ohgr

8000 staff including very high level engineering and technical.

I get bagged and tagged at least once a week when I go shopping in the UK in the last 50 years. You don’t want to come here at all. I’d rather hang around in Russia these days.

Facetious comment aside the only time I’ve had problems with border security anywhere is getting a large carpet back home from Azerbaijan. This was very interesting and required them to examine every square centimetre of it. China, US, UK, Europe all really boring. Russia was incompetent. They didn’t even check anything at all (2012)

They can arrest you for anything. I’ve been arrested twice. And questioned once. And apologised to twice.

Literally a large chunk of the ARM core team are in Cambridge including most of the GPU folk and there are a ton of infra and software team in a couple of other UK locations.

On top of that, a big chunk of the follow the sun on call engineering (SRE) are here that look after global infra and most of the European support operation are in Northern Ireland.

Wankers! Sorry that's not constructive. But that's what they are.

Especially when government ministers regularly accidentally delete everything and get away with it...

Yeah they really need to get that under control. It's a complete rip off at this point.

I don't mind them charging say $50 "Apple premium" for the fact it's a proprietary board and needs firmware loading onto the flash but the multiplicative pricing is bullshit price gouging and nothing more.

Yes there has to be magistrate approval and you can challenge a notice with legal representation.

Go on eBay and buy the following Open University book sets. They go for around £30-50 a pop: MU123 (basics), MST124 (more complex). 6 months worth of study in each book set. If you like it do MST125 (even more complex) and M140 (stats) after. That's the first year of a mathematics degree literally from the ground up through GCSE and A-level stuff. If you really like it, get a student loan and do the associated accredited degree.

£30 for 6 months is pretty damn cheap and you get to keep it forever!

ebay example of the latest edition for sale: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/197011707080

On archive.org too if you are happy with PDFs: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22The+MU123+Cour...

First MU123 book A: https://archive.org/details/BookAMU1232ndedOU2014/MU123-Book...

This is a proper accredited course developed over 50 years or so with its own textbooks and material from a respectable university, not a gamified subscription portal experiment put together by god knows who that can disappear in a puff of smoke at no notice.

Indeed. But you can of course say "show me the court order" and defend yourself.

I never get this perspective. Firstly we do give them a crap load of revenue. Secondly it'd probably trash any of their non US business almost immediately as people start looking for contingency in case they pull out of other countries. Thirdly they didn't pull out of China. And fourthly there are a lot of Apple engineering staff here in the UK - it'd cripple them because they won't move to the US.

They will comply with the law and make a lot of noise and not a lot else.

Apple will do it for the attention, PR and to hurt the idea generally even if they lose. Mindshare and ire towards the government are as strong as any legal judgement over time.

I am very glad they are doing this as a UK based ADP user. Waiting to see how long before they forcibly turn it off for existing users. I will of course just remove everything from iCloud at that point.

Yeah that. I only got rid of mine because I wanted the nice mini-LED screen on the 14" MBP. No plans to replace that one any time soon!

No. They just need to capture or sink one caught pulling cables up.

This is only effective because there are no real consequences for it.

Ok so my next house: must have Faraday cage.

Yeah the canonical "offline" method is to use the LTSC images and activator from https://massgrave.dev/ . That's the only way to run a licensed copy of office on an airgapped network.

Oh don't :)

I'm actually worried that some newer smart devices might be set up to use well known public wifi services that are available from consumer routers.

Just sitting here I have public "EE Wifi X" and "BT Internet" which it could connect to if configured at the factory to do that.

Then I am boned.

Well no it's not lazy at all. I'll tell you why.

It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly.

THAT is a complete dealbreaker.

As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that.

There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.

I have never found a reason to do that personally. It seems like an extra step I don't need. I also don't want the printer going near a shared folder and I definitely don't want the printer's true owner (the vendor) to be handling my documents over email!

Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook).

O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.

I never let my printer near the Internet. It goes on the "fucking trash" subnet which has no route out. Mine's an HP but it complains occasionally that it can't get new firmware which makes me feel warm inside.

SSD is fine. I have a rework station. I haven't upgraded the other things in a computer for about 15 years.

You can buy parts for it absolutely no problems at all so this is an exaggeration.

Yeah it's not perfect on iOS but better than maintaining your own stack. Basically it creates a VPN to localhost then proxies the DNS and traffic over that. It only modifies the DNS using a blocklist and passes your normal traffic straight through.

Works well. Even the crappiest nasty sites won't get through it.

I've got a Polestar 2. The map is shown inside the dashboard. The calls appear on the centre display.

I think it's a limitation of the vehicle's implementation.

Probably not. I don't own one as I'm lazy. I actually paid for AdGuard and use it on my iPhone and iPad. It comes with a mini PiHole implementation built in.

Correct. Which is the point. The user complains that the problem is a software crisis when the software is fine on completely different hardware. That would suggest by elimination it's not a software problem, or is a software problem tied to particular hardware.

(incidentally they mostly use USB-C apple pencils and some clone ones when they lose them and the parents don't want to buy a genuine replacement one)

Yeah annoys me too.

You can turn them back on everywhere in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars always.

It's a bit hit and miss for sure. If you turn off the subscription and Apple Music portal stuff it works fine though. I use it with a cable to sync to my iPhone with offline files I ripped with XLD from CDs. It's all the network crap that breaks it.

You don't need an Apple account to install an adblocker. You just install it from here https://adguard.com/en/adguard-mac/overview.html

And you don't have to pay for it, just close the ask.