Posts by Nick Pettefar 495 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2007
There's always something amusing about American natural disasters. The amount of money they spend on causing disasters around the world could be spent on easing the lives of their own population during natural disasters. Money not spent on proper housing, flood defences, sea walls, better infrastructuire, social health care, etc. It's almost as if they deserve what nature throws at them.
Having lived for a few years in Brussels, I would dearly love to have a local ordnance allowing the shooting of shitting dogs, especially the Rats-on-Sticks variety that the Brusselai seem to adore. UGH! Vile little rat-like canines straining on their leashes and covering the pavements with their poo whilst their moronic owners look the other way. Poisoning is too good for them - shoot them! Oh what fun we could have!
Plessey semiconductors had their chip fab plant there, producing many wonderful analogue and digital chips and there are many other high-tech companies there too: Intel and of course Motorola are there, along with other big companies such as Castrol Burmah, Nationwide, Zurich, Honda (x2), BMW, WH Smith, MAN, Triumph (bras!), Fairchild Semiconductors, Johnson Controls, Square-D, Dialog Semiconductors, etc. Did you know the NHS was based on Brunel's medical scheme for the Railway Village workers of the GWR in Swindon? The National Document archive is there as well as the Bodleian library, the Science Research Council, the fantastic STEAM railway museum and the Richard Jeffries museum. Famous Swindonians are XTC, , Billie Piper, Desmond Morris, Diana Dors, Melinda Messenger, Mark Lamarr, Julian Clary (and me!).
I know Simon from the 70s and he is a nice chap. I visited the museum last year with my son and we had a wonderful time. I was like a kid in a toy shop looking at and remembering all the old computers and my son loved the games consoles and machines. The museum is situated behind the wonderful old hall and new library.
I much prefer holding a magazine, book or newspaper (apart from getting grubby fingers) than my heavy iPad 3. You can read it, stuff it into your bag or pocket to read later, read it in the bath, on the beach, tear interesting bits out, give it to your mate/partner, write in the margins, whack wasps with it and probably other uses too.
EVERY time I shutdown my Mac (for serious software updates for example) I have to force close Firefox. Tedious.
I can't see ANY difference between FF9 and FF10. Can anyone enlighten me? Work on XP (yes, really, the retards) and home on Mac Lion (gradually getting used to it but still have a Vista feeling about it).
I bought the QNAP TS-210 for around 130 quid and it's been fine. Looks awful unless you're into white plastic bricks but has all the functionality including Time Machine and NFS. Filled it with 2TB drives. I liked it so much I bought another one to back it up. Now have my stuff on at least five hard drives so fairly secure unless there's a fire or Johnny Darko incident...
I do like the look of this machine though and the drive bays are smart; but without NFS it's effing useless.
I bought a bag for my MBP from Amazon.co.uk and 15 months later a cord tensioner thingy flew apart. I sent them an e-mail and received one in return telling me to eff off. I replied stating that the bag should have been fit for purpose for more than a yea rand they should know this and next minute the telephone rings and an obsequian tells me that as my bag is only three months old he will refund me the total price. All somewhat surreal. One would have imagined that Amazon.co.uk would know the UK laws and can also see the details of their order. I have dealt with Amazon several times with regard to warranties, returning faulty or incorrect goods and they really seem to be a random shambolic act.
I agree that Apple do seem to be trying to ride roughshod over the EU two-year law at least concerning the information they publish on their website and they should be punished for not making it clear what the situation and their responsibilities in the EU are. We consumers do seem to get a bad deal when it comes to warranty and guarantee information, compounded by the ease with which we can move around within the EU. I think our EU expectations of sameness are not being matched with reality, maybe that is a high expectation but I am an optimist and hope that things will only get better.
The confusion for shoppers in the UK over the Sales Of Goods Act (www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1979/54), Distance Selling regulation (www.out-law.com/page-430), the EU to-year warranty (www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-1677034/Two-year-warranty-EU-law.html) and what the manufacturers and suppliers inform us is really an unforgivable mess and needs to be sorted out. It is most likely a similar mess in all the other EU countries too with previous and existing laws and practices .
My iPad2 is wonderful and bad at the same time. It looks and works very well but:
* I cannot do things like uploading pictures to websites, which is baffling!
* It is very difficult to hold for anything other than a short time. I would love to use it in bed but it is almost impossible as it is too heavy to hold up for long. Instead I have to prop it up somewhere, somehow, which is often not possible. This means that watching videos, playing games or reading in bed or anywhere where there isn't a surface to put it on is not feasible which sort of negates the purpose of having it.
* The lack of a handle of some sort makes it rather awkward to hold.
* Editing text is quite difficult without cursor keys, having to guess and poke and fiddle just makes hard work of something that should be simple and easy.
* I wish it had stereo speakers built in.
I guess these criticisms apply to most tablet computers though.
I often pop into the Salisbury reseller (Stormfront) and usually find customers in there. I had to wait to be served, dreadful! I find the staff well informed and a pleasure to do business with. I am currently waiting for them to fix my cracked MacBook case, free of charge, despite being over four years old. Nice. I thought the nearby Southampton Apple shop was too crowded and small.
In a similar vein, in Germany in every street there are numerous sex shops and chemists (apothekes) in almost every street and there are never more than one or two customers in there and often none. One wonders how they pay the rents, especially in places like Munich.
Any strong competition against Google is a Good Thing. They need to keep on their toes. It might be a bit rubbish but it must be a constant thorn and irritation in Google's side and will hopefully spur them on to better things.
My Firefox has Scroogle as the search engine.
T'other day I succumbed to a temporary wave of fear and curiosity and installed that there Sophos free Mac anti-virus software on my MacBook I bought in 2007.
Sure enough it found three viruses. Aye.
All three were from wayback when and all were Windoze ones. I just deleted them. e-Mail attachments from Windoze users.
I have now de-installed it.
I'll install it again and re-run it in a year or two.
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