|
Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
.I rarely get blown away by a demo, but this is one you gotta see. Based on this InfoWorld review (which admittedly looks like a demo), the Dex docking station.
Also see the longer review at Engadget.
[See the full post at: Samsung Dex – what Continuum should’ve been]
This will usher in a whole new age of BYOD shenanigans. I don’t think I can burden one more step toward “Transcendent Man”.
Employers Must Obtain Employee Consent For BYOD Program
III. The Order Denying Class Certification Must be Reversed Because the Court Made Erroneous Legal Assumptions.
When ruling, the trial court assumed that an employee does not suffer an expenditure or loss under section 2802 if his or her cell phone charges were paid for by a third person, or if the employee did not purchase a different cell phone plan because of cell phone usage at work. In addition, the trial court assumed that liability could not be determined without an inquiry into the specifics of each class members’ cell phone plan. As we discuss, each of these legal assumptions was erroneous.
(5) If an employee is required to make work-related calls on a personal cell phone, then he or she is incurring an expense for purposes of section 2802. It does not matter whether the phone bill is paid for by a third person, or at all. In other words, it is no concern to the employer that the employee may pass on the expense to a family member or friend, or to a carrier that has to then write off a loss. It is irrelevant whether the employee changed plans to accommodate work-related cell phone usage. Also, the details of the employee’s cell phone plan do not factor into the liability analysis. Not only
1145
*1145 does our interpretation prevent employers from passing on operating expenses, it also prevents them from digging into the private lives of their employees to unearth how they handle their finances vis-a-vis family, friends and creditors. To show liability under section 2802, an employee need only show that he or she was required to use a personal cell phone to make work-related calls, and he or she was not reimbursed. Damages, of course, raise issues that are more complicated.
(6) Because the trial court made erroneous legal assumptions, the denial of class certification must be reversed.
All other issues are moot.
COLIN COCHRAN, Plaintiff and Appellant
the California Second District Court of Appeal held that California labor law requires employers to reimburse employees who are required to use their personal cell phones for work-related purposes for a reasonable percentage of their cellphone bill. The court held that the reimbursement obligation is triggered even if employees do not incur any additional expense.
This may be a signal of what’s to come in other states given that California isn’t the only state with laws that require reimbursement for all necessary expenditures incurred by employees in discharging their work duties. Plus, even in states with no such statutes, the argument will be made that the absence of reimbursement is an impermissible wage deduction.
The answer is that reimbursement is always required. Otherwise, the employer would receive a windfall because it would be passing its operating expenses onto the employee. Thus, to be in compliance with section 2802, the employer must pay some reasonable percentage of the employee’s cell phone bill. Because of the differences in cell phone plans and work-related scenarios, the calculation of reimbursement must be left to the trial court and parties in each particular case
Back in the early-1930s, renowned economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that technical innovations and rising productivity would mean that advanced country workers would be able to work only 15 hours and still enjoy rising living standards
Faced with a peasantry that didn’t feel like playing the role of slave, philosophers, economists, politicians, moralists and leading business figures began advocating for government action. Over time, they enacted a series of laws and measures designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support.
Mass Effect : Quotes
Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays. Our technology. By using it, your civilization develops along the paths we desire.
Speaking of ‘The Singularity’; I’d like to throw one now, followed by a “Warp”. 
This looks like the first steps towards a pocket computer/phone that has a universal dock workstation capability. Why own a computer and a phone, when you can have one CPU that does it all???
I have been wondering for years when technology like this would become available!
Very cool
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
I’m sure it’s geek-tastic. Yawn 
Windows 10 Home 22H2, Acer Aspire TC-1660 desktop + LibreOffice, non-techie
From my perspective, there are two major drawbacks:
a/ this is going to be too expensive – not as a one device replacing all others but as something that you carry in your pocket; I am always willing to pay max 200 USD for a smartphone as I do not use any cases, do not care too much where I leave it and drop it from time to time – I cannot imaging having a phone that costs 800 USD or so. It would have to be military-grade drop-, water-, whatever proof.
b/ it will be never (in a foreseeable future) as powerful as a desktop computer – due to battery constraints and of course as smartphones get faster, desktops get faster too…
A smaller drawback – freedom of choice (although it closes down in the Windows environment as well), I will not give up on building my own setups with own selected parts and phones are all quite similar in the end – suited for general use, not any specific ones.
