This is great news. I'd been concerned for some time that I want watching enough ads, and that those ads I did watch we're failing to translate into product purchases at a high enough rate.
I'm really glad that they're putting serious resources, effort and scientific brainpower into improving my ad consumption. To those dedicated scientists devoting their research to this matter - I salute you.
Like Linus, I also write the simpler form of this kind of code when writing in C/C++.
Unlike Linus, I feel bad about it! My colleagues point out places where arithmetic overflows might lead to crashes. Honestly I find it really difficult to think through the overflow issues for *every single* plus, minus and multiply operator in my code. I think it's like cryptography in that sense -- most regular programmers, including good programmers, don't look at arithmetic operators from the perspective of attackers.
In this case, does Linus' code have the exact same behavior on all possible inputs including overflow-causing inputs? If not, which of the two behaviors is the desired one?
Are there places (maybe including this one) where the kernel code doesn't guard properly against arithmetic overflow? Will the newfound attention bring hackers scrutinizing it for overflow flaws?
Why are you rebooting your machine so freqently that the time that systemd might save at boot time should even matter so much?
I'm writing a service that runs on a cloud service provider. When I come to sit down at my desk and deploy it for the first time, it spins up a VM. When I finish coding, I shut down the VM. So when I'm authoring this kind of program, I experience "VM boot-time" once or twice a day.
Does knowing how to code make it any better when Windows or Windows apps go toe up? Really? Are you going to debug Windows or Mathematica because you took a coding class?
No.
But what you're going to do is whip up the quotes you got from car dealership into a spreadsheet and write a little macro that empowers you better. Or you'll read a news story about something political, use a tool that scrapes the relevant websites, and do something with the data. Or you'll have written a LOGO program in class and it shaped your mind just a little bit to understand algorithms better, i.e. procedural instructions, so that the next piece of technology you see you have a grasp of what's going on rather than just throwing up their hands and calling it magic. Or you'll get fed up with doing something manually in Word all the time at your job so you'll put together a macro that saves then 20 minutes a day, or a bash script.
Not everyone will do this for sure. But I've seen a lot of people become more empowered in lots of little ways through code.
And that's why I'm launching an initiative to get more men into elementary education. While things are improving in fields like CS, the gender ratio of men in elementary education has remained stagnant at only 13% for decades.... And I'm absolutely sure that I can count on the support in this effort of all my liberal friends, who have lead the charge to improve the gender ration in CS and other fields. After all, as they've told me so many times, they're all about equality and fairness.
SO WHO'S WITH ME?
What's weird is that you thought you were making an ironic joke, and that liberals and "SJW"s wouldn't agree with you.
Kind of backfired when it turns out that everyone agrees with you that more men in elementary education would be great.
(myself? male, and I taught maths+coding to 9th-12th graders in India and then was special-needs assistant in a 4th grade classroom in the UK. I remember that all the teachers in that elementary school were eager to have more male teachers as well.)
While we're on the subject of unrealistic counterfactuals... If each American had to choose between keeping their cellphone or their gun, how many would choose which?
I'd love a smart kettle. Currently I walk into the kitchen, turn it on, and wait 5mins for it to boil. If I could click a button without interrupting my work, it'd save me 5mins a time, 30mins a day, 3 hours a week. That's a lot!
You find it bizarre that (1) people wish to live their lives as they choose, (2) they don't want to change their lives so as to prevent an all-knowing Big Brother government? That they'd rather government change than they change?
The law is like a massive code base. Like all such, it has bugs and loopholes. Sure we fix them as soon as we can (generally, more slowly in massive code bases). But at the same time when we find folks using exploits then we defend in every other way we can. That's what's happening here.
(plus: Each one of these outraged news stories is part of the PROCESS by which the bugs get fixed in a democratic society).
I've never had that work. Four times in a row I called to let them know I'd be travelling and they suspended the credit card a few days after my purchase.
This was First Tech Credit Union, by the way. I think they're just more provincial than a big bank... My Chase credit card has never been suspended abroad even without calling
I think you've misread the article you're linking to. All the article said is that it download ~5gb into a folder as part of the update. And leaves it there. Does nothing with it unless the user specifically chooses to click the "upgrade" button.
