrow empty plugs.
2) you rent the device. The cable box only comes with one type of cord. You cannot switch cords, boxes or cable companies. You sigh.
It would be nice if the cords were interchangeable a-la USB phones, but even those have a myriad nonstandard wallwarts delivering to the last-...mile^H^H^H inch near your wall ;)
The problem here is that this watch is very close to useless without the middle man, as evidenced by its utter inability to tell time.
The problem isn't the pairing, but the ill-intent behind the design causing the need for users to pair it: Why does the WATCH lack an actual internal clock battery so it won't just forget the time when the charge dies? Sometimes a smart watch is just a watch --why should the power to tell time be torn away from you and I with nary a watch-related failsafe?
What am I using the smartwatch without pairing it, AC? Nobody is complaining when others here admit to having a useless tablet bought with promises of yesteryear that was condemned to be repurposed to the living room or kitchen. Besides, pairing to the phone is cumbersome, requires an app that phones home on us and is the equivalent of those mandatory presence checks that required your CD game to take up the CD drive as proof of purchase before the game could be played.
I actually disable text and app notifications and eventually just keep the watch disconnected. Bluetooth actually chews thru the battery on both the watch and phone. I have 2 phones that know of the watch and it's a pain to have them fight for control of the watch. The company is turning off the servers and the forced registration / login and pairing process is now a pain, so I tend to disable the app and it's a bother to have to reenable it just to set the clock.
But going back to my reason and use cases... besides telling TIME, a watch has alarms we might employ as a wakeup call for our jobs. But most people don't have a watch these days. Smartphones aren't advised to be left laying near our heads under under the pillow overnight. So if choose to move the smartphone away from my head at night, I'll lose the utility of the vibration option. I'd need to wake up the rest of the bedroom with an audible alarm. Why must I do that, when the Pebble "smart" watch has this handy vibrating function and might be nice and useful as a cheap, non-smart timepiece?
Besides traveling a few years back in time to cancel my Pebble purchase, I have no other options with the watch other than making use of it. If someone is forced to settle for a smart TV due to lack of other options, there's nobody forcing him to make it "smart" and let it do unknown things on their network by acquiescing to reveal the home Wifi password
UX teams at Microsoft, Google and Apple started this downward trend. Junk slowly destroyed our multidimensional interactions by hiding options from our (or, should I say "their") property by removing a visual dimension at a time.
We're devolving from the already-poor web3.0 husks of Menus, Toolbars, and local help files so revered in the eighties and nineties to a place where none of them exist even when a screen is present (your phone is less and less likely to have physical buttons so when on fullscreen you end up pixel hunting, long-pressing the screen looking for hidden popup menus, and quitting a program because settings option only appears from certain hidden contexts... )
So now it's common for the only option to be a blank screen with an ill-placed hamburger menu and minimal output and they're killing even that.* We've fallen a long way down from the days when a rich menu had a Preferences entry that led to a dialog with a multiple rows of tabs.
The commercial world is basically hiding all help files, menus, toolbars and buttons behind a blackbox, offering screenless products that are forcing users to move their vocal cords to trigger little more functionality than a linear command-line. They're stepping back into the DOS days, except worse... those times used to gift us with keyboards and a screen, and obligatory user training on usage and error correction back then. You end up with situations like everyone slashdot who on this week's Google Home outage may have thought of visiting the store because the "Sorry, something went wrong" error for all commands and even involving local alarm clocks or casting. It's the ultimate blackbox-ification since the product is broken without the net (there was really no help or GUI indication of what to do, so it's not hard to empathize with the guy).
We now have the Pebble "smart" watch where the date/time menu makes it impossible to actually SET the date and time. When the device is discharged it resets to 12:00 of some obscure day. A watch with such a reasonable set of hardware buttons shouldn't have to be paired with an app on a phone just to tell it the time, man!
Chromecasts and Fitbits are worse, with no screens. I see more "convenient" Wifi features from printers and recent dedicated cameras that want to roam free on our home networks (along with IoT garbage and Windows 10 and our Sony smart tvs ) and demand installation of an always-on app. There used to be a time when we do a one-time wired setup where a CD installer took care of everything, and then some http maintenance config option would remain for convenience without having the company spy on you.