And then of course comes upgradeability – you don’t have to throw away your computer, you just replace certain parts. But people bought the laptops concept, so I suppose this “enthusiast” group is relatively small.
It does have some market potential, but will not replace desktop.
What I find rather suprising is: “Samsung also teamed up with Microsoft to optimize apps like Word, PowerPoint and Excel for Dex.”. If those 3 start to be a real alternative to desktop Office, Windows will be doomed completely for home users, I seem not to understand the direction MS is going. Maybe Xbox integration + mobile apps means they’ll try to move gamers to consoles and regular users to smartphones, concentrating on enterprises only?
I really wish some BIG company take care about home Linux, which seems to be the “new Windows” as it once was.
The main problem with Mobile OS like Android, is that you cannot do a simple clean reinstall of the OS on the smartphones, eg when something goes wrong with the OS or phones = Planned Obsolescence. With desktop OS, you can. With smartphones/Mobile OS, you can only do a Factory Reset or System Refresh.
So, Mobile OS that’s been modified to work as Desktop OS like the Samsung DEX or Win 10 Mobile Continuum, is not a long term solution for most consumers, ie they cannot be used for about 10 years, unlike an OEM Windows desktop/laptop computer.
Through the work of interested private software developers, some high-end Android smartphones that have been rooted(to have administrator privileges) can be ROM-flashed or clean reinstalled with their Android Mobile OS. IOW, this facility is not available for nearly all low-end and mid-end Android smartphones.
Walled-off iPhones from Apple are totally out of the question, eg can’t even be rooted/jail-breaked.
It may be pointless to merge the Mobile OS with the Desktop OS since their business/money-making focus are different, ie the OEM have purposely made smartphones running Mobile OS to become like disposables with a lifespan of about 2 years.
I have a friend who has a cupboardful of obsoleted smartphones and tablets, ie since 2007.
On top of that, Mobile OS are mostly for telecommunication, mobile and casual use, ie not for doing serious professional work in the office, studio, factory floor, etc.
I have just about concluded that Windows as a tool to do work is a fading thing. Windows 7 is the last one of its kind. I regard Windows 8 and 10 as a completely different kind of computer that is not really designed to be used as a tool. Most of us have grown accustomed to completing useful tasks using a tool called Windows. Microsoft which I was indeed enthralled with for decades, has turned into a dying business grabbing every thing it could, and has totally lost sight of me and all the other customers.
So, I have begun to give a lot of thought to what I will do next.
That leads me to be interested in Android. Ubuntu and the various flavours of Unix are just not for most people, like me. Apple is a distinct possibility, but I still have a tough time dealing with the intrusive and controlling and thus limiting aspects of the Apple world. Apple is indeed what Microsoft envies and would like to be, but Apple is much more refined and customer focused.
So, I am with you, Woody. This looks like it could be my next interest.
CT
And also within W8.1 :
SSD optimisation (not in W7) no spinners on any of our systems, only used for external backups.
Integrated support for 3D printing (if you have a 3D printer 
)
USB 3.0 support out the box
High-DPI and DPI Scaling Support – for ultra-high resolution displays.
Classic Shell only uses 2.5mb of memory when running so, it’s a winner to get rid of the vile tile interface.
Although I still have/use W7 pro as a failsafe system
Nice article Here for your consideration..
I’d previously tried a method of using W7’s TaskMan on W10, while it was mostly fine, the ability to extend the timescale was missing.
Thanks for the Process Hacker 2 hint, the System Information window fits the bill pretty well
If you uninstall Metro (takes like 30 seconds and removes 95% of them)…
Isn’t it beautiful?
EDIT Use “Select File” to add image, so it can show
I’m a hardliner when it comes to UIs. I am of the opinion that there is nothing better on the desktop PC than the traditional pull-down menu bar, and that the hamburger menu is one of the great scourges of mankind. To me, Win 2k was the peak of UI design. I hated XP until I tried it and saw how easy it was to get back the Classic appearance.
