Posts by Timmy B 990 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Mar 2011
"Again from my own point of view I believe that there is no reasonable justification for private firearm ownership especially since land parcels large enough for their safe use are disappearing as any free land is converted into housing."
Spoken like someone who has, I bet, never left the comfort of a city...
"there was one I was acquainted with for over a year before I even knew he was vegan"... I'll call you out on that one. You simply cannot have a conversation with a vegan for more than 20 minutes without knowing they are a vegan (from an ex-vegan before you're all up in arms....)
You realise this is a thin veneer of faux civility that simply won't change one tiny thing? This allows companies and people to look all nice and great whilst changing nothing in their actions. If they really cared they would, as already mentioned, implement actual education initiatives and truly create equal opportunity.
"Who is repairing these?"
Just because most people don't want to it doesn't mean Apple should make it impossible for anyone to. There is no reason at all, other than awkwardness and penny pinching, to stop people replacing the camera module for another totally legitimate Apple part. If this was carried to the motor industry then there would be hell to pay. "Sorry Sir, your car has been limited to 30mph as you have replaced your broken windscreen with a new one that is not the original part".... This is terrible, and wrong, and I'm an Apple user..
"150 quid and you get a modern Android tablet with bright clean screen for not much more than the *cheap* keyboard for the *older* iPad!"
They look like they ship with a low end processor that's 4 years old, and only 3gb ram. Your definition of "modern" is not like mine at all.... That's ignoring the software support that may just provide updates until the middle of next week.
OH has a Nord and despite some teething issues solved by firmware updates, it's a great value phone. Easily doing everything a normal phone user needs. It will also take some brilliant photos - in particular she's been very pleased by the colour on some recent pictures of autumn trees.
"If you have to ask the price, - you shouldn't be getting an iPhone."
I'd change that to say "you shouldn't be getting a top spec current iPhone" I swapped but I paid only £100 more than my other half paid for her Nord by dropping a version and getting a XS over an 11 when I moved to Apple. What's the betting my XS will be supported long after the Nord too?
The other half and I are long time OnePlus fans. We've been using them since the 3 and up until now have been very, very pleased. I recently went to the appley dark side and the boss lady has picked up a Nord. It's been terrible with some of the flakiest firmware OP have produced so far. She has stuck with it and now the phone only randomly resets once a week (at the start it was sometimes twice a day) and fails to pick up one in 5 or 6 calls. We're crossing our fingers for the next FW update to hopefully sort it out as they are promising. Have a good look at the OP support forums before considering a Nord.
"John Lewis are living off a reputation long since gone."
Not in my experience. We've had cause to use them twice. Once for a diswasher - 6 months past the end of its 3 year warranty - we phoned just to see if they would do anything and didn't expect so. they paid for an engineer that arrived next day and repaired it free of charge. We had a TV go 3 weeks before the end of its 5 year warranty - could not be fixed so they gave us a roughly comparable modern version - not comparable in specs to what we lost but comparable in what we would get if we spent the same money now so an improvement - and we also got another one year warranty.
Other family members have similar experiences I'll go by real world examples. Perhaps it's down to it being expected and not enough people like me post positive reviews. Considering Argos has 4.5 on trust pilot I'm thinking that TP are slightly questionable...
"MY reaction to this, is to get my iPhone (the only Apple product I own) as a hand-me-down from a family member."
What I do is buy 1 or two revisions back (currently using an XS) that I buy from older stock from John Lewis in the UK. I get at least 2 years warranty and this being from John Lewis is second to none. It's a brand new phone so no issues and the first year is actually apple support too so I get to trundle into an apple shop, etc.
I've done this with my macBook, iPad and watch too. I went all Apple a year ago as I just fancied some expensive toys. By getting them all a year out of date I still get a good number of years of software support. As they are all John Lewis I get their support. I saved over a grand buying like this.
"pi zero W, a camera, wired to a switch, some cable and a BELL - no cloud, same functions, this is an IT site, right?"