We even have this little-used WPS button that could get adapted precisely to get past the issue of inputting a Wifi password on a screenless device. Heck,
all bluetooth devices avoid the App trap by having a pairing button and a clear default pin... but no, people just want to plug something in, install an app that will snitch on them, and then be locked out of their verbal command line when the service hiccups.
* And like their Google map page does when you visit blocked scripts "When you have removed the javascript, what remains must be an empty page". Infuriating, considering 20 years ago the word ran maps oblivious to javascript settings, so this "must" is self-imposed, and with ill intentions knowning today's greed for analytics crimes.
Nope, they don't have mine because I'm not a consumer whore like y'all.
Must not live in the USA then. Look up Equifax's 2017 leak of 143+ million records on US dwellers if you need your memory refreshed about systematic collection that is dispassionate about YOU taking any consumer-ish steps. The big financial system is set up so they go straight to all your financial entities, which then happily leak YOUR data in the form of unhideable credit reports available to anyone with the right background. I believe this is supported by governmental edicts (think, public court records and not so public loan and default information) in exchange for who knows what.
When I saw the 340m number, I thought "wait, are they even in the US alone?" Lo and behold, as of tonight, http://worldpopulationreview.c... estimates 320 million US inhabitants. Either we have tons of foreigners inadvertently caught in the web (ouch, you poor Europeans in practice were too late with your GDPR) or the data is replete with dead weight (almost 10% being dead North Americans).
I posit there is a healthy mixture of both, with a sprinkle of fake and inaccurate data in there... Credit reports from a decade ago were full of discrepancies between the big 3 credit reporting agencies wrt the accounts they were tracking, plus inaccurate addresses / Dates of birth / mixed data that belonged to a relative. I saw this same trend with my name under Spokeo et al as recently as 3 years ago, so I won't hold my breath that a greedy firm with more records than feasible US householders will actually have accurate data.
Think "number padding". Just like Facebook's "1 billion active users!!!!!!111!!" claim fails to clarify what percentage was bots, fakes and well-meaning sockpuppet / alt accounts you guys all have for discreet stalking :)
Agreed, the correct behaviour should be:
This camera is already connected to a different account. Would you like to
* Disconnect from all other accounts and connect it to this account
* Leave the camera connected to other accounts and also to this account
* Do not change this camera's connections
I've seen people get really nervous when the choice isn't "yes" and "no".
Computer users and choice do not mix well, though I hate how UI design has taken this to extremes.
In my experience, giving people detailed explanations triggers the attention deficit disorder unless they're heavily familiar with the product and confident in light of freedom rather than hand-holdy.
Slashdot recently had a GUI discussion where we gleaned that legacy MacOS designs heavily leaned on action verbs like "Save" "Discard" "Cancel" or "Save" "Cancel". Writing this, I seem to recall an age around Windows 95 or so where 3-choice dialogs were common... nowadays it seems devs are lazy and just hook in the System API that automates all dialogs to OK/Cancel.
In decades past many a program written like this had the pleasant unintended consequences when an otherwise English-only prompt with a long english question shows buttons with appropriate language translations for those buttons.
Today's lazy dev mentality. Every fiscal quarter a certain dev or other will delegate a dangerous bug into the realm of "one-off". I am tired of this mentality of waving bug tracker reports away and closing them. We know they never get to the bug if it's delayed as a "corner case", improbable, right off the bat. They often close 'em when long enough has passed that we've stopped posting new leads, reports and requests for updates. Worse, many bug reports remain as "NEW" for years even after several different weeks of our trying to escalate them. It's intentional cruft.
Devs are saving face when they mess up. "One-off" is PR made to alude to some lottery-winning odds... a quantum soup with flukes so infinitely improbable that "NEVER GONNA HAPPEN AGAIN because the user will go away if we hide and we can pretend it never happened in the first place!" is the lie we're expected to live with and to spread to the users.