XP was the last version of Windows I could make acceptable with only Microsoft tools (regedit.exe being one of them… lots and lots of registry edits). Windows 7 was okay with the Classic theme, but that locked out the DWM and all of its benefits, and the GDI-drawn themes on 7 (like Classic) seem far more prone to tearing than with XP, and I hate tearing too.
I solved that with an Aero Classic theme, suitably modified to fit my requirements (though I gloss over that, it involved a lot of work), but that brought up all kinds of Windows 7 “features” that I had to eliminate (like mouseover thumbnails of running programs on the taskbar). Windows 7 by itself would have driven me crazy– while it was a lot closer to being usable as-is than anything that has come afterward, it still needed a lot of work to get it where it felt like “my” computer.
When I decided to do as so many people like Radosuaf and Noel (and many others on the other sites I visit) suggest, to try 8.1 suitably modified, I was not sure it could be made acceptable to me. I’m enough of a UI purist that even gutted and modified to the hilt, I couldn’t stomach Win 10.
When I first installed 8.1 a few weeks or months ago, I was pretty baffled by the tiles– though I knew that they would be there. I had all of my modifications at the ready… Classic Shell to dispatch the tiled Start Screen and the Charms bar hot corners, New Old Explorer to get rid of the ribbon and “files stored on this computer,” 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to kill the mouseover thumbnails, a bunch of .reg files I’d created or downloaded before, a theme UI patcher to allow my custom theme to work, plus the theme itself. I also added a replacement for the terrible stock Win 8.1 “which app do you want to use” dialog from WinAero and all of the classic Win 7 games, also from WinAero.
After throwing all that in, it looked like Windows again. The password dialog upon boot is still Metro-ish, as are the “this file is preventing your PC from shutting down” and the Ctrl-alt-del menu, while that does bother me a little, I only have to look at those a short time. At least I’ve managed to choose a color that closely matches my theme for the background.
Once I’m authenticated, it’s my same desktop, start menu, taskbar (including the start button), theme, etc., as with 7. If you didn’t notice that the titlebar captions are now centered instead of left justified, and that the up arrow (which was supplied by Classic Shell in 7, as it was missing), refresh button, and the dropmarker are gray instead of the more colorful Windows 7 versions, it looks identical to 7.
That, of course, was not enough. The apps had to go, even though they were already removed from all the menus and essentially irrelevant. My PC is not a phone, and it runs programs. Apps are self-contained, scaled-down programs that are purposefully limited so that they work within the confines of the mobile environment. This is not a mobile environment, so why would I accept all of the limitations made to accommodate them? Their very presence is offensive; it’s a reminder of Microsoft’s goal to use me as a step-stool they can stand on to try to grab some other market (mobile) that I could not care less about.
I found a script online (and of course I vetted it first before running it) that uses the powerful but tiny command line tool install_wim_tweak to remove the apps… all of them. The hard to kill ones (Camera, OneDrive, Windows Store) are gone too, and there has not been the tiniest downside to it. The system is flawless… stable, reliable, quick.
In terms of UI, I still rate modified 8.1 a step behind 7 because of the places the metro interface still appears, but in functional terms, it’s a little better than 7. The file copy collision dialog is much improved… the chkdsk function (I use the GUI, not the command line) is much faster and can do some repairs from within Windows rather than requiring a reboot, and the file locking semantics seem a lot less, shall we say, over-exuberant than those in Win 7 (which often left files locked long after the programs that locked them were closed, which is why I always installed Unlocker… I have it in 8 also, but I don’t use it nearly as much as I had in 7). Bootup is far faster on my laptop (Core 2 Duo with Samsung 850 Evo SSD), though on my much more powerful desktop, I don’t notice any difference (it also boots from a SSD).
None of those in and of themselves would have made me go to 8.1, but those extra three years of security support… that was what did it.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)
Out of curiosity, what do you see when you run, in PowerShell, this command on your Win 8.1 system?
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Select Name
This is what I have on my Win 8.1 workstation still:
I gather from what you’ve written above that your system is pretty stable.
