Hello Ford? About that Focus
That I bought a year ago. It’s cheaper now. I feel I’m due some money back.
<click brrrrrr>
Hello….?
Same. Stupid pay the price and stop complaining.
54 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2013
And how long did that take you?
And how long will it last?
My point is, why do ‘they’ keep reinventing stuff, instead of choosing a a jumping off point and continually improving it?
and yes, for my Linux requirements I have done what has been suggested; Mint and Raspberry Pi OS. And very satisfied I am too.
Surely the other way round?
“This is why cyclists and motorcyclists don’t chow up the road surface and massive lorries do”
Motorcycles and cyclists can turn their tyres against the surface like PS vehicles can and do, but the contact patch is miniscule compared and they hardly ever do it because it’s a crap way to maneouvre two-wheeled vehicles.
What planet are you in?
I learned to drive in a non-PAS Vauxhall Cavalier. My instructor gave me a stern rebuke when I tried hauling the steering wheel round whilst stationary because of the damage/premature wear it would do to his steering rack. That was 40 years ago, I’ve never forgotten it and taught my son to listen out for a power steering pump struggling to turn the tyres against the road surface, and that will be cheaper for him in long term maintenance to just keep the car moving slowly whilst maneouvering.
I worked for a UK clothes and home retailer (defunct quite recently actually) in early 90s, and one morning we arrived at HO to find, on one floor, monitors disconnected and placed on the floor (15inc crt so some effort required), little piles of screws neatly beside the Elonex desktops, lids lifted and the 4MB/8MB sticks of RAM gone. Probably about 40 machines. Hey ho, we’d heard it was going on and we were a victim. You’d think a lesson would have been learned. Except that 2 weeks later, a different gang (maybe) returned and this time were not so civil, and a number of the monitor signal wires (fixed connection, not plugged) had been cut to speed relocation, the lids of the pcs wrenched off with some kind of pry tool and again, the RAM nicked. Just for good measure, they didn’t bin the remains of their sustenance; crumpled sandwich packages, crisp packets and coke cans.
Same. I was with the other half of the forced marriage that resulted in DXC - that’s CSC and they were terrible then. I got the hell out 4 years after I was TUPEd from one of their first UK contracts. Empty promises of career progression and opportunity. All I ever did was my best.
Newspaper report some years ago showed estate agent photos of a house in Dungeness, Kent, lovely and appealing but photographed from angles where you couldn’t see the nuclear power plant a couple of hundred metres away.
Found it!
https://metro.co.uk/2009/09/29/for-sale-charming-white-fronted-cottage-by-nuclear-power-station-448867/amp/
I visited EMC World in 2011 and we were shown internet-connected vending machines that recognised your phone as you walked by, and shouted out to you offering wares based on earlier purchases from wherever they took place. Not necessarily the same location, they just knew who you were. Creepy.
The British defunct retailer I worked at, used to print all manner of stuff on 2 or 3 or 4 part through the IBM tractor feed hammer printer, white green pink and blue (with carbon). These might be 5-10 thousand pages which we then had to run through a Moore-Paragon decollator, to separate the copies and wind up the carbon paper, then EACH COPY through a Moore-Paragon burster. These ancient machines had the propensity to completely transform those carefully aligned pages to scrunched up waste, if not carefully managed which was no small feat at 3am. When all this was transferred to a super fast IBM 3800 laser, yes four mono copies were printed and down the side in small letters each copy had printed the colour it used to be.
When I worked on the employee service desk for a large British retailer, I was once asked to remote in to a IBM 4680 terminal and watch the transactions go through, whilst CCTV observed the same terminal. A certain shop worker was making refunds, but to balance the cash drawer, she would slip herself a £10 or £20 here and there during a real transaction, and slide a Polo mint (‘Lifesavers’) from one pile to another to keep track of her gains. By making refunds, and sliding then Polos back to pile 1, at the end of the day they all had to be back there to balance the drawer.
