[invisiblewave]

Understood. I'll ask. I plan to find someone with detailed knowledge of the electronics and buttonhole them quite severely.

It's hard to get answers to questions like this when you're there.

 

[eMcL]

It's not a functional objection, it's a principled one. Machines should not pretend to be human. I have the same objection to chatbots and suchlike. Partly it's a privacy concern; mainly it's one of manners - when a human fails to understand an instruction, it is (initially at least) assumed to be their fault; assuming your intentions were clear, it is for them to work out what was meant and then to comply. When a machine fails (try, e.g., the Amex IVR system, which I profoundly detest, particularly the spectacularly irritating Scots git they had voice it) it is always somehow your fault. This is particularly important if you were properly brought up in Britain, and therefore speak rapidly, elliptically and, all in all, not as expected by the machine. I do not wish to learn robot - I wish the robots to learn the King's English.

It's part of a wider issue about ownership and control - I will probably migrate from Windows (to Linux) at some point now that "it's a service" and they increasingly try to stop you controlling it - consider e.g. smart charging in Windows 11, which cannot be disabled permanently. Give me root access, a command line and an operating system I can modify, with a soldering iron if necessary, and then I'm happy.

Ultimately the car I sometimes like best is my 1964 Porsche 356. I have actually fixed that with a hammer (and a screwdriver and a special wrench) and it does exactly what you tell it, even if what you tell it is very stupid indeed. Contrast that to e.g. the Artura, where I couldn't work out how to stop it beeping every time I exceeded the speed limit by 0.1mph, or modern cars whose functionality can be changed at whim by the manufacturer - see e.g. BMW or Tesla. I digress.

Somewhat Quixotic - Perhaps I sit at the other end of the spectrum looking forward to the inevitable evolution of the species into mechanical form with the freedom to travel in space wherever they want and leave us to our idyllic existence on planet Earth… but for now we are in the early stages of co-existence. Thank Turing …

 

[964Cup]

Somewhat Quixotic - Perhaps I sit at the other end of the spectrum looking forward to the inevitable evolution of the species into mechanical form with the freedom to travel in space wherever they want and leave us to our idyllic existence on planet Earth… but for now we are in the early stages of co-existence. Thank Turing …

You are Elon Musk and I claim my five pounds.

 

[eMcL]

You are Elon Musk and I claim my five pounds.

Robot #1

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Well, as a starter for 10, Apple product is marginally more shit now than it was last time I tried it. Which is to say really really really shit. Having finally found a way to copy files to the blasted thing - via our Synology, because God forbid you should simply be able to drag them across a USB connection - I then wasted a couple of hours trying to find a media player that would simply play the files from local storage. This appears not to be a thing in the land of Fisher Price computers for the hard of thinking, so I've deleted the files I so agonisingly copied across and have now - very very reluctantly - added the horrific iTunes bloatware to my PC. That's busy importing 100Gb of MP3s and ruining them by converting them to AAC - and is insisting on playing random snippets of the songs as it does so. Now I have to work out how to move all the ruined tracks across to the phone and see if I can at least get Apple Music to play them.

Android: connect phone, allow access, copy files, install Musicolet, done.
Apple: connect phone, click "trust", see phone in Explorer, folder is empty and no write permissions, swear, make public share of Synology backup folder, connect to that from phone, copy files, install 27 different apps none of which work properly (some, e.g., VLC will play individual tracks, but none of them have an option to import whole folders and all of them seem have fucking adverts everywhere - I despise advertising), swear, delete all 27 useless apps, delete 100Gb folder, install iTunes, duplicate 100Gb of data in inferior format, connect device, click "trust" for the 87th time, tell Iphones to manage the device (doh, really?), nothing happens, swear, sign in, wait for unwanted two-factor authentication, enter stupid code, disconnect device, reconnect device, click "trust" for the 88th time, nothing happens, wait, "welcome to your new iPhone smiley smiley happy happy rainbows", click past stupid tour, get rid of stupid Apple Music ad in iPhone, hit sync, error, go back to library, tell the stupid thing you want to sync the music library, hit apply, spinny spinny thing but no actual progress bar, shrug, click done, click device icon, finally get progress bar, note that it's doing 2 of 10,009 tracks per second, settle in for very long wait.

I hate Apple. I hate their stupid walled garden. I hate that the interface was designed by children for children. Everything seems to have ads, pop-ups, desires to notify you, but nothing actually seems to work. Stupid non-standard connectors, hopeless app store with no apparent sorting options, horrible interface with no buttons just gestures that you're apparently supposed to know in some Chomskian innate grammar fashion because God forbid they should provide any documentation. Gah. I want a computing device, not a child's plaything.

[/rant]

TLDR; Apple sucks. I haven't connected the phone to the car yet. This could all be a gigantic waste of time.

I can recommend alternative software if you’re interested. Also I use Apple Lossless (you can mass convert to it if you have some other lossless format) re quality of the audio. Personally I feel the same way you do, just about windows and android. But in the end it’s a bit inexcusable for McLaren to support one cult over another. Both should be options.

Btw synology, which I love, is sadly starting to go a bit walled garden too. Preferring their own relabeled drives “for your safety” of course. Sad thing is now that Drobo is dead no one has an SHR expandable pool as well done as they do and their synology drive app is like crack good relative to others. There is one other new make, trans something. Forget the name. I may check them out. But yea, sad that the synology tools don’t just work via CarPlay.

