Re: Rubbed the wrong way
Combine Lord and Lady somehow.
Lardy Of The Rings.
One donut to rule them all.
30 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2008
I'm quite often out and about at night where there's almost no light at all (no, I'm not carrying duct tape, a stanley blade or a balaclava (well the last one depends on the temperature!)), will it turn on a torch and ruin my night vision for me as well?
No thanks Apple, even you're touch ID is bloody annoying and temperamental at the best of times. If you're not a coffee shop dwelling hipster that is.
They (tech firms collectively, not just Apple) need a new tag line, something like "Technology without thought" would suit most of them at the moment.
Every time I think of elections now I think of the Stealers Wheel song with a slight twist:
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
Here I am, stuck in the middle of poo
Sadly, it's seems to be a worldwide phenomenon, there's something about national and international politics that constantly attracts a majority of self serving, egomaniacal f*ck knuckles, regardless of the political flag they're claiming at the time of election.
We've only just been screwed over by them and now we're getting it again.
It's almost like they want to cull smaller businesses.
Their subscriptions are already expensive for what they are (for us), they dropped Access from the Business subscription and added it to the ProPlus subscription, but that has no email (yup the 'Pro' version doesn't come with email) so we ended up having to go the the enterpise subs.
When the contracts up in a few months, we'll be free of O365 dependant systems, so we'll likely move on, there's only so much gouging small business will take before the middle finger gets wound up.
VAT doesn't count, they're just collecting it for whichever country they sold the gadget in. In actual fact, they probably profit from VAT, as it's not instantly collected by governments and likely gains interest for them? Someone with better knowledge than me might know better.
I bet they get a deal on any business rates as well.
I can see the EU introducing a EU wide standard corporation tax rate because of this, in fact that's probably the whole idea of kicking up such a fuss now. I wonder if they will go as far as banning corporations if they don't toe the line - "Don't want to pay taxes <insert evil corporation>? Then you can't sell your product in the EU" kind of thing.
Not enough new content for my tastes, I'm not one of those people that can watch things over and over again. If I've watched it once, I already know what the outcome is. The film catalogue is pretty dire.
Add in the VPN blocks, the area specific content and it just doesn't do it for me any more.
Currently buying Now TV boxes with 6 months subs in them for £20 whenever I can find them. Remove voucher, throw / sell Now TV box, use voucher, TWD / GoT for £3.33 per month (and that's about what it's worth to me). Doubt that will last for long.
Not that I'm watching much of it at the moment, most of it really is rubbish, watch something maybe once or twice a week.
I suppose that's true when your customer service and web account interface are a total joke, couple that with a complete lack of 4G roll out outside of large urban areas and they're probably shedding customers hand over fist in the UK.
Recently cancelled our account with them, tried to call them with an account query and they'd never heard of us before, seriously, no company information and nothing linked to previous telephone numbers. Took me nearly 4 hours of pressing various keys, shouting expletives at recorded messages, getting cut off because the customer support couldn't be arsed to work out what was going on, being pushed from one rep to another, waiting whilst various reps systems crashed etc.
The last email I received from them had so many dead support URL's in the body and footer it wasn't even funny after a while.
Sadly the only option we had was to move to EE, at the moment their 4G and customer service has been fantastic (about 5 calls in so far!), a human picks up within a few rings, sorts the problem, done in 5 minutes. Shudder to think what BT will do to their CS though...
Feel sorry for anyone laid off by them, but boy do Vodafone deserve to be suffering, worst company ever (this week).
>More like AOL. It's like the 1990's never ended...
Can you imagine if CD's were still in vogue? Every house hold on the planet would probably have at least a dozen Facebook CD's by now.
Sometimes you need to look to the past to check on how the likes of AOL failed with this walled garden attitude, it failed then and it'll fail now.
Facebook has been allowed to get away with a lot of private data by a lot of people (and most know what they are getting themselves into), but if they start feeding shit to the mushrooms they're going to have a riot on their hands. People aren't as stupid as Facebook thinks.
