Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

First... sorry, you're right. I should've addressed SS and AVG directly, rather than you. Corrected as above.

Secondly... no, Rossman has not been given short shrift. At least where bd139 and I are concerned, our opinions are the result of deep-down, depth-first research on exactly what Rossman and his PAC are doing. The legislation he promotes is already so watered-down that by the time it comes back from committee, it will be nothing more than our representatives making another gift to the bastards they're supposed to be regulating. Everything I've seen indicates that Rossman and his PAC know this, and I for one don't trust him or them with a penny.

Bottom line is that if we did get this legislation passed, it will be just like when some corporate lawyer offers a check for thousands of dollars to some poor sod who's been exposed to hazardous waste product in exchange for signing away their right to sue later. The corporations will just point to it and whine that they've already made this concession, which we have no means to enforce without costing the taxpayer billions in the long run.

No, we need to stop begging them to do the right thing and start making them clean up their own mess.

mnem
 

The only sure fire way of doing that is to stop buying their products until they do clean up their mess. You cannot complain about them and still continue to use their gear, that makes you and everyone else who uses their gear, part of the problem, fact. You have to hit them where it hurts the most, in their wallet.

I'm not the one complaining aboot them. You are.

I don't feel the value to dollar ratio is there with iPwns. I'm not bd139; I don't rely on the iPwn services Apple provides for my livelihood the way he does.

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it... provided you don't fuckerize it yourself like I did.  I will probably buy another for my wife if I can't resurrect daughter's old one cheaply enough... I'm already thinking aboot ways to workaround the crunked-up audio/charge connector and  that I borked last time I had my big ol' hamhands inside it. And this time I'll outwit myself and get the extended hummer provision plan along with it, just like bd139 does. 

mnem
 

[Brumby]

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it...

Would you extend that sentiment to a brand new iPhone straight out of the box?

[Specmaster]

I've keep out of this "discussion" but can't let the comments on SD cards pass.
Most, if not all, phones with microSD card compatibility have a slot they have a tray of sonmesort so nothing to stick a coin or similar into. My Samsung has a sealed tray that maintains water resistance. I  guess you will argue you said SD card not microSD, but that would be silly, no recent phones (or any I can think of) have used full sized SD cards.

The advantage of an SD card is it is somewhere I can store my photos and data that is fairly secure and can be removed and read in another computer even if the phone has died or been smashed.  No,  don't consider the cloud to be secure and accessible for this purpose. I may need the data when the network is not available or my phone is dying.

 

Yes you are correct, I did indeed mean micro SD card. The other benefit with them is that should you need the phone to be looked at under warranty, you can remove the micro SD card and keep your photos and other personal info safe and still allow the techs to work on the phone. Agree 100% with your comments here, the cloud is not a secure environment at all or is always accessible particularly in some rural locations which means that should you use the phone there to take photos, then those photos would not be backed up on the cloud so should an accident happen with the phone, you lose everything. Also, of course as my family have discovered what happens when your space in the cloud gets full? Not everyone has a computer that they can download their cloud data to.

[mnementh]

...The advantage of an SD card is it is somewhere I can store my photos and data that is fairly secure and can be removed and read in another computer even if the phone has died or been smashed.  No,  don't consider the cloud to be secure and accessible for this purpose. I may need the data when the network is not available or my phone is dying.

No, you're right to an extent, provided we are talking aboot a utilitarian device rather than an aspirational brand luxury item like a iPwn. THAT point I already answered:

...Yes, but you are comparing a utilitarian device with an iDevice which is manufactured and marketed as a luxury aspirational brand. Literally comparing apples and oxcarts. The sleek, sealed design is part of the exclusivity that is their stock in trade; this simply is not a reasonable argument.

You don't have to buy Apple. Nobody needs anything they make. Trying to make them be like your Yugo phone is like trying to beat a alligator into a pigeonhole; even if you were successful, what value would be the result? You are not going to ever be able to make people stop wanting an exclusive product, nor make other people stop making those products to sell to them.

No, the solution here is still to fix the core problem of allowing any corporation to command our lives, and forcing them into accountability.

You know... that thing that's been a dirty word since The Gipper played the role of a lifetime... regulation.

And agreed... for a certain portion of the public, removable storage is and will always be preferred, whether or not the feeling of security it gives is entirely based in reality; I lost almost a year's worth of family photos on a random SD card failure, so I know that feeling of security is illusory at best. Another set of contacts is another point of failure is another way removable media is as likely, arguably more likely, to fail than internal flash. The ideal situation would be for it to be stored both on internal flash and SD card at the same time; but that is an edge case use not statistically significant here, as the average user is not going to know or care how to make it happen for them.

