I have a Samsung Gear Fit 2 and I was incredibly disappointed with its inability to connect to anything that wasn't a Samsung phone. I figured we live in a connected age of technology where I could synchronize the data my watch collected with my PC... but nope. Asus tablet? Nope. Apple tablet? Nope. The internet? Nope. To get it to do anything useful I need a Samsung phone and this wasn't advertised on the box or the site before I purchased it.
So I have months of data on my smart watch that's entirely useless so I had to start punching it into Excel spreadsheets at the end of every day. Insanity. I regret the purchase.
As far as using it to manually track my exercise as though it were 2007, it goes for about a day and a half before it needs to be charged which doesn't seem very good in my opinion.
Now with Dark Mirror, is Twilight Zone really relevant?
Assuming you mean Black Mirror, I would think that the Twilight Zone would entirely relevant for those of us who feel that Black Mirror is terrible. I'm a huge Twilight Zone fan, both the black and white original and the revival, as well as a huge Outer Limits fan, both the black and white original and the revival.
In my opinion the three shows have their own style, the latter having an interweaving story within stories during it's revival, while Black Mirror is less 'Twilight Zone' and more 'Ham Fisted Juvenile Message' than it is enjoyable sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, there were a few episodes of Black Mirror that were actually brilliant from a sci-fi perspective but the majority of episodes are more about "The Message" than it is about sci-fi or being clever (like Twilight Zone).
Where have you been working? Every high tech company (software shops) I've worked for
Part of corporate IT consulting gigs evaluating security concerns for various industries ranging from manufacturing, large health care facilities, engineering firms, etc.. The majority of employees did not work on their own time outside of a few engineering managers that did it because they loved their job.
However I've been at some firms, often legal, medical, or engineering, where minimal time wasting occurs (outside of people conducting job searches prior to asking for a raise or leaving their employer for another job). I feel these locations have employees with an appropriate level of allocated work, where there's no time to waste browsing Facebook. I expect these locations have effective managers or actual managers whereas the sites occupied by time-wasters are poorly managed.
However like you I have worked unnecessarily late hours when I was in IT and I think we do experience situations that are entirely unlike what most people experience and this is not common, nor should it be expected unless people are paid more. I feel with how managed services and globalization has blown up that this is going to happen much less as IT is available on-the-clock in a different time zone.
I've been reading western topics like this for a good 15 years now and, quite frankly, I don't believe North Americans are actually working more but rather they're occupying more of their time with work because they're working less.
For a good span of my life I had worked in IT and had to spend a good chunk of my time evaluating web logs for management and I would easily say that the majority of office workers with PCs would waste a huge chunk of time browsing Facebook, forums, baby sites, wedding sites, stock sites, local news sites, sports sites, dating sites, etc., etc. Hell, plenty of people paid their electric, gas, credit card, etc., bills at work as though they didn't have the internet at home... and the porn. I can't count the number of men that had porn stashes on their computers.
Certainly the amount of time wasn't consistent across the board and for some of these folks it was only 15 - 30 minutes a day on someone else's dime devoted to personal browsing but for many it was up to 2 hours. I'd say the average was an hour. And what else could they be doing at work? Are they conducting personal affairs over the phone?
The point I'm making has less to do with how pervasive internet slacking is in work environments that use computers but to question how many people are suffering because they're doing too little work at work?
foreign (and even domestic) intruders don't bother looking for misdirected ports.
This is horribly incorrect and I hope you're not responsible for putting production servers behind a 'misdirected port' as there are plenty of port scanners that will identify RDP, SSH, etc., on non-standard ports and will attempt to bruteforce them with common name dictionary attacks for the username and whatever it is they're doing with passwords.
I have an RDP honeypot setup on one of my home IPs so I can observe the behaviours of trojans, hackers, etc., and with my RDP hosted on a port higher than 10,000, I have a scrolling log of people attempting to get in. Within the past hour I have an IP from Russia in the 80.255.80.0/21 subnet, another IP in a smaller Islamabad educational subnet, and someone in a/24 Sweden network. There's plenty more but that's all I felt like looking up with an APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE.
