The grumpy thread

[eddyramrod]

Price must be an issue if they have not sold.

 

pickup, cheapest of its age and type around.

 

 

IMF? And as for the BX, like my A40 they are a bit of a specialist market these days so all I can say to that is... Good Luck!

[myglaren]

I see your shit cycle lane and raise you

 

 

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=dock+r ... 5999999999

 

The far side used to be a busy two lane road until those tossers at the council turned one half into a bike lane which never gets used.

 

You'd think they would do a study - a bit of observation over a few weeks, to see if these cycle lanes are actually required.

 

Was just getting up to go in the shower when I spotted this out of the window.

 

 

Seems she has dropped her phone down the drain and fair play to her she got down, lifted the (very heavy and filthy) drain cover then went groping around in the crap down there for her phone.

 

She then scuttled up the road leaving the drain cover like this:

 

Apologies for the dire image quality, my fault for just doing a point and shoot through an unopened window with a fair bit of flare in it.

 

I did go and reseat the drain cover - something I have been intending to do for the past twenty years as it makes an awful 'clonk' every time a car passes over it - which is every car up and down the street.

[scaryoldcortina]

Twice now this week I've been asked for fairly rare and otherwise unobtainable car parts, which I had, and was prepared to sell (mainly because I'm skint) both times the punter has been pleased, a price was agreed and they left, promising to return the next day to collect, both using the excuse of being in an unsuitable vehicle for old car parts (one in a disco TD5 and the other a 59 plate BM 3 series).

 

See if you can guess how many of them came back to collect? Yup, neither of them

 

In other news, the saxo now has a test. Brake imbalance 8% (I did nothing to it) Split boots downgraded to "advise" by supergluing the fresh split closed again. It does have an oil leak, you can see the stripe of oil along the floor where the driveshaft has been flinging it. Not a huge leak though, and not dripping.

[Ross_K]

You'd think they would do a study - a bit of observation over a few weeks, to see if these cycle lanes are actually required.

 

Nope. They gotta use up their budget don't they?

 

Shite like cycles lanes and support groups for blind transgender midgets or Roma gypsy lesbians is where your taxes go. Great eh?

[willswitchengage]

pointless consumer crap?

 

 

One company's nailed it especially well...

[RedSparrow]

True. The iPad especially. The few people I have met who own one seem to just constantly try to justify to themselves why they bought it. 'Yeah, it's good because it can XYZ(nothing a cheap netbook can't do)'.

[Guest]

True. The iPad especially. The few people I have met who own one seem to just constantly try to justify to themselves why they bought it. 'Yeah, it's good because it can XYZ(nothing a cheap netbook can't do)'.

 

Yeah, but they 'work' and 'perfectly', all the time.

 

Except if you try and play a Vimeo video on one. Or type too quickly.

 

The best bit of Mac bothering I have ever known happened when a friend of mine submitted an audio CD as part of a piece of coursework. He'd mixed it down, finalised it, tested it in various CD players to make sure it worked, and then submitted it.

Later he received an email from our tutor informing him that his mark was zero because she couldn't play the CD. Why could our tutor not play the CD?

 

Because she was using a Mac.

 

It couldn't read the CDA data on the disc that every other non Apple kit from here to Kazakhstan managed with. Had my mate not gone apeshit he'd have potentially lost his place next year for what was technically a non submission, according to our tutor. Of course the second he took it to the course leader and she put the CD into her PC, it loaded up in WMP and played straight away.

 

Said tutor did the marks scheme on the same Mac and it pissed the formatting up the wall too, so the score table made no sense on anything it was opened in. The marks were all over the page and the rest of it looked like the Matrix crossed with an ASCII wet dream brain fart.

 

It's shit like this that drives me INSANE with Macs. What's even more comical is that the Apple apologists will actually try and claim problems like this didn't \ couldn't happen : 'Well, it's never happened to me, so as far as I'm concerned Apple stuff is still perfect.' Except it did happen and these people are so myopically narrow minded it's hilarious. I must use that argument next time I encounter a fake MGB being driven cretinously.