What is significant here is that this is not an either/or choice. You can have what you want (for now, anyways) with your Jeep-level smartPwn, bd139 can have the premium ducksucking package with his Cadillac iPwn, and I can buy the cheap-arse Hyundai smartPwn with so much flash in it I'll never care aboot a SD card, and we can all have what we want.

But what we all need to do is come to terms wit the fact that totally sealed handsets are going to happen, but that we don't have to buy them. Just as Apple devised a way to make a waterproof Thunderbolt port, they can similarly make a SIM slot, or even an unlocked integrated GSM SIM. A SD card tho... is a bit of a different fish. While technically possible, they're going to be a lot harder to make waterproof as they are connected directly into the brain of the phone, where a SIM slot does not need to be and so is a lot easier to harden against the evils of exposure to the outside world.

Once we do come to terms with that, then we can stop sniping at each other and force the market segmentation you're talking aboot to happen, and vote with our dollars so we can each keep buying what we want.

Cheers,

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

First... sorry, you're right. I should've addressed SS and AVG directly, rather than you. Corrected as above.

Secondly... no, Rossman has not been given short shrift. At least where bd139 and I are concerned, our opinions are the result of deep-down, depth-first research on exactly what Rossman and his PAC are doing. The legislation he promotes is already so watered-down that by the time it comes back from committee, it will be nothing more than our representatives making another gift to the bastards they're supposed to be regulating. Everything I've seen indicates that Rossman and his PAC know this, and I for one don't trust him or them with a penny.

Bottom line is that if we did get this legislation passed, it will be just like when some corporate lawyer offers a check for thousands of dollars to some poor sod who's been exposed to hazardous waste product in exchange for signing away their right to sue later. The corporations will just point to it and whine that they've already made this concession, which we have no means to enforce without costing the taxpayer billions in the long run.

No, we need to stop begging them to do the right thing and start making them clean up their own mess.

mnem
 

The only sure fire way of doing that is to stop buying their products until they do clean up their mess. You cannot complain about them and still continue to use their gear, that makes you and everyone else who uses their gear, part of the problem, fact. You have to hit them where it hurts the most, in their wallet.

I'm not the one complaining aboot them. You are.

I don't feel the value to dollar ratio is there with iPwns. I'm not bd139; I don't rely on the iPwn services Apple provides for my livelihood the way he does.

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it... provided you don't fuckerize it yourself like I did.  I will probably buy another for my wife if I can't resurrect daughter's old one cheaply enough... I'm already thinking aboot ways to workaround the crunked-up audio/charge connector and  that I borked last time I had my big ol' hamhands inside it. And this time I'll outwit myself and get the extended hummer provision plan along with it, just like bd139 does. 

mnem
 

I was only complaining about their ethics, the products by and large are OK but so very expensive when compared to similar specs from others. As regards to the custom chips not every chip etc is going to custom surely? Even if they are, that is still not a reason to make them unavailable via the Apple system. If you had a pretty good Keysight scope a couple of years old and it went down, wouldn't you expect to have it repaired by them at a sensible cost or would you be happy for them to say, can't help you but you could always buy another??

[Brumby]

As regards to the custom chips not every chip etc is going to custom surely? Even if they are, that is still not a reason to make them unavailable via the Apple system.

No.  However, it would seem obvious that supply through the Apple system would potentially involve a much greater logistics infrastructure.  In addition, the difference in cost of sending out 100 iPhones or 100 chips is negligible, but the difference in profit is huge.  JMHO.

[tautech]

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it...

OK so you want a portable device to work alongside your existing infrastructure which of course for many of us is Windows and you wanna drop PDF's and the like onto your iPad so to have them on hand in the workshop for mechanical repairs and the like.......trouble is Apple and Windows won't play nice together and you need iTunes as an interface just to get PDF's onto your iPad ! 
Sure some of your iPad file sys is visible on Windows but try dropping files onto it for convenience of use later. 

[Brumby]

OK so you want a portable device to work alongside your existing infrastructure which of course for many of us is Windows and you wanna drop PDF's and the like onto your iPad so to have them on hand in the workshop for mechanical repairs and the like.......trouble is Apple and Windows won't play nice together and you need iTunes as an interface just to get PDF's onto your iPad ! 
Sure some of your iPad file sys is visible on Windows but try dropping files onto it for convenience of use later.