Your family aren't being guinea pigs. The worst they'll get is ~5gb less space on their hard disks. Heck, they've probably got more than that in their recycle bin and system restore points and so on. Totally not worth investing your time to prevent this.
Telemetry which isn't explicitly chosen by the user is completely indistinguishable from malware.
So back to my question: how do you think telemetry helps Microsoft other than by helping it help end-users better?
Maybe you didn't answer because, as per your quote above, you think it's irrelevant. Partly I agree with you, and I never like data taken without my explicit consent. On the other hand if you only get telemetry through opt-in then you're dooming yourself to unrepresentative data.
So much of their updates are sneaking in telemetry, user experience tracking, and other shit entirely designed to benefit Microsoft
I can imagine lots of ways that telemetry will help Microsoft -- by helping them understand their users better, and direct their efforts to better help users.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft. Not on Windows10 - instead I'm on the C#/VB language design team. I look at telemetry every day. We put in an easy-to-use "send-a-smile/frown" button in the menubar of Visual Studio so it's easier for people to send feedback. We put a lot of effort into making that send-a-frown feature able to diagnose hung processes or crash-dumps so it could give us more actionable bug reports with minimal end-user effort. I spend a lot of time working with end-users -- listening to them at conferences, in studies, in forums, in all kinds of ways, to get anecdotes. I collate those anecdotes with telemetry data to see whether they're representative, and to guide us on where to seek out additional anecdotes to flesh out intriguing telemetry data. We don't currently gather telemetry from developers on how they're using new experimental language features in C#/VB, but I've often wanted that so we can see how those proposed language features are working out in practice (because once you add a language feature it's nigh-on impossible to remove it). I use telemetry every single week to make a product that's better for end-users.
There's an interesting quote from an earlier version of the BBC News article on this story (since replaced)...
Police spokesman James McLellan said that, throughout the interview, Ahmed had maintained that he built only a clock, but said the boy was unable to give a "broader explanation" as to what it would be used for.
I can imagine how it went down...
Ahmed: It's a clock
Police: But what would it be used for?
Ahmed: What do you mean? It's a clock
Police: And what kind of things would you use a clock for?
Ahmed: I tell you, it's a clock! What do you think you do with a clock?
Police: You tell me
Ahmed: It's a clock! It tells the time! It's a clock!
Police: Ah, so you admit it's a clock. Now what would you use it for?
All the time I spend reading Slashdot articles at work is really part of my "in-service training, continuing education and professional development" for my job as a software engineer. Good to know!
(can't write more for this comment -- got to run and read Ars Technica as well. All this on-the-job training takes a lot of time.)
I guess it depends on the game. I've had no Comcast internet for over a week due to storms. In that time I've happily installed Dragon Age Inquisition onto my Xbox One, been playing it for a week, with no problems at all.
Who uses Wikipedia as a trusted source? I do! If I'm with friends from around the world and we need to convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit, I look for the formula in Wikipedia and no further. Yesterday we wanted to know if a kettle really reached 100âC. Wikipedia again? You bet? Or idly reading about WW2 battles maybe triggered by a contemporary reference? Wikipedia again AND NO INTEREST IN OTHER SOURCES, as always.
I think a big part of the trust is I can trust a search result that points me to Wikipedia, but every other search result might just be an advertising sink, or other people asking the same question with no reliable answers, or other junk.
Slashdot Mirror
What an awful article! Pompous and wordy, and oddly fixated on railroads.
Tldr: change is happening.
This is great news. I'd been concerned for some time that I want watching enough ads, and that those ads I did watch we're failing to translate into product purchases at a high enough rate.
I'm really glad that they're putting serious resources, effort and scientific brainpower into improving my ad consumption. To those dedicated scientists devoting their research to this matter - I salute you.
Like Linus, I also write the simpler form of this kind of code when writing in C/C++.