Helpdesk staff and programmers are supposed to follow logical thinking, fully aware that computers are powered by deterministic processes. A certain set of conditions will ALWAYS railroad an input from every single user who mounted the minecart right into a hard brick wall. It's just a matter of having the cart placed visibly enough for the conditions to be met over and over. Yet the people with the power to fix it deem the report as worthless due to negligence and shiny-chasing desires. The tech industry's drive is painfully shifting to a realm of stupid^W willfully hostile decisions the likes of Firefox, KDE4, Gnome3, Windows Metro and 10, SystemD proliferation and the Tracking + Analytics + Ad wars.
I've seen cases of severe bugs waved away by either hiding the feature that led to the bug or just giving an inaccurate warning that eventually comes back when some other related component is inadvertently not obfuscated with the same malice. Today's companies only "change" when something horribly high-profile happens and the reputation lands an egg on its face. The low-wage guys at the bottom were unable to change things when there was time and ample focus on the problem and reasons to fix it. Until tech makers --not tech *users* become the focus of today's court retribution worldwide (ie: being arrested for stupid stuff like breaking in when you're reporting an authentication / login breach as a user, but never seeing arrests of developers who create the breach to abuse the back door, let alone policy-makers... closed-door conspirators and knowing CEOs --think internet of things and remote power plant insecurity, while you're at it), things will continue this way.
I refuse to do any banking over the Internet. If I need to know a balance I go to an ATM or a real human teller. I get printed statements every month in the mail.
Anybody can refuse web banking. It's not difficult.
Not sure if you include "credit card payments" here but it's becoming impossible to use the internet without a credit card and an email address. Trusting trust --if you want to have some kind of paypal account then you need to provide a credit card (or a bank account IIRC --and there's no offline way of populating that, so you're effectively doing banking by proxy)
But I digress. The reason I replied was to remind you that no matter what you do, your information will be leaked --if it's not YOU, it will be one of the companies you choose to use... But it doesn't stop there --if you live in the US, a coinflip chance determines whether scammers already got your information last year. So in a crowded stadium, one in two is a considerable amount to leave to random chance... half of the people you see are statistically likely to be one of those 150 million people out of 300 million total population attacked by the Equifax hack. Even if you never walk thru their corporate headquarters doors --you have no choice. Funny, I put the wrong name in a websearch and saw news that Experian (the other non-optional credit union out of now 4 standard bodies) also got hacked, though that one went under my radar -- https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
That one was "only" 15 million marks. Sad to think that something that large is discounted to the point of never being mentioned during Equifax's raking over the coals last year, just because it reduces the stadium illustration from 50% to a 10% of those 50% odds, which is still a respectable 1 in 20 people in that stadium instead of 1 in 2.
We are in deep trouble. If someone got your social security number and you keep it for life with no exceptions, then it's game over --we just don't know when or how we're going to get the surprise once the credit union hackers start trickling the data to high-payers. Worse yet, even legit companies share our data with impudence. It's only a matter of time before "private" data from that breach ends up tainting muddy sources like those gossipy involuntary aggregation | blackmail sites of the likes of Spokeo Inc.
It's worth checking out the recycle bin
Thanks for your thread. One AC child post mentions the term "scambating" and my ddg searches were immediately useful. A result was titled "419 Eater - The largest scambaiting community on the planet!"
I've got mixed feelings about realizing there are online communities doing this! If only we did something more to educate instead of fighting what isn't our war...
Anyway, I would worry their potential for exposure to retaliation after each volunteer eventually starts appearing in logs repeatedly. I know nothing about Doxing or the volunteer scambaiters' armor / proxies. Maybe the IP addresses and telco details can give away the well-meaning folks to scammer-initiated swatting if the scammers pool a few of their own resources for black ops teams or something --it is more profitable for them to organize versus the anti-scam volunteers and the might even burn a little of their non-zero ill-earned profits to outsource their hero hunts...)
Another led to a subreddit with this couple-day old post
https://www.reddit.com/r/scamb...
it says there is preliminary (unofficial) signs that VMware can be detected and glitched, but I would take these anonymous reports with a grain of salt till I learn more. I've heard of host VM exploits but not of who might use them outside of a security research lab till now
At the end of the process [...] he attempted to delete My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and proceeded to swear at me for wasting his time.