That one "word" is the reason I asked this question...

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it...

Would you extend that sentiment to a brand new iPhone straight out of the box?

When I bought an iPhone 4, I couldn't even get it to work, without first installing iTunes on my computer     ...and that piece of software was the most arrogant, invasive, controlling, pain-in-the-ass thing I have EVER had to deal with ... even outdoing AVG on that scale.

[mnementh]

The problem here is we are arguing each and every part of the puzzle as if it were the only reason... when there's a dozen different pieces that add up to "No way in hell unless we break the corporations up like we did with IT&T".

First off... let's address the assertion that these devices are absurdly expensive... they are not. Sure, other manufacturers turn out similar products at a much cheaper price... AFTER the bleeding edge manufacturers do all the hard R&D work, and take all the market risk. My favored BLU phones are a prime example. But I am under no delusion that my personal phone, which is still BLU's flagship model, is in any way comparable to a flagship iPwn. It is just what I consider to be reasonable value for dollar in a device I carry in my pocket.

If you had told teenage me that I would be able to get the tech inside a iPwn for the equivalent of $600 then, I'd have beaten you with a 2x4 until you took me to that future. 

So now we know that a similar product can be made so cheaply... we know how Apple does it too. By buying exactly as much as is needed to do a production run, putting it all into that production run, and not getting into the very expensive and money-losing side business of parts brokerage. This not only makes per-unit cost much less, it means they can maintain pre-release security much more completely, and by using lots of custom silicon, they have all their suppliers tied up in NDA for the foreseeable future. It's a win-win-win trifecta for them... but the cost is... warranty is done on an exchange basis rather than repair.

You know the old saw aboot "Good, Fast, or Cheap; pick any two." Well, a similar derivative applies here: "Bleeding edge, Miniaturized, Repairable, or Cheap; pick any two, maybe three". Apple makes bleeding edge, miniaturized and (for the tech involved) cheap products. Then they add a lot of hand-holding, personal service and yes, a certain level of customer dick-suckery, along with an upscale pricetag and image; all of which cost money to maintain.

They do so at the demand of their biggest customers, the American public... who in general don't give a flying fig aboot repairability; they just want the new shiny, and the pre-purchase hummer, and for it to work until something shinier comes along. The real enthusiasts want the post-purchase hummer too, like bd139 pays extra for.

Your Keysight scope is somewhat repairable... a lot of off-the-shelf components... but it is much more expensive than your Apple product, it is definitely not at all miniaturized even by today's grossest standards, and it is not bleeding edge, aside from a handful of products which literally start at half a million dollars a pop.  The difference here is the market; hardly even the same ballfield as the market Apple sells in.

mnem
 

[Brumby]

They do so at the demand of their biggest customers, the American public... who in general don't give a flying fig aboot repairability

.... until the device fails and their anxious pleas to get back irreplaceable photos or other data is greeted with "Sorry.  That's impossible. .... Look - Here's a new shiny!"


Then someone in a NY repair shop does the "impossible".

[mnementh]

OK so you want a portable device to work alongside your existing infrastructure which of course for many of us is Windows and you wanna drop PDF's and the like onto your iPad so to have them on hand in the workshop for mechanical repairs and the like.......trouble is Apple and Windows won't play nice together and you need iTunes as an interface just to get PDF's onto your iPad ! 
Sure some of your iPad file sys is visible on Windows but try dropping files onto it for convenience of use later.

That one "word" is the reason I asked this question...

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it...

Would you extend that sentiment to a brand new iPhone straight out of the box?

When I bought an iPhone 4, I couldn't even get it to work, without first installing iTunes on my computer     ...and that piece of software was the most arrogant, invasive, controlling, pain-in-the-ass thing I have EVER had to deal with ... even outdoing AVG on that scale.

My iPwn4 worked as soon as they handed it to me over the counter. Wife's too.  I loathed the speed of the thing, as it was buggy, underpowered and ran on AT&T, but I didn't have to connect to iTunes until I decided to put music on it.

I haven't touched iTunes in years. I've had at least one iPud since mmmhmmm... 2005?

Dropbox. Done. If you manage someone else's iPud like I do, create a iCloud account for that iPud and you can drop files on it with authentication via text to your smartPwn and never even have to lay hands on the device.

Yes, you have to be willing to fit your needs within the Apple infrastructure, which involves giving up a certain amount of your alleged privacy. But really, with pretty much every government and Facebook-type data-mining corporation tapping every bit of the core infrastructure anyways, how much privacy do you really have?

