jybkk

On 11/30/2016 at 7:38 PM, louse1953 said:

Don't know if you noticed but you are not in the EU.If you want to equate it correctly you work it on average wage of each country.100 EUR would be just over a days pay in Germany,so Thailand has got it right.You lose points here too.

Don't know if you noticed but I've adressed that point in the second sentence of my post.

Let's take your example using median household income:

• Thailand: $7029
• Germany: $33,333

So you get a ratio of about 4.7

Crossing a red light is punished by a fine of 90EUR in Germany. That's about 3500THB, more than 10 times the amount in Thailand, and still 2 times more expensive if you take into account the differences in revenue.

More interestingly, in Germany, driving without a license is punished by a fine proportional to your monthly wage: between 1/3 and 2/3 of your monthly salary (up to the judge). In Thailand, the fine is fixed, 400THB. So unless you're suggesting people have monthly salaries of 600 to 1200THB, you understand why I think this fine is ridiculously low in Thailand.

Driving without a license is in my opinion an extremely serious offense. 400THB does not reflect the gravity of the situation.

About the points, my bad. I forgot that they added that a couple years ago. I have yet to see people losing those though.

These fines re ridiculously low. No wonder the roads are so dangerous here.

Even if you apply a factor of 5 to take into account the difference of cost of life and revenue, those are still between 3 and 20 times cheaper than what you'd be fined in the EU (with the addition of losing points on your license).

For example Running a red light is about 100EUR to 160EUR over there. Here it's a mere 300THB.

The worst is probably the 400THB for driving without a license. It's crazy. In most of Europe the fine is often in thousands of Euros.

Meanwhile, the fine for a loud vehicle is 5 times the one for riding with no helmet. Kind of telling of the priorities.

The official way of transferring something from a computer to an iPhone is through iTunes. Apple doesn't let their phones act like 'external drives' when plugged on computers (weird interepretation of their 'It just works' motto).

You can install some alternative softwares that do something similar (like the one suggested by another user). But in any case you'll have to install software.

Alternative idea: depending on what she wants to do with these 15Gb of pics and video, it could be interesting to actually sync those to some online storage that would then be accessible from anywhere (including the iPhone) while not taking actual space on the device. For example check 'Google Photos' https://photos.google.com/ which allows you to store an unlimited amount of pictures and videos on your account. It is available for both Android and iPhone so you'd just have to install the app on the Samsung, tell it to backup those pics. Then install on the iPhone with the same account and you'll see the pics appear as they are backed up from the Samsung.

On 6/26/2016 at 7:02 AM, Scotwight said:

Not true. They offer no local content in Thailand. You pay the same prices as the USA with half the content. Netflix is discriminating against Thai people.

To be fair to Netflix, it's the content owners who impose these geographical restrictions on the content. The one thing that is not geographically restricted is... Netflix's own content.

7 hours ago, ghworker2010 said:

easy solution is twofold...

1. ditch hotmail and create a gmail account

2. ditch the Windows laptop and buy an Apple mac. Once you have mac you will never go back. 

1. I agree that gmail is better than hotmail, but I think OPs problem doesn't warrant this. It sounds like some network performance issue (definitely not related to using Win7 or win10, that's not how websites work).

2. Ha! Yeah, right. in my company, the 'marketing department was adamant they needed Macs. We obliged. A year later, out of the 5, 2 went back to windows laptops, 2 are using Windows on their Mac with bootcamp and only one actually still uses Mac and OSX.

3 hours ago, opouri said:

First need to get cars out of the city which means many multi story car parks then busses to take people to where they need to go.

Police will only create more problems if they start doing there job. Need infringement cameras every where so can send them a fine for breaking the law. Then the police can be used for chasing up those who don't pay there fines People will start doing the right thing if they know it is going to cost them.

 

Yes. S44 will solve nothing. What they need is a multi-front short term +long term plan. It should include:

• Long-term planning for road development with modern traffic approach (computer analysis, no more of this u-turn nonsense, etc...)
• Push towards 'mixed commuting' (large car parks near public transportation hubs allowing people to first use the car then leave it before entering the most congested area)
• Acceleration of the original Mass Transit plan (the 10 lines or so were supposed to be ready by 2015. What we have now is maybe 20% of what was planned)
• Strict enforcement of parking/stopping rules (traffic on main roads is severley impaired by cars stopping anywhere on the left side. A single car parked on the left of a 3-lane road makes the whole stretch effectively a 2 lane road in terms of flow).
• Computerized real time traffic light management
• Universal public transportation ticket/card
• Incentives for public transport commuting ( monthly 'commuter card' with discounted fare for home <-> work trips, tax rebate on commute cards purchased by employers for their employees,...)