It is disappointing and scary that scammers don't just hang up in the safety of their spoofed caller ID.
The potential harm is deleting hundreds or thousands of pictures or your college papers / thesis or taxes just because their only goals are defrauding your for $$$ or destroying years of your digital memories. :)
That this seems widespread among the scammers is worrying, and you'd almost believe that scammer-college is teaching this same type of retaliation to all scammers
I've seen this kind of retaliation in a video where a techy guy on Youtube was documenting an attempt at scamming him.
It is easy to picture many a senior citizen somewhere getting a scam call to go sour. You can imagine a catalyst being unexpectedly running into a declined credit card transaction, as if the scammer felt he had a right to feel indignant for having had a waste-of-time for an evil deed he failed to complete.
The lack of automated local data redundancy thru file versioning on Windows is disturbing, especially given how popular ransomware is at achieving similar loss of both data and money.
"Absence of evidence is not proof of absence"
Let's keep this paraphrase and this story close at hand when the apologists continue professing how Apple absolutely protects your privacy.
Apple is more guarded with privacy and has done some commendable things standing up for privacy, but if they are willing to extract "other people's" private data from Facebook without our consent... how difficult could it be for us to be one of *those* "other people"? how appealing could it be your user's own data to be closely guarded if you are the borrower/keeper of that data, like Facebook happened to be in this case?
No "mistakes" are made when these costly / profitable data-sharing alliances are forged, except for getting caught, that is :)
It boils down to our picking the lesser of 2, 3, 4 evils, but every company ultimately ends up painting itself into a corner as the evidence slowly trickles in over the years.
Good points!
we spent a long time trying to explain where the 'share screen' button is, and the person unable to find it, because we forgot he was not a presenter and so the UI elements are missing, not disabled with a tooltip explaining why it wasn't usable. Wouldn't want to clutter the guest UI with controls they can't use anyway, right?
I had an annoying surprise helping someone important but not very tech-savvy 3 days ago. A couple, actually, since I'm not normally helping remote users and knowledge of these gotchas is "tribal". After the call I confirmed the Mac version just does not allow a PC user to take control of the mouse and keyboard control. MS always silently ignores features in their ports to mac even when version numbers are the same --as true in the IE5 port of 20 years ago as in the latest Office 2016 port.
I connected and the share button was present, but nothing advertised how he could yield control (or how we the technicians might "request" it, which Joinme makes a bit more obvious). This is a pain because of the travesty guess-heavy minimalistic design of the past decade. It prevents techs from saying "Click on X button, Y menu or Z dropdown". Many icons are hieroglyphs with no labels, and despite ample experience providing phone support in a more descriptive era of UI of the late nineties we end up wasting time describing these moon runes and how to click them even in cases where we're already seeing a read-only screen in someone else's control. The call was exploratory in nature rather than a "X is broken" call, and I would have had to poke around on webpages to trigger some dialogs as well as click a few programs --plus the person was not on Windows, which always adds a layer of mental conversions.
On the screen sharing glitches, have lost count of how many times someone has said "uhh, the screen is all black" to someone else who then would stop and restart sharing and it magically worked then.
We've had 2 mandatory all-hands screenshares over Skype for Business for HR-related stuff. I wasted most of the first one assisting one of our users who had a black screen. This involved troubleshooting, describing slides and sending screenshots until the person finally gave up. The other time, I was the one impacted (I can't recall if I was seeing all black or just having no sound).
Skype is not alone. Slack has group calls and 7 of us had a frequent meeting with same-room screenshares where each person had a different thing to demo informally... one to three people would randomly roll bad dice and be unable to join properly. Some shoulder-surfing was needed and if you were remoting in that day, you'd sometimes be impacted and miss that part of the meeting. I hate that Firefox dropped their v40-something project to support screensharing. At one point mac users at our sites were on a 5-year-old version of Lync (Skype for Business) and it was a pain figuring out their options for a quick share anyway (sometimes we had to instruct them to use the little-known Office365 web install portal and use a login they weren't aware existed to download Lync or the new version of Skype), but FF was always there. Shame that FF also never supported change of control or one-to-many shares.