At least with Apple, you have a legally binding contract with them... an exchange of money for services... saying they will keep your personal info to themselves. And unlike MS, they have a vested interest in fulfilling that obligation, as you are a paying customer.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

They do so at the demand of their biggest customers, the American public... who in general don't give a flying fig aboot repairability

.... until the device fails and their anxious pleas to get back irreplaceable photos or other data is greeted with "Sorry.  That's impossible. .... Look - Here's a new shiny!" Then someone in a NY repair shop does the "impossible".

And that's only because they didn't set up their phone to automagically back up to the cloud for "reasons". As we've already established, the Apple ecology really only works for those who fully buy into it; for those who buy an Apple product expecting it to behave like a Windoze product or a Android product... they are going to be forever disappointed.

I can do the same thing for those photos I lost on that randomly dead SD card... at a cost of several hundred dollars. It is not reasonable to expect that level of service from the Apple bar or any manufacturer. If you took said phone to Apple and they told you "$250, and there's a high probability I won't be able to get jack shit off that phone anyways" you'd have a shit-fit conniption and shit-post them all over the intardNet.

Another of those dozens of pieces of the puzzle I refer to above.

mnem
 

[SilverSolder]

[...] ...trouble is Apple and Windows won't play nice together and you need iTunes as an interface just to get PDF's onto your iPad ! [...]

My wife is extremely angry about the lack of compatibility between the two, it gets in her way constantly.

I'm looking at a new idea:  putting an FTP server on the iPad.  Have you attempted something like that?

I have one on my Android phone and it is an awesome way to sync to the PC...   but who knows, maybe Apple doesn't allow it or something...

[mnementh]

I do, however, feel the regular iPud at ~US$330 is a steal of deal for the tech and painless user experience you get from it...

Would you extend that sentiment to a brand new iPhone straight out of the box?

No idea. Haven't had a new one out of the box since that iPwn4.  The last two I've had were used; the setup for them after factory reset was pretty much the same as my iPud, aside from having to figure out how to import my contacts from GMail.

iTunes was only necessary when I wanted to load music or videos on them, just like my iPuds at the time.

mnem
 

[med6753]

Welcome to the "Right to Repair Channel" with Apple bitching and moaning thrown in for good measure and total freaking boredom to some of us readers.     

Sorry, but the last 10 to 15 pages of this thread have been IMHO a waste of time. BUT....it does make it easy to catch up because I skip 90% of it. 

 

[tautech]

[...] ...trouble is Apple and Windows won't play nice together and you need iTunes as an interface just to get PDF's onto your iPad ! [...]

My wife is extremely angry about the lack of compatibility between the two, it gets in her way constantly.

I'm looking at a new idea:  putting an FTP server on the iPad.  Have you attempted something like that?

I have one on my Android phone and it is an awesome way to sync to the PC...   but who knows, maybe Apple doesn't allow it or something...

Nuthing tricky like FTP no and dunno if you can as I don't get much into that sorta stuff.
Since iPhone 3 been using iTunes for backups and still use it for a 6S so that sorta tells you what I think of clouds....they can go get stuffed as I'm not buying into it !
iTunes is a PITA but it works and you can keep all your stuff stored local.

[beanflying]

Welcome to the "Right to Repair Channel" with Apple bitching and moaning thrown in for good measure and total freaking boredom to some of us readers.     

Sorry, but the last 10 to 15 pages of this thread have been IMHO a waste of time. BUT....it does make it easy to catch up because I skip 90% of it. 

Just add more hot air or water to it and it continues perpetually ...... 

[Cerebus]

They do so at the demand of their biggest customers, the American public... who in general don't give a flying fig aboot repairability

.... until the device fails and their anxious pleas to get back irreplaceable photos or other data is greeted with "Sorry.  That's impossible. .... Look - Here's a new shiny!"

It never ceases to amaze me that "backups" is not in the dictionary of almost any user. Some of them are lucky, and have professionals managing their devices for them, so those backups do actually exist. For everybody else there is Apple, who do indeed say "Here's a new shiny...", but continue "...setup up with your restored settings from iCloud with all your photos, messages, etc.". Don't forget that much of the price of an Apple device is the infrastructure to support the 'free' 5Gb of cloud storage that they maintain indefinitely for you - which you can whack up to 50Gb for a very reasonable £0.79 a month (two pints of beer a year) or 250 Gb for £2.49 a month (a coffee a month).