We went out and bought a PAYG EE 4G cheapy phone to test, it's by far from perfect (Near Weymouth, Dorset), but it had far better signal with fewer call drops compared to Vodafone. Pretty fast 4G as well, we were getting 50 Mbps / 13 Mbps inside buildings a lot of the time, even EE's 3G at it's slowest was far, far quicker than Vodafone's 3G.
I know what you mean though, it is definitely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire switching carriers in rural (ish) areas, they're all pretty useless outside of the larger population hubs, even for making a basic call, let alone for data.
18 billion invested, where exactly?? Be nice if they had a working infrastructure to start with, especially in the South West of England!
<rant alert>
We've had over a year of continual excuses and being ignored by Vodafone, they have non-existant 4G service in the South West and their 3G service has been terrible, so much so that 3G was turned off on all phones due to constant call drops and calls from customers sounding like Daleks. Even then call drops were still happening, but at least you could have more than a 10 second conversation with someone before having to find a land line.
My last network support ticket lasted nearly 3 months before their engineers 'fixed' the issue, which still isn't fixed. The one before that took 2 months to be 'resolved', and wasn't.
And don't get me started on the web site and customer portal, if you want to see what a site would look like if you gave a few hundred monkeys access to keyboards and a vat of jelly, go try and use it.
</rant alert>
tl;dr
Been with them for over 10 years, will be moving carriers come the new year, bunch of amateurs. This will bring it's own issues though, as the only other viable option is EE.
The state of the mobile infrastructure in this country is pathetic and 'coverage' doesn't mean squat if you don't have a usable service.
Isn't it just. Today's Macs are great if you don't need to do much beyond looking at pictures, maybe make a YouTube movie or check your email, for everything else it's clunky as hell. It's like they've gone backwards if you're a professional try to get a job of work done.
Give me OS 9 over X any day.
Thanks bro,
Never had issues with printer drivers, but then we weren't really running any old kit, I remember there being an issue with one of the scanners, but that was soon sorted with a call to the manufacturers.
-And graphics performance on OS X is better than PC because of the way the OS handles images, especially PDF.
Never seen any real proof of this, and I've worked side by side with Macs / Linux / Windows machines for years. You'd have had a point if we're talking Power-PC, now though if there is a difference, it's imperceptible on modern machines.
No where did I mention cheap is best, just that the similar powered machines were far cheaper.
It's just opinion ya know, no need to have a fit.
-No matter that Photoshop works the same on a PC, "real creatives use Macs".
I worked in the print trade for over 10 years and was staggered at how attached some people were to their Macs. We had an in house repro studio and they never quite forgave me for upgrading them to PC's that enabled them to work faster for a fraction of the price of Mac based products. They didn't have an argument beyond "but it's a Mac", because the PC's did exactly the same job, some of them even looked pretty.
I was also trained as a chippy when I left school. Had I walked in to the local builders merchant and been presented with the choice of a hammer with glitter on it or the same one without, I'd have taken the one without, especially if it was a third of the price.
Right tool for the right job every time and unfortunately, since apple moved to Intel, Macs just don't offer anything above the "Ooh, I saw that on TV" appeal any more.
I also no longer like their OS, it's clunky, full of IAP and just feels wrong to me, fine if you just want to browse the web and get your email. Which is probably why their popularity has grown with the masses.
Always surprises me that people still don't know that you don't need a licence for a TV if you aren't watching or recording programmes as they are being broadcast.
I know TVL are a PITA, but if you genuinely don't watch or record live TV, tell them to eff off and take you to court, then just bin any correspondence you receive from them. They've no legal right, as far as I know, to 'inspect' your equipment. Just don't lie about it and unplug any receiving equipment from the aerial/satellite sockets.
Even easier with smart TVs these days, plug into network and carry on watching catch up TV to your hearts content. Just don't watch anything live.
There are DMLS printers, like the one that recently printed a fully functioning metal, doesn't-break-on-first-shot, hand gun. Very expensive bits of kit at the moment, but there have been a few hobbyists who have built one.
I'm not sure that you'll see 3D printers in every home, but I can see them being in a lot of garages. I know quite a few people who have expensive lathes in their sheds/garages for hobby's. A 3D printer, plastic or metal, costing a few thousand isn't beyond the realms of possibility for a fair few people that I can think of.
