Some excellent comments,
so maybe the terrible article was worth it, after all?
1555 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2010
Very much this. Our smoke alarms run off the mains. with battery backup but, if one battery fails, they all start beeping. As they're on the mains, pulling the battery doesn't stop the beep, so they've all been turned off at the fuse.
Super safe! Not helped by the fact that there's supposed to be a key to open the battery compartments, but the previous owner lost that, so we had to force them open with a screwdriver, breaking the battery caddy in some cases. Total crap.
I must be into my fourth year with smart meters. During that time, they've been read once by the energy supplier that had it fitted (as I was leaving them), and subsequent suppliers have been reliant on me taking the readings from the display on the meters (the portable display that came with the meters can't do even this simple task, so I've long since disconnected it).
If nefarious third parties are pilfering my data, perhaps they'd like to offer their services to the energy companies?
To be fair, he froths with enthusiasm about every new development of anything, ever.
Much as I've said I don't want contactless payments on my phone, if it's just a case of waving the phone with no need to unlock, then it's likely as convenient as current contactless cards, and so the idea is appealing, at least. Security concerns loom large, however (not sure I want all my eggs in one phone, so to speak).
Are there any schools without some sort of IT hardware available for the kids to use? Mine are only in years 3 and 4, and they do Scratch programming on a semi-regular basis (using Windows PCs that they acquired on a highly unfavourable IT contract that damn near bankrupted the school).
The world has moved on. When we were kids, if you were introduced to a computer, you'd probably have had no choice but to use the command line. These days, a child's first experience of computing is probably a parent's iPhone - going from that to a blank screen with a flashing cursor that won't do sh!t until you learn some arcane language, probably isn't going to seem particularly encouraging.
I have a DAB in my car, as well as streaming on my phone, and generally prefer to have the DAB on. I'll switch back to FM, if I'm in a poor reception area, but that only works for Radio 4, everything else that interests me is not available on FM.
Currently converting all my CDs to play through the radio's USB socket, but it's much less faff to just switch between the radio stations that interest me. I doubt you're the only one not interested, but plenty of people are able to find something on the radio that fits with their interests.
Most don't pay because most reporting these days is a copy/paste from elsewhere and "investigative journalism" is a joke because most news outlets don't want to rock the boat in case the government stops throwing stories their way they don't have to.
I really don't think it's any more complicated than that.
Is that what this is about? 'Cos it looks more like an effort to piss money up the wall.
Seriously, though, if this is about films being refused classification on the grounds that they're "obscene", then that's a legitimate grievance, although it's the government that determines what is obscene, not the BBFC.
and people would quickly stop using it, and it would be replaced by another freebie. People aren't paying for on-line encyclopaedias, and they won't pay for online encyclopaedias. Authoritative reference sources still exist, and Wikipedia won't put them out of business, so long as people still need them - Wikipedia is just a convenient resource that can be dipped into to get a quick primer on a given subject, or get a bit of trivia.
Yes, it's a monopoly, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over someone having a monopoly over trivia. It's only a problem if you believe Wikipedia is as important as Jimmy Wales seems to think it is.
f2fs (thanks, Samsung!) and Cyanogen - you'll be glad you did. If you're not keen on hacking your device, the Nexus Root Toolkit will do most of the work for you.
My Nexus7 is damn near as wizzy as the day I unboxed it, now. The latest Cyanogen available when I nuked it was KitKat, although I think Lollipop is available now (something to do at the weekend).
I won't downvote this comment, as it's true that Minecraft could make for some very engaging classroom projects (if you can disguise learning as a game, that's a massive win), but the idea that Microsoft are doing this for anything resembling altruistic reasons is laughable.
Microsoft have form when it comes to shovelling shit into schools and getting them to pay for it. Mind you, that's generally true of all school IT suppliers.