And I'm sure a lot of other ideas could be proposed by actual urban development and traffic expert from all around the world where these problems have been handled. It's not like Bangkok is any different.

4 hours ago, MockingJay said:

All regular Marihuana user I know and/or ever have worked with were: 
1) Ineffective

2) Lots of talk, but no action

3) Unreliable

4) Slow (acting AND thinking)
5) Irresponsible

6) Always had an excuse for their own shortcomings, mostly others were to blame
7) Partial or complete disconnection from reality
8) Telling others what they "SHOULD" do, i.e. become vegetarian, vegan, etc. while themselves living an utterly unhealthy lifestyle (party all night sleep at work, drinking, Ganja, smoking, I don't need a helmet, etc.)
9) Complete overinflated self esteem (most were complete losers to be honest)
10) Changing jobs frequently, always someone else to be blamed for that
11) Unhappy and edgy whenever "sober"... (which basically means whenever they had to physically work)

Sure - legalize that stuff and make sure that the world tumbles even deeper into stupidity...

Alright. A bit of logical fallacy 101:

• The plural of anecdotes is not data: whatever experiences you have, it's far from enough to build an opinion on a phenomenon that maters at society level. This is why we have science which does studies with thousands of data points, statistical analysis and correction for bias. And the immense majority of it agree that Cannabis is one of the least dangerous substance. Far below alcohol (in term of social impact) or nicotine (in terms of addiction)
• Correlation is not causation: You've seen many cannabis consumers who've been pretty irresponsible and lazy members of the society. Well, I believe you. I've seen many too. But how can you be sure that it's the drug that made them lazy, and not the their laziness that has pushed them towards that 'chill out' drug? I know lots of very productive members of society who are consumers (including people running serious businesses with hundreds of employees), would they miraculously be imprevious to these side effects?

I'm not a user of cannabis, however I've tried it in the past, and the effects are definitely milder than alcohol. It doesn't make you black out drunk like alcohol does, doesn't leave you with nausea or a throbbing headache on the next day, and neither does it bring you to some fantasy land with hallucinations. It's mostly a very efficient relaxant.

If it was such a danger to society, we'd have seen countries or states that have legalized it crumble down. As far as I know, Colorado and Netherlands are still doing fine. If not better.

Legalizing doesn't mean it should be a free for all drug fest. It should be controlled, probably the same way as alcohol is. Driving under the influence of cannabis or operating machinery should still be punishable by law. It shouldn't be sold to minors, and in my opinion, consumption should be limited to private homes or licensed establishments.

But further than that, the current level of demonization and prohibition is just counterproductive. It uses police and justice resources for nothing, contributes to the enrichment of drug dealers though black market (giving them resources to continue their surrounding criminal activities) and waste an opportunity for a better regulated and taxed market. The problem is that generations have been fed with these boogymen stories of reefer madness and zombified cannabis users while being told that alcohol is just fine.

Check this study published in the Lancet: http://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/News stories/dnutt-lancet-011110.pdf

The graph below which comes from this study shows that the impairment of mental functioning, the loss of tangibles and loss of relationships are all much lower for cannabis than for alcohol.

My lad has an iphone 6 that over 2 year contract has cost £1000 plus. i have a £50 Chinese Smartphone and he is the first to agree that apart from the Camera quality they do exactly the same. Its just keep up with the jones to ludicrous extremes

I'm no Apple fan but there's no universe in which this statement is true.

Unless you only use your phone to make calls (in which case even your Chinese 50GBP is unnecessarily expensive), there are oh so many things your Chinese 'smartphone' will never be able to do.

Everything will be excruciatingly slow. Apps are designed to run on relatively recent software. For the price you mention, you get the equivalent of an iPhone from 5 years ago. Lot of apps will probably not even work properly. To reach that price, they have to cut a lot of corners. Battery life will be a fraction of what you'd get on a good phone, hardware will most likely die prematurely, screen resolution and brightness will be sub-par.

I agree that getting the latest flagship iPhone or other is usually overkill though, and buying it subsidized makes the cost even worse.

