I strongly suspect that one way to measure how onerous the password policy is in a particular environment is to go through the office flipping up keyboards. The metric would be as a percentage of yellow stickies with passwords stuck underneath. You could weight the metric by the size of the penalty for writing down your password.
One place I worked, for some bizarre reason we all had to set our passwords in RACF and they'd be somehow propagated from there to Windows and Unix boxes. (This was probably early to mid nineties.) It was company policy. There had to be letters and numbers and one capital letter and it had to be changed every 30 days. Yes, not 90, 30. Someone figured out that Jan1993, Feb1993, Mar1993, Apr1993 and so forth met the monthly requirements, the password rules, and never repeated.
So we all started using that.
(I suppose a more sophisticated system would have spotted that everyone in the department was using the same password.)
By way of reference, I consider the smaller Apple Watch to be overly large for a watch but I still wear it because I enjoy the feature set. Anything larger is pure Mayor Of Geekville.
I take it you've never owned a real outdoor watch, or, say, a mechanical watch with stopwatch function. Or a diver's watch. All of which are larger and thicker than the one on my wrist now. The Apple watch is more petite, it's true. I have noticed that most of the owners at work are women, but I thought that was due to the "it just works" mindshare, the idea that you didn't have to be technical to own one.
Wait what? Wishful thinking at best. My watch is first generation, doesn't even have wireless charging or a forward facing camera like the very next generation after it, and it makes and receives calls fine, isn't bulky, has no antenna sticking out, gets just as good reception as my phone and lasts two days or more on a charge, depending on what I'm doing with it. (which is actually better battery usage than I get with the phone) And it's not hard to use at all. Calls can be made with voice commands, so no fumbling with tiny keyboards, and it'll either use the speaker and microphone on the watch or a wireless headset if you have one paired. My only regrets are wireless charging and a forward facing camera, although I only want the latter so I can make video calls like Dick Tracy...
(I keep leaving the damned thing on the charger at home.)
if you had a regular 'feature' phone instead of a damn battery-draining smart phone, it wouldn't need to live in the fucking charger -- tethered to the ac mains like it was on life support. pull the plug already. battery life measured in weeks, not hours, can be yours.
I wouldn't have put it like that, but you're right. Our "house phone" (so we can keep our original hard line phone number) is a cheap flip phone, and it'll last over two weeks on a single charge. We've really lost something in the rush to make smart phones do more and more in a thinner and thinner package.
Just a few minutes ago I took a call from my daughter on my watch without my phone being in bluetooth range.
The Apple Watch can do that already, since it also connects over WiFi. The phone forwards the audio or connection as needed.
Nothing up my sleeve here -- the Gear S will take calls without wifi or bluetooth. It has a sim card and its own phone number. My phone forwards automatically to the Gear S phone number when they're out of range to each other. The Gear S came out in 2014. I actually keep the wifi turned off on the watch to save battery. (Also wifi coverage is lousy at work, but that's another story.)
But don't let me stand in the way if you want to trade in your current Apple watch for what amounts to a tiny incremental improvement. The rest of us have had this capability and more for several years.
The point still stands: The Apple watch won't take cellular calls not because the technology is unavailable or impractical, but simply because Apple doesn't want it to happen.
...and in all likelihood the company couldn't legally do anything about it even if they wanted to. I had reason to talk to a lawyer about a different work matter, (in which I found that age is a protected class -- good to know) and her opinion was that an Indian manager forcing out non-Indians in favor of new hires from India was probably not actionable, because in this case most of the employees forced out were white (although, two happened to be naturalized citizens of middle-eastern descent) and whites aren't a protected class (pretty much by definition), whereas being Indian *is* a protected class (IANAL, but the person I was talking to IAL, although the opinion was admittedly off-the-cuff and not researched) and apparently reverse-racism is very difficult to prove.
I'm actually wearing a Gear S as I write this, so yeah, I get it. Just a few minutes ago I took a call from my daughter on my watch without my phone being in bluetooth range. (I keep leaving the damned thing on the charger at home.)