Unlike Linus, I feel bad about it! My colleagues point out places where arithmetic overflows might lead to crashes. Honestly I find it really difficult to think through the overflow issues for *every single* plus, minus and multiply operator in my code. I think it's like cryptography in that sense -- most regular programmers, including good programmers, don't look at arithmetic operators from the perspective of attackers.
In this case, does Linus' code have the exact same behavior on all possible inputs including overflow-causing inputs? If not, which of the two behaviors is the desired one?
Are there places (maybe including this one) where the kernel code doesn't guard properly against arithmetic overflow? Will the newfound attention bring hackers scrutinizing it for overflow flaws?
Why are you rebooting your machine so freqently that the time that systemd might save at boot time should even matter so much?
I'm writing a service that runs on a cloud service provider. When I come to sit down at my desk and deploy it for the first time, it spins up a VM. When I finish coding, I shut down the VM. So when I'm authoring this kind of program, I experience "VM boot-time" once or twice a day.
Does knowing how to code make it any better when Windows or Windows apps go toe up? Really? Are you going to debug Windows or Mathematica because you took a coding class?
No.
But what you're going to do is whip up the quotes you got from car dealership into a spreadsheet and write a little macro that empowers you better. Or you'll read a news story about something political, use a tool that scrapes the relevant websites, and do something with the data. Or you'll have written a LOGO program in class and it shaped your mind just a little bit to understand algorithms better, i.e. procedural instructions, so that the next piece of technology you see you have a grasp of what's going on rather than just throwing up their hands and calling it magic. Or you'll get fed up with doing something manually in Word all the time at your job so you'll put together a macro that saves then 20 minutes a day, or a bash script.
Not everyone will do this for sure. But I've seen a lot of people become more empowered in lots of little ways through code.
Who was taught to ingest sugar in large quantities?
The only ones who taught that were Coke and other ads. Not schools. Not government.
Or:
1) the olives are stuck in a barrel and squished
2) there is no step 2
And that's why I'm launching an initiative to get more men into elementary education. While things are improving in fields like CS, the gender ratio of men in elementary education has remained stagnant at only 13% for decades.... And I'm absolutely sure that I can count on the support in this effort of all my liberal friends, who have lead the charge to improve the gender ration in CS and other fields. After all, as they've told me so many times, they're all about equality and fairness.
SO WHO'S WITH ME?
What's weird is that you thought you were making an ironic joke, and that liberals and "SJW"s wouldn't agree with you.
Kind of backfired when it turns out that everyone agrees with you that more men in elementary education would be great.
(myself? male, and I taught maths+coding to 9th-12th graders in India and then was special-needs assistant in a 4th grade classroom in the UK. I remember that all the teachers in that elementary school were eager to have more male teachers as well.)
Something that's made better by ads? ... The Superbowl.
While we're on the subject of unrealistic counterfactuals... If each American had to choose between keeping their cellphone or their gun, how many would choose which?
I'd love a smart kettle. Currently I walk into the kitchen, turn it on, and wait 5mins for it to boil. If I could click a button without interrupting my work, it'd save me 5mins a time, 30mins a day, 3 hours a week. That's a lot!
You find it bizarre that (1) people wish to live their lives as they choose, (2) they don't want to change their lives so as to prevent an all-knowing Big Brother government? That they'd rather government change than they change?
I don't think it's bizzare. I think it's normal.
The law is like a massive code base. Like all such, it has bugs and loopholes. Sure we fix them as soon as we can (generally, more slowly in massive code bases). But at the same time when we find folks using exploits then we defend in every other way we can. That's what's happening here.
(plus: Each one of these outraged news stories is part of the PROCESS by which the bugs get fixed in a democratic society).
Summary: quit complaining about it.
I don't feel much kinship with the "me" of 20 years ago when I was 20. Nor at 30. Like... who was that person? what on earth was he thinking?
I imagine that uploading might be similar.
Ads are what slow down the mobile web. Eliminate them and it runs blazingly fast.
Reckon you can do that, Google?
Call your bank before tourism?
