Look around you. 10% are really bamboozled by [Insert skill here] and 10% are streets ahead of those that get by. Maths, Foreign language, social skills, drawing. (Skydiving may be an exception.)
Have you heard of BAD-GOOD-BEST clinical governance? 10% of clinicians lead and make big efforts to study and improve. 80% 'keep up more or less'. 10% are drunk and/or good at covering up their lack of competence. (See http://vulpeculox.net/ob/index... and follow the bad-good-best link)
Let me also draw your attention to the '10% rule' in gene-controlled attributes. Left-handedness, Harder tooth enamel and so on. IMHO this is an evolutionary insurance mechanism (nothing whatsoever to do with the subject) so that if there's a mass-wipeout type event then there may be odd-balls who are far enough different to survive.
Suppose I type in a phone number Google understands I live in the UK. The same goes for wanting to buy a mattress. So far so good. That's helpful intelligence.
But if I want to view the poems of Emily Bronte I don't want 100 gazillion results from Amazon.
Just like I use NoScript and AdBlock+ so I want to cut out the shop windows. If I want info from the web then I don't want canned waffle.
Tech is for older kids. Challenge and experiment at this age. Lego to make a bridge that the cat can cross . Draw a picture that Auntie thinks actually looks like a Badger not a [insert vague animal here] Create a birthday invitation card that has fizz. Ask 1,000,000,000 questions you don't know the answers to.
There's the weird perception that 99.9% of the world are creepy, scammy, bastards. No they aren't! Twice-nightly soap operas condition you to the idea that if someone steps on your toe then WW3 breaks-out. Of course not. Treat people with respect and get them on your side. (Of course if you're a vame[sic] 1P-shooter nerd then this won't make sense to you but everybody is born with social skills even if various media suck it out of them.)
(1) Trackball [For everyone - A mouse is crap tech.]
(2) Brush-up on keyboard navigation. Most desktop applications are good in this respect but many web pages are in the stone age.
(3) Tune the driver parameters.
(4) If the user has particular issues (which may not all be motor related) then focus on a 'way to do it'. For example a positive one-click even if the mouse button takes a hammering.
(5) There used to be special drivers but 5 years ago when I looked they seemed to be dying-out.
One of the issues is losing faith/confidence in one's own skills and getting more nervous/flustered. Try and find a fun and 100% no-problem' way of coaching them. Another issue with poke 'n hope is things go wrong and much more confusing. For example a double click or a right-click instead of a left click will start weird dialogs or actions. "Hey! I wandered over that email address and now it's asking me lots of questions!!" and so on. So it's up to your patience to reduce the stress. (And if you're trying to sort it out by phone then without something like Teamviewer you're going to get in a muddle and the user is going to feel a time-wasting idiot and failure.
Is to educate ourselves on the nature of the scam first hand. We can hang-up whenever we like so it's not like any commitment. First hand experience of this sort of thing is valuable and gives confidence when it's not so clear cut. Perhaps IT pros won't be clicking on attachments any time soon but the people we support do and we need to find out how far they've been scammed etc. which is a bit weird as WE are trying to do telephone support EXACTLY as the bogus supporters. To the end user what's the difference?
(R) Outward facing. Customers are important to them
(C) Need a comfortable berth but are really keen to help 'friends'
(L) Techies and creatives who have visions inside their heads that must get out
Structure your organisation with Right/Centre/Left branches for sales/admin/production and you can fit the right personality types in and then they all get their different achievements. Look at Left-Right-Center at http://vulpeculox.net/treems/i...
Suppose I make a 2x2 Rubik Cube. You and 100 others say we must extend this to 3x3......And somebody does. Hurrah!
Concepts that catch the imagination come first. Then comes the sense to build a foundation or the tools or the clear ethos or the luck to know a few bods who will play as a team following your clear lead. (They may be ancillary skills to big chief um he programmer, but everyone sees the purpose of the device.)
Whatever the caller's number the phone companies don't let people call you for free. There's a well tried and tested system for this to ensure the caller pays. So that's sorted. Next the complaints which are ignored. In the UK we have a 1471 facility that tells you who just called but works on the number and won't tell if they've withheld the number. So they continue without any redress...
