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Technology
It's 1999, and in this IT department the big crisis isn't Y2k, says a pilot fish there -- it's the Melissa virus.
"We were infected, and we were all called into the Emergency Operations Center to devise a strategy to determine the extent of infection and how to mitigate the effects," fish says.
"The server admins were coming up with methods to clean up any servers that were affected. The desktop group was trying to figure out how many desktops were infected. We in the network group were trying to come up with a way to block traffic from the virus, both inbound and outbound, at the firewalls.
"Everything was moving as well as could be expected, but we had to give an update to senior leadership on progress.
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Read more: And thanks so much for your input, boss!
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Write comment (96 Comments)Remember ProjectJacquard Two years ago, Google showed off its &connected& jean jacket designed largely for bike commuters who can&t fiddle with their phone. The jacket launched this past fall, in partnership with Levi&s, offering a way for wearers to control music, screen phone calls, and get directions with a tap or brush of the cuff. Today, Google is adding more functionality to this piece of smart clothing, including support for ride-sharing alerts, Bose&Aware Mode,& and location saving.
The features arrived in the Jacquard platform 1.2 update which hit this morning, and will continue to roll out over the week ahead.
Itsort of odd to see this commuter jacket adding ride-sharing support, given that its primary use case, so far, has been to offer a safer way to interact with technology when you can&t use your phone & namely, while biking, as showcased in the jacketpromotional video. (See above).
But with the ride-sharing support, it seems that Google wants to make the jacket more functional in general & even for those times you&re not actively commuting.
To use the new feature, jacket owners connectLyft and/or Uber in the companion mobile app, and assign the &rideshare& ability to the snap tag on the cuff. The jacket will then notify you when your ride is three minutes away and again when it has arrived. When users receive the notification, they can brush in from their jacket to hear more details about their ride.
Another new addition is support for BoseAware Mode, which picks up surrounding sounds and sends them to the userear through supported headphones. The feature is helpful in terms of offering some noise reduction without losing the ability to hear important things happening around you & like approaching vehicles, horns, and other people, for example.
Jacquard will now allow users to turn any gesture into a toggle for Aware Mode to turn it on or off for Bose&sQC30 and QC35 headphones.
And lastly, the jacket will support being able to drop a pin on the map to save a location then see, share or edit it from the appActivity screen.
The jacket continues to be a curious experiment with connected clothing & especially given that much of what the jacket can do, can now be accomplished with a smartwatch these days.
Google and Leviaren&t sharing sales numbers, so ithard to speak to adoption at this point, either.
However, a Google spokesperson did tell us that &[Leviis]pleased with the response and continue[s] to be excited to hear from people about whatuseful and what requests they have once they purchase the jacket.&
Given the addition of ride-sharing support, one wonders if maybe the focus is expanding beyond the bike commuters crowd, to those who just don&t like having their smartphone out, in general.
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Read more: Google and Levi’s ‘connected’ jacket will let you know when your Uber is here
Write comment (97 Comments)Smart Compose, the experimental autocompletefeature in the new Gmail on the web that Google announced at its I/O conference last week, is now available for testing.
Smart Compose is an AI tool that promises to automatically finish your sentences for you, using what it has learned about how people typically write. Based on myexperience so far, itnot quite as good as Googledemo made us believe it was, but itstill quite usefuland will likely save you a few keystrokes as you go about your day.
You&ll have to enable &Experimental Access& in the new Gmail settings to be considered for this first test. I did so last week and the new feature is now live in my account.
I admit that I always feel a bit empty inside when I use Smart Reply, the somewhat more limited version of this feature in the mobile Gmail app that provides you with a few potential two or three-word replies. And I always wonder if the person on the other end knows I was too lazy to write a real answer.But it also makes me feel more productive because I end up answering more emails. Ita trade-off that Smart Reply is currently winning. My guess is, the same will happen with Smart Compose.
For now, though, Smart Compose is still quite limited (and only works in English). When it works, italmost magical, and the suggestion isalmost always spot on. But it only works for rather trite sentences so far. If you go off the script, you could write paragraph after paragraph without ever seeing the prompt.
It&ll happily autocomplete any clichéand write &Hi [name],& at the top of your email, which I guess is something, but that doesn&t feel especially intelligent. We&re still looking at an experimental feature, though, and these tools tend to get better as they learn more about how users behave.
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Read more: You can now try Smart Compose in the new Gmail
Write comment (91 Comments)Japanese gamers and manga aficionados and every combination thereof will get a treat this summer with the release of a NES Classic Edition loaded with games from the pages of Weekly Jump. The beloved manga mag is celebrating its 50th anniversary and this solid gold Famicom is part of the festivities.