I've never had that work. Four times in a row I called to let them know I'd be travelling and they suspended the credit card a few days after my purchase.
This was First Tech Credit Union, by the way. I think they're just more provincial than a big bank... My Chase credit card has never been suspended abroad even without calling
I think you've misread the article you're linking to. All the article said is that it download ~5gb into a folder as part of the update. And leaves it there. Does nothing with it unless the user specifically chooses to click the "upgrade" button.
Your family aren't being guinea pigs. The worst they'll get is ~5gb less space on their hard disks. Heck, they've probably got more than that in their recycle bin and system restore points and so on. Totally not worth investing your time to prevent this.
A "special kind of idiot" who in one act made more money than I'll make in two decades, and who looks like they'll get away with it.
There's a word for this kind of idiot. It's either "lucky" or "not an idiot" but I'm not sure which...
Telemetry which isn't explicitly chosen by the user is completely indistinguishable from malware.
So back to my question: how do you think telemetry helps Microsoft other than by helping it help end-users better?
Maybe you didn't answer because, as per your quote above, you think it's irrelevant. Partly I agree with you, and I never like data taken without my explicit consent. On the other hand if you only get telemetry through opt-in then you're dooming yourself to unrepresentative data.
So much of their updates are sneaking in telemetry, user experience tracking, and other shit entirely designed to benefit Microsoft
I can imagine lots of ways that telemetry will help Microsoft -- by helping them understand their users better, and direct their efforts to better help users.
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft. Not on Windows10 - instead I'm on the C#/VB language design team. I look at telemetry every day. We put in an easy-to-use "send-a-smile/frown" button in the menubar of Visual Studio so it's easier for people to send feedback. We put a lot of effort into making that send-a-frown feature able to diagnose hung processes or crash-dumps so it could give us more actionable bug reports with minimal end-user effort. I spend a lot of time working with end-users -- listening to them at conferences, in studies, in forums, in all kinds of ways, to get anecdotes. I collate those anecdotes with telemetry data to see whether they're representative, and to guide us on where to seek out additional anecdotes to flesh out intriguing telemetry data. We don't currently gather telemetry from developers on how they're using new experimental language features in C#/VB, but I've often wanted that so we can see how those proposed language features are working out in practice (because once you add a language feature it's nigh-on impossible to remove it). I use telemetry every single week to make a product that's better for end-users.
There's an interesting quote from an earlier version of the BBC News article on this story (since replaced)...
Police spokesman James McLellan said that, throughout the interview, Ahmed had maintained that he built only a clock, but said the boy was unable to give a "broader explanation" as to what it would be used for.
I can imagine how it went down...
Ahmed: It's a clock
Police: But what would it be used for?
Ahmed: What do you mean? It's a clock
Police: And what kind of things would you use a clock for?
Ahmed: I tell you, it's a clock! What do you think you do with a clock?
Police: You tell me
Ahmed: It's a clock! It tells the time! It's a clock!
Police: Ah, so you admit it's a clock. Now what would you use it for?
All the time I spend reading Slashdot articles at work is really part of my "in-service training, continuing education and professional development" for my job as a software engineer. Good to know!
(can't write more for this comment -- got to run and read Ars Technica as well. All this on-the-job training takes a lot of time.)
Even more importantly, maybe they'll discover why headphone cables get so tangled up, and learn how to design new tangle-resistant headphones.
I guess it depends on the game. I've had no Comcast internet for over a week due to storms. In that time I've happily installed Dragon Age Inquisition onto my Xbox One, been playing it for a week, with no problems at all.
Who uses Wikipedia as a trusted source? I do! If I'm with friends from around the world and we need to convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit, I look for the formula in Wikipedia and no further. Yesterday we wanted to know if a kettle really reached 100âC. Wikipedia again? You bet? Or idly reading about WW2 battles maybe triggered by a contemporary reference? Wikipedia again AND NO INTEREST IN OTHER SOURCES, as always.
I think a big part of the trust is I can trust a search result that points me to Wikipedia, but every other search result might just be an advertising sink, or other people asking the same question with no reliable answers, or other junk.