But suppose there was a number you could punch in just after a junk-call. This would then feed through to (a) the who paid for it data and (b) a central nuisance calls depot. Now as soon as say 5 nuisances are registered against some caller (indexed by who's paying not junk number) then the cost per call becomes say £3.00 If they get 20 reports then it becomes £30 per call. All collected through the existing phone toll collection system. All hassle free for the consumer.
Node has its good points but seems to have (a) one way of coding plus a nanny-nag of you will be doing that RESTfully won't you. (b) tool-chain builders. If I want to make an application I don't need a whole factory of Gits and Grunts, templates and transient libraries. I most certainly don't want updates of libraries to destabilise my perfectly working application for no reason, no warning and no documentation.
PHP will be around for a long time because any idiot (and I mean that) can have a go. That doesn't mean all PHP code is crap but what makes code 'good' can be skipped. (YMMV for what the base for quality code is.)
There are plenty of captionless bits of ironmongery about I'll agree. So the intelligent visitor uses Wikepedia to start with then has some context, jargon and grounding...
Now find a curator and see if you can leverage your little fulcrum of knowledge against their lever of knowledge. When you've done this a couple of times (asked to see inside, asked how did the sizobells get the stuff to the twinkychute) you'll know exactly (a) how to get the most out of a museum and (b) give the curators the buzz of the one in thirty visitors who has a brain and asks such obvious questions they've never been asked like that before. A parking-lot of stuff isn't a museum but a basement of curious carvings can (in the right hands) be an electric delight.
People relate to people. (That's not to say I like a UI which tries to have a 'human' conversation (Microsoft paperclip/doggy are you listening?) [You see what I did there?] But as a developer if you're 'asking' for data from the user then why not put yourself in the position of 'the clerk at the desk taking the details'. Once you've done that you may go the next level and put yourself in the position of the person answering the questions.
You've all seen good and bad 'personal details' websites so it's hardly necessary to continue.
We all know about stupid questions asked by an insensitive drone.
IMHO the difference is between 'demanding' and 'asking nicely for a reason'.
Don't these people realise? People sit at home and dream of dropping nukes on their shitty politicians. We all do. (Personally a few plagues and extracted fingernails as revenge for their greedy self-interest as well.) So eliminate all homes. Better still eliminate all brains. Make thinking a crime.
If malicious code is being passed around well known public forums then deal with that code. Hey! Why not encourage the eyeballs and brain cells of visitors to report hacking code requests. It could be done because most people won't have the slightest thing to do with terrorists and hackers.
It's an attitude problem. Make it easy for me to report something suspicious and make it easy for me to believe I'm doing something valuable and sensible by talking to clued-up people then I will. OTOH Why bother with these twits.
If parents are *curious* and keep stumbling across interesting questions then there is some hope that the children might pick it up. Curiosity and being able to use the data as information in a complex intellectual model is what makes the difference between a technician (hairdresser, programmer, etc.) and a scientist exploring the world and interpreting data. Neither technicians or engineers are scientists. Everyone uses technology, engineers make technology given a scientific input.
To be able to express a complex intellectual model and describe things accurately requires *language*. (Also having a large vocabulary of interesting words is a real intellectual-class winner in the school playground.)
And finally from me, find compelling analogues or fun experiments.
If the Earth was the size of a full stop, the Sun would be about the size of a ten pence piece 2 metres away. Now as our good friend Mister Oxbarrow says "On the scale of fishy that's a whole lot of pilchards." When you think about it the idea of a speck floating in some infinity around a blob all that distance away is bizarre. If you roll a marble past a football it keeps going straight and doesn't get bent towards the football by gravity. The whole thing is clearly bonkers.
A lot of knowledgeable, experienced and clever people have 'been there, done that' when it comes to committees etc. As their interest may not be in leadership but delivering tech or just getting things done without a lot of opinionated discussion from people who exhibit the D-K effect, they take a back seat and find excuses to avoid management meetings and responsibility. Many management methods are designed to leech the brains from the better qualified so why would I want to join in with what is essentially a bunch of amateurs diluting my competence, wasting my time, arguing and deciding to be idiots regardless of my clear advice.
Hi!
It's great you're curious and not afraid to (what other people would disparagingly call shoot your mouth off ) tell us about what you've found interesting. The world needs people who find the world interesting. Like Richard Feynman who was one of those ace boffins who found everything interesting and tried to make all of us interested in 'being interested'. (I particularly like the craft he used in his lecture 'cargo cult science' to draw us into his way of thinking.)