 

For the record, I owned a G5 once, and I came extremely close to smashing it up with extreme prejudice because of flaws like the ones described above. It couldn't read half of my CDs because the drive couldn't understand the DRM copy protection on the discs. Funny, they worked perfectly fine in my AKAI boombox I picked up off Bury market for £5, but my £1200 G5 (then supposedly the hottest shit out of the dog's arse) threw a hissy fit and refused to read them. Some dickhead at Lancaster offered me £1100 for it 3 months into my 'ownership' of the aforementioned fuckshite twatbox and I nearly ripped the lad's hand off.

 

The sooner the person responsible for the iTunes interface experiences intense physical pain, the better, too. It never, ever worked right on my G5 and when I got a 4G iPod for Christmas years ago the first thing that hit the bin was the iTunes disc. It had one chance and decided to overwrite my iPod one night for no fucking reason after I'd just finished scraping the 'library' horseshit from the HD to the iPod. 'Oh well', say the Apple bummers, 'You didn't set it up properly, it can't just do that automatically'. YES IT CAN, IT FUCKING DID, oh fuck I appear to have snapped the iTunes disc in half. Strange that a piece of software that's supposed to 'just work' fucked everything up in sight by being fundamentally shit and having a piss poor interface, innit? STOP MAKING EXCUSES.

 

I downloaded YamiPod about three days later and have used it ever since. It seems I have the only 4G iPod left that hasn't had its battery \ hard drive explode. Still works, who gives a fuck?

 

Also, Shure E2C earphones. Hateful pieces of shit.

 

Baaaaaa!

[Negative Creep]

I reinstalled XP on my desktop at the weekend, so of course that would mean losing iTunes and my meticulously rated and play counted music library. Can't go wrong with copying the entire My Music Folder right? Well it did bring back my library - or rather it brought back an 18 month old version

[philibusmo]

Hmm, I've always got on well with iTunes on my Pc, and I am honestly no fan-boy. I hate using Macs.

 

This evening I had some spare time so decided to carry on with building my computer case. This required some araldite. No problem, there has been a tube of it hanging above the bench in the garage, casually falling on any carefully laid out selection of vehicle components I have laid out on there, scattering them across the floor, for the past four years.

Well not today there wasn't. The one day I actually need the bloody stuff and it's legged it. Looks like I will have to postpone that job until I can nip down to homebase.

[ashmicro]

ITunes is a badly engineered piece of shit. Many here know my opinions of it. Even the most myopic of Apple-lickers must concede that if something needs THAT many and THAT frequent updates, then it's not a "continuous improvement policy" as Apple claim. It's a firefighting exercise.

 

I shouldn't really complain about iTunes, though - my accountant told me that in the last financial year I made nearly 2 grand sorting out machines that iTunes had fucked up. Some donkey even installed it on a standalone Windows 2008 R2 server.

 

I reckon the Windows 8 tablets will stick a big dent in the iPad market share. I've tried a couple, and they're very user friendly, with all the familiarity of Windows. And industry standards, not proprietary shit like Wat describes.

[Ross_K]

True. The iPad especially. The few people I have met who own one seem to just constantly try to justify to themselves why they bought it. 'Yeah, it's good because it can XYZ(nothing a cheap netbook can't do)'.

 

I've got a 4 year old Macbook but it runs Windows, if that's any consolation.

 

Apple fans remind me of that Samsung ad where all the Apple fanboys are queuing for the latest iDevice. One guy says "I could never get a Samsung, I'm a creative" The guy beside him says "Shut up dude, you're a barista"

 

Ah, here's the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0q7BoMAEbc

"If it looks the same, how will people know I upgraded?" :D

[Guest]

 

I reckon the Windows 8 tablets will stick a big dent in the iPad market share. I've tried a couple, and they're very user friendly, with all the familiarity of Windows. And industry standards, not proprietary shit like Wat describes.

