I watched a video where a guy asked people how many moons the earth has, the person on the video said seven. I am not surprised in any way the script had huge success.
It is great and should be celebrated. For me the big win is no longer having to hand over high-way robbery amounts of money for the Heathrow express. Having a better and cheaper service to Heathrow terminals is brilliant. Byeeeee Heathrow express!
Yes, I'm also curious what will happen there. The Express is still faster (20 vs 30 mins), but costs twice as much. And you have to get it from Paddington. It sits in a weird niche where the alternative rail routes weren't that much longer, but if you really had to get to the airport in a hurry (especially connecting from the West Country) it was a nice emergency option.
Now you also have the option of doing Reading > Hayes > Heathrow entirely on the Elizabeth Line.
My biggest gripe is that despite the high price, you spend the entire journey being force-fed live news on the TV and PR fluff about how it's the best rated line in the UK (no surprise, it goes between two stations).
Heathrow Express has long been a bit lost. The original idea was that you would check in for your flight - including baggage drop - at Paddington before taking the Express. When the "lawn" area at Paddington was opened in 1999, the back wall (now a row of shops, from Boots to Fat Face) was a row of check-in desks with baggage facilities.
I never used these and I kind of wish I had, because after 9/11 they closed and never reopened.
[edit: Wikipedia tells me the check-in service ran until 2003 and "was withdrawn due to low usage and high cost of operation", nothing to do with 9/11. My mind must have filled in the more dramatic memory]
Then a few years later the Heathrow Connect service opened, a slightly slower, much cheaper alternative to the Express (it changed names a few times but I believe is the same service as now constitutes the Elizabeth Line on that stretch) - so nobody who was coming from Paddington, planning ahead, and paying their own fare had much reason to take the Express any more.
You can take the tube to heathrow today, and it’s not too bad an experience. Going to soho it’s only 20 minutes longer than heathrow express (and no train change!).
It is a bit annoying to take from terminal 3 — they really push you to the express. But easy enough and I’ve done it a couple times when traveling on my own dime.
There was already the Picadilly line? I'm sure Heathrow Express is faster (depending exactly where you want to go/change for of course) but if your problem with it was the price, it wasn't mandatory.
There are ads and ticket sellers points of the Heathrow Express all over Heathrow's terminals. It's easy to accidentally pay for an overpriced train if you don't know there is an alternative that costs half the money and arrived in almost the same amount of time.
The last time I was in Heathrow I befriended a poor couple of Italians who bought a £25 Heathrow Express ticket because they thought they needed it to ride the £2.50 Picadilly Line.
And tourists with rail passes that cover it. When I visited the UK in 2019, I splashed out over $300 for an 8-day pass, because I wanted to be able to treat the entire national system as my personal hop-on-hop-off service. I will definitely recommend that aspect.
The Heathrow Express was one of the worst legs of the system; having just regurgitated my airline breakfast, I was delighted to be sitting in a coach with no air conditioning in August.
I agree that the alternatives are woefully underdocumented. I recall the choice being framed as "well, you can go to the taxi stand, spend 75GBP to go the whole way to the hotel, or use the rail option and spend 20GBP on a taxi from Paddington.
In retrospect, what I should have done is taken the Underground from near Paddington to where I was staying (100 metres from Euston, so I think it involves about 8 train changes within 75m) and saved the difference.
But given that many of those business travellers will be going to/from the City (Liverpool Street) or Canary Wharf, the Elizabeth Line is going to be a much more attractive proposition even disregarding the price difference.
I expect Heathrow Express to be quietly abandoned in a few years' time. Network Rail and GWR would quite like the trains off the GWML fast lines.
Yeah, I’ve traveled to London a lot and the new office is a short walk from the Elizabeth line. It’s an even shorter walk than the tube! The new line would have to be quite bad for me to stick with heathrow express (once the Elizabeth line finally shows up at heathrow…)
That's always been my expectation. It can make sense on your own to just pony up if you're leaving from near Paddington anyway, especially if you have luggage. But I usually stay near Trafalgar Square and just take the Piccadilly Line.
I have pretty much this existing setup. One thing I'd add is that it's quite noisy. If you have somewhere you can put it, and your house is all cat 6'ed up then great. But if like me you have it in the same room as you, you wil notice it. And it's not the pc, the fractal case has very quite 120mm fans, it's the HDDs.