In a way, this is analog to the saying that the best camera when the moment is fleeting isn't the expensive DSLR glass that you left stashed elsewhere, but the cheap pinhole one you already have in your pocket.
Not a theological scholar, but my understanding is that Allah is technically, the same God as the one found in the old Testament of the Jews and New Testament of the Christian faith. Ergo, he did condemn Allah.
Hi, there. I agree with the sentiment. Still, there are reasons the technical similarity is superficial. Apologies for the long post this late at night.
Both religions agree that there is a single god. However, at best, Allah and the religion around him represents a fork of the Abrahamic god. Saying both are the same is inaccurate similar to how certain words are hijacked beyond the original intent: "hacker" does not accurately reflect the context of "cracker".
Not being a Muslim, finding this article for my reply was interesting:
http://www.truthortradition.co.... One of the point is that Muslims do not believe in Jesus being the son of God. Some muslims present Jesus as just another prophet.
Considering bitrot, I'll paste some bullet points here though I do not agree with all the points:
God does have a personal name mentioned thousands of times in the original manuscripts. The original Jewish Tetragrammaton spelling of God's name has been largely replaced by misinterpretation of a commandment to respect the name. You see titles like "Allah" ("The [true] god"), "Lord" or the Jewish "The name" shaping tradition in ways God would not approve, considering his very liberal use of "God" alongside the characters for his name. Considering that we do know the names for mythological gods like Zeus and Apophis, it is funny that a name so important would be so uncharacteristically buried by his enemies. In modern faiths, the original Jewish name still survives in a few bible translations. The King James bible includes one of them, where it's survived the replacement largely customary within that translation and the name appears as Jehovah:
And what the heck is up with that someone is sitting on you or holding you down as you transition from sleep to being awake.
You're not alone... The sleep paralysis wiki page caught my eye some time ago. The picture is very appropriate for the unusual sensation of an outside force, when the unexpected lapse exerting our "inside" force is more accurate.
I've heard the threshold of sleep can come with the experience of auditory and visual hallucinations as the brain is countering sensory deprivation.
Panic attacks can happen at night at the waning edge of sleep, and instances of all three (paralysis, hallucinations and panic attacks) are mentioned on this source https://www.livestrong.com/art...
The standard for HTML was developed as a way for scientists to communicate with each other, and against a background of Usenet norms which were hostile to advertising. I don't think it's really fair to blame Berners Lee for failing to foresee what the WWW would become.
Berners is not to blame --agreed! However, there is no real power to prevent the current WWW committees and browser implementors from doing stupid things (feels like the sinking ship that was the adoption of KDE 4.0, Gnome Shell, Windows 10). Power Users Who Care are facing a losing fight. Most can't just fork Firefox every time it drops a feature nor expect Palemoon and Waterfox to support it forever, or at all. At some point an annoying standard is introduced that will not be reflected by these forks I do follow, or the browser just makes one up despite the obvious ill-will.*
We the users should be making the W3C and browser implementors responsible for crap standards and policy decisions. "Just switch!" isn't working when the 4 major browsers are an illusion of choice. It's almost like 2-party political voting, or broadband's "vote-with your wallet", or using iOS to run Safari skins that are marketed as non-Safari browsers.
* W3C was OK with a standard "Battery Status API" that eventually got canned for allowing mobile device fingerprinting - https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com...
There has been some stuff that seems to favor advertisers rather than regular folks (tracking beacons, localstorage tracking) are more often than not used by the enemy than corner cases of the likes of Flash games.
Most new phones out there where on 6 this past fall, despite the comfortable availability of 7, and fresh release of 8.
It takes 2 to 3 years for current versions of Android to reach the mainstream in a reasonable percentage. Till then, we're left with old devices that [sensible] people have little reason to shut off, barring physical breakage and battery degradation.
Degradation nicely segues into an interesting conversation on Hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16318191) about what can be considered a reasonable slow support death for a long-lived device... the hardware looks new and hasn't failed, but the software from 5 years ago is no longer re-install-able in the event of a reset. There's a scary appy situation equivalent to link-rot that ultimately will get everyone off the old OS's... not going to be pretty
MP3 is MPEG-1, not MPEG-2. Known MP3 patents expired sometime last year (specific date appears to depend on who you ask).