I don’t think the remaining Apps I have in Win 8.1 impact anything except disk space, of which I have plenty to spare, and my system is supremely stable, so I need to be very careful about what else I tweak. Still, something in the back of my mind wants a clean break from all Apps entirely; I feel very much the same as you do about “toy” software.
FWIW, on a Win 10 “Creator’s Update” test system I have already managed to eliminate all the Apps except two items necessary to run Settings, and the system hangs together just fine. I developed my own Windows10ReTweaker script to do it. I will probably always have more to add to it, but it re-tweaks a new Windows 10 release pretty quickly back to the level I prefer.
-Noel
Once I’m authenticated, it’s my same desktop, start menu, taskbar (including the start button), theme, etc., as with 7.
Well, actually I like W8.1 interface much more than the one in W7. It had been great 7 years using it, but feels a bit dated for me. I’ve been using Android for quite a long time and I’ve grown fond of flat interface. However this may sound, I like W10 look even more…
I try spend as little time as possible in the operating system and I also try to keep it as lean as possible (without spending too much time on doing it, of course), which basically means I do not install any 3rd party programs to tweak the system (only exception being Bing Desktop – not really 3rd party – as I love Bing wallpapers). My tweaking of fresh W8.1 install takes less than 10 minutes: removing all Metro apps via Powershell, getting rid of unused shortcuts (IE on taskbar, Camera app in the Start screen etc.), few clicks in the taskbar menu and that’s it. After that, what I really don’t like about W8.1 is the Start screen instead of menu (Win+X helps not to use it too much) and charms bar (but not to the extent I’d do anything about it).
Glad you like 8.1 in the end. Welcome to the club :).
If you uninstall the UWP apps that can be easily removed
And you do not install the telemetry patches
And you use Classic Shell as a User interface….
I have found Win8.1 to be stable and trouble free to use.
I run special software. MeetControl Diving software and Daktronics control for scoring the sport of diving (Olympic, not SCUBA). USB to RS232 adapter. With no problem. Plus all the usual stuff.
I still use Win7 as well. But Win8.1 will hopefully give me three more years.
Apple is Unix now …
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
CT – I think several companies see an opening with W10 appearing to throw home/SOHO users under the bus. When well known companies begin to throw their weight on non-Windows options for home/SOHO users Windows could be in trouble. I see these efforts as preliminary efforts to exploit the opening. Right they are showing some working prototypes for buzz with potential manufacture a year out.
I have had a close look at 8.1. To me, 8.1 is like someone has taken 7 and thrown it up against a wall, then put it back together again using different names for the same thing out of some kind of a mean spirit, and re-purposing the entire system into a cell phone touch interface, now designed to sell something called Apps, which I have no interest in. I know people have found ways around the clumsy interface, but why put up with it, when 7 is so much better. To me, 10 is 8.1 on steroids — much worse.
I hated 8.1, it got in the way of everything I was familiar with in Win 7. It is the main reason I jumped on Windows 10, before the free offer expired (and it was a year old).
I think as far as user experience goes, Windows 7 was what Vista could have been. And Windows 10 is analogous to that, in the sense that it is what 8.1 could have been.
I really like the UI experience in Windows 10. I can work with it just as well, or better than Win 7.
The only downside to Win 10 is the nagging questions about telemetry, and the update issues. But I have the Pro edition, so I have used the group policy editor to tame most of the annoyances. I use a local account, and have disabled the store apps, Cortana web search, etc.
So far, so good. It is probably the most stable, highest performance Windows OS so far!
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
So, if you buy the expensive version and really know how to change the default structure of the OS, you can manage to make it work for you. Effectively, you have figured out how to make a product work for you in spite of its design, and that may not be for long?
CT
It’s really fairly easy to clean up and tweak. And once you’ve done it, MS doesn’t undo your changes with every update like they do with Win10. The only third-party s/w I use is Classic Shell.
You do have to watch the updates for what MS tries to add, but then you have to do that for Win7 as well.
I have found it stable and hassle free.
Effectively, you have figured out how to make a product work for you in spite of its design
That’s an astute observation, and very accurate.