There's a sweet spot where price, performance and usefulness meet, which is much below the 28,000+ THB you'd pay for the latest iPhone. But it's not 2,000THB. At that level even though you're wasting less money, you're still wasting it. A good range is around 10,000-14,000THB for a smartphone. If you do a bit of research, you'll get one that will last you as long as a flagship and provide 90% of the features for half the price.

Do buy a Smart Tv with the Netflix app installed (or install it yourself). That way is the only way to watch 4K (now a reasonable amount of content).

So let me get this right to or install it yourself means what install what product do you mean the

Chromecast ??? does it have the 4k that you speak of

If not what product can I buy in Thailand that does the so called install it your self.

Can it be done on the outside of the old TV.? or does one have to open up the old Smart TV?

Sorry I wasn't very clear.

The devices I mentionned (Chromecast, AndroitTV, Sticks, Apple TV, etc...) are external devices that you plug on your TV, like you would plug a DVD player. They are however much smaller (fit in the hand).

You can find those in the Section Electronics/Streaming Media Players of Lazada for example: http://www.lazada.co.th/shop-media-players/

Some of these devices are 4K compatible.

Think of these as tiny computers without screens. When you get one, you plug it on the HDMI port of your TV (like you'd do with a DVD player) then switch the TV on to display what is on this port. You'll see the device booting up then present you with an interface usually very similar to what you'd get on a smartphone. From there, you'll be able to configure it to connect to your home wifi then you'll go on the App Store (or Play Store) where you'll find all the applications you need (Netflix, etc...).

The HUGE advantage over Smart TVs is that these App stores are the ones from Google or Apple, which are by far the 2 most popular in the world. Companies who put apps on these stores have a very huge incentive to keeping their apps up to date and free of bugs because they are used on billions of devices. The same cannot be said of the stores specially setup individually for the Smart TVs of LG, Samsung, etc...

The idea is that you should buy a TV for what it's supposed to be good at: Displaying images. But for the access to the content, get a separate device, meant only for this.

AFAIK accessing other countries Netflix content over VPN has become quite difficult. It used to be very easy but now most of known VPN exit nodes have seemingly been blacklisted.

The catalogue isn't as dense as it is in the US, but I really think that for that price it's still owrth it. Particularly for series. There are IMO really outstanding Netflix-only series like Daredevil, Narcos, Jessica Jones and Stranger things that already can fill quite many evenings of watching television.

I recommend however that you do NOT buy a Smart TV and keep software as separated as hardware as possible. A good regular LCD TV will last you easily 5-6 years, if not more, but you can be sure that the 'SmartTV' software will cease to be updated after a year or so, making your TV much less smart halfway along its lifecycle.

Get a regular LCD and buy an 'AndroidTV' or 'Smart Stick' or a 'Chromecast' r for a couple thousand bahts. They usually have a lot of support from development community which will provide updates and make sure nothing is commercially locked. Then when they are really outdated, then you can get a new one that will work with the latest versions of Netflix and whatever new service will come at the time without changing the whole TV.

Re. "you can be sure that the 'SmartTV' software will cease to be updated after a year or so, making your TV much less smart halfway along its lifecycle"

You are misinformed. While I can't speak about every brand/model of what's called a smart TV, I do know that many ... if not all ... smart TVs' apps/software are periodically upgraded via internet

Every single Smart TV I've seen has pretty bad software and very quickly, updates are kept to a minimum and often focused on monetizing more rather than improving the user interface.

I'm not the only one who thinks that, check testimonials online and you'll see that gettign a Smart TV is at best a gamble.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-reasons-shouldnt-buy-smart-tv-anymore/

AFAIK accessing other countries Netflix content over VPN has become quite difficult. It used to be very easy but now most of known VPN exit nodes have seemingly been blacklisted.

The catalogue isn't as dense as it is in the US, but I really think that for that price it's still owrth it. Particularly for series. There are IMO really outstanding Netflix-only series like Daredevil, Narcos, Jessica Jones and Stranger things that already can fill quite many evenings of watching television.

I recommend however that you do NOT buy a Smart TV and keep software as separated as hardware as possible. A good regular LCD TV will last you easily 5-6 years, if not more, but you can be sure that the 'SmartTV' software will cease to be updated after a year or so, making your TV much less smart halfway along its lifecycle.

Get a regular LCD and buy an 'AndroidTV' or 'Smart Stick' or a 'Chromecast' r for a couple thousand bahts. They usually have a lot of support from development community which will provide updates and make sure nothing is commercially locked. Then when they are really outdated, then you can get a new one that will work with the latest versions of Netflix and whatever new service will come at the time without changing the whole TV.