I don't disagree that changing the port will decrease the frequency by which you'll be polled considering that most of the trojans are specifically focused on port 3389. Furthermore, changing the port does nothing when a person is compromised by malware that pulls the information from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default, of which there are plenty of infections that propagate via this method.
Opening up RDP on any port for any business server is grossly incompetent unless you have 2FA, and even then I'd rather have it behind a VPN.
While I'm reading some negativity in the comments section concerning this delay, Apple should be applauded as they're undoubtedly coming up with a progressive device eschewing the archaic components cobbled together for your grandparents 'speakers', like the speaker cone, the magnet, and the voice coil.
As every Apple user knows, you never update to the latest Mac OS or iOS release when it first comes out due to the sometimes insurmountable issues you might face (like lost data). However this one seems to be the worst, the primary issue being the inability for an iPhone or iPad to connect to a large number of wireless networks because Apple has decided what is a 'safe' network and what is not. This was feedbacked during beta testing in the summer and unfortunately the final release still incorporated this unpatched 'feature' where plenty of folks will go to places like a large hotel and can't stay connected to wifi (connect for a second, get an IP, disconnected) even after setting the new settings like 'always join'. This bug still existed after three iOS 11 patches, undetermined if it was fixed in 11.1. Also serious reports of battery draining as well.
It seems dependant on the location. So far I've had issues at sites that do not have a password on the wifi connection but require additional sign up information. "iOS 11 will no longer allow your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to connect to weak Wi-Fi networks automatically" was how it was worded at another site but in practice I'm seeing it preventing people from connecting to their local wifi.
Not sure if this is a typical Apple 'progressive' feature or a byproduct of bugs but sit long enough at a location with public wifi and listen to the people who upgraded having a powwow trying to figure out how they can connect after upgrading to IOS 11.
Users reported issues during the dev builds earlier in the summer but it seems they've rolled out these 'features' (bugs) regardless and piles of people can't connect to public wifi, especially if it doesn't have a password. There's an auto-join function to override whatever the feature is supposed to represent but it's not working.
Seriously, do Microsoft employees actually use Bing? Back in the day when we had HotBot, WebCrawler, Yahoo, etc., etc., they would all produce independently useful and alternative results. These days, for better or for worse, the only tangible results seem to come from Google. I'm sure there's alternatives but Microsoft is not one of them.
"Hey everyone! Look what we did! We threw Internet Explorer out the window, copied Chrome, added the Windows 8 Metro interface that everyone loves, and we took out all the options!... and if anyone has any feedback, we don't care!"
The fundamental point that both Microsoft and Google are missing with the latest iterations of their browser, is that Internet Explorer offered an alternative to Chrome that gave people more personally configurable options, plenty of corporate configurable options via group policies, and a menu interface that wasn't too complicated. Microsoft decided they'd try to copy Google and made the decision easier. Want to relocate temporary internet files? Nope. Compatibility view? Nope, that's Internet Explorer. Want to fix Edge when this store app breaks, which it often does? Good luck.
I drank the kool aid between the Windows NT 4 / 2000 / XP / Vista / 7 days but these days Microsoft is a company I don't recognize and doesn't recognize its users. This is why Apple computers are popping up everywhere in my periphery, they actually care about the user experience.
Bro, if I could be so bold so as to assume your gender, I'd give you all my mod points if I had them. I came to the comments section specifically to see if anyone had anything funny, snarky, sarcastic, or sardonic to say about UC Berkeley as I was genuinely shocked to hear that anything useful comes out of there. Seriously, I thought UC Berkeley was a liberal arts joke school based on their antics.
I don't know why Google isn't called on this by more people as it seems like it's common knowledge by techies that Google's first hits on a Google search are scam sites attempting to trick you into calling them rather than HP, D-Link, Microsoft, etc.. While the savvy folks on this site would subconsciously skip past these links, seniors are regularly calling these numbers to invite malicious scammers into their computers who then proceed to charge them recurring fees to maintain their computer.
