I can only imagine some scammer calling up Google and asking to transfer the service to their device. Techsup would treat them as if they were new internet users under the age of 13 or over the age of 50 with a nephew's celly on speed dial for all those pebkac level issues.
While I'm all for a system that rewards excellence, I think that unless Google is totally transparent about their methodology, this is going to be really easy for them to become further corrupted as a corporation and uprank loyal advertisers and downrank apps from the unwashed masses.
I would hope they would publish their testing methods and benchmark constraints.
I get a call from family members like the people you're describing and I always have to come up with an excuse as to why I can't fix their computer. Usually I just try to help them but only if they answer some questions quickly.
I find that I can usually solve the problem by step 2, but I always send the questions to them via email so they can work it out.
I find this helps even noob computer users to learn to fish.
1. Can you summarize the problem in under ten words? 2. Call me back when you can summarize the problem in under ten words. 3. What did you do now? 4. Why did you do that? 5. What did you find when you googled the summarized ten word problem? 6. Google it, call me back if it is still a problem in 1hr.
Some internet users aggressively self-sabotage. You can't fix stupid, so you might as well be nice about it while you let them down gently.
Each WebAssembly module executes within a sandboxed environment separated from the host runtime using fault isolation techniques. This implies:
1. Applications execute independently, and canâ(TM)t escape the sandbox without going through appropriate APIs. 2. Applications generally execute deterministically with limited exceptions.
Aaaaaand:
The design of WebAssembly promotes safe programs by eliminating dangerous features from its execution semantics, while maintaining compatibility with programs written for C/C++.
Provided this is designed & implemented with an end-user-first mentality, sign me up! If it's designed with a Facebook-shareholders-first mentality, it will trigger another Noscript update to deny webassembly reqs from unknown hosts...etc.
tl;dr: just make the web work with the end users in mind not the greedy sods
Most of what we need the internet for is being replaced and overshadowed by graphic-heavy bells & whistles. We could use the internet safely if we applied a more minimalist approach to design and if we standardized video or dynamic UI for the internet better than we are now.
Ethics watchdogs need to step up and start really trying hard to break the current push for more javascript.
The web browser should display a page that can be interacted with effectively and efficiently, without all the added bells & whistles, because those bells & whistles are often introduced to create security vectors for black hatters.
Most people using the internet have limited safety understanding. Flash is one of those platforms that can seriously harm a computer if the Flash object is designed as malware. Couple this with the loose security in users still using IE that often utilizes ActiveX and the results are predictably negative.
MSFT can try as much as they want but I'll never trust them very much and everything they release has to be combed through by teams of 3rd party security experts in order to protect their clients.
Again, using Firefox & Noscript, coupled with a given user's paranoia, will prevent most malware type issues.
Sure let's hear what you have to say. What did you say? You don't want people to have access to your private personal information? Let's see here... okay so we'll go ahead and just release some of that publicly for you. Don't complain. We haven't released EVERYTHING on you, just yet...
Really interesting choice of words since Apple decided that they can 'make a word mean whatever will benefit them the most' when they changed 'app' from being an appearance in a sport to 'software interfacing with a hardware system.' In riling against the practice you subtly reinforce it. Bravo!
Slow down cowboy!
App is short for application. Apps is the plural. You got this wrong totally. If Apple uses the term APPS, they are merely using the general term with the happy coincidence that it includes the first three letters of their company name.
How many of you remember WAREZ APPS? Apple wasn't even a thing back then for most of us.:D
The trend to always include feminine gender whenever some story is happening speaks to a much larger global issue. Egalitarians prefer non-gender biased news. Feminists are egalitarians. If you think you're a feminist but you have many views that exclude egalitarianism, then you are NOT a feminist.
That said, Trump's weird foreign policy news is not really something Slashdot should be covering. It's sorta interesting because these are robotics people caught up in the torrent but them being girls has nothing to do with the story, really.
I get that you're joking but the erosion of our language to this pseudo-marketing language is devolving us completely as a species.
No corporation can deny the meaning of common words.
Skill is not the same as "number of apps interfacing with a hardware system," and this perversion of language continues to be tolerated.
Corporations want this because it means they can make a word mean whatever will benefit them the most, either to limit their own culpability or to trigger a buying response.
Amazon wants to take the word "skills" and apply it to "app-count" but if this was truly an amazing product, it would work on every app and not require special coding just to get it to work.
I'm unimpressed to be quite honest. If an app is any good, a user will use it until something better comes along. Google can't understand that and they force users into their versions of whatever popular app exists. Google+ was an example of this kind of shakedown. It's terrible. Facebook is no better but Google+ was simply awful.
