Grumble Thread

[Cockney Sparrow]

I simply stay well away from Apple products. I have always found them unreliable and restrictive since my first encounter with the Apple II.

Any of my friends telling me a tale of woe about their Apple products are met with "but I thought they all rectified themselves, at the latest overnight - that's why there is such hefty price premium, isn't it?".

[Bryn]

Any of my friends telling me a tale of woe about their Apple products are met with "but I thought they all rectified themselves, at the latest overnight - that's why there is such hefty price premium, isn't it?".

Whoever thought that was entirely wrong. My old Mac laptop (back in the days when they came with a DVD drive) would not play either DVD-Rs or DVD+R written on my Panasonic recorder. More recently, when I had to resort to an iPad Air II to use with the Zoom USB dongle for remote control of my H3-VR (they do not offer an Android version of the software) I was surprised and frankly disgusted to find that I needed to use third party software to get music files onto it, and that it would not handle FLAC or mp2 (from DAB) files. Apple may have a more secure OS than Microsoft but it is not as immune from malware as is popularly thought.

[kernelbogey]

I simply stay well away from Apple products. I have always found them unreliable and restrictive since my first encounter with the Apple II.

I have an iPhone and a MacBook Air. I recently had a problem with the latter and phoned the helpline late at night. I was talked through the issues with a helpful, patient man in Sydney Australia, who gave the impression of having infinite time and patience for my issues. We arranged for him to be able to see the screen I had up - without himself being able to *do* anything; and we got the problem defined and partially resolved. I was dead impressed. Whether that justifies the premium price for the kit must be a matter of personal choice. Relatively early built-in obsolescence troubles me a bit. But as Stuart Lee wrote in last Sunday's Obsever - under, for me, headline of the year - 'Will the planet outlast my laptop?'

[Bryn]

I have an iPhone and a MacBook Air. I recently had a problem with the latter and phoned the helpline late at night. I was talked through the issues with a helpful, patient man in Sydney Australia, who gave the impression of having infinite time and patience for my issues. We arranged for him to be able to see the screen I had up - without himself being able to *do* anything; and we got the problem defined and partially resolved. I was dead impressed. Whether that justifies the premium price for the kit must be a matter of personal choice. Relatively early built-in obsolescence troubles me a bit. But as Stuart Lee wrote in last Sunday's Obsever - under, for me, headline of the year - 'Will the planet outlast my laptop?'

https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/written_for_money/will-the-planet-outlive-my-dying-laptop/

[Dave2002]

I simply stay well away from Apple products. I have always found them unreliable and restrictive since my first encounter with the Apple II.

Indeed they are not perfect, but they are an order of magnitude better than most PCs - both hardware and software.

Win PCs can work quite well in corporate environments where knowledgeable technical teams can keep things working.

I still have my original Apple laptop - from 1997 - and I checked that it worked a year or two back. It is now of course horrendously slow compared with what most of us are used to nowadays.
I have a coupe of iMacs from around 2010 - and some later machines - all of which still work.

I have known iMacs to fail - but not my own.

Oh - yes - I did also use Apple IIs - and liberated one or two when they were being deleted from inventory. I wanted to keep one - maybe as a museum piece - but it did go to the dump eventually, along with the similar Commodore PET. Perhaps that would now be worth quite a lot!

[eighthobstruction]

This is not an answer to any post on this thread/page....it is more general than that....

Is AI writng any of these posts ??....it sometimes seems that way....

[kernelbogey]

This is not an answer to any post on this thread/page....it is more general than that....
Is AI writng any of these posts ??....it sometimes seems that way....

Hello Eighth
I know a little song; shall I sing it to you? It goes like this: 'Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer do....'

[smittims]

I supose some robots can already pass those on-screen 'tests' which are there 'to check that you are not a robot'. I've had cold sales calls which sound very human until gradually you suspect that the answers betreay the fact that you're talking to a robot. I feel like the barman in 'A New Hope ' who says 'we don't serve droids in here'.

[oddoneout]

This is not an answer to any post on this thread/page....it is more general than that....

Is AI writng any of these posts ??....it sometimes seems that way....

I don't know about these parts but it' certainly been tested(and found wanting) on the online R3 schedule blurb for some time now...

[french frank]

I've had cold sales calls which sound very human until gradually you suspect that the answers betreay the fact that you're talking to a robot. I feel like the barman in 'A New Hope ' who says 'we don't serve droids in here'.

I suppose you can ask 'it' directly - I think it would give an honest answer. But that might be considered a bit rude if 'it' was a human being. Perhaps 'Do you have a middle name?' would be a suitably veiled enquiry, but either or both might give the Dirac-ian response 'Why do you want to know?' - over to you, squire ...

[Dave2002]

I suppose you can ask 'it' directly - I think it would give an honest answer. But that might be considered a bit rude if 'it' was a human being. Perhaps 'Do you have a middle name?' would be a suitably veiled enquiry, but either or both might give the Dirac-ian response 'Why do you want to know?' - over to you, squire ...

I had a query about a pension related matter last year, and phoned DWP. The "person" who responded was very quick, very accurate, and fired questions at me at a great rate of knots. In the end I asked the question "You seem very good and very quick at this, so am I talking to a human?" The response was assuring - but I reckon robots are getting better by the minute.

I think there are a lot of methods being used - possibly against us all. One would be to track people who do puzzles online. Spot those people who can do well on difficult puzzles, and either recruit them or shoot them - in the case of an internal coup.

[cloughie]

This is not an answer to any post on this thread/page....it is more general than that....

Is AI writng any of these posts ??....it sometimes seems that way....

Are you a ROBOT

Please mark any obstructions!

[eighthobstruction]

Are you a ROBOT

Please mark any obstructions!

....too prone to mistakes....always putting my 0100110, where my 0100110 shouldn't be....

[Beresford]

. But this is just part 1 of what turned up to be a double grumble - one from me, the other on behalf of "Big" Charles upstairs, who had had his passport photos rejected by renewals as being "not good enough". "They said my eyes weren't sufficiently open", he told me, "but I wasn't p*ssed or hungover, or anything; and they look fine to me". They did, but anyway, he then asked me to take some more photos using his mobile phone camera. I did, in various locations of his well-lit fourth floor flat, following the scrupulous passport dept instructions to the letter. To both our eyes, the results looked no different in quality from the examples given in the guidance document, yet, on assessment through the passport office's vetting app, these, too, were deemed inadequate, "too much like black and white photos". Quality-wise I can vouch that they were far better than ones I myself had accepted for a replacement senior travel card, done in a photo booth. In the end we will have to try again tomorrow morning, in hopefully better light conditions, assuming this to be the presiding problem, but I am left feeling doubly confirmed in my despair at the compliance requirements for what once would have been the most elementary necessities for living now being fallaciously dumped on ordinary folk in the name of "e££iciency".

I had home brewed passport photos rejected, even though they were taken by a camera and uploaded to my laptop. I found that if I increased the brightness and contrast quite a lot, more than you would expect, so they looked like a 1950's advertising picture, they were accepted. I use Fastone software to do this, but any simple editor should be able to cope, and crop to get rid of vertical lines etc.

[Serial_Apologist]

I had home brewed passport photos rejected, even though they were taken by a camera and uploaded to my laptop. I found that if I increased the brightness and contrast quite a lot, more than you would expect, so they looked like a 1950's advertising picture, they were accepted. I use Fastone software to do this, but any simple editor should be able to cope, and crop to get rid of vertical lines etc.

Thanks B. Not being knowledgeable about today's camera technology I did not think to ask!