But Apple's design philosophy for the watch was always as an accessory for the iphone, not as an independent device. It was a "force multiplier" for iphone sales, never intended as a separate product. (I had to do some reading when this article came out, because I hadn't been aware that Apple hadn't already done this.)
The technology to put the great majority of the feature set of a smart phone into a watch (confined only by the small screen) has been available since at least 2014. It was not ineptitude, but a deliberate marketing decision on Apple's part not to use it.
And even now, it looks from TFA that the new i-watches won't take calls on their own.
I've admittedly not been keeping track of smart watches in general, but I'm really surprised that Apple hasn't done this (a GSM-capable watch) yet. It seems like a case of being dragged into it by their competitors.
My embarrassingly old Samsung Gear S (not an S2 or S3) has a sim card, can do all of that (in TFA) and originate and receive calls. And if I forget my phone at home, calls to the phone are automatically routed to the watch. (This was my primary use case, as I'm often leaving my phone either at home or at work.) I keep wifi turned off, as it seems an unnecessary battery drain, but 3g and bluetooth turned on.
I've seen several Apple watches on co-worker's wrists, but didn't realize they're still anchored to their owner's iphones. How quaint.
When these new GSM-capable watches come out, the marketing could be entertaining. Let's see if Apple tries to make people believe they invented the concept.
Which reminds me, I have to make note of the day the new watches come out, so I can avoid the starbucks next to the local AT&T store. On release day there's always a crowd in the parking lot waiting for the store to open, and this makes it tough to get coffee. I don't know what Apple puts in their kool-aid, but they are the undisputed masters at developing mindshare.
At least with AI the initial goals were hit and our definition changed to some degree. "AI will play chess and win!"... "Ok, it can play chess really really well but that's only because it can see every move and choose the best one not because it is intelligent.".
Exactly. One could argue that seeing every possible move and choosing the best one isn't really AI. That's just tic-tac-to with more decision branches and faster processors.
> You mean all those Indian managers, who once get a management spot, only hire other Indians?
Wow. I mean, wow. It's not just me seeing this? Previous job, my US native manager was pushed out by a remarkably aggressive Indian manager here on H1B. He grew the department (then numbering 18) to 26, with every single new hire being another H1B worker. He was openly hostile to employees who were locals, (even bragging in meetings of his intention to improve his budget by filling vacancies with workers from India) resulting in most of them leaving on their own. Backfill was H1B employees only. By the time I left, it was a sea of orange badges, with only three locals still working there.
It didn't occur to me that this could be the norm, not an edge case.
I think "a firehose of stupid" is my new favorite phrase. I'd like to borrow that.
True story: A friend of mine had been trash talking Facebook practically since it came out, with (admittedly legitimate) criticisms "how much thought does it take to click like? Or forward a meme?" and "people haven't even met most of their 'friends', and everyone is pretending to be something they're not" and other things. My counter is that if you're doing all that, you're using Facebook wrong. I use my account as a blog, and write (in my own words, not "copy and paste this so others can enjoy it") about observations I've made through life, like the loud, painfully metrosexual prick in the line ahead of me at Starbucks with the outrageously complicated drink order, (happened twice to me and once to my daughter -- not sure if it was the same guy or if this was a fad) or more personal things like my daughter's ferret, who loves to dance on my keyboard, leading me to discover Lightroom shortcuts I had no idea existed. I also tend to preview photos on facebook before offering them for sale.
So anyway, in general, if most of your Facebook actions are just clicking on stuff, then yeah, you're part of the problem.
The punch line is that the friend mentioned above recently confessed that he actually did have a facebook account, but didn't want to admit it. He friended me, and... his account was absolutely everything he had been complaining about. Memes. Pictures of his food. Close to zero original content. Lots of photos, but zero photos that he had taken himself, zero photos of any part of his life. Fake name. Fake stats. Network packets cried out in vain as they were forced to transport content of no import whatsoever.
but it keeps getting propagated, because people want to believe that they are privy to some bit of important knowledge that nobody else knows.