But if I asked you, say, "What's interesting about bed' would you say nothing? There are dozens of questions to be asked, some of which may have been answered but it's the curious mind that wonders simple things like why are beds raised off the ground and what sort of bedclothes and why we might change into specialist nightwear? From what's the smallest uninteresting number to what's the economic impact of being able to identify a protozoa in the salivary glands of a particular species of mosquito we need inquisitive people without narrow vision.
So here is my question. Are you a fanatical specialist or a sponge for all the world's knowledge?
Different people learn in different ways. For some watching is enough but others need to 'do'. There's a lot of work been done on the various ways. Videos are unlikely to be the whole answer. In fact they may not be suitable at all if they concentrate on click-this-click-that. The task is in the person's head and they may need careful preparation of information or mental triggers to check for odd circumstances. So the task is not 'clicking at the orders screen' but 'taking an order and making sure nothing can go wrong(using the orders screen)'.
"Hey new boy. Browse those manuals/videos and ask a few guys what they're doing."
That's not a good approach because :
(a) It's not structured
(b) There are no objectives (How does new boy know what's important/frequent/tricky?)
(c) There's no 'reward' for learning a skill.
Chucking somebody at a wiki suffers from these issues.
A tutorial is not the same as a reference manual. A wiki is the latter.
If you want to teach somebody a bunch of skills you need to print out a worksheet with the skills listed in a step-by-step order with spaces for review by supervisor. (This works for audit as well). The progress (hopefully backed with encouragement from the superviso, drives the long slog.)
To me as as someone who has a linux box, isn't afraid of the command line but really gets pissed of with the idea that you have to remember magic strings of characters to get the bastard working the the way you want it rather than the way 'they' have decided is the one true way I'm fully in agreeance with the OP. The trouble is the more skilfully tuned your distro is so the up-front and follow-though documentation assumes guru level of *nixism. Strange thing! I run a computer to get work done not to type "sudo foo --x y z" Hey I'll run a http server, what could be simpler, but oh dear that partition is mysteriously out of bounds. Perhaps I'd better change the start-up programs (and I'm not talking grovelling with services/daemons here) but either I can't or the system calls me a stranger and then can't make any defaultchoices that actually eanble me to get on with my life.
Admins of systems that serve serious stuff will know how to secure their systems, but the box-or-two business will be running back to Windows (with good reason) due to the horror of not wearing a bloody useless cycle helmet - oh I mean not logging ion as root.
Home-linux distros needs nil access restrictions then good advice. Security depends on people so EMPOWER PEOPLE by EDUCATING them why layers of security are good and worth worrying about. SUDO is box-ticking for Linux.
Kids get all excited about things.
When you grow up, have a family and realise the world is made of more than bits dressed-up as glossy pixels, then you'll understand that software is a craft to involve your inner programmer not a ski-slope for the sparkle-headed.
Complacency is the wrong word. Look at people. Graduate, by study and research, into management. There are many disappointments to be had there but also many opportunities to use experience to pour oil on the waters of desperation and panic.
Grow up.
Tech has to deliver a bonus. So a USB stick beats 8",5",3" floppies (It's scary)
I have a mobile (not smart) phone but I write numbers I need on the cardboard case (a bog-roll inner tube) because that's quicker than farting about with a 0-9 keyboard.
My best desktop utils (calendar, menu, password cache, documentation finder) were written 15 -- 20 years ago.
There *IS*progress but mostly it isn't something to invest in until it becomes mature.
Slashdot Mirror
Look around you. 10% are really bamboozled by [Insert skill here] and 10% are streets ahead of those that get by. Maths, Foreign language, social skills, drawing. (Skydiving may be an exception.)
Have you heard of BAD-GOOD-BEST clinical governance? 10% of clinicians lead and make big efforts to study and improve. 80% 'keep up more or less'. 10% are drunk and/or good at covering up their lack of competence. (See http://vulpeculox.net/ob/index... and follow the bad-good-best link)
Let me also draw your attention to the '10% rule' in gene-controlled attributes. Left-handedness, Harder tooth enamel and so on. IMHO this is an evolutionary insurance mechanism (nothing whatsoever to do with the subject) so that if there's a mass-wipeout type event then there may be odd-balls who are far enough different to survive.
But if I want to view the poems of Emily Bronte I don't want 100 gazillion results from Amazon.