If something is good people will use it. Youtube is good so people use it all the time... but Youtube administrative causes a lot of users big trouble. Look at people who lose their revenue because some professional squatting company comes along and files bogus DCMAs against legitimate Youtube users who were merely applying the fair-use rules appropriately in the first place.
Google doesn't really care about you. They don't care about your audience or your beliefs or values. They just want to force their own profit margins and grow their garden of trust until the next big harvest.
I find it utterly strange that the same profiles that a moderator would use in their official duties would be somehow linked to their own Facebook profile. That seems to me like a huge security oversight. Paid mods should ALWAYS have separate credentials from their own personal stuff. What happens when FB fires someone? They just change their FB acct to non-admin? Seems like a huge problem if there are any rollbacks.
No. You gotta keep shit separated. I get that most forums around typically associate user accts with privs... but that's bad policy if your system is going to be targeted. Better to have secret hidden mod accts that can be audited internally but do not show up externally... and can't be accessed remotely. Remote mod accts should have extra layers of auditing and security as well.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but FB never seemed like a very talented company, or at best their amoral practices will always be to their disadvantage, as we see here.
The answer to this puzzle is simply not to ever work for them. Surely then they will just go bankrupt and disappear, since the best people wouldn't dare join them in fear of similar activity if it doesn't go well.
Do you ever want to work somewhere you can't be fired from?
Now, they can shift the blame to people who don't patch.
Depends on why someone is running XP. If it's for business and software relies on that os for some reason, that's one major case. Another is the case of older folks who don't know much about computers so they are running the same thing they have ran since they bought the machine. Maybe they never ran an update?
True story. I got a call from my ex about her father's computer and I'm a nice person so I head over to his place because he "can't get the interenet". Show up and he has 1200+ unknown processes running and the mouse is lagging horribly due to the lack of RAM available.
I tried not to laugh but he had some malware and this malware was in a battle against some other malware. A malware battle royal was taking place on his system. Worms were strangling one another.
He was running Vista. I said plainly that the computer was salvageable but unless he had the original disks it would probably be more expensive to get a new OS installed than to buy a new computer at that point.
So I told him I had a couple hours to burn and would gladly help him buy a new one.
By the time I was done he was on a rocketship compared to that boat-anchor system. I patched his system, got him all the software and ran ccleaner for him plus installed malwarebytes. He was overjoyed.
A WEEK LATER, I get a call that he can't get on the internet. I show up and he had his old system connected to the router. I guess he thought it was needed to go in THAT port and not his new computer??? IDK but these older users always give me a good chuckle but I def try to help whenever possible.:)
I have no idea how adding any amount of tech will ever be able to beat a good coffee, coarse ground, in a stainless steel french press.
Hence the microfilter. I fine-grind my coffee using a Vitamix and store a week's worth of ground in a lock2lock tupperware container. I measure out 30g or slightly more in the french press. Once the water is boiled I let it sit a little then pour it into the french press. Ten minutes of steeping, then I press and pour into a pitcher. I dump the grounds and rinse out the french press completely empty. Then I pour the coffee into the microfilter and let it sift out the remaining sediment. Every so often I rinse out the microfilter to get rid of the extra sediment.
The result is a perfectly filtered coffee that keeps in a pump thermos for hours. This whole process takes 20min from start to finish but it's not 20min of concentrated time. Most of the time I'm just letting gravity do the work. I can do the rest of my morning routine while this coffee is getting brewed and filtered.
Would using a k-cup or tassimo be easier? Not overall. Overall once you consider the expense of paying something like 50x the cost of coffee beans for one-cup convenience and factor in the lower quality per cup flavor and all the time waiting around for one cup to brew at a time, my method is indeed superior for time savings and also for quality -- and it's cheaper!
The internet of things is a mess. I really dislike that catchphrase too. I believe the idea of a physical connection to the internet being unavoidable is very much a logical fallacy.
I prefer things that do not loop in because I can control them better. When I buy them I own those products and that means I get to decide how to use them.
The moment I realized I would have to install an app to make my coffee maker work, was the same moment I bought a stainless microfilter and a french press and took that thing back to the store.
Throw out anything that loops in -- you don't need it! The ONLY reason they want to do that is to get you hooked. Either so you don't use someone else's coffee or so you don't use refilled ink. Whatever. Just put your money on good quality gear that is more analog and you'll be MUCH happier.
And the last place one should look for any kind of scientific discovery is through non-scientific canvassing. The opinions of the unwashed masses are popular ones, but that does in no means make them correct.
All those terrifying nightmares that language gave me in university turned out to be some fond memories, in retrospect. COBOL's inflexibility taught me to become impeccable and also how Zen can help programmers to overcome any obstacle.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only imagine some scammer calling up Google and asking to transfer the service to their device. Techsup would treat them as if they were new internet users under the age of 13 or over the age of 50 with a nephew's celly on speed dial for all those pebkac level issues.