I’ve sold two iMacs in the past of year and both of them were at least 8 years old when they were re-sold. Both were immaculate and had never given me a lick of trouble. In both cases the buyers said they had got them at a very reasonable price - shows what I know - and both emailed me subsequently to say Thanks.
My wife still uses the 2011 MBA I got her (in 2011 for clarity). My brother has a second-hand 2014 iMac and converted from Windows.
In other words 100% of the 5 Macs I have known, have been 100% reliable and never let their disappointed their owners. Interestingly none had needed an upgrade, same spec they came with from day 1. Performed most acceptably.
Where I still work, there used to be a smoking area that was essentially a corridor with swing doors at each end, with a few tables and chairs for a coffee and fag break. Problem is, it was (and is) a very handy shortcu between two significant offices. To use it, you stood at one end and gulped in a lungful of air, opened the ‘airlock’ door and Olympic-walked the 50m and released the air at the other end. It saved your lungs but your clothes still scoope up the smoke and you could smell it on you.
Secondly, my older brother had an Atari ST but only ever played games on it, but fags were cheap then and he routinely went through 20 a day. But he was the brawn of the family; every couple of weeks I was paid a fiver (lot of money when you’re 15 in the mid 80s) for opening up his ST and giving it a clean out, after I’d told him all the ash was the cause of it overheating and causing disk read errors.
Exactly the same, except that being at the end of a branch line meant my services were first to get the chop in the event of signal failure or other excuses and then forced on to a stinky old bus replacement service.
I try to use the time I’ve got back usefully…I’m not much of a gym goer but a whole backlog of diy has been cleared, breakfast is less rushed and I take a ten inure stroll around the adjacent park a couple of times a day. Better than spending a fiver on Costa Ona crowded street.
I had built up a batch of 20-odd disks removed from a Proliant ML750 which was being scrapped but we wanted to ensure the disks got special treatment, I took them down to the maintenance engineers and asked them to drill holes through with the drill stand in the area where the platters were and through the pcb. He called me back and said come and get the rest, I’ve managed 2 of them, any more and I’ll have to start charging you for broken drill bits.
Fast forward 20 years and now I get them destroyed by a company that brings in machine no bigger than a photocopier but it has a scissoring blades at one end of a slow conveyor. You put the disk on one end of the belt, a camera takes a picture of the disk’s barcodes etc, the the blades come down and slowly slice the disk into bits the size of Twix bars. It’s awesome to watch and the crunching is totally satisfying.
The bits then drop into plastic boxes, where - because the disks were no longer whole maybe - I expected them to miraculously lose weight. No. I nearly pulled my kipper lifting the first one with the equivalent of 15 hard disks in it.
I worked for a UK clothes and home retailer (defunct quite recently actually) in early 90s, and one morning we arrived at HO to find, on one floor, monitors disconnected and placed on the floor (15inc crt so some effort required), little piles of screws neatly beside the Elonex desktops, lids lifted and the 4MB/8MB sticks of RAM gone. Probably about 40 machines. Hey ho, we’d heard it was going on and we were a victim. You’d think a lesson would have been learned. Except that 2 weeks later, a different gang (maybe) returned and this time were not so civil, and a number of the monitor signal wires (fixed connection, not plugged) had been cut to speed relocation, the lids of the pcs wrenched off with some kind of pry tool and again, the RAM nicked. Just for good measure, they didn’t bin the remains of their sustenance; crumpled sandwich packages, crisp packets and coke cans.
I was an Amiga user, non smoker, but my brother - 40 or more JPS per day - was an Atari ST owner. But an electronics enthusiast he was not, I was really the computer kid, so he used to pay me a fiver periodically to open it up and clean it out when the disk drive played up. Good money when I was 14.
Back in 2011 I visited an expo by a large eel know storage company in Las Vegas and it was the first they were bandying around the term Big Data and where it lives.