Will this MP3 and MPEG-2 combo result in finally getting US distros like Red Hat derivatives to build in support without incantations for alternative repositories and Lame (ha) combinations of gstreamer names?
I miss the wild, valiant days of Mandrake 7, where apparently nobody cared for scary patent click-thru warnings yet.
I would hope it would be hard to make that argument. Who would be dumb enough to fall for it? Basically what you are saying is "bet your business on me, and once you pay me you are on your own".
"I'll document it and show you how to fix everything yourself" pretty much means "besides the documentation, I have no special knowledge or skills that could help you if/when something goes wrong, but trust me, this is the best thing ever". Do you really expect anyone to fall for that?
Sounds a lot like our expectations as consumers of cellphones. Modern software, even for the likes of free and open source (Firefox, Chromium, Android OSP) takes a particular cynical twist on that whole "if something goes wrong when we deprecate X for no good reason..."
With trillions of unpatched holes. Maybe one day they will invent Windows Update.
I bought a gift a year ago and it was even worse with tablets on physical stores or Amazon. The asymptotic Android 4.4 version apparently just dropped off the map, but it dragged results down for years. Most worrysome is that its old Dalvik runtime is dog slow at best, and infuriating under load. 5 makes things better, but I wouldn't bet on finding it for cheap.
A few hours ago tonight I coincidentally ran into https://www.cnet.com/topics/ta...
where Samsung tablet's video says "best one it's ever made". It's a serious 500 bucks which I find offensive after having purchased other Samsungs for $200 before. That is the golden price point for Android in my eyes. Despite the 500 bucks, the OS is declared to be 7.
The Google tablet isn't reported with a specific version, so a search led to finding 6.0 and 7 https://arstechnica.com/gadget... (we can assume auto-updates given that Google's name is involved but it's almost like 8.0 wasn't even a dream in the reviewer's mind.) More likely the builds just don't exist yet.
The Huawei tablet is only on 6. These are reviews that will hang around for the whole year, so it is worrysome that they don't even mention 8.0 even though it's been available on Browserstack's test suite for several months.
It's odd that the cheap $125 Chinese smartphone I bought around September, despite its serious storage planned obsolescence, came with 7.1 when so much premium stuff out there was still on 6 (and serious offerings already had version 8). It's a pain just number-wise, and features even within the same Android build are shamefully inconsistent across manufacturers... this causes many people to go see things as "iPhone versus non-iPhone" if they are ever disappointed.
Plenty of people have similar complaints the newer SSDs and complaints about coil whine have existed for ages.
Yes! It's good seeing I'm not the only one. For other /.ers who think we're crazy, I think there are two things in play
0) Somewhat healthy hearing and not having reached the 40's.
1) SSD noise. Work refreshed the HDD laptop with an new SSD system from the same maker (Dell's Elitebook) around 18 months ago. I'm surprised I stopped noticing it a few months after resigning to my fate. It took me about 5 months of hearing the coil whine from up to 6 feet away whenever the drive is spinning up.
2) Scrolling whine. It sounds like a mix between white noise from radio stations and the SSD noises. It doesn't affect every brand of PC I've used, and it's only been present when using headphones as I scroll. I've experienced it on PCs as far back as a 386. Most recently on a Pentium 4, IIRC. It rarely comes out thru the speakers, if at all, so I'll second tepples in the issue being leaking from shoddy electronics.
Many connections are so fast now, there's no need to do MITM caching
Every time a fool advocates for changes for everyone because the internet appears to be fast enough at his personal ivory tower he must be reminded of what it looks like in the suburbs. And third world countries. And mobile browsers basically worldwide.
On mobile devices the effect is componded. Devices forever loading megs and megs of third party javascript tracking code, useless css and images in very improper amounts of ram (and how quickly the OS decides the page needs to be swapped out and fully reloaded from scratch yet again, for added pain) waste unknown man-hours because the web has been crippled as a tracking delivery platform rather than the humble beginnings as an information delivery one.