 

[jobama1]

I can recommend alternative software if you’re interested. Also I use Apple Lossless (you can mass convert to it if you have some other lossless format) re quality of the audio. Personally I feel the same way you do, just about windows and android. But in the end it’s a bit inexcusable for McLaren to support one cult over another. Both should be options.

Especially since it was a selling point that it'll have both, and the previous systems were Android based 🙃

 

[invisiblewave]

I can recommend alternative software if you’re interested. Also I use Apple Lossless (you can mass convert to it if you have some other lossless format) re quality of the audio. Personally I feel the same way you do, just about windows and android. But in the end it’s a bit inexcusable for McLaren to support one cult over another. Both should be options.

Btw synology, which I love, is sadly starting to go a bit walled garden too. Preferring their own relabeled drives “for your safety” of course. Sad thing is now that Drobo is dead no one has an SHR expandable pool as well done as they do and their synology drive app is like crack good relative to others. There is one other new make, trans something. Forget the name. I may check them out. But yea, sad that the synology tools don’t just work via CarPlay.

The advantage of Android, for the ultra-paranoid, is that you can run it completely without Google should you so wish. I don't believe that's possible with Apple.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

The advantage of Android, for the ultra-paranoid, is that you can run it completely without Google should you so wish. I don't believe that's possible with Apple.

We disagree on where you place your trust. THAT said, to me the advantage of android is side loading and ability to tinker and do cool things that the mothership doesnt think proper. Also, apple is like a dog seeing squirrels all day. They focus on something for a minute, than their ADHD kicks in and they ignore things to death. I could go on a long list of their sins myself.

I like Windows and Android for many things they are good at, but not for my daily driver. Obviously others will have different sets of things they value more and less, and as always, YMMV.

 

[invisiblewave]

We disagree on where you place your trust. THAT said, to me the advantage of android is side loading and ability to tinker and do cool things that the mothership doesnt think proper. Also, apple is like a dog seeing squirrels all day. They focus on something for a minute, than their ADHD kicks in and they ignore things to death. I could go on a long list of their sins myself.

I like Windows and Android for many things they are good at, but not for my daily driver. Obviously others will have different sets of things they value more and less, and as always, YMMV.

I don't trust any of them, although I think Apple is more trustworthy than either Google or Microsoft. But I don't think it's them we should be worrying about anyway, it's the aggregated data collection that will be a problem when we get an authoritarian government, or somebody in charge willing to break the rules to stay in power.....

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I don't trust any of them, although I think Apple is more trustworthy than either Google or Microsoft. But I don't think it's them we should be worrying about anyway, it's the aggregated data collection that will be a problem when we get an authoritarian government, or somebody in charge willing to break the rules to stay in power.....

Very much agreed. Cloud stuff is lame an the services die all the time. The data from those services goes into bankruptcy or something like that, and it gets abused to hell. I'm a big advocate of "personal" clouds where you own your own hardware and make it available to yourself but control the data. Ergo a big synology (and many other makes) of personal cloud stuff.

Most people, sadly, do not care at all. I get a lot of eye rolls. To each their own.

 

[drhex]

Very much agreed. Cloud stuff is lame an the services die all the time. The data from those services goes into bankruptcy or something like that, and it gets abused to hell. I'm a big advocate of "personal" clouds where you own your own hardware and make it available to yourself but control the data. Ergo a big synology (and many other makes) of personal cloud stuff.

Most people, sadly, do not care at all. I get a lot of eye rolls. To each their own.

Using O365 with encryption myself on a 1Gb link - works very well for me. Risk of meddling with the data is pretty slim for now, the stuff of interest is available to interested parties through mail provider anyway. Very happy to not have to run the full setup myself anymore.

 

[invisiblewave]

Very much agreed. Cloud stuff is lame an the services die all the time. The data from those services goes into bankruptcy or something like that, and it gets abused to hell. I'm a big advocate of "personal" clouds where you own your own hardware and make it available to yourself but control the data. Ergo a big synology (and many other makes) of personal cloud stuff.

Most people, sadly, do not care at all. I get a lot of eye rolls. To each their own.

I run a mail server and cloud server. The cloud server is very simple to set up.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I run a mail server and cloud server. The cloud server is very simple to set up.

I sooo wish I had the energy to do the mail server. I hear it can be a big pain. Synology provides one but after reading several people who do it it seems like a part time job. :/

 

[drhex]

If you run your own Exchange it certainly is.

 

[invisiblewave]

I sooo wish I had the energy to do the mail server. I hear it can be a big pain. Synology provides one but after reading several people who do it it seems like a part time job. :/

For me it's not that difficult, but you do need some technical knowledge. Once you've tweaked the configuration it's mostly maintenance free other than certificate renewal.

 

[drhex]

And updates/backups. That was the biggest pain for me, ran seven servers in the setup.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

For me it's not that difficult, but you do need some technical knowledge. Once you've tweaked the configuration it's mostly maintenance free other than certificate renewal.

I hear dealing with spam can be a pain in the butt too.

 

[invisiblewave]

And updates/backups. That was the biggest pain for me, ran seven servers in the setup.

If you pick the right software that part's easy, and even better if you have RAID.

 

[invisiblewave]

I hear dealing with spam can be a pain in the butt too.

Nope. This is one of the big benefits. I see virtually no spam.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

If you pick the right software that part's easy, and even better if you have RAID.

Yea the SHR growing raid on synology is nice. Their hyperbackup app works really nicely. And you can effectively mirror one server to another real time with synology drive if you want to have a fail over backup server in another location. Pretty much set it and forget it, at least the way I have mine set up.