In one of the keynotes, the guy told of a project where HR depts had started trawling your socials to get a flavour of what kind of person you were, and then also of a project where vending machines in Japan called out to you by name, offering you tempting treats, based on your purchasing history and the fact it had recognised your device details as you strolled by.
I use Serviiio and a bunch of mains network connectors with a couple of hubs for things like CCTV and printer in the summer house/office. When I got my Sky Q equipment (multiroom including new hub/router) my network went haywire. Stuff just stopped being seen; printer, Serviio, XBOX problems. Also, Q multiroom as standard is all about WiFi which caused a massive pain for the numerous mobile devices here. I reverted back to my pretty TP-Link and found the Sky network access credentials easy enough online. Now everything works again, and my own router meant I could tweak access controls etc which I couldn’t get to in the Sky router. Also, with a bit of googling was able to make the Q stuff work over cabled Ethernet not WiFi which made a big difference.
The short version is, the Sky supplied (customised TP-Link) equipment disrupted what my own environment so much it was with the time and effort to deploy kit I could manage completely myself. Their box is in the loft, in its box.
Just for clarification, it doesn’t only charge by plugging in to the iPad lightning socket, which does make it bizarrely stick out. You get a little dongle (free!) with the pencil with female both sides, so you can charge from a standard lightning cable. Looks like a large paracetamol or mint and easily loseable.
I absolutely agree, there never was/were any drone/s, it was a false flag event concocted as an excuse to state that multi-million pound anti-drone equipment was being installed. Got to to counter good news with bad - in this instance, feed us the fear and hysteria (so what if a few thousand people missed their flights, they only saved hard for their holidays).
Slightly related, I believe that all these high-profile IT ‘failures’ by Big Corp are no coincidence either. There’s something going on but I can’t put my finger on it. Some sort of agenda or plan or something. I’m not being specific because I can’t be. Just suspicious.
I had something similar. The tills in the restaurant were DOS machines, all worked ok even had touch screens. The provider came in and told the managers a costly upgrade to Windows 2000 was required, many improvements, including supporting two card readers etc. I did my bit and watched them install the kit, then came the testing where they promptly fired up the SAME DOS application just running in a DOS-emulating window.
The best part though was the two card readers part - ‘twice as many customers!’ they puffed - ‘still only one till operator!’ I retorted - as experience went on to show, nothing improved but the frequency of windows crashes and patching accelerated.
Yes - the scene where they creep into the computer room bridge (note: NOT server room!) and swap out a loaded tape with one containing 'deez new program'. To do it, Benny Hill (Professor Peach, looking after the technical end) is offered a screwdriver??! And when the tape is mounted, it's clearly twisted....and making some sort of bup bup bupbupbupbup noise..now, in all my years as an op, no 3420 made that sound...
This isn't a UAV, as most quads aren't. I am a quad enthusiast, not a UAV builder, and not everyone who builds quads wants to strap an Arduino & GPS to it and have it fly away to A then B then C under it's own control...most of us build a quadcopter then fly it ourselves...at which point it is just another hoverable RC aircraft.
So please - don't get all Daily Fail and mix up your terms and frighten people...
Agree with all Tom 38 points, and as a commuter at the end of a branch line, will add this - that when there is a problem on the main line, the branch line services suffer first; invariably services are cancelled and a bus laid on...and it descends into an uncomfortable, overheated, crowded pukey nightmare.
But - because the mainline soldiered on and a bus replacement provided, there's no recompense for the inconvenience. Carry on paying. At least, reduce my annual fare pro-rata but no; I still pay the same per-mile cost as the travellers on the mainline whose service is disrupted less or kept going because they represent the bulk of the travelling public.
Lastly, one train an hour?? Look - just lay on a branch shuttle to the nearest mainline connection, would you please, Abellio Greater Anglia? And make it one every half an hour. I would accept a change of train for a more regular service to get home after a long day!