Dude, I've been saying for years that this is the reason behind almost every stupid conspiracy theory ever. It's good to see that others might feel the same way.
I agree. But it's more than just conspiracy theories. Every article of the type "My teeth were falling out until I found this amazing trick! Dentists don't want you to know this! Don't use toothpaste to brush your teeth! Make this recipe at home for healthy teeth! Watch your cavities disappear overnight!" Where the formula is one part Windex to two parts possum fat. Most of them are relatively harmless (although possum fat tastes terrible) but they all have one thing in common: (a) they are generally ineffective, and (b) the "hook" is the mark's secret inner conviction that he knows some key fact nobody else knows.
So my facebook friends are all soaking their bunions in a mixture of apple juice and kerosene, using a toenail embedded in axle grease to ward away yellowjackets, and I despair for humanity.
Others have already mentioned that Facebook could (and probably will to a certain extent) use this device to push their own agenda, but leave that for now. The interesting thing to me is that downright hoaxes are still ignored, which seems to argue in favor of the "push their own agenda" argument.
As just one example, a repeat offender is the "Don't use 911!!!" hoax that tells the (demonstrably false) story about how an innocent young lady was saved from a horrible fate by remembering how her parents told her to dial 112 instead of 911 from her car when someone was following her. All went well and the perp was arrested and the girl escaped unharmed all because she did what her parents told her and dialed 112.
This is in the US, where 112 may work in some metropolitan areas as a courtesy to visitors from Europe, but isn't an official emergency number. It may happen to get you to emergency services in New York or Miami, but won't get you anywhere in Perrysburg, Ohio. The article is a dangerous hoax, but it keeps getting propagated, because people want to believe that they are privy to some bit of important knowledge that nobody else knows.
The point being, if Facebook was so concerned about their site being used to propagate false news, where the hell are the "alternate articles" calling this a hoax? If you google "call 112 instead of 911" the first 20 or so hits are articles pleading with you to not fall for this.
I mean WTF, Facebook? Is debunking some story about Ivanka's charities more important than calling the wrong emergency services number in an emergency?
Yeah, yeah, I've seen the spam. And the infomercials, and the ads in Facebook. All pretending like this is, like, a new and wonderful thing that people have just discovered.
Someone said it just the other day. I despair for humanity.
(It so happen, in our area, that most of the local channels originate from a huge cluster of antennas on a nearby mountain top. A farmhouse-grade TV antenna picks up 20+ channels including sidebands. I guess that millennials don't know this shouldn't be surprising.)
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don't mind being a few years behind, buy an Android.
Bleh. Caveat: I happen to carry both -- an iphone work phone and an android as my personal phone. Side bar: The *only* good thing about the iphone's skinny, slippery, difficult to grasp anodized case is that it slips into the belt pouch next to the android phone without too much shoving. Further caveat: I make part of my living through photography.
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, stop fooling yourself and get a real camera.
Yes, the iphone takes good photos in bars, it recognizes faces and does some tricks with focusing and does a good job calculating average exposure and doing automatic noise reduction. And you can do cute things like add floppy ears and cat noses. As long as you're sharing to an app that ios knows about, sharing is relatively easy once you learn the tricks. For most people, this is good enough. Thus, "The end of the DSLR for most people". Remember that once upon a time, "most people" thought 110 film was great because the cameras were small and easy to carry around. "Most people" wouldn't recognize bokeh if it was biting them on the neck. The iphone, and let's face it, any midrange-or-higher Android phone already does better at photography than what most people need. But let's be real here: That's very different from "truly caring about great photography".
So yeah, my next camera is totally gonna be an iphone. No wait, it isn't. Because I really *do* care about great photography.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly suspect that one way to measure how onerous the password policy is in a particular environment is to go through the office flipping up keyboards. The metric would be as a percentage of yellow stickies with passwords stuck underneath. You could weight the metric by the size of the penalty for writing down your password.
