This was made around 2009, apparently, but it’s set in the year 2019 so we’re about halfway. Compare it to Microsoft’s 1990s vision of the future.
Life in 2019, a la Microsoft, seems glossier and thinner, but.
News
This is why I buy Macs
You can tell me that PCs are more customisable and I’ll nod but think you a geek. You can tell me that PCs are more powerful and I will take you at your word because you’ve got that kind of face. You can most definitely certainly tell me that PCs are cheaper, there’s no question about that.
But my question is why you’d put yourself through this:
And so I proceeded to install the updates that were available, all 97 of them! I thought I would click to download and install and just leave it running. It stayed on 0% and would not budge. After some digging around I found out that there is a setting turned off by default that can cause this problem so I swiped from the right of the screen, tapped Settings, chose Change PC Settings, tapped Devices and then turned on ‘Download over metered connections’. How did I not spot that immediately? It’s just so obvious…
Anyway, I started to download the updates again and nothing happened until I was greeted with an error code that meant nothing to me. I went to help and support and found out that it meant that other updates were being installed. Well, they were not and I still have not installed one single update.
UPDATE: some new updates appeared which I managed to download, but I now have to provide administrator access to install them. I am logged in as an administrator, but it won’t let me install them because I need to give administrator access despite the fact I am an administrator and that it will not tell me how to do that. For f*cks sake!!!
If you are using Windows 8, I feel sorry for you – Shaun McGill (10 June 2014)
Via The Loop.
A short slice of Jim Carrey
Reportedly actor and comic Jim Carrey just gave an inspirational graduation speech. He did it at the Maharishi University of Management and I’m sure the full thing will be online soon but already we get this.
This is one minute and two seconds from it in which he genuinely is inspirational. I think the top half of the minute is a bit cloying but it becomes sensible and good and strong:
What you can do when you’re alone
This fella, Richard Dunn, was stuck overnight at Las Vegas airport with a smartphone, some duct tape and presumably a copy of Celine Dion’s All By Myself. I’d have napped or read a book, but he made a movie.
All by myself from Richard Dunn on Vimeo.
Swedish government trying six-hour workday
Shudder.
Some government workers in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, are about to embark on an interesting experiment this summer–a six-hour workday, with full pay.
The year-long project, set to officially begin July 1st, will divide some workers into two groups. One enviable test group will work shorter days, while their colleagues will work eight hours each day. It is unclear how this will be decided exactly, but it is an experiment designed to test growing assumptions that fewer, more-focused hours could be a boon for employee productivity. “We’ll compare the two afterwards and see how they differ,” Mat Pilhem, the Left Party deputy mayor of Gothenburg, told The Local. “We hope to get the staff members taking fewer sick days and feeling better mentally and physically after they’ve worked shorter days.”
Via 99U
This is why you are all the time tired
You’re getting up at 5am, you’re stopping around 6pm. Also, you’re stupid. Nah, it can’t be any of that, except maybe the stupid. Time magazine has 14 better reasons, which include ones that I know for sure are what cause me problems:
You have trouble saying ‘no’
People-pleasing often comes at the expense of your own energy and happiness. To make matters worse, it can make you resentful and angry over time. So whether it’s your kid’s coach asking you to bake cookies for her soccer team or your boss seeing if you can work on a Saturday, you don’t have to say yes. Train yourself to say ‘no’ out loud, suggests Susan Albers, a licensed clinical psychologist with Cleveland Clinic and author of Eat.Q.: Unlock the Weight-Loss Power of Emotional Intelligence. “Try it alone in your car,” she says. “Hearing yourself say the word aloud makes it easier to say it when the next opportunity calls for it.”
14 Reasons You’re Tired All the Time – Time magazine (8 June 2014)
Click that link and immediately see a four-word summary of the whole piece. As I’m seeing so often now, it looks like a writer saved the story under a straightforward title and that’s what the URL was built from. The article itself has had its name changed but the underlying web address still refers to how /bad-habits-drain-energy/.
I love spotting that kind of thing. It’s like web detective work. CSI: WWW.
But anyway, that never-saying-no is just one of several salutary sections of advice in the full piece.