 

No, they won't I'm afraid. People are in love with Apple products, even though they don't work properly and are hideously overpriced for what they offer. The Windows competitors could be the best tablets in the world, but the average cunt in the street won't buy one 'because it's not an Apple, they just work.' There is some serious PR \ Marketing mindfucking at play here. Apple and VW must share creative teams.

 

Oh, and I put your argument about iTunes needing constant updates, something the Apple faithful claim their beloved Macs never need (and are apparently immune to viruses, too). More cognitive dissonance : 'Well, the updates are there because the same people who did the hardware did the software, the updates are there to keep it [iTunes] working the best it can'.

 

Slight problem mate - it never worked properly in the first place.

 

Oh, and if there's one story that confirmed Steve Jobs as a total shitpiece, it's this one. Apparently when on his deathbed, he refused an oxygen mask because he didn't like the design.

 

I think I'd have smothered the cunt there and then. Priorities, dickhead.

[M'coli]

You'd only have been able to smother him if he'd liked the look of the device you were going to smother him with, then he'd have got his marketing analysts to rate just how good the smothering experience was, and whether they'd be more excited if smothered in a different way.

[Ross_K]

Hmm, preferably like Michael Hutchence.

 

Although technically he strangled (as opposed to smothered) himself...

[ashmicro]

 

I reckon the Windows 8 tablets will stick a big dent in the iPad market share. I've tried a couple, and they're very user friendly, with all the familiarity of Windows. And industry standards, not proprietary shit like Wat describes.

 

No, they won't I'm afraid. People are in love with Apple products, even though they don't work properly and are hideously overpriced for what they offer. The Windows competitors could be the best tablets in the world, but the average cunt in the street won't buy one 'because it's not an Apple, they just work.' There is some serious PR \ Marketing mindfucking at play here. Apple and VW must share creative teams.

 

Windows 8 will run on a Galaxy tab, specifically Windows 8 RT which is for the ARM arch. I'm trying to dual boot my Tab now. Not being tied to one hardware manufacturer will give Win8 at least that advantage, ie, the ability to upgrade one's existing hardware. MS are talking about a $49 pricepoint for the RT edition.

 

As an aside, I disinterred this VMDK this today, and I still like it better than Spack OS.

 

 

 

@Rossk K: I'm doing the same as you, except the other way around - I have a Hackintosh.

[Spiny Norman]

You'd only have been able to smother him if he'd liked the look of the device you were going to smother him with...

I was going to make a crack about an iPillow, and for some reason I Googled it, and there is such a thing.......

 

I asked the missus for the newspaper today and she had a right go at me for being so '20th Century' and handed me her iPad instead.

That fucking spider never knew what hit it.

[ashmicro]

[willswitchengage]

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/stock ... lldown=off

 

^^ (sorry long link- it's late!) There's Apple's stock price on a log plot to show how staggeringly successful they've been over the past ten years - an 100x increase in stock value.

 

That's a current market capitalisation of half a trillion dollars, or, in English, twice Scotland's GDP or the second most valuable company in the world - slightly behind Saudi Aramco. So, a company that makes novelty computers is valued roughly the same as the world's largest oil extractor. Hmm.

[Pete-M]

My ancient and unloved iphone 3G threw a wobbly again today, to cure this involved first repairing ichewns on the PC so it could find the phone, then updating ichewns because it was whining about needing an update, then backing up everything on the iphone, then deleting everything from the phone, then downloading the most current software for the phone (the same as it had before), removing the apps that don't work with my phone - which used to work until they were updated by ichewns a few minutes earlier, the installing the current IOS onto the phone, then reinstalling all the contacts etc that were backed up at the beginning of this malarky.

 

Took about half an hour, which isn't too bad really. Then another 10 minutes to put the phone back to how I like it.

 

In other news, Natwest found my wages so it's all back to normal for me.

[scaryoldcortina]

I think the big change came when computers, phones and music players stopped being a means to an end and started being lifestyle items that need constant replacement to keep up with the latest super trendy and so much better way to use the internet, make phone calls or listen to music.