One place I worked, for some bizarre reason we all had to set our passwords in RACF and they'd be somehow propagated from there to Windows and Unix boxes. (This was probably early to mid nineties.) It was company policy. There had to be letters and numbers and one capital letter and it had to be changed every 30 days. Yes, not 90, 30. Someone figured out that Jan1993, Feb1993, Mar1993, Apr1993 and so forth met the monthly requirements, the password rules, and never repeated.
So we all started using that.
(I suppose a more sophisticated system would have spotted that everyone in the department was using the same password.)
By way of reference, I consider the smaller Apple Watch to be overly large for a watch but I still wear it because I enjoy the feature set. Anything larger is pure Mayor Of Geekville.
I take it you've never owned a real outdoor watch, or, say, a mechanical watch with stopwatch function. Or a diver's watch. All of which are larger and thicker than the one on my wrist now. The Apple watch is more petite, it's true. I have noticed that most of the owners at work are women, but I thought that was due to the "it just works" mindshare, the idea that you didn't have to be technical to own one.
Wait what? Wishful thinking at best. My watch is first generation, doesn't even have wireless charging or a forward facing camera like the very next generation after it, and it makes and receives calls fine, isn't bulky, has no antenna sticking out, gets just as good reception as my phone and lasts two days or more on a charge, depending on what I'm doing with it. (which is actually better battery usage than I get with the phone) And it's not hard to use at all. Calls can be made with voice commands, so no fumbling with tiny keyboards, and it'll either use the speaker and microphone on the watch or a wireless headset if you have one paired. My only regrets are wireless charging and a forward facing camera, although I only want the latter so I can make video calls like Dick Tracy...
if you had a regular 'feature' phone instead of a damn battery-draining smart phone, it wouldn't need to live in the fucking charger -- tethered to the ac mains like it was on life support. pull the plug already. battery life measured in weeks, not hours, can be yours.
I wouldn't have put it like that, but you're right. Our "house phone" (so we can keep our original hard line phone number) is a cheap flip phone, and it'll last over two weeks on a single charge. We've really lost something in the rush to make smart phones do more and more in a thinner and thinner package.
so yes or no, can I get an iWatch, continue to have no iphone, and take calls on the watch.
Since they don't actually *say* "yes", my bet is "no".
Just a few minutes ago I took a call from my daughter on my watch without my phone being in bluetooth range.
The Apple Watch can do that already, since it also connects over WiFi. The phone forwards the audio or connection as needed.
Nothing up my sleeve here -- the Gear S will take calls without wifi or bluetooth. It has a sim card and its own phone number. My phone forwards automatically to the Gear S phone number when they're out of range to each other. The Gear S came out in 2014. I actually keep the wifi turned off on the watch to save battery. (Also wifi coverage is lousy at work, but that's another story.)
But don't let me stand in the way if you want to trade in your current Apple watch for what amounts to a tiny incremental improvement. The rest of us have had this capability and more for several years.
The point still stands: The Apple watch won't take cellular calls not because the technology is unavailable or impractical, but simply because Apple doesn't want it to happen.
Another attempt to play catch up to Samsung.
I'm actually wearing a Gear S as I write this, so yeah, I get it. Just a few minutes ago I took a call from my daughter on my watch without my phone being in bluetooth range. (I keep leaving the damned thing on the charger at home.)
But Apple's design philosophy for the watch was always as an accessory for the iphone, not as an independent device. It was a "force multiplier" for iphone sales, never intended as a separate product. (I had to do some reading when this article came out, because I hadn't been aware that Apple hadn't already done this.)
The technology to put the great majority of the feature set of a smart phone into a watch (confined only by the small screen) has been available since at least 2014. It was not ineptitude, but a deliberate marketing decision on Apple's part not to use it.
And even now, it looks from TFA that the new i-watches won't take calls on their own.
Until that happens, the watch is ( for me ) a device of limited utility, and not of interest regardless of price.
Um, well, you can get that, but unfortunately, it wouldn't be Apple. At least, not yet.
I've admittedly not been keeping track of smart watches in general, but I'm really surprised that Apple hasn't done this (a GSM-capable watch) yet. It seems like a case of being dragged into it by their competitors.
