Posts by CountCadaver 888 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2018
Then again how many spend that much time online or more? Or otherwise sat in front of a pc / games console?
It's just the older people get that they become less technologically interested as a rule - my grandparents both in their 80s for example have zero interest in computers or the internet, however their recently departed 90 year old neighbour had a Mac and spent time online
I'd even accept what I got from tier 1 "I need to consult the relevant team and I or they will come back to you"
"Yes it seems that yes your town is down for by december 2026, clickety, clickety, I see we are just finishing up the next town over, so next step is to do some upgrades in between you and them, then do some surveying work, so.....hmmm wait a sec you said something about someone out painting for an OLT?....click click click tap tappity tap...ahhh found it, yes they are coming out to do this, with an estimate of X, after that connection to end customers should be roughly a - b months later so current non firm estimated date is on or around this date but this can be moved back and forward depending on weather etc. I'll also ask the web team to correct and update the website" - you know like...most other companies can manage.....
Ahh the same "good old GPO" who derided telephones as some hideous american idea, "we have plenty of messenger boys and who would want such a thing in their homes?"
Fast forward to 1980 and they are still issuing shared party lines till privatisation LONG after they were phased out in other countries (most of the US IIRC phased them out in the 60s)
I'm more inclined to believe direct in ground non ducted cabling was an intentional choice to stymie any new technology as that means change and change in the world of the GPO / Openreach is a bad bad bad thing.
Using ducting both protects the cabling and permits a replacement cable to easily be pulled in should the cable become damaged. Its just another example of GPO/BT/BT Openreach being their usual difficult obstructionist selves.
GPO became Post office telecoms (as witnessed by the mixture of names on the infrastructure in my street), which was then privatised as BT, who then (under regulatory mandate were forced kicking and screaming) to hive off the infrastructure into Openreach and even then have faced the regulators wrath several times and been forced to increasingly divorce openreach further and further from their BT parent due to playing favourites, obstructing non BT companies and other sins.
Openreach are WHY the fibre rollout is taking so long, they ONLY stopped rolling out FTTC as Alt-Nets started putting in full fibre and disproved openreach's scaremongering about it being utterly unfeasible and totally unaffordable to ever rollout in the UK for <insert BS here>
If it were up to Openreach, I doubt we'd have FTTP any time
Fixed that for you, if it had been up to openreach they would have found an excuse to prohibit FTTP/FTTC/ADSL and all to protect their leased lines and ISDN services (ISDN being why they tried every trick in the book to slow walk the roll out of ADSL as ISDN was billed by the minute whereas adsl was a flat monthly fee)
Openretch frankly are an anachronism and should be shutdown as their "corporate culture" is frankly abysmal
well iirc they then can offer to connect others once the infrastructure has been built on your £ - bit like the gas networks told my folks years ago they could connect their house to gas but then let it slip they would then offer to connect their neighbours for a token sum, result my parents held off and less than 5 years later the council or someone else in the public sector paid them to roll it out
Openreach should be required to keep accurate data on their network and freely share this with others.
Also instead of all these overbuilds a non profit should have been created to own the lot and then distributed the work evenly with GPON being binned by now and all infrastructure being put in being symmetrical XGSPON and existing GPON being replaced.
Instead we have a shambolic free market approach that's led to some streets being dug up 5 or more times, streets missed because of past decisions intentionally made by GPO, BT, Openretch to have used direct in ground cabling to save money / impede competitors / up the amount they can charge for future maintenance (no ducting)
My town marked in 2020 to be upgraded by 2026, status on openreach fibre checker says that, then goes to build not planned and now to not yet available, yet their own mapping still has my town marked down to be upgraded and their site doesn't explain any further.
I query this with them and get an email saying it has to be passed to second line as they see what I mean but don't have the information so have asked a specialist team to respond. Great I think, *maybe* they have realised being a shower of borderline abusive wastrels isn't a good thing?
In the meantime while waiting for an answer, I come home and notice an openreach van leaving and on the pavement OLT and PWR has been spray painted.
Now I'm thinking "wow, perhaps someone has looked into it and realised there has been an oversight?" and I'm now understandably optimistic and thinking positively of openreach.
I check my email and get a proforma response from second line telling me "they have no plans to upgrade my area but please keep checking our website, however if you want it sooner you can purchase our FTTP on demand service that provides up to 330mbps of download speed"
......cue positivity extinguished
Just shows how utterly clueless and incompetent openreach are that they can't even communicate internally ......hopeless is a total understatement.
I replied with the photos (as they don't believe you otherwise) to be met with deafening silence - as per usual
Clearly still think they are the only telecoms supplier and worse to some extent think they legally should be the only option on a take it or leave it basis....
Or you know the cops could actually do their job rather than not turn up, gaslight -"it's a grey area", "that's not a crime" etc, ask about CCTV and when told there isn't any just say there isn't anything they can do or lastly get threatening when pressed on the issue and starting implying you are guilty of something or "we don't like people who contact us frequently", "you know smart people take a telling" and worse - plod Scotland
That's big brain thinking there, not only do you keep yourself sharp in your own time but you are actively sticking it to the man by sabotaging them and getting paid for it. Though it would work as well if you just did what most office workers do and spend the day randomly surfing the web, stringing out inane meetings for inordinate amounts of time and massive bathroom breaks....