A page view with a dam providing the proper non-trivial adblock and hostfile fixes might load in a second, but it takes several times that much for everyone else even if much data is "cached" by your browser, router's DNS or ISP. A lot of code out there is made so it'll check for new content on every load (how else do you think they'd give us changing ads for every rotation, if not for dynamically reloading content we don't really need?)
On mobile, even HTML loaded from file:// still can take an unacceptable second or two loading *in AIRPLANE MODE*, because parsers are braindead. So, NO. If things on airplane mode are this bad for a non-trivial part of the modern world (almost 40% of traffic is smartphones, which is normally not going to be flying at the comfortable speeds you may see at home)
Your information is several years out of date. On "newer" versions of Android (basically any phone made in the past 3-4 years)
Let's correct a common misconception to help open a few eyes; there's a few grim reasons for the "out of date" statement... it's not that out of date. Here's the gist of what turned out to be a long post:
"Android has had granular permissions for a while" only affects people on Android 6 (Nov 2015) and newer. It's just December 2017. Most people repeating the factoid also don't tend to consider that there's only a near-coinflip chance (46 versus 54 per hundred) that their Android-wielding listener lacks that assumed protection due to grim realities in Android version penetration issues.
To see why Android usage is an important part of smartphone versions, here are some numbers. Smartphones make up about 35+ % of site visits with some projections from 2016 estimating 2017 ownership at close to 5 billion around the globe. Though /.ers have known that Apple had a commendable granular permissions setup for a long while, about 85% of those worldwide smartphones are on Android.
I can't find numbers on whether Android phones for most non-tech folks are OEM-upgraded flagships phones. Apparently Apple and Samsung (and HTC) dominate the vast majority of phone purchases, so perhaps things aren't too bad given the first 2 are known for expensive flagships. Flagships are important because other phones in Android land usually get stuck with no updates, and even dare ship with the Android version from a year or two PRIOR to their release date.
Version SIX is where all the touted granular permissions came out for Android.. That it was a new feature back in 2015 is discussed on paragraph 3 of this read for a beta of what was released some months later in 2015. This other read is more useful but puts up an anti-popup warning)
I bought an LG G3 phone in May 2015, (it had been LG's newest flagship 12 months earlier and had already been phased out by the G4 when I bought it). It runs a version 4.4 build that I did not bother upgrading to v5. Apparently version 6 did get released over the air for my carrier, but today is first I've heard of it. That release was in May 2016. Marshmallow, Android version 6 came out in November 2015.
We're STILL in 2017. This permissions empowerment is slightly over 2 years "new", not 4. The number TWO is also associated with the years a US contract lasts out there*. There are probably a thousands of US consumers out there that are still tied to that contract with a phone built with the old all-or-nothing permissions model, or just got a new phone with that model, living under 2 years of app tyranny.
Versions 6 and 7 of Android have this model, but only make up 46 percent of Android phones as of September, but this leaves a whopping 54% of Android users in the all-or-nothing world. Here's a chart from Sept 2017
It feels good denying random crap to apps. Maps wants "Contacts" "Location" "Phone" and "Storage". It freezes when I deny it location access, but the funny thing is, it then lies about this:
"This app won't work properly unless you allow Google play services' request to access" Calendar, Camera, Contacts, Microphone, Body Sensors, SMS, Storage. Notice that even with the new model, that shows a clear, dubious discrepancy be
The rest of us can simply disable "security.insecure_connection_icon.enabled" in about:config.
Oh?
Just like Firefox's extensions fiasco where some similar about:hack "allowed" your unapproved extensions to continue running if it wasn't publicly vetted by the mozilla version of an app store? That respite, like many Firefox moves was killed on v48 a year ago and blew away a Firefox extension that was developed in-house and had no business being available to the world. And just a year earlier? the Chrome and Safari side grenade exploded with a different "security" feature that cost us man hours, training and bug stabilization time. Browserwise, there is nowhere safe of these whims.
