The view from Lincolnshire

My lad gave me his old Iphone3, since he bought a Galaxy Andriod. Now, under normal circumstances thers no way i’d pay £300 for a phone, no matter how smart it is, but if you’re going to give me one free, then im quite happy to put some credit on it and play.

Apart from many flaws (listed later), the by far and away worst feature of an Iphone is the fact most of the free Apps and many of the paid for apps SIMPLY DONT WORK!! OK, you might only pay 69p or 99p for them, but I spent Nearly £10 on Apps that either didnt work, didnt work as described, or stopped working after they updated. And there doesnt seem to be a mechanism for getting your money back. After all, i see no reason that apps shouldnt come under the Sale of Goods Act and be ‘as described, of merchantable quality, and fit for purpose’.

Bokodo bar code reader didnt work at all. On the other hand, RedLaser barcode scanner seems to work about 50% of the time. Skywalk, a Stars and Constellations program, worked when i first downloaded it, then it updated, and started to crash out on loadup, updated a week after that and seems to work again. Ispeed sort of works, it throws many many false positive for speed cameras such that in urban areas it almost always on. Speed is a similar program, buit crashes on load, another one suffering the fate of an update. NavFree UK shows a map but its so arcane and obscure to use its useless. Panorama Free, was never going to work. Many free one fail to load or run, i just deleted them, since there free then one cant complain apart from the waste of time and data allowance downloading them.

See, i worked in IT 30 years. I started writing COBOL on punched cards in the early 80′s and ended up project managing large rollouts of hardware and software, (and were talking LANS and WANs, 100 servers, 300 workstations, 100 locations, £1.5million budgets). I know all about what software should and shouldnt do. And one thing i do know is when you have a software set that works, you dont update anything. So the Apps habit of forcing you to accept updates with no method of rolling back to the original is doomed to create tears before bedtime, especially when they fail to test the app on all o/s versions.

Im not impressed with the idea of upgrading the iphone o/s, either. I remember once when my wife bought an iPod, a few years ago, we installed the software and a week later it enthusiastically offered to update, which i foolishly let it. It subsequently trashed the PC, and took me 8 hours and a complete disc reformat to get it all working again, AND it trashed the iPod and we had to do a factory reset and reload. The moral here is to not roll out so many different o/s’s. Theres an old saying, if you fiddle with anything for long enough, you’ll break it. O/S updates are a perfect demonstration of this. Even Microsoft tends not to go beyond x.3 and a version every 4 years.

And then you get the User Interface. The problem Apple have with the entire range is not what the manuals tell you, its what they dont tell you, the word of mouth heuristic knowledge that you need to get it to do stuff. The stuff that isnt written down, that you have to spend ages googling for or posting on forums to see if anyone knows how to do it. Theres a principle in writing user interfaces – its should be blindingly obvious what you have to do to make it do what you want it to do. It should be perfectly clear what button to press. You shouldnt have to plough thru hundreds of pages of manuals and web posts to find out how do something. But you do have to. Its possibly not THE most user hostile GUI ive ever seen, but its certainly in the competition.

Then theres the way it bleeds credit off. I dont want a contract phone, i can put £30 on a bog standard mobile and it lasts me 3 months. This Iphone bleeds credit off as you sleep, it worse than a $10 Thai hoe. You wake up at 8 AM and there will be message saying you have used your months allocation of data and you’re going to be charged from now on, and all the time you’ve been asleep. God knows how. You can stop it by turning off 3G, Wifi and location services, but then you have a phone that just send texts and makes calls, and my £12 ASDA phone does that.

Then theres the battery life. Or lack of, in this case. If you dont put it on charge EVERY night, its dead in the morning. My £12 ASDA cheapo last about 3 weeks on one charge. Ideally, you need to walk round with your iPhone plugged into a car battery to keep it working all the time. Theres no point in a phone you cant switch on for fear of running out of credit and power just doing nothing. lets face it, as a design concept, it fails on two very basic requirements.,

I went on to the Apple Public User Forums and had a moan. Within an hour, they had deleted my post off the forum and sent me 69p back. But you think how many of the thousands of peopel how get an app that doesnt work, and dont bother to complain, someone is making thousands of pounds for selling cr*p.

Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, bread and dripping, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, and didn’t get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.

Then, after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose, not from a bottle.

Takeaway food was limited to fish and chips, there were no pizza shops, McDonald’s, KFC, Subway or Nando’s.

Even though all the shops closed at 6pm and didn’t open on a Sunday, somehow we didn’t starve to death!

We shared one soft drink with four friends from one bottle and no one died from this. We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy toffees, gobstoppers and bubble gum.

We ate white bread and real butter, drank cow’s milk and soft drinks with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because . . . we were always outside playing!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day, but we were OK. We would spend hours building go-karts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.

We built treehouses and dens and played in riverbeds with Matchbox cars.

We did not have PlayStations, Nintendo Wii and Xboxes, or video games, DVDs, or colour TV.

There were no mobiles, computers, internet or chatrooms. We had friends and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. And we ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, too.

Only girls had pierced ears.

You could buy Easter eggs and hot cross buns only at Easter time.

We were given air guns and catapults for our tenth birthdays, we rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or just yelled for them.

Not everyone made the school rugby, football, cricket or netball teams. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that. Getting into the team was based on merit.

Our teachers hit us with canes, gym shoes and threw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren’t concentrating.

We can string sentences together, spell and have proper conversations now because of a solid three Rs education.

Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road.

Mum didn’t have to go to work to help Dad make ends meet because we didn’t need to keep up with the Joneses!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

Parents didn’t invent stupid names for their kids like Kiora, Blade, Ridge and Vanilla.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

You might want to share this with others who grew up in an era before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives.

And while you are at it, forward it to your children, so they will know how brave their parents were.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104579/The-magic-1950s-suburbia-socks-darned-baths-shared-kids-roamed-wild.html#ixzz1n6uAAh1o

Here’s another pair of interesting facts:

* 580 foreigners a DAY got a job here last year
* 530 Britons lost their jobs every DAY here last year

You dont need to be a rocket scientist to add these two facts together and arrive at a conclusion.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2101431/UK-unemployment-Number-female-jobseekers-reaches-highest-level-23-years.html#ixzz1mTNHhwcD

Heres the latest crop of immigrants to grace out newspapers on just ONE day:

Ilyas Ashar, 83, and his wife, Tallat Ashar, 66, who deny charges of false imprisonment, human trafficking, sexual offences, violence and benefit fraud. They trafficed and ten year old girl here from Pakistan and kept her imprisoned a slave for ten years

Gladys Popoola, a west african, today admitted to claiming more than £200,000 in benefits despite having three jobs and a property portfolio worth more than £500,000 in a six-year web of deception, which involved using a false identity and claiming to be unmarried and out-of-work, only came to an end today when she admitted to 16 counts relating to fraud.

A family of Romanian pickpockets preyed on drunken and sleeping commuters on late night trains, stealing cash and mobile phones. Six members of the same Rostas family plagued daily the overland train service from Charing Cross in central London to Gravesend in Kent, systematically sweeping carriages snatching phones and bags from the arms of unsuspecting passengers. Blackfriars Crown Court heard that the family ran a highly lucrative late-night pickpocketing scam for two years, selling the phone handsets they had stolen in Romania, while they used the Sim cards to make expensive long-distance calls to Romania and Spain.

Heres one of them, Andrea Ferendcz, showing her gratitude to our hospitality:

Ali Dizaei, Britain’s most controversial police chief, was jailed for three years today after being found guilty of corruption for a second time. The Scotland Yard commander will never wear police uniform again after being convicted unanimously at his retrial of misconduct and perverting the course of justice. He received a three-year prison sentence at London’s Southwark Crown Court today, yet another corrupt crooked copper

And lets not forget Abu Qatada, the vile terrorist hate preacher we are not only unable to throw out the country because of the idiot Human Rights laws so beloved by the liar Nick Clegg, but we actually have to spend £10k a day protecting him in case some tries to do the right thing and rid us of this vile, evil man.