Just like I use NoScript and AdBlock+ so I want to cut out the shop windows. If I want info from the web then I don't want canned waffle.
Tech is for older kids. Challenge and experiment at this age. Lego to make a bridge that the cat can cross . Draw a picture that Auntie thinks actually looks like a Badger not a [insert vague animal here] Create a birthday invitation card that has fizz. Ask 1,000,000,000 questions you don't know the answers to.
There's the weird perception that 99.9% of the world are creepy, scammy, bastards. No they aren't! Twice-nightly soap operas condition you to the idea that if someone steps on your toe then WW3 breaks-out. Of course not. Treat people with respect and get them on your side. (Of course if you're a vame[sic] 1P-shooter nerd then this won't make sense to you but everybody is born with social skills even if various media suck it out of them.)
(2) Brush-up on keyboard navigation. Most desktop applications are good in this respect but many web pages are in the stone age.
(3) Tune the driver parameters.
(4) If the user has particular issues (which may not all be motor related) then focus on a 'way to do it'. For example a positive one-click even if the mouse button takes a hammering.
(5) There used to be special drivers but 5 years ago when I looked they seemed to be dying-out.
One of the issues is losing faith/confidence in one's own skills and getting more nervous/flustered. Try and find a fun and 100% no-problem' way of coaching them. Another issue with poke 'n hope is things go wrong and much more confusing. For example a double click or a right-click instead of a left click will start weird dialogs or actions. "Hey! I wandered over that email address and now it's asking me lots of questions!!" and so on. So it's up to your patience to reduce the stress. (And if you're trying to sort it out by phone then without something like Teamviewer you're going to get in a muddle and the user is going to feel a time-wasting idiot and failure.
Is to educate ourselves on the nature of the scam first hand. We can hang-up whenever we like so it's not like any commitment. First hand experience of this sort of thing is valuable and gives confidence when it's not so clear cut. Perhaps IT pros won't be clicking on attachments any time soon but the people we support do and we need to find out how far they've been scammed etc. which is a bit weird as WE are trying to do telephone support EXACTLY as the bogus supporters. To the end user what's the difference?
A $10 microphone won't be much good for a variety of people. OTOH ask where is the signal degradation happening? If you don't know then find out.
Either the chief apologist for the local constabulary should
Guess what? Harassment is anti-social behaviour which should be criminal. (Pressurising a politician is different.)
Structure your organisation with Right/Centre/Left branches for sales/admin/production and you can fit the right personality types in and then they all get their different achievements. Look at Left-Right-Center at http://vulpeculox.net/treems/i...
Suppose I make a 2x2 Rubik Cube. You and 100 others say we must extend this to 3x3... ...And somebody does. Hurrah!
Concepts that catch the imagination come first. Then comes the sense to build a foundation or the tools or the clear ethos or the luck to know a few bods who will play as a team following your clear lead. (They may be ancillary skills to big chief um he programmer, but everyone sees the purpose of the device.)
But suppose there was a number you could punch in just after a junk-call. This would then feed through to (a) the who paid for it data and (b) a central nuisance calls depot. Now as soon as say 5 nuisances are registered against some caller (indexed by who's paying not junk number) then the cost per call becomes say £3.00 If they get 20 reports then it becomes £30 per call. All collected through the existing phone toll collection system. All hassle free for the consumer.
PHP will be around for a long time because any idiot (and I mean that) can have a go. That doesn't mean all PHP code is crap but what makes code 'good' can be skipped. (YMMV for what the base for quality code is.)
There are plenty of captionless bits of ironmongery about I'll agree. So the intelligent visitor uses Wikepedia to start with then has some context, jargon and grounding...
Now find a curator and see if you can leverage your little fulcrum of knowledge against their lever of knowledge. When you've done this a couple of times (asked to see inside, asked how did the sizobells get the stuff to the twinkychute) you'll know exactly (a) how to get the most out of a museum and (b) give the curators the buzz of the one in thirty visitors who has a brain and asks such obvious questions they've never been asked like that before. A parking-lot of stuff isn't a museum but a basement of curious carvings can (in the right hands) be an electric delight.
You've all seen good and bad 'personal details' websites so it's hardly necessary to continue.
We all know about stupid questions asked by an insensitive drone.
IMHO the difference is between 'demanding' and 'asking nicely for a reason'.