Are you me? I have almost the exact same build as discussed in the post, and I am super annoyed with how loud the disks are. I have a cronjob that puts them to sleep every night(the NAS is in my bedroom)... For some weird reason they never stop spinning otherwise.
Made me chuckle. Until SSD are within the reach of a reasonable price range we're out of luck. I have resorted to leaving my NAS off and turning it on when I need it.
For reference here's the drives I have. I don't think they're by any means the loudest and nor are they the quietest. The perception of noise can be a lot to do with surroundings, if you have wooden floor instead of carpet and a whole number of factors. For me the constant whiring is too much.
It really depends on the drives you have. When I upgraded from 3TB to 4TB and 6TB models, I was very much taken aback by how much louder these drives are despite being in the same WD Red CMR product line. Some of their more recent SMR drives have really weird acoustics that always makes me think they are about to fail, but in reality thats just now they should sounds like, yikes.
I remember being on a stand next to SGI at E3 in 1997. They had a giant black truck in the arena like the one that Knight Rider drove into. They were selling these machines that looked way more powerful and expensive than anything the games industry could afford. People at the show were mainly debating when and if Intel could release a 1ghz processor. Stange what you remember.
I went for an interview once at a hedge fund. There were a surprising amount of questions about web scraping. I very much got the feeling it was an active and ongoing problem. So yes I do think there’s a business in there.
AFAIK Plaid does a fair bit of old school scraping behind the scenes - a lot of the "nice new web" is built on the backs of old kludgy websites doing the same scraping things people were doing 20 years ago.
Finance/banks are especially... inconsistent, to say the least.
Having recently worked for a hedge fund I noticed that too - although my idea predated that engagement .
That's probably my first go-to market (if anyone has leads send me end email) .
Hedge funds actually call this "alternative data".
If you worked for a hedge fund and you know they purchase scraped data from quite a number of vendors then why are you asking if it’s a viable business model?
At this point I feel unsurpringly betrayed. As others have pointed out there is no going back. With little to no visibility on what the phone, the ipad, the mac-mini is doing, are they safe? I hear there's no device level scanning, has that been confirmed by someone other than Apple?
What are you guys also doing? Is there a website that helpfully details how to get yourself out of the eco system?
I can tell you what I have done so far, but it's very much work in progress.
- Removed all photos from iCloud and turn off all iCloud stuff.
- Backup up phones to my mac (encrypted), will transfer to nextcloud and NAS.
- Built a NAS and now storing photos there - looking at.
running PhotoPrism, but haven't made that work yet.
- Transfered useful cloudstuff to Hetzner's NextCloud hosted. and enabled E2EE on certain folders.
- I use NordVPN but I always have done.
I realise it's a lot of effort to go to so I can privately store a pictures of me eating an ice cream in Rome ... but as we all know that's not really the point.
> With little to no visibility on what the phone, the ipad, the mac-mini is doing, are they safe?
No. You can't trust proprietary software. Even if it's not doing anything bad now, that could change tomorrow.
All this Apple polish is a mirage that distracts us from the truly important stuff. Real computing is built on top of open software. Software that works for us instead of them. In the end that's the only thing we can actually put some trust in.
Ya but now you're flagged as someone who has something to hide, possibly trying to clear off devices before the change was implemented.
Hmm maybe that's their game. You don't need to scan, just need to see who deleted all their photo's over the last few days. A higher than random hit rate I'd guess.
I'd rather be flagged as someone who gives a shit about privacy and autonomy than passively accept the further degradation of those things. If we all treat this as a tragedy-of-the-commons situation and impotently accept whatever these companies do in order not to raise a fuss and draw attention to ourselves, then the future is inevitable and the world will go further down this path than it already has. The presumption of guilt is fucking ridiculous and I won't be a party to it, nor will I run and hide.
And what about all the people like me: imminently following the same path but never having used iCloud photos?
You're suggesting they are faking one violation of the 4th amendment for a much more egregious violation of the 4th amendment. They (AAPL) have nothing to gain by doing this.
Just sayin, it's not a _completely_ unimaginable situation. If the FBI was somehow able to access to those delete logs..
Anecdotal: One year my brother was coming back from spring break and there was a sign that said "drug checkpoint 1 mile." right before an exit. Everyone that got off at the exit got searched.