 

iTunes I don't get. Literally. They don't make a linux version anyway.

 

 

PS, I found a 1997 copy of the Ford Consul Classic and Capri Owners Club (FCCCOC) magazine the other day and read some of it. The instructions for submissions says ONLY typewritten copy can be accepted because the editor's applemac won't read PC disks

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

Part of Apple's success is a lack of competition. PCs/Windows are coasting on being the default.

 

Take retail: all of the computers in the Apple Store are open, unlocked and connected to the internet. If you want to go in there, update your Facebook page, take a photo of yourself with the camera and set it as the wallpaper, you can do that. You're encouraged to play with the products. Compare this to Tesco, where all the machines are locked down and have McAffee 'your computer is at risk' notices on the screen. In Staples, they are all locked down. Last time I was in PC World, most of the computers were locked down, one had a failed Windows install error message, and several others were unlocked but covered in virus software alerts. Hardly encouraging.

 

Oh, and I put your argument about iTunes needing constant updates, something the Apple faithful claim their beloved Macs never need (and are apparently immune to viruses, too). More cognitive dissonance : 'Well, the updates are there because the same people who did the hardware did the software, the updates are there to keep it [iTunes] working the best it can'.

Anyone who says Macs don't need updates is deluded, they're just infrequent and massive. The iTunes updates are annoying because Apple don't seem to understand patching so each one is nearly 80mb. I've just run software update and there's an update to add RAW support for TWO cameras which is somehow over 8mb.

[Richard]

[RedSparrow]

Said it before and I'll say it again, iTunes is one of the most flawed, buggy and inefficient pieces of software I have ever come across. Still though, friends who are Apple fans swear it can do no wrong despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

 

Can anyone recommend a better program to use with an iPod incidentally?

(yes I have an iPod but it's 4 years old and secondhand!)

[vulgalour]

While we're grumpy about i-stuff, one of the things that gets me is when people post a terrible picture and then write "Sorry, took this with my iphone". If it's such a shit camera, why are you using it in the first place? Also, why do you need to tell me, is it so that I'll be impressed at how much money you've wasted there with your non-camera?

[messerschmitt owner]

if only it was true - I've never paid for an OS update for a current version of a mac os - they come free and come less often than a windows one - every time I switch my Windows 7 netbook on it wants to update something.

[Ross_K]

Snow Leopard was a 30 quid "update" to Leopard. Lion's pretty much a service pack to Leopard too - I forget how much that costs.

 

What I've noticed is that Mac users think that moving to a newer version of their OS is free.

 

The amount of times someone's said to me "While you're at it can you stick on Snow Leopard/Lion/whatever the latest version is..."

 

Then they look all disappointed when you tell then it's going to involve money changing hands. They can't believe the benevolent Jobs could have screwed them so.

[ashmicro]

Sure. the Mac OS updates are less frequent, but look at the size of this bugger that I installed recently. Incidentally, the sound stopped working after this one, I had to modify some kexts, which caused a multitude of kernel panics before I got it working again.

 

[messerschmitt owner]

I have never found the need to update onto a new 'big cat'!

 

My old mac ran OS10.3, this one runs 10.5.8 - when I got it, it ran 10.5.2 and the six updates to the OS have always been free. I don't consider an update to a new 'big cat' to be a freebie. Anyway, £30 for an updated version of the operating system is nothing in comparison to the £75-150 to upgrade Windows 7 from starter to Home or Business versions of the same software already on the netbook (just locked till you pay the cash).

[Ross_K]

OSX users would do well to stay on top of their security patches just like Windows folk.

 

If you're on Tiger or Leopard though, there's no security update for Flashback and that other backdoor back in April.

 

You won't know you're vulnerable because software update doesn't look for the patch.

 

Anyway, I've got no interest in a Mac vs. PC brawl. I work with both so don't really give a rat's arse which one I'm sat in front of. They've both got pros and cons.

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Mac vs PC: Bollocks