My embarrassingly old Samsung Gear S (not an S2 or S3) has a sim card, can do all of that (in TFA) and originate and receive calls. And if I forget my phone at home, calls to the phone are automatically routed to the watch. (This was my primary use case, as I'm often leaving my phone either at home or at work.) I keep wifi turned off, as it seems an unnecessary battery drain, but 3g and bluetooth turned on.
I've seen several Apple watches on co-worker's wrists, but didn't realize they're still anchored to their owner's iphones. How quaint.
When these new GSM-capable watches come out, the marketing could be entertaining. Let's see if Apple tries to make people believe they invented the concept.
Which reminds me, I have to make note of the day the new watches come out, so I can avoid the starbucks next to the local AT&T store. On release day there's always a crowd in the parking lot waiting for the store to open, and this makes it tough to get coffee. I don't know what Apple puts in their kool-aid, but they are the undisputed masters at developing mindshare.
Nah! I'd rather put my vagina hat back on and go around whining that I only get paid 70% of what men do.
I tried that, but people kept asking about the beard.
The answer is our work with nuclear fusion will go horribly awry and sterilize all men. Hooray!
I think I read that novel. Didn't it have a talking dog?
At least with AI the initial goals were hit and our definition changed to some degree. "AI will play chess and win!"... "Ok, it can play chess really really well but that's only because it can see every move and choose the best one not because it is intelligent.".
Exactly. One could argue that seeing every possible move and choosing the best one isn't really AI. That's just tic-tac-to with more decision branches and faster processors.
> You mean all those Indian managers, who once get a management spot, only hire other Indians?
Wow. I mean, wow. It's not just me seeing this? Previous job, my US native manager was pushed out by a remarkably aggressive Indian manager here on H1B. He grew the department (then numbering 18) to 26, with every single new hire being another H1B worker. He was openly hostile to employees who were locals, (even bragging in meetings of his intention to improve his budget by filling vacancies with workers from India) resulting in most of them leaving on their own. Backfill was H1B employees only. By the time I left, it was a sea of orange badges, with only three locals still working there.
It didn't occur to me that this could be the norm, not an edge case.
> "employers as the best judge of the employee merits they need to succeed and grow the U.S. economy"
"employee merits" being, cheap labor willing to work killer hours, terrified of being fired. I mean, what employer wouldn't want that?
"grow the U.S. economy" being, grow the net worth of US-based companies.
I think "a firehose of stupid" is my new favorite phrase. I'd like to borrow that.
True story: A friend of mine had been trash talking Facebook practically since it came out, with (admittedly legitimate) criticisms "how much thought does it take to click like? Or forward a meme?" and "people haven't even met most of their 'friends', and everyone is pretending to be something they're not" and other things. My counter is that if you're doing all that, you're using Facebook wrong. I use my account as a blog, and write (in my own words, not "copy and paste this so others can enjoy it") about observations I've made through life, like the loud, painfully metrosexual prick in the line ahead of me at Starbucks with the outrageously complicated drink order, (happened twice to me and once to my daughter -- not sure if it was the same guy or if this was a fad) or more personal things like my daughter's ferret, who loves to dance on my keyboard, leading me to discover Lightroom shortcuts I had no idea existed. I also tend to preview photos on facebook before offering them for sale.
So anyway, in general, if most of your Facebook actions are just clicking on stuff, then yeah, you're part of the problem.
The punch line is that the friend mentioned above recently confessed that he actually did have a facebook account, but didn't want to admit it. He friended me, and... his account was absolutely everything he had been complaining about. Memes. Pictures of his food. Close to zero original content. Lots of photos, but zero photos that he had taken himself, zero photos of any part of his life. Fake name. Fake stats. Network packets cried out in vain as they were forced to transport content of no import whatsoever.
I'm reminded of the old Walt Kelly quote.
"The joke in the field is that the male contraceptive has been five years away for the last 40 years"
Did anyone else immediately think of nuclear fusion?
but it keeps getting propagated, because people want to believe that they are privy to some bit of important knowledge that nobody else knows.