A friend of mine works for a local in-home computer service company and relayed a story of a woman that was paying around $3,000 a year for 'maintenance' from a scammer that started with her calling "D-Link" (I use quotes because it's a Google result not the real D-Link) because her internet provider, Cogeco, advised her to do this due to some UPNP vulnerability. She called them a few years back and was fleeced for years.
Using Google right now, which geolocates me to Google Canada, if I Google search for "HP Phone number" the first hit is Google customer "HP Phone Number - Call (Toll Free) Phone Number - printerhelpdesk.usâZ". That's not Hewlett Packard. âZ
Slashdot headline reads "A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income" yet quoted in the article "The researchers did find that young people - specifically people in their twenties - worked less"
Sooo... yea. I realize Slashdot has become a new social justice platform but c'mon, this is at least the third universal basic income propaganda post of the week and it's certainly stretching the boundaries of legitimate.
"locking down devices" isn't your job but parenting is, which involves a number of responsibilities one of which is moderating what devices you give them with credit card information saved therein.
Whoops, I meant 76.9% did not support basic income but Slashdot doesn't seem to allow me to edit the correction. What Slashdot does a great job of is blocking half the page with a giant advertisement that makes it difficult to scroll and click.
The Slashdot of Today basically comes across as a communist propaganda machine what with so many postings along the lines of "capitalism is bad, robots are taking your job, universal basic income is what everyone wants." Seriously, scroll through today's lists and that's literally what's there.
I say this as the headline leaves out the fact that Switzerland already had a referendum on this topic which lead to a defeat of the proposal. 76.9% were for it, 23.1% were against it. https://www.admin.ch/ch/d/pore...
I don't know how this is even a topic. When I'm at work I'm focused on the job I'm being paid for, not scamming my employer. If I run out of work I find something else to do that's benefiting my employer. I would expect to be fired if I were working for someone else while getting paid by an employer and equally I would fire anyone else who does the same if I were in a position of management.
Haha I'm glad to hear someone else is annoyed with Slashdot's annoying jumbo ad. I installed ad-blockers specifically because of Slashdot, it's the most annoying invasive ad that blocks the text while I scroll.
It tells you a lot about a company when they're more concerned about Fake News (TM) than they are about the advertising revenue they're receiving from a plethora of scammers that regularly bilk less technical folks out of piles of money, specifically seniors looking for phone numbers for well known companies.
That's what I was thinking when I read this post. I can't comprehend that most power users *aren't* using this function. I would stop using a browser entirely if it dropped 'close other tabs' but closing tabs to the right is a fundamental aspect of my work-related browsing.
While LTSB is great in the enterprise, it requires a higher priced VLK to get it. AFAIK it doesn't come with the standard VLK agreement, you have to have the next tier agreement which costs considerably more. I believe in Canadian dollars it's about 3x the amount of the OEM license that comes with a business PC.
That's fine. Then prompt them every now and then to suggest it. Or give them the option to set it to automatically install at 3 AM.
The big problem here is that Microsoft took away a pile of options when they came out with Windows 8 / 10 and haven't learned their lesson. I have an all-in-one in my kitchen and regretted Windows 10 within a few weeks because I'd come down in the morning to read the news while having breakfast and it wanted to update or it was finishing an update from the last time it interrupted me. Or I'd use it in the evening around dinner time and it suddenly rebooted on me for the same reason. It seemed like it was constantly disrupting my ability to use the system because of updates, it was extremely frustrating and since I outright disabled the Windows Update service my life has been peaceful.
Innovative ideas for updates
- Allow you to schedule updates to occur at a specific time.
- Not interrupt you the next time you use your system if that specific time was missed.
- Allow you to update when you shut down your computer.
- Prompt you to update your computer every once in a while.