Therebasically no chance this Jump-themed NES will get a release in the US — first because hardly any Americans will have read any of these manga (with a couple exceptions) and second because even fewer will have played the Famicom games associated with them.
Familiar… and yet…
That said, this nurtures the hope inside me that we will at some point see other themed NES Classics; the original has, of course, a fantastic collection — but there are dozens more games I would have loved to see on there.
You can hack the thing pretty easily and put half the entire NES library on it, but Nintendo official versions will have been tested and perhaps even tweaked to make sure they run perfectly (though admittedly emulation problems aren&t common for NES games).
More importantly itpossible these hypothetical themed consoles may come with new accessories that I desperately need, like a NES Advantage, Zapper (not sure how it would work), or NES Max. Perhaps even a Power Glove
In the meantime, at least if you missed the chance to buy one the first time around, you can grab one come the end of June.
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Read more: NES Classic loaded with classic manga games raises hopes for other special editions
Write comment (91 Comments)Do you want random Tinder users to see where you&ve been Uh, no Well, great news: an upcoming Tinder feature called Places will allow for just that. According to screenshots detailing Tinder Places uncovered by The Verge, the dating app is developing a feature that tracks your location via its app, then shows potential matches where you&ve been. The idea is to allow people to come across their real-life missed connections, similar to how the dating app Happn works today.
There are some caveats about the new feature. For starters, this is something Tinder has in testing & the way it works at launch could be different. Also, the feature can be shut off, the documentation says & a toggle in the appsettings let you turn it on or off at any time. And we&ve learned that, thankfully, this feature will be opt-in.
However, thata decision you should approach with caution.
Above: Places documentation, image credit: The Verge
The way Tinder has implemented the location feature is concerning. Instead of allowing users to explicitly &check in& to a given place & like their favorite coffee shop or a cool restaurant or bar & Tinder continuously tracks users& location with its app, then makes a determination about which of your &places& it will show to your potential matches.
The company, at least, thought to remove things like doctors, dentists, banks, and the place where you live or work from this automated location-sharing option. It also won&t add a place to your list until after you&ve left & though it doesn&t say how long it waits to do so. (The documentation hedges on the timeframe by saying things like &we&ll wait a while& or &it&ll take some time.&)
While Tinder says your recent places will expire after 28 days & meaning, other Tinder users won&t be able to see where you&ve been past that point & the company does appear to be keeping a wider history of users& location and travels for itself. The documentation explains that Tinder will use this Places information in order to improve the product & by learning which places lead to matches, which users are always deleting, and it will use the data to improve its ability to show users better matches.
Above: Tinder Places, image credit: The Verge
In other words, Tinder will be tracking you, as well as giving potential matches the ability to narrow down the parts of the city you frequent & right down to your daily habits. That means potential matches could figure our things like which bar you regularly hit up for after-work drinks, where you work out, what your favorite breakfast spot is, and so on.
The advantage to daters gaining access to this information about other Tinder users is fairly limited. After all, simply hitting up the same Starbucks in the morning isn&t any sort of signal about someonepotential as a love match.
But it does put a lot more data into the hands of potential stalkers, while offering Tinder access to a massive treasure trove of location data & the selling of which, even anonymized and in aggregate, could be a big business. Even if Tinder doesn&t aim to sell the data directly, it clearly paves the way for the company to show more specific location-based ads in its product.
It also lets Tinder group users into cohorts regarding their interests & without explicitly asking for that data, like Facebook does. For example, Tinder would know if someone shows up at church every week, or regularly takes their dog to a dog park & things it could use to classify users and match them accordingly.
Thatuseful to some extent, in a handful of cases & but just because you have a dog, doesn&t mean you need to date someone with a dog, too. In the end, itless useful to have &things& in common with people & itmore useful to share the same values, experts say. And those values are more important than the initial attraction (which fades as the hormones wear off), and more important than a set of common interests & those can be negotiated in a relationship.
In the end, therefar more for Tinder to gain here, than users to gain from the Places feature & especially with the downside regarding its potential for harassment or stalking.
One serious concern was whether Places would be opt out or opt in & the documentation The Verge found didn&t make this clear. However, we&re relieved to hear (from people familiar with product) that Places is an opt-in experience.
This featureimpending launch is not really a surprise. Tinderalready said it was working on rolling out a new location feature this yearduring its earnings calls, something it described as having the potential to bring in a new audience and &expand the definition of dating.& That could imply the company wants to make Places more of a social networking, or friend-finding feature, rather than just an option for finding dates.
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Read more: Tinder’s upcoming location-based feature seems a bit creepy
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