If malicious code is being passed around well known public forums then deal with that code. Hey! Why not encourage the eyeballs and brain cells of visitors to report hacking code requests. It could be done because most people won't have the slightest thing to do with terrorists and hackers.
It's an attitude problem. Make it easy for me to report something suspicious and make it easy for me to believe I'm doing something valuable and sensible by talking to clued-up people then I will. OTOH Why bother with these twits.
To be able to express a complex intellectual model and describe things accurately requires *language*. (Also having a large vocabulary of interesting words is a real intellectual-class winner in the school playground.)
And finally from me, find compelling analogues or fun experiments. If the Earth was the size of a full stop, the Sun would be about the size of a ten pence piece 2 metres away. Now as our good friend Mister Oxbarrow says "On the scale of fishy that's a whole lot of pilchards." When you think about it the idea of a speck floating in some infinity around a blob all that distance away is bizarre. If you roll a marble past a football it keeps going straight and doesn't get bent towards the football by gravity. The whole thing is clearly bonkers.
A lot of knowledgeable, experienced and clever people have 'been there, done that' when it comes to committees etc. As their interest may not be in leadership but delivering tech or just getting things done without a lot of opinionated discussion from people who exhibit the D-K effect, they take a back seat and find excuses to avoid management meetings and responsibility. Many management methods are designed to leech the brains from the better qualified so why would I want to join in with what is essentially a bunch of amateurs diluting my competence, wasting my time, arguing and deciding to be idiots regardless of my clear advice.
Users can look around and make choices.
Hi! It's great you're curious and not afraid to (what other people would disparagingly call shoot your mouth off ) tell us about what you've found interesting. The world needs people who find the world interesting. Like Richard Feynman who was one of those ace boffins who found everything interesting and tried to make all of us interested in 'being interested'. (I particularly like the craft he used in his lecture 'cargo cult science' to draw us into his way of thinking.) But if I asked you, say, "What's interesting about bed' would you say nothing? There are dozens of questions to be asked, some of which may have been answered but it's the curious mind that wonders simple things like why are beds raised off the ground and what sort of bedclothes and why we might change into specialist nightwear? From what's the smallest uninteresting number to what's the economic impact of being able to identify a protozoa in the salivary glands of a particular species of mosquito we need inquisitive people without narrow vision. So here is my question. Are you a fanatical specialist or a sponge for all the world's knowledge?
Different people learn in different ways. For some watching is enough but others need to 'do'. There's a lot of work been done on the various ways. Videos are unlikely to be the whole answer. In fact they may not be suitable at all if they concentrate on click-this-click-that. The task is in the person's head and they may need careful preparation of information or mental triggers to check for odd circumstances. So the task is not 'clicking at the orders screen' but 'taking an order and making sure nothing can go wrong(using the orders screen)'.
A tutorial is not the same as a reference manual. A wiki is the latter.
If you want to teach somebody a bunch of skills you need to print out a worksheet with the skills listed in a step-by-step order with spaces for review by supervisor. (This works for audit as well). The progress (hopefully backed with encouragement from the superviso, drives the long slog.)
Admins of systems that serve serious stuff will know how to secure their systems, but the box-or-two business will be running back to Windows (with good reason) due to the horror of not wearing a bloody useless cycle helmet - oh I mean not logging ion as root.
Home-linux distros needs nil access restrictions then good advice. Security depends on people so EMPOWER PEOPLE by EDUCATING them why layers of security are good and worth worrying about. SUDO is box-ticking for Linux.
Kids get all excited about things. When you grow up, have a family and realise the world is made of more than bits dressed-up as glossy pixels, then you'll understand that software is a craft to involve your inner programmer not a ski-slope for the sparkle-headed. Complacency is the wrong word. Look at people. Graduate, by study and research, into management. There are many disappointments to be had there but also many opportunities to use experience to pour oil on the waters of desperation and panic. Grow up.
Tech has to deliver a bonus. So a USB stick beats 8",5",3" floppies (It's scary) I have a mobile (not smart) phone but I write numbers I need on the cardboard case (a bog-roll inner tube) because that's quicker than farting about with a 0-9 keyboard. My best desktop utils (calendar, menu, password cache, documentation finder) were written 15 -- 20 years ago. There *IS*progress but mostly it isn't something to invest in until it becomes mature.