I believe if you upgrade to Windows 7 you can gain all of those features.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Samsung Gear Fit 2 and I was incredibly disappointed with its inability to connect to anything that wasn't a Samsung phone. I figured we live in a connected age of technology where I could synchronize the data my watch collected with my PC... but nope. Asus tablet? Nope. Apple tablet? Nope. The internet? Nope. To get it to do anything useful I need a Samsung phone and this wasn't advertised on the box or the site before I purchased it.
So I have months of data on my smart watch that's entirely useless so I had to start punching it into Excel spreadsheets at the end of every day. Insanity. I regret the purchase.
As far as using it to manually track my exercise as though it were 2007, it goes for about a day and a half before it needs to be charged which doesn't seem very good in my opinion.
Now with Dark Mirror, is Twilight Zone really relevant?
Assuming you mean Black Mirror, I would think that the Twilight Zone would entirely relevant for those of us who feel that Black Mirror is terrible. I'm a huge Twilight Zone fan, both the black and white original and the revival, as well as a huge Outer Limits fan, both the black and white original and the revival.
In my opinion the three shows have their own style, the latter having an interweaving story within stories during it's revival, while Black Mirror is less 'Twilight Zone' and more 'Ham Fisted Juvenile Message' than it is enjoyable sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, there were a few episodes of Black Mirror that were actually brilliant from a sci-fi perspective but the majority of episodes are more about "The Message" than it is about sci-fi or being clever (like Twilight Zone).
Where have you been working? Every high tech company (software shops) I've worked for
Part of corporate IT consulting gigs evaluating security concerns for various industries ranging from manufacturing, large health care facilities, engineering firms, etc.. The majority of employees did not work on their own time outside of a few engineering managers that did it because they loved their job.
However I've been at some firms, often legal, medical, or engineering, where minimal time wasting occurs (outside of people conducting job searches prior to asking for a raise or leaving their employer for another job). I feel these locations have employees with an appropriate level of allocated work, where there's no time to waste browsing Facebook. I expect these locations have effective managers or actual managers whereas the sites occupied by time-wasters are poorly managed.
However like you I have worked unnecessarily late hours when I was in IT and I think we do experience situations that are entirely unlike what most people experience and this is not common, nor should it be expected unless people are paid more. I feel with how managed services and globalization has blown up that this is going to happen much less as IT is available on-the-clock in a different time zone.
I've been reading western topics like this for a good 15 years now and, quite frankly, I don't believe North Americans are actually working more but rather they're occupying more of their time with work because they're working less.
For a good span of my life I had worked in IT and had to spend a good chunk of my time evaluating web logs for management and I would easily say that the majority of office workers with PCs would waste a huge chunk of time browsing Facebook, forums, baby sites, wedding sites, stock sites, local news sites, sports sites, dating sites, etc., etc. Hell, plenty of people paid their electric, gas, credit card, etc., bills at work as though they didn't have the internet at home... and the porn. I can't count the number of men that had porn stashes on their computers.
Certainly the amount of time wasn't consistent across the board and for some of these folks it was only 15 - 30 minutes a day on someone else's dime devoted to personal browsing but for many it was up to 2 hours. I'd say the average was an hour. And what else could they be doing at work? Are they conducting personal affairs over the phone?
The point I'm making has less to do with how pervasive internet slacking is in work environments that use computers but to question how many people are suffering because they're doing too little work at work?
foreign (and even domestic) intruders don't bother looking for misdirected ports.
This is horribly incorrect and I hope you're not responsible for putting production servers behind a 'misdirected port' as there are plenty of port scanners that will identify RDP, SSH, etc., on non-standard ports and will attempt to bruteforce them with common name dictionary attacks for the username and whatever it is they're doing with passwords.
/24 Sweden network. There's plenty more but that's all I felt like looking up with an APNIC, LACNIC, and RIPE.
I have an RDP honeypot setup on one of my home IPs so I can observe the behaviours of trojans, hackers, etc., and with my RDP hosted on a port higher than 10,000, I have a scrolling log of people attempting to get in. Within the past hour I have an IP from Russia in the 80.255.80.0/21 subnet, another IP in a smaller Islamabad educational subnet, and someone in a
I don't disagree that changing the port will decrease the frequency by which you'll be polled considering that most of the trojans are specifically focused on port 3389. Furthermore, changing the port does nothing when a person is compromised by malware that pulls the information from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default, of which there are plenty of infections that propagate via this method.