Dude, I've been saying for years that this is the reason behind almost every stupid conspiracy theory ever.
It's good to see that others might feel the same way.
I agree. But it's more than just conspiracy theories. Every article of the type "My teeth were falling out until I found this amazing trick! Dentists don't want you to know this! Don't use toothpaste to brush your teeth! Make this recipe at home for healthy teeth! Watch your cavities disappear overnight!" Where the formula is one part Windex to two parts possum fat. Most of them are relatively harmless (although possum fat tastes terrible) but they all have one thing in common: (a) they are generally ineffective, and (b) the "hook" is the mark's secret inner conviction that he knows some key fact nobody else knows.
So my facebook friends are all soaking their bunions in a mixture of apple juice and kerosene, using a toenail embedded in axle grease to ward away yellowjackets, and I despair for humanity.
Maybe I need new friends.
Others have already mentioned that Facebook could (and probably will to a certain extent) use this device to push their own agenda, but leave that for now. The interesting thing to me is that downright hoaxes are still ignored, which seems to argue in favor of the "push their own agenda" argument.
As just one example, a repeat offender is the "Don't use 911!!!" hoax that tells the (demonstrably false) story about how an innocent young lady was saved from a horrible fate by remembering how her parents told her to dial 112 instead of 911 from her car when someone was following her. All went well and the perp was arrested and the girl escaped unharmed all because she did what her parents told her and dialed 112.
This is in the US, where 112 may work in some metropolitan areas as a courtesy to visitors from Europe, but isn't an official emergency number. It may happen to get you to emergency services in New York or Miami, but won't get you anywhere in Perrysburg, Ohio. The article is a dangerous hoax, but it keeps getting propagated, because people want to believe that they are privy to some bit of important knowledge that nobody else knows.
The point being, if Facebook was so concerned about their site being used to propagate false news, where the hell are the "alternate articles" calling this a hoax? If you google "call 112 instead of 911" the first 20 or so hits are articles pleading with you to not fall for this.
I mean WTF, Facebook? Is debunking some story about Ivanka's charities more important than calling the wrong emergency services number in an emergency?
> Charter came up with new prices and packages, and many customers saw their bills rise when their previous discounts expired
So, just like Comcast, then.
I think this is stu... wait, I got a Facebook alert. Back in a sec.
> an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV
Yeah, yeah, I've seen the spam. And the infomercials, and the ads in Facebook. All pretending like this is, like, a new and wonderful thing that people have just discovered.
Someone said it just the other day. I despair for humanity.
(It so happen, in our area, that most of the local channels originate from a huge cluster of antennas on a nearby mountain top. A farmhouse-grade TV antenna picks up 20+ channels including sidebands. I guess that millennials don't know this shouldn't be surprising.)
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don't mind being a few years behind, buy an Android.
Bleh. Caveat: I happen to carry both -- an iphone work phone and an android as my personal phone. Side bar: The *only* good thing about the iphone's skinny, slippery, difficult to grasp anodized case is that it slips into the belt pouch next to the android phone without too much shoving. Further caveat: I make part of my living through photography.
Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, stop fooling yourself and get a real camera.
Yes, the iphone takes good photos in bars, it recognizes faces and does some tricks with focusing and does a good job calculating average exposure and doing automatic noise reduction. And you can do cute things like add floppy ears and cat noses. As long as you're sharing to an app that ios knows about, sharing is relatively easy once you learn the tricks. For most people, this is good enough. Thus, "The end of the DSLR for most people". Remember that once upon a time, "most people" thought 110 film was great because the cameras were small and easy to carry around. "Most people" wouldn't recognize bokeh if it was biting them on the neck. The iphone, and let's face it, any midrange-or-higher Android phone already does better at photography than what most people need. But let's be real here: That's very different from "truly caring about great photography".
So yeah, my next camera is totally gonna be an iphone. No wait, it isn't. Because I really *do* care about great photography.