Hey Tesla! Great work on pushing the electric car mandate forward like you have. Please continue to do awesome stuff.
((Crosses fingers))
Nah they have important vacations and yachts to enjoy on the golden parachute for all their hard work. :S
While I'm all for a system that rewards excellence, I think that unless Google is totally transparent about their methodology, this is going to be really easy for them to become further corrupted as a corporation and uprank loyal advertisers and downrank apps from the unwashed masses.
I would hope they would publish their testing methods and benchmark constraints.
I get a call from family members like the people you're describing and I always have to come up with an excuse as to why I can't fix their computer. Usually I just try to help them but only if they answer some questions quickly.
I find that I can usually solve the problem by step 2, but I always send the questions to them via email so they can work it out.
I find this helps even noob computer users to learn to fish.
1. Can you summarize the problem in under ten words?
2. Call me back when you can summarize the problem in under ten words.
3. What did you do now?
4. Why did you do that?
5. What did you find when you googled the summarized ten word problem?
6. Google it, call me back if it is still a problem in 1hr.
Some internet users aggressively self-sabotage. You can't fix stupid, so you might as well be nice about it while you let them down gently.
This would appear to solve so much trouble caused by JS.
More info for those interested:
http://webassembly.org/docs/se...
Aaaaaand:
Provided this is designed & implemented with an end-user-first mentality, sign me up! If it's designed with a Facebook-shareholders-first mentality, it will trigger another Noscript update to deny webassembly reqs from unknown hosts...etc.
tl;dr: just make the web work with the end users in mind not the greedy sods
Most of what we need the internet for is being replaced and overshadowed by graphic-heavy bells & whistles. We could use the internet safely if we applied a more minimalist approach to design and if we standardized video or dynamic UI for the internet better than we are now.
Ethics watchdogs need to step up and start really trying hard to break the current push for more javascript.
The web browser should display a page that can be interacted with effectively and efficiently, without all the added bells & whistles, because those bells & whistles are often introduced to create security vectors for black hatters.
Most people using the internet have limited safety understanding. Flash is one of those platforms that can seriously harm a computer if the Flash object is designed as malware. Couple this with the loose security in users still using IE that often utilizes ActiveX and the results are predictably negative.
MSFT can try as much as they want but I'll never trust them very much and everything they release has to be combed through by teams of 3rd party security experts in order to protect their clients.
Again, using Firefox & Noscript, coupled with a given user's paranoia, will prevent most malware type issues.
Hey Dwight! Jim is planning to get you voted off the payroll again!!
Sure let's hear what you have to say. What did you say? You don't want people to have access to your private personal information? Let's see here... okay so we'll go ahead and just release some of that publicly for you. Don't complain. We haven't released EVERYTHING on you, just yet...
User was friended for this comment. :D
Slow down cowboy!
App is short for application. Apps is the plural. You got this wrong totally. If Apple uses the term APPS, they are merely using the general term with the happy coincidence that it includes the first three letters of their company name.
How many of you remember WAREZ APPS? Apple wasn't even a thing back then for most of us. :D
The trend to always include feminine gender whenever some story is happening speaks to a much larger global issue. Egalitarians prefer non-gender biased news. Feminists are egalitarians. If you think you're a feminist but you have many views that exclude egalitarianism, then you are NOT a feminist.
That said, Trump's weird foreign policy news is not really something Slashdot should be covering. It's sorta interesting because these are robotics people caught up in the torrent but them being girls has nothing to do with the story, really.
I get that you're joking but the erosion of our language to this pseudo-marketing language is devolving us completely as a species.
No corporation can deny the meaning of common words.
Skill is not the same as "number of apps interfacing with a hardware system," and this perversion of language continues to be tolerated.
Corporations want this because it means they can make a word mean whatever will benefit them the most, either to limit their own culpability or to trigger a buying response.
Amazon wants to take the word "skills" and apply it to "app-count" but if this was truly an amazing product, it would work on every app and not require special coding just to get it to work.
I'm unimpressed to be quite honest. If an app is any good, a user will use it until something better comes along. Google can't understand that and they force users into their versions of whatever popular app exists. Google+ was an example of this kind of shakedown. It's terrible. Facebook is no better but Google+ was simply awful.
If something is good people will use it. Youtube is good so people use it all the time... but Youtube administrative causes a lot of users big trouble. Look at people who lose their revenue because some professional squatting company comes along and files bogus DCMAs against legitimate Youtube users who were merely applying the fair-use rules appropriately in the first place.
Google doesn't really care about you. They don't care about your audience or your beliefs or values. They just want to force their own profit margins and grow their garden of trust until the next big harvest.
Once again, a company is managed by sales guys not tech guys. What could possibly go wrong?