Opening up RDP on any port for any business server is grossly incompetent unless you have 2FA, and even then I'd rather have it behind a VPN.
While I'm reading some negativity in the comments section concerning this delay, Apple should be applauded as they're undoubtedly coming up with a progressive device eschewing the archaic components cobbled together for your grandparents 'speakers', like the speaker cone, the magnet, and the voice coil.
As every Apple user knows, you never update to the latest Mac OS or iOS release when it first comes out due to the sometimes insurmountable issues you might face (like lost data). However this one seems to be the worst, the primary issue being the inability for an iPhone or iPad to connect to a large number of wireless networks because Apple has decided what is a 'safe' network and what is not. This was feedbacked during beta testing in the summer and unfortunately the final release still incorporated this unpatched 'feature' where plenty of folks will go to places like a large hotel and can't stay connected to wifi (connect for a second, get an IP, disconnected) even after setting the new settings like 'always join'. This bug still existed after three iOS 11 patches, undetermined if it was fixed in 11.1. Also serious reports of battery draining as well.
It seems dependant on the location. So far I've had issues at sites that do not have a password on the wifi connection but require additional sign up information. "iOS 11 will no longer allow your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to connect to weak Wi-Fi networks automatically" was how it was worded at another site but in practice I'm seeing it preventing people from connecting to their local wifi.
Not sure if this is a typical Apple 'progressive' feature or a byproduct of bugs but sit long enough at a location with public wifi and listen to the people who upgraded having a powwow trying to figure out how they can connect after upgrading to IOS 11.
Users reported issues during the dev builds earlier in the summer but it seems they've rolled out these 'features' (bugs) regardless and piles of people can't connect to public wifi, especially if it doesn't have a password. There's an auto-join function to override whatever the feature is supposed to represent but it's not working.
Seriously, do Microsoft employees actually use Bing? Back in the day when we had HotBot, WebCrawler, Yahoo, etc., etc., they would all produce independently useful and alternative results. These days, for better or for worse, the only tangible results seem to come from Google. I'm sure there's alternatives but Microsoft is not one of them.
None of the Apple executives use Macs these days and it shows.
Not because I don't believe you but because I'd like to send that off to a few Mac zealots I know.
"Hey everyone! Look what we did! We threw Internet Explorer out the window, copied Chrome, added the Windows 8 Metro interface that everyone loves, and we took out all the options! ... and if anyone has any feedback, we don't care!"
The fundamental point that both Microsoft and Google are missing with the latest iterations of their browser, is that Internet Explorer offered an alternative to Chrome that gave people more personally configurable options, plenty of corporate configurable options via group policies, and a menu interface that wasn't too complicated. Microsoft decided they'd try to copy Google and made the decision easier. Want to relocate temporary internet files? Nope. Compatibility view? Nope, that's Internet Explorer. Want to fix Edge when this store app breaks, which it often does? Good luck.
I drank the kool aid between the Windows NT 4 / 2000 / XP / Vista / 7 days but these days Microsoft is a company I don't recognize and doesn't recognize its users. This is why Apple computers are popping up everywhere in my periphery, they actually care about the user experience.
Bro, if I could be so bold so as to assume your gender, I'd give you all my mod points if I had them. I came to the comments section specifically to see if anyone had anything funny, snarky, sarcastic, or sardonic to say about UC Berkeley as I was genuinely shocked to hear that anything useful comes out of there. Seriously, I thought UC Berkeley was a liberal arts joke school based on their antics.
I don't know why Google isn't called on this by more people as it seems like it's common knowledge by techies that Google's first hits on a Google search are scam sites attempting to trick you into calling them rather than HP, D-Link, Microsoft, etc.. While the savvy folks on this site would subconsciously skip past these links, seniors are regularly calling these numbers to invite malicious scammers into their computers who then proceed to charge them recurring fees to maintain their computer.