It’s shades of gray though… It’s been necessary to make every version of Microsoft operating system ever released into something different than what’s delivered out of the box in order to get the best of it.
For a long while it has been becoming more and more involved to tweak and augment the OS to really get the most power out of it.
I’ve written eBooks about doing so, based on a big set of notes created from times going all the way back to DOS (yeah, I’ve been around a while). Each new version brought unprecedented new amounts of tweaking needed to get an acceptable functionality for serious computing – you know, the kind of computing needed to create things, to engineer new things…
Just as an example, I had a bit over 100 pages of things that needed to be done to Windows 7. When they were applied, it was a good bit better than the best tweaked Vista.
Windows 8.1 required about 140 pages, but the result ended up slightly better than Windows 7.
I started on a Windows 10 book, but got to about 180 pages and quit. Why? Because the next version of Windows 10 came out, and I had to redo much, and there were new things that needed work. But the most important thing was this: When all the dust settled, it wasn’t ANY better than the best tweaked Win 8.1! For the first time in history a new release couldn’t be tweaked and augmented into something better or more powerful or more sophisticated than its predecessors.
If you don’t want all the “new” application level stuff Microsoft is doing – i.e., coding Apps and adding cloud integration – then the OS has stopped improving.
I’ve just gone through a Creator’s upgrade on my lean, mean, highly-tuned desktop-only Windows 10 test system, which achieved about 99% of what a well-tweaked Win 8.1 does… It went from running 41 processes to support an empty desktop to 105 processes!!
I’ve been re-tweaking and trimming all evening. I’ve got it down to 77 processes, and it is once again a lean desktop-centric system.
Thing is, I lost things in the process…
The ability to re-theme my desktop (because 3rd party tools are still being re-developed for Creator’s update compatibility), there are bugs in various places, and it doesn’t seem as stable.
Extra work for no gain isn’t moving the world forward.
On my list of things to do still is to restore a snapshot I made with the Apps still installed and evaluate whether any useful gains have been made in that quarter.
-Noel
So, if you buy the expensive version and really know how to change the default structure of the OS, you can manage to make it work for you. Effectively, you have figured out how to make a product work for you in spite of its design, and that may not be for long?
Exactly! That’s what I’m always saying – in the end it is possible to work with Win 10 – it’s just not worth the hassle when you can get 95% of your needed usability with 8.1 with 5% of the effort you’d have to put to maintain W10 in a fairly acceptable state.
…you can get 95% of your needed usability with 8.1
And (assuming you keep yourself in charge of updates), Windows 8.1 isn’t going to be changed out from under you. That’s the biggest deal IMO.
Unfortunately, from what I’m seeing in Win 10 version 1703, Microsoft is still heading away from the thoughtful designs that once made Windows great.
I’m evaluating the version 1703 Apps right now, and I’ve got to tell you, so far I’m not seeing improvements, especially not in actual usability. It’s as though the App programmers are trying to do as little as humanly possible and still take home a paycheck.
Besides the issue listed in the image above, who thinks that a programmer would prefer the key layout shown for PROGRAMMER mode vs, say, something like this?
C D E F 8 9 A B 4 5 6 7 0 1 2 3
Hover over the MS button and you get ToolTip help. Hover over the QWORD button and… Nothing.
I tried the Maps App… Once allowed to talk to a number of different virtualearth.net sites online, I see a map of the world. But zooming in/out gets what one could only call a visually messy animation even though I have a workstation class machine with a good GPU. I prefer a dark background, yet the dark map theme is hard to use because it’s lacking contrast and is almost overwhelmed by the bright Search box, which doesn’t conform to the light/dark settings. The map label text is darned difficult to see! I thought Windows since version 8 was supposed to be all about text rendering perfection, yet we have this (contrasted against Google maps rendered by Internet Explorer):
All that work to provide the same thing as is being done by a web page already, but not quite as well.
Perhaps the thought that they can’t do things as well as the competition may finally be occurring to Microsoft because I can find no Weather App at all. Apparently Weather has been dropped.