Apple also make keeping backups of laptops/desktops managable by the average user. Sure, unlike the phones and iPads it's not all done for them, they have to buy an external drive and plug it in, then turn time machines on, but once that's done they get backups every hour. I have never lost data on an Apple device except by my own stupidity of not turning backups on on one machine or making alternative backup arrangements for that machine (I lost a drive of archived material when the disk it was on went south).

[Cerebus]

Sorry, but the last 10 to 15 pages of this thread have been IMHO a waste of time. BUT....it does make it easy to catch up because I skip 90% of it. 

Oh come on, that "10 to 15 pages" includes my lovely, fishnet stocking clad, legs. That alone is worth the price of admission.

[Cerebus]

I'm looking at a new idea:  putting an FTP server on the iPad.  Have you attempted something like that?

I have one on my Android phone and it is an awesome way to sync to the PC...   but who knows, maybe Apple doesn't allow it or something...

Even if your FTP server is running FTPS the very idea of running an FTP server on a phone connected to the internet without a firewall and IDS sends shivers down my spine.

[beanflying]

Rolling it Weston Style in the Shack today. I really should open the 735A up and tweak those last few PPM's out of its tiny self  Internally untweaked from when I got it.

Posted to assist those of us still trying to remove the Stocking clad Cerebus legs from our minds 

[SilverSolder]

I'm looking at a new idea:  putting an FTP server on the iPad.  Have you attempted something like that?

I have one on my Android phone and it is an awesome way to sync to the PC...   but who knows, maybe Apple doesn't allow it or something...

Even if your FTP server is running FTPS the very idea of running an FTP server on a phone connected to the internet without a firewall and IDS sends shivers down my spine.

There are ways to mitigate the risks...   you aren't really carrying unencrypted super sensitive info on a loseable phone anyway, right?

For example, bind the server to only 192.168.x.x addresses (LAN only, not Internet).   Set it up to only admit specific client IPs.  You can also enable/disable it completely...  there is no reason to have it "on" when leaving the house...  Maybe using an NFC tag, if you want to get all modern and everything...

[mnementh]

Or you could just admit to yourself that privacy in the digital age is a fucking unicorn (or a dragon, if you prefer ), start using your iDevices as if someone were always watching, and pay Apple the 99¢ a month to use iCloud as your tertiary backup so that even when you forget your weeklies, you don't suffer too much pain the next time you flush your phone down the loo.

mnem
*to empty room* I know you're listening. hissssssssssssssssss...

[SilverSolder]

Or you could just admit to yourself that privacy in the digital age is a fucking unicorn (or a dragon, if you prefer ), start using your iDevices as if someone were always watching, and pay Apple the 99¢ a month to use iCloud as your tertiary backup so that even when you forget your weeklies, you don't suffer too much pain the next time you flush your phone down the loo.

mnem
*to empty room* I know you're listening. hissssssssssssssssss...

Wife tried that, filled it up in a couple of months LOL.  She likes shooting videos so generates tons of data! 

"privacy in the digital age is a fucking unicorn" is right...  that's why a FTP server makes sense.  I'm tired of paying security tax, now I just want something that actually works...

[mnementh]

They do so at the demand of their biggest customers, the American public... who in general don't give a flying fig aboot repairability

.... until the device fails and their anxious pleas to get back irreplaceable photos or other data is greeted with "Sorry.  That's impossible. .... Look - Here's a new shiny!"

It never ceases to amaze me that "backups" is not in the dictionary of almost any user. Some of them are lucky, and have professionals managing their devices for them, so those backups do actually exist. For everybody else there is Apple, who do indeed say "Here's a new shiny...", but continue "...setup up with your restored settings from iCloud with all your photos, messages, etc.". Don't forget that much of the price of an Apple device is the infrastructure to support the 'free' 5Gb of cloud storage that they maintain indefinitely for you - which you can whack up to 50Gb for a very reasonable £0.79 a month (two pints of beer a year) or 250 Gb for £2.49 a month (a coffee a month).

Apple also make keeping backups of laptops/desktops managable by the average user. Sure, unlike the phones and iPads it's not all done for them, they have to buy an external drive and plug it in, then turn time machines on, but once that's done they get backups every hour. I have never lost data on an Apple device except by my own stupidity of not turning backups on on one machine or making alternative backup arrangements for that machine (I lost a drive of archived material when the disk it was on went south).

Preaching to the choir, man. "Please tell me you can fix this...!" (you know, in that squeaky, terrified voice ) means "I haven't done a backup in like... ever!!!"

mnem