A friend of mine works for a local in-home computer service company and relayed a story of a woman that was paying around $3,000 a year for 'maintenance' from a scammer that started with her calling "D-Link" (I use quotes because it's a Google result not the real D-Link) because her internet provider, Cogeco, advised her to do this due to some UPNP vulnerability. She called them a few years back and was fleeced for years.
Using Google right now, which geolocates me to Google Canada, if I Google search for "HP Phone number" the first hit is Google customer "HP Phone Number - Call (Toll Free) Phone Number - printerhelpdesk.usâZ". That's not Hewlett Packard. âZ
Slashdot headline reads "A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income" yet quoted in the article "The researchers did find that young people - specifically people in their twenties - worked less"
Sooo... yea. I realize Slashdot has become a new social justice platform but c'mon, this is at least the third universal basic income propaganda post of the week and it's certainly stretching the boundaries of legitimate.
"locking down devices" isn't your job but parenting is, which involves a number of responsibilities one of which is moderating what devices you give them with credit card information saved therein.
Whoops, I meant 76.9% did not support basic income but Slashdot doesn't seem to allow me to edit the correction. What Slashdot does a great job of is blocking half the page with a giant advertisement that makes it difficult to scroll and click.
The Slashdot of Today basically comes across as a communist propaganda machine what with so many postings along the lines of "capitalism is bad, robots are taking your job, universal basic income is what everyone wants." Seriously, scroll through today's lists and that's literally what's there.
I say this as the headline leaves out the fact that Switzerland already had a referendum on this topic which lead to a defeat of the proposal. 76.9% were for it, 23.1% were against it. https://www.admin.ch/ch/d/pore...
I don't know how this is even a topic. When I'm at work I'm focused on the job I'm being paid for, not scamming my employer. If I run out of work I find something else to do that's benefiting my employer. I would expect to be fired if I were working for someone else while getting paid by an employer and equally I would fire anyone else who does the same if I were in a position of management.
Haha I'm glad to hear someone else is annoyed with Slashdot's annoying jumbo ad. I installed ad-blockers specifically because of Slashdot, it's the most annoying invasive ad that blocks the text while I scroll.
It tells you a lot about a company when they're more concerned about Fake News (TM) than they are about the advertising revenue they're receiving from a plethora of scammers that regularly bilk less technical folks out of piles of money, specifically seniors looking for phone numbers for well known companies.
That's what I was thinking when I read this post. I can't comprehend that most power users *aren't* using this function. I would stop using a browser entirely if it dropped 'close other tabs' but closing tabs to the right is a fundamental aspect of my work-related browsing.
While LTSB is great in the enterprise, it requires a higher priced VLK to get it. AFAIK it doesn't come with the standard VLK agreement, you have to have the next tier agreement which costs considerably more. I believe in Canadian dollars it's about 3x the amount of the OEM license that comes with a business PC.
That's fine. Then prompt them every now and then to suggest it. Or give them the option to set it to automatically install at 3 AM.
The big problem here is that Microsoft took away a pile of options when they came out with Windows 8 / 10 and haven't learned their lesson. I have an all-in-one in my kitchen and regretted Windows 10 within a few weeks because I'd come down in the morning to read the news while having breakfast and it wanted to update or it was finishing an update from the last time it interrupted me. Or I'd use it in the evening around dinner time and it suddenly rebooted on me for the same reason. It seemed like it was constantly disrupting my ability to use the system because of updates, it was extremely frustrating and since I outright disabled the Windows Update service my life has been peaceful.
Innovative ideas for updates
- Allow you to schedule updates to occur at a specific time.
- Not interrupt you the next time you use your system if that specific time was missed.
- Allow you to update when you shut down your computer.
- Prompt you to update your computer every once in a while.
I believe if you upgrade to Windows 7 you can gain all of those features.
Or what about us letting us configure the operating system to never disrupt me when I'm using it and 'install updates at shut down'.