Microsoft has had 2 years to polish these Apps and make them the stars of their new UWP programming environment – supposedly the future of Windows – yet we have obvious mediocrity remaining. Someone please tell me again why the UWP is supposed to be the next big thing, if this is the best MICROSOFT can do with it.
And even the desktop… My auto-hiding TaskBar now pulls down BEHIND my clock application. Who thinks THAT is the right behavior? It’s as though Microsoft thinks it’s okay to reset everything back to the 1980s.
Microsoft’s Marketing people (b?) must be pretty frustrated that they really don’t actually have anything good to sing about.
-Noel
I asked the system to check for updates yesterday afternoon and it turned up none. It’s probably because I’m testing using a local account. I saw elsewhere that a .11 update was available; I’ve not applied it manually. I’ll get around to doing that.
My firewall settings probably blocked the store from updating anything.
In continuation of a prior conversation we had, b, the Calculator App appears to be no more functional than before at actually being useful. But hey, thanks for trying.
Apps by this point – 5+ years after having been conceived – should be knocking our socks off. Instead, my socks are only a bit loose around the ankles.
-Noel
“<span style=”color: #000000; font-family: ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;”>Effectively, you have figured out how to make a product work for you in spite of its design, and that may not be for long?” – The problem with W10 is MS effectively releases a newish OS about every 8 months that is at best a beta release. There is no long term version (install and use for x years). It seems like they are trying to emulate rapid release cycle of Ubuntu (a new, formal version with new version numbers every 6 months) without an LTS version being periodically released (Ubuntu every 2 years with 5 years of support). However MS forces everyone to eventually install the newest version which risks breaking the install. Ubuntu does not automatically force users to update from on version to the next and for many recommended strategy is use an LTS version and upgrade every other LTS release (about every 4 years). </span>
Windows 8.1 will no longer be supported after January 10, 2023.
What then?
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
The question that really needs asking isn’t tied to how long it will be supported. OSs don’t just magically stop working on end of support.
The question is more like “How long will older versions of Windows be useful?”
The crystal ball gets cloudy… Personally I’m not seeing enough good things in Microsoft’s current direction with Windows to make me think Microsoft is the right company to focus on going forward. They have shot themselves in the proverbial foot by essentially turning their backs on serious OS development and business use and focusing on toys (Apps and mobile computing). I’m sure someone internally suggested they continue with a real “Pro” edition, but was shot down. Now we see the results of that – an OS that has just stagnated w/regard to getting complex, meaningful work done.
Realistically, no business wants “Windows as a Service”, which seems to me to be just jargon for “we’re unable to continue doing good, solid OS improvement, so we’re throwing a smokescreen over our implosion“.
What’s new in the “Creator’s Update” that’s really going to help business do things better? 3D-animated PowerPoint slides? LOL
Rest assured that most every IT person on the face of the Earth is presently looking it over thinking, “How can I redo all the things I did before so that we can keep working with this…”
-Noel
You are 100% correct. Exactly my thoughts. I believe we are no using the last Windows OS of any real use. I intend to use Win7 for a lot of years to come. I have lost interest in following new computer designs because I do not expect to buy another Windows computer.
I cannot imagine any clear thinking IT manager/director in a modern corporation or large enterprise could consider Windows 10. I am quite sure that if I presented such a plan to the businesses that I previously worked at/with, I would be either laughed out of the board room or fired.
CT
Apps are basically non-existent, W10M is virtually dead, and gaming… From another forum:
“I played forza horizon 3 a lot in both 1607 and 1703. There was no difference in performance between builds.”
“What about Game Mode? I’d expect Forza to be among the games that get biggest gains?” (Forza is MS game and also UWP)
“It’s on by default. It might as well not have existed because it didn’t make any difference in my experience. Neither smoother nor reduction in fps drops.”
But we have Paint 3D :).
Donations from Plus members keep this site going. You can identify the people who support AskWoody by the Plus badge on their avatars.
AskWoody Plus members not only get access to all of the contents of this site -- including Susan Bradley's frequently updated Patch Watch listing -- they also receive weekly AskWoody Plus Newsletters (formerly Windows Secrets Newsletter) and AskWoody Plus Alerts, emails when there are important breaking developments.
Notifications