That's ok, I understand that I live in the South West and there are certain sacrifices you have to make for a better lifestyle (IMO!), connectivity being one of them!
Even with a good 3G connection here, speeds are around 1-3MB download and 0.25-1MB upload. That's if you get any data at all, even with nearly full signals connections just crap out most of the time.
This is with Vodafone, the only network around here where you can at least get a signal most places. With most other providers, you'd be lucky to get any signal at all :-)
In my town, with a nearly full 3G service, I'm lucky if anything will download at a reasonable speed.
It's so bad here that 3G mostly stays off on the mobile phones in and around the office, constant call drops and rubbish bandwidth make it virtually useless. I get better bandwidth on Edge.
3G might be wonderful for city folk, but any where else it's pretty naff.
When you can buy a game in the morning, finish the SP and return it by the afternoon, it's no wonder the second hand market is buoyant. Not everyone wants to play MP, especially when it's full of hackers and gobby, overweight 12 year olds on a sugar kick.
It would be interesting to see what the second hand market is like for games such as ME3 in comparison to MOH or COD type games.
I doubt most game devs will get it though, the industry used to be quite innovative, it's just stagnated into quick release COD v6535423154 clones, now with spotted hankies as paid DLC!! Mind, thats probably more the bean counters fault than the actual devs. Nothing like a slimy bean counter to make a mess of an established concept.
Considering how rubbish most connections to the internet in the UK are (iirc the US isn't much better, esp rural areas), especially upload speeds, this won't work until connections are both quick and rock steady.
It'll take way too long to initially upload several GBs of files for most people. It's much more convienient to keep most files locally and only upload files where sharing between devices/locations is necessary. Like most people already do.
I don't even want to imagine how slow running an OS over an internet connection will be...
Until internet connections give the same upload as download and become rock steady, then the GDrive is a pointless exercise.
Do these people live in 'cloud' cuckoo land?!?
Been possible since early 2008 at least - http://www.biocow.com/iCopy/index.php - think that works the same way from what I can see.
Also be about as popular.
Biggest problem is that I want copy and paste between any application on the iPhone, not just Safari/Mail.
Anything less is just a pointless gimmick imo.
Appl€ need to pull their fingers out of their arses and actually implement all the missing features that seem to be standard on every other phone on the planet apart from the iPhone.
It's a great bit of kit but the missing features have caused at least 2 people I know to stop using it as a business phone and move to the Storm.
Only reason I'm still using it is because I'm not due an upgrade until February. If at that point it still doesn't have those standard features, I'll be binning it as well.
I personally would have turned up and asked them to prove how much data was shared. The burden of proof is on who ever is doing the accusing correct? So they'd have to have data that proved *how much* you shared??
Or has UK law being bastardised so much that people are now guilty until proven innocent?
'There’s room to install a sound card, but as things stand you’ll probably be relying on the integrated SoundMAX audio.'
That comment there is enough for me to never look at an Alienware rig again, a decent sound card is part of a good gaming machine now days, onboard sound just doesn't cut it.
@£3624 I'd expect a top of the range x-fi card.
At that price, it's about 2 grand more than it's worth...
Good article over all (especially for new adwords users), but basically 6 pages to tell advertisers if they don't know what they are doing, can't be arsed to RUN campaigns properly (ie track costs, clicks, use analytics, set up internal tracking systems, study how it works etc etc), then they are wasting their money?
Nothing new there really.
Advertising, whether it be in magazines, papers or on the internet takes effort to run. You can't just type in a few words and expect the money to roll in, you have to work at it.
Adwords works well if you keep an eye on it. I've no doubt that they try and squeeze every penny out of advertisers, they are a business after all.
"Can you hear that? That high pitch whining. That's the death keel of HD DVD..."
Can you here that 'whoosh' as both formats completely fly past the vast majority.
I mean really, barring a few gimps, most people couldn't give a stuff about this HD format war, probably one of the main reasons it's dragged on so long.
It's a bit like the XP to Vista path, why bother if you can't really see much of a difference.
HD will be the realm of geeks for a long time to come, noone else is really interested. Hell, a lot can't really see the difference between HD and a good quality SD once you sit them 5ft from their TVs.