Way too much fuss for me. All I have to do with a ring / alexa setup is change the batteries every 3 months or so. I don't have to write / find software, etc. I don't even want to consider the pest that would be writing an iOS app to support answering the door remotely. I'm sure that something to do all this is on Github somewhere but I'm beyond wanting to faff with that - I have far better things to spend my time on when I can just have a plug and go solution.
"So why would you want to be disturbed by every doorbell, and still have to worry / manage the door for them the few times you can get away?"
We have perhaps 4 visits a day by various nurses and others. Also most things we buy are delivered, even more so at the moment. Our home office that I work from is upstairs. For me to get up and deal with every visitor is just disruptive to work. The record is 9 visits in one day. If we didn't have ring then every doorbell would have to be answered in person.
The other advantage is that having dogs we can change the ring noise every couple of weeks and they don't bark anywhere near as often.
There are in the region of 750000 people in the UK doing what I do (according to Age UK so that's probably just elderly relatives add in those with disabled children then you'll easily exceed a million).
One mans pointless tat is another mans life changer some people can't see beyond the end of their noses, though.
"And why? So you can see who comes to your door when you're not there."
Because you can't think of a good reason it doesn't mean there isn't one. As I said elsewhere we use one in the care of an elderly relative. It means we are able to monitor and observe things when we are not here. After nearly 15 years of caring for an elderly, infirm and very sick person the odd one or two hours we can afford away from the house are a god send. To have the ability to check that everything is ok and care nurses, etc arrive at the correct time makes it possible.
"Of course. Why would one install a simple circuit consisting of three pieces of wire, a buzzer, a power source and a button when one can use a computer that has to be networked to a massive bank of servers halfway around the world and requires a cell phone to properly use?"
Because not everyone lives like you do. We care for an elderly relative and have a combination of ring / alexa devices, key safes and cameras that allow us to monitor the house and people coming and going.
We have had an instance when we were out, a visitor (innocent it ended out) that matched the description of someone that had invaded the house of someone else on our road called. We were able to answer the ring and record the incident. How could your "normal" doorbell help us in what we need to do?
There are more things in the world than you know and experience.
On the desktop you are right. Ever single desktop type app and UI I've seen and used on Linux just seems a bit "off" it's like a UI was stuck on top of something that never really wanted it.
But then since I swapped to Mac every time I go back to windows it feels kind of the same - Windows is also just a bit "off".
The best desktop OS out there is Mac OS. I've used them all and I won't go back from Macs now - it simply needs no faffing, fiddling or tweaking - just works - and I'm getting too old to mess around with the minutiae of configuration any more. Not that I can't - I just can't be bothered.
So - porting Edge to Linux obviously means that Microsoft is going to move everything to Linux and stop developing Windows.... But they ported it to Mac first. Does that mean they are going to stop developing Windows and move to Mac?
I wonder if the person that came up with this idea stopped and had a bit of a think before he started....
It's the opposite that MS are thinking. After all most of what people do now is in the browser and if the same browser is available on all platforms and it is what people want to use and it is Edge (a bit what if) then why would people not buy cheap Windows PCs?
There is a replacement scheme for batteries for a Nissan leaf that starts at about £2500 and goes up to about £5000 depending on the battery you need replaced. The old batteries are then used in solar power walls. I can't find details for a Tesla but as batteries are between 2 and 4 times the capacity I can imagine that they would be 2 to 4 times the price - but they do have a good warranty plan on batteries (I'm a leaf owner btw).
There is also a company near me that will upgrade batteries to higher capacity in a leaf - something we are considering once our warranty runs out.
""New" Edge or "Old" Edge?
I have always used FF"
I also used FF for the longest of time. Then I swapped to classic Edge and then to new Edge. New Edge is faster and the UI far less clunky than FF. When I say FF is clunky there is simply something a bit... mmm... laggy with it. It simply doesn't seem to respond as well as I would like. On Mac, Windows or Linux. New Edge, though.... a totally different, smooth, polished experience. Just try it - bin it if you don't like... but at least give it a go.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