Apart from the ratios of ingredients being different and some shampoos don't contain sodium laureth sulfate (SLS) due to its harshness, which is the cheap degreasing component most supermarket brands use, which is also used in washing up liquid aka dish soap and industrial degreaser akin to acetic acid and vinegar being the same base ingredient, its just that vinegar is 95% water, splash 100% or even 30% acetic acid on your chips and you will be sorry
I hate the huge touchscreen in my new car ....up till the midlife "refresh" horror of horror ..it had buttons and a reasonable size touchscreen....seems manufacturer wants to get people forcibly accepting the shite their electric vehicles use so they bork good working layouts with the bonus for them of being cheaper to make (screens are ridiculously cheap....shame the one in my car takes over a minute to wake up so you start car and ONLY then does the screen start to boot and you can't do any of the following till it farts fully into life - change the AC temp, fan speed, activate or deactivate the dentist/heated windscreens, turn the heated seats on or off, ditto the heated steering wheel, not can you change the radio station or whatever media you are streaming.....it is infuriating frankly
Windows Me being my bete noire to support...what a useless pile of steaming merde that was....spent more time trying to get the thing not to crash long enough to update a driver than I spent actually installing the driver and this on the work laptop of a solicitor about 20 years back.....(Yes a solicitor aka attorney)
Windows 7 pro or ultimate was about microsofts zenith and since then it's been more and more downhill
Win 7 is mentally tied with win2k - 7 had more functionality but win 2k was utterly rock solid (particularly by SP2 and granite solid by SP4 -thing ran for months on end without any griping or oddities)
10 is a distant second to 7, 11 kinda behind that, xp behind that further still (and if we are talking pre SP3 then it's REALLY far back....I regretted moving from 2k to XP on my personal machine)
I'm only still using windows as I game
Otherwise I'd sail off to Linux mint, which has been quietly running on an ancient laptop for months on end without drama (handles octoprint to talk to my 3d printer - octoprint gives me a headache though sometimes....trying to get webcam monitoring working....is something I am yet to get time and patience to argue with)
Every windows new version annoys me more and more - no I don't want OneDrive, no I don't want targeted advertising, no I don't want to share my location etc etc so stop asking me with every major update....
I note that device manager still looks and (thankfully) operates as per win2k
Settings app is a joke as 9/10s of the time you hit a dead end and Microsoft resort to "oh use this dism command which I will copy to you"
Cue lines and lines and lines which is them CLEARLY throwing a hail Mary or 3 into the breeze and hoping something works....
My local permanent staff keep pushing idiotic schemes that make zero fiscal sense and the local councillors are too timid to ask the hard questions - i.e. why are we leasing parking meters when the outright purchase cost is barely 2 years lease ?, (they then bought them and due entrenched local opposition they then reabolished parking charges again (much to the utter fury of the permanent staffer who needs his head removed from his derriere and made to realise he is answerable to the public, the public aren't beholden to him - arrogant rude and frankly infuriating little man
Oh dear god no - political appointees - trump would demand anything non flattering stripped away, that whatever took his fancy was front and foremost - "coal found to be beautiful and cleanest burning " etc
TLAs would use it to cover up malfeasance by heavily suppressing anything they deemed inconvenient
Will you give it a rest or at least look up what the world was like before regulation was imposed despite industry screaming
- child labour (oh look what's happening in your red / free market states)
- adulterated food
- medicinal "tonics" that either did nothing or contained poisons
- rivers bursting into flames (and in Canada Lake Ontario)
- heavy toxic smogs
- poisoning of the air with lead due to the addition of tetraethyl lead to gasoline leading to lifelong ntellectual impairment in children
See also the half baked attempts (and yes plural) to stop bt using openreach as a weapon. What's happened is that they have had to grudgingly stop the worst of the antics, but their attitude towards the general public still stinks (purposely done "oh you aren't our customer, the ISP is our customer, you are theirs" - funny how Transco and the electrical DNOs don't tell you to phone your gas supplier or electricity supplier....no they just come out and sort the fault, not kludge solutions to kinda make it work and then smear the end user with malicious and false allegations - yes been on the receiving end of this BS from openreach), their staff have a terrible attitude and still act like it's the bad old days of the 1970s where they were the only telecoms supplier and an arm of the GPO, generally combative and hostile attitude towards both isps and end users, acting like they aren't subject to ofcom oversight and worse.
Openreach need not only turned into a network rail style non profit but also a purge of their "culture" by cutting out ALL of the deadwood both engineering staff and managerial staff as those elements are beyond redemption
Govt intervention doesn't always turn out for the best
However The following DID have a positive impact
Pure Food and Drug Act
Federal Meat Inspection Act
Creation of the EPA - "The American conversation about protecting the environment began in the 1960s. Rachel Carson had published her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides, Silent Spring, in 1962. Concern about air and water pollution had spread in the wake of disasters. An offshore oil rig in California fouled beaches with millions of gallons of spilled oil. Near Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, choking with chemical contaminants, had spontaneously burst into flames. Astronauts had begun photographing the Earth from space, heightening awareness that the Earth’s resources are finite."
Funny how those who wax lyrical about the "good old days" and cling to "the market will solve itself" to claim regulation is a bad thing and govt intervention won't help gloss over rivers bursting into flames, horrendous smog etc.....
Yet people STILL claim the risks are over egged and "nanny state gone mad" and "I grew up around it and it did me no harm"(though often these folks are often the less well educated in society.....hmmm wonder if there is a link there.......)
(Yes I know all about the intellectual impairments that exposure to lead can cause, not least due to poor kids in Baltimore who suffered due to the following study - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Lead_Paint_Study )
They are adopting SaaS (alongside one off purchases - for the moment) as they have been swallowed by Canva
Links
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-release/
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/canvas-affinity-acquisition-is-a-subscription-based-weapon-against-adobe/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24113423/affinity-canva-acquisition-pledge-license-price-subscription
https://medium.com/@colleengratzer/canva-acquires-affinity-what-it-means-for-designers-f970c9a638db
https://www.reddit.com/r/AffinityPhoto/comments/1bo05z1/canva_acquires_affinity/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Affinity/comments/1boosl1/long_my_thoughts_on_the_canva_acquisition/
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