Updated iPhone Skype app rolling out
It’s not supposed to be out until next week but an improved Skype for iPhone has launched early. I can’t see it yet in either my US or UK App Stores but some users in America are finding it waiting for them.
Whenever it lands, it will still be free and comes with definite speed improvements plus a debatable improvement to its visual design. It’s going to look more like Windows Phone.
Take a look for it now as this is the right link, it’s just not clear yet when it will have updated to the new version.
The iPad version of Skype is to get a similar redesign but there’s no word when yet.
Productivity can go wrong in the biggest companies
When you or I fail to do something, it can be pretty bad but it is unlikely to have a visible impact on millions of people. You know where this is headed.
Apple never reveals its plans ahead of announcing them, but a fairly detailed report published prior to the conference from 9to5Mac laid out what it claimed was Apple’s map news.
Key changes included enhanced, “more reliable” data; more points of interest and better labels to make certain locations like airports, highways and parks easier to find; a cleaner maps interface; and public transit directions — that is, providing people with data about nearby buses, subways and trains. Further ahead, the report noted plans to integrate augmented reality features to give people images of what was nearby.
Why didn’t they appear? One tipster says it was a personnel issue: “Many developers left the company, no map improvements planned for iOS 8 release were finished in time. Mostly it was failure of project managers and engineering project managers, tasks were very badly planned, developers had to switch multiple times from project to project.”
It’s a take that is both contested and corroborated by our other source. “I would say that planning, project management and internal politics issues were a much more significant contributor to the failure to complete projects than developers leaving the group,” the source said.
I like Apple Maps: I find Google’s improved iPhone maps app a chore to work, though I too have been misdirected by Apple’s one.
Token football thing
I’d like to say that I want to at least get in the spirit of the World Cup football excitement but frankly the only way I could possibly register that it’s happening is every single bleedin’ news programme keeps telling me so. Apparently the England team has arrived in wherever it is. Apparently this is news.
But while the existence of the World Cup has been bludgeoned into my head and before I manage to shake it out again with the very greatest of ease, I did come across this. Fantasy Football costs America billions of dollars in lost productivity.
I know what you’re thinking. They have fantasies about football?
In a recent study, it was found that fantasy football players are costing employers more than $1.1 billion in productivity every week, during the National Football League season. This statistic was brought out by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The attraction towards fantasy football is immense because of the lucrative payout that it offers. This is a billion dollar business, which involves 24.3 million players according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.
However, with so much interest in fantasy football, how much of time is being devoted to real work? According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc about 22.3 million employed people spend half an hour of work time every week on managing their rosters and other fantasy football related activities.
The Impact of Fantasy Football Teams on Productivity – Careerealism
That article is dated 2013 and it sits in a website more replete with ads that I am generally comfortable directing you to. Maybe my infectious enthusiasm for football is enough to persuade you to go read the whole tedious piece, I don’t know.
They’ll hate you anyway
Most people do not create things. At least, they don’t create anything that many other people will ever know about. You can cook for your family for twenty years, nobody outside the ungrateful brats will ever know. You can save your multinational corporation a billion pounds and they definitely won’t tell the world. But if you do something that goes out to people, if you do create something or write something or produce something, you will be hated.
You’ll also hopefully be liked or even loved but the guaranteed one is hated.
In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers examined predispositions towards topics that subjects knew nothing about.
Some critics are harsh by nature, not because of what they see in the creation they are criticizing.
They found a reliable trend in the responses of certain participants. Despite being asked about a myriad of unconnected topics—and asked again about new topics at a later date, to confirm they weren’t just in a bad mood—they found two abnormal groups who they classified as “likers” and “haters.” The “likers” tended to rate most things positively with zero external information, and the haters… well, you know where this is going.
Born Hatin’ – Why Some People Dislike Everything, Gregory Ciotti, 99U
I’d like Ciotti to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly but we are many years into that process by which the misuse of a word becomes the correct use just because nobody can be bothered to stop it. Nonetheless, the rest of the piece is particularly interesting about how all this applies to what we write online – and why we get some hatred back.