IT Guy: "We need to upgrade our servers."
Business guy: "That costs too much. Don't bring suggestions like that to a meeting again!"
IT Guy: {{okay.png}}
Oh wait. Maybe it was an inside job?
The gnuplot thickens!
I bet ISIS refused to run the windows updates required to allow the cyberwarfare thingymagic! :)
I find it utterly strange that the same profiles that a moderator would use in their official duties would be somehow linked to their own Facebook profile. That seems to me like a huge security oversight. Paid mods should ALWAYS have separate credentials from their own personal stuff. What happens when FB fires someone? They just change their FB acct to non-admin? Seems like a huge problem if there are any rollbacks.
No. You gotta keep shit separated. I get that most forums around typically associate user accts with privs... but that's bad policy if your system is going to be targeted. Better to have secret hidden mod accts that can be audited internally but do not show up externally... and can't be accessed remotely. Remote mod accts should have extra layers of auditing and security as well.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but FB never seemed like a very talented company, or at best their amoral practices will always be to their disadvantage, as we see here.
We'll find a way.
Then the answer is simple. Don't work for big companies. Take your ideas and build your own team to execute them.
The answer to this puzzle is simply not to ever work for them. Surely then they will just go bankrupt and disappear, since the best people wouldn't dare join them in fear of similar activity if it doesn't go well.
Do you ever want to work somewhere you can't be fired from?
Depends on why someone is running XP. If it's for business and software relies on that os for some reason, that's one major case. Another is the case of older folks who don't know much about computers so they are running the same thing they have ran since they bought the machine. Maybe they never ran an update?
True story. I got a call from my ex about her father's computer and I'm a nice person so I head over to his place because he "can't get the interenet". Show up and he has 1200+ unknown processes running and the mouse is lagging horribly due to the lack of RAM available.
I tried not to laugh but he had some malware and this malware was in a battle against some other malware. A malware battle royal was taking place on his system. Worms were strangling one another.
He was running Vista. I said plainly that the computer was salvageable but unless he had the original disks it would probably be more expensive to get a new OS installed than to buy a new computer at that point.
So I told him I had a couple hours to burn and would gladly help him buy a new one.
By the time I was done he was on a rocketship compared to that boat-anchor system. I patched his system, got him all the software and ran ccleaner for him plus installed malwarebytes. He was overjoyed.
A WEEK LATER, I get a call that he can't get on the internet. I show up and he had his old system connected to the router. I guess he thought it was needed to go in THAT port and not his new computer??? IDK but these older users always give me a good chuckle but I def try to help whenever possible. :)
Hence the microfilter. I fine-grind my coffee using a Vitamix and store a week's worth of ground in a lock2lock tupperware container. I measure out 30g or slightly more in the french press. Once the water is boiled I let it sit a little then pour it into the french press. Ten minutes of steeping, then I press and pour into a pitcher. I dump the grounds and rinse out the french press completely empty. Then I pour the coffee into the microfilter and let it sift out the remaining sediment. Every so often I rinse out the microfilter to get rid of the extra sediment.
The result is a perfectly filtered coffee that keeps in a pump thermos for hours. This whole process takes 20min from start to finish but it's not 20min of concentrated time. Most of the time I'm just letting gravity do the work. I can do the rest of my morning routine while this coffee is getting brewed and filtered.
Would using a k-cup or tassimo be easier? Not overall. Overall once you consider the expense of paying something like 50x the cost of coffee beans for one-cup convenience and factor in the lower quality per cup flavor and all the time waiting around for one cup to brew at a time, my method is indeed superior for time savings and also for quality -- and it's cheaper!
The internet of things is a mess. I really dislike that catchphrase too. I believe the idea of a physical connection to the internet being unavoidable is very much a logical fallacy.
I prefer things that do not loop in because I can control them better. When I buy them I own those products and that means I get to decide how to use them.
The moment I realized I would have to install an app to make my coffee maker work, was the same moment I bought a stainless microfilter and a french press and took that thing back to the store.
Throw out anything that loops in -- you don't need it! The ONLY reason they want to do that is to get you hooked. Either so you don't use someone else's coffee or so you don't use refilled ink. Whatever. Just put your money on good quality gear that is more analog and you'll be MUCH happier.
And the last place one should look for any kind of scientific discovery is through non-scientific canvassing. The opinions of the unwashed masses are popular ones, but that does in no means make them correct.
Would you believe me if I said it was a typo? Because it was a typo... and I'm writing this on a COBOL laptop... so JCL dorped the s.
All those terrifying nightmares that language gave me in university turned out to be some fond memories, in retrospect. COBOL's inflexibility taught me to become impeccable and also how Zen can help programmers to overcome any obstacle.
It is a sad day, but he had a long life. RIP.