When Mozilla is saying the http sites will work "for a while" for local printers / routers, they're taking the haughty tone appropriate for someone saying we'll be allowed to be beggars at their house until they tire of taking pity on us... as if browser makers were paying US for using THEIR products. One reason open source projects aren't taken seriously, mind you, is present in that vacuous statement: unlike closed source companies like MS and Oracle, the statement of EOL comes with no hard dates. That's a red flag right there, considering Firefox has more or less had "courage" in announcing pulling the plug on other features or forcing unwanted garbage as well.
I'm tired after seeing the bleakness of all the bug threads with complaints of business burdens produced by these changes that just keep falling on deaf ears: All browsers do this deprecation game on a whim without any standards emporium behind the stupidity (though sometimes the W3C is part of the problem.) The only winning move is NOT to upgrade, because freedoms imaginaryly lost n% of the time to some unseen enemy in a potential hack are less concrete than the freedom lost right now for 100% of the time in the form of loss of value and features.
I don't agree with stealing. This Slashdot coverage from the past decade may remind you think twice about it, anyway :D
* College Student Finds GPS On Car, FBI Retrieves It
* Student Sues FBI For Planting GPS Tracker
I am glad to see comments about the Milky Way's beauty, which I only experienced once on an country road trip in college.
For slashdotters who haven't had the chance of running into it, here are a few minutes of timelapse clips of the Milky Way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Astrophotography posts on reddit may have more info if you're curious about implementation, and in my limited knowledge you'd need good DSLR lenses, software post-processing and rotation mounts to follow stars and planets well enough, capturing several seconds per "frame."
Anyway, parts of the video prior to that 3 minute timestamp aren't immune from a bit of obvious light pollution. Even that kind of star visibility would be desirable and impossible anywhere I have lived.
My neighborhood is in a major city and seems better than most nearby ones. That still amounts to very bright *gray* night sky backgrounds that obscure almost all the stars. There's virtually no visibility except for some tree-dominated spots like the front of my own block, and sometimes I need to look out of my peripheral vision to see any stars. It's worse after snow accumulates and the bright gray sky becomes an odd shade of pink for some reason.
Living here for 10 years, I had noticed for the latter half that I can barely follow the stars that used to be somewhat more visible, like the constellation of Orion. Now in my mid-thirties I have wondered whether the problem is my night vision degrading "naturally" (as happens with hearing) or of the pollution problem was supposed to be noticeable over one's lifetime (2% a year doesn't seem to matter).
One of my dreams is being in an area that is dark enough to watch the Milky Way with friends again. I don't own a car nor have any business near towns 2 hours away that would offer that chance. Here is a dynamic light pollution map that I found with a quick search - https://www.lightpollutionmap....
I somewhat satiate the physical problems for filling that thirst for astro-philia by using software. Before I knew of open source, I started with a demo of Starry Night (just found the current pro version is $150).
Now I use free multi-OS options like Stellarium for Windows and Linux. It is a looking glass to the sky, sensitive to your local latitude where you can remove the atmosphere or accelerate time or zoom into stars and planets).
Celestia allows traveling in space and time with nice planet models of the solar system and beyond. It was handy for roughly tracking the eclipse "shadow" above North America in real time at work. It can also show let you track the ISS. I have a blast when fixing perspectives to watch Earth from the ISS (I recall an earlier version back when MIR had stopped floating around), or using it to better understand retrograde loops in planet motions (http://www.nakedeyeplanets.com)/movements.htm) and syncing up with the pole and letting earth spin a time lapse to watch the polar shadow to grok the seasons without thinking of flashlights shining on basketballs.
Have fun!
Would love to get a dialer option to reject the low-hanging fruit that is (xxx)yyy-nnnn with a single checkbox. Unfortunately phone companies make some cash on blocking features such as autoblock hidden numbers (aka private callers) and that's something I've only seen on landline providers anyway. My cell company used to have a web-customizable SMS spam blacklist but it mysteriously went away
Sucks that I also can't blacklist numbers until AFTER they've called... Regex functionality would be nice, and the best I can do is create a single contact to pile up unwanted numbers after the fact, then block the contact once. This fails on account of the (xxx)yyy-nnnn system because nnnn gives them almost 10000 random numbers that I can't be expected to manually block ahead of time