A phone for emergency always off?

Seriously? Never on?

I recommend to switch it on and test (like one should do with every emergency equipment from time to time).

Visit a DTAC service center and ask (as I am not a DTAC customer and given up to keep track with all the recent changes).

The 2G upgrade offer (in Thai only):

https://www.dtac.co.th/camp/prepaid/2g-upgrade.html

MY emergency ... car trouble , accidents ,... Why would I keep it on ? I have internet & email if those back home want to reach me . I switch it on .... to see my balance , and renew for 180 days.

So I just need a new 3G simcard in the old (dumb)phone ?

No, your old dumbphone most likely cannot handle 3G. Make use of the 'replacement' promotions and get a newer dumbphone for nearly free while changing the SIM at the shop. Your old dumbphone battery is also most likely dead (even without use, these batteries have a life of 2-4 years, after which they barely can hold the charge).

Quite a little confusion in this thread.

What people should know:

• 2G technology is gradually being phased out in Thailand (to reuse the bandwidth for other purposes)
• 3G is now (or soon) the minimum required on a phone to work in Thailand. 4G capability isn't required
• The size of the SIM is not related to the type of network (2G, 3G, 4G can all be used with the classic big size SIM). It's just that newer 3G/4G phones prefer the smaller SIM sizes (to save space internally).
• Changing old 2G-only SIM is required because the SIM contains software that takes care of things like encryption and Identification on the network and this software cannot handle the newer networks.
• You don't need a smartphone to use 3G network if your objective is only to make calls.
• As pointed out by other posters, DTAC and other operators are pushing users to make the switch before it's too late with promotions where you basically get a 3G compliant 'dumb-phone' for free (or a couple hundred bahts). It is highly recommended to do the switch as soon as possible.

My personal recommendation is that if you don't need a smartphone, then don't buy one, especially not a cheap one. It's just going to do everything badly, including calls. If you care only about emergency/occasional calls, then get one of these cheap 3G compatible 'dumb phones' and the transition will be smooth.

Sorry to hear about your health condition. I hope you'll find a way to get better.

However, if I had a recommendation to give, is to go see a real doctor. Homeopathy is, at best, just placebo.

http://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

Bill Gates got hacked!

Was he? First time I heard this.

What kinds of things do you do to protect yourself?

What you're describing here isn't really much an IT problem but rather a financial/banking one, and almost exclusively limited to the US.

In my home country, identity theft is a very strange and foreign concept because opening a line of credit requires way more than a mere couple of easily obtainable personal information. That 'freeze' you describe sounds kind of an add on to reach the same level of security. I'd assume it would be really enough.

Gosh today's journalism is bad.

Title: Apps mysteriously disappear

Article: It was a bug that was fixed. There's no mystery.

Intrusive- emergency contact details within and without Thailand, along with vehicle details (useful if you're lying dead in an accident) and (optional) email address?

Yep- pretty intrusive!

Those are the fields I had no problem filling.

My problem was with:

• social media usernames
• places often frequented
• bank account

And before you argue that these were optional: it is not written on the form that these are optional and the officer I met that day did not accept the form with these fields blank.

The main problem currently is the complete lack of consistency in the application of this form.

Your battery is knackered. Get a new one or better still buy a MacBook (I know Apple are a horrible company, but their computers are good). I bought an HP for the wife a few months back, the screen detaches to become a tablet. I regret the purchase and she won't use it. Windows 10 is a shambles, a dreadful operating system. I had to buy her a MacBook.

Windows 10 is perfectly fine. Those who rant about it never come with factual reasons as to why it's so bad. And that's because they dislike the OS not because of its performance/features but because of the (admitedly very bad) way it was pushed to the users.

On another hand, buying a Macbook might not be the greatest idea if the user never had any experience with Mac OS. Pretty big/frustrating learning curve there.

Macbooks are an easy recommendation because they are indeed good laptops, just a bit overpriced.

But if you take a few minutes researching before buying, you'll find a lot of good laptops that even have more chance of having the combination of price/features you actually care about. usually these research end up telling you not to buy HP Kind of sad to see such an iconic brand so low now. Almost all of their PCs have issues. Amongst the most solid brands currently are Asus and Lenovo... but don't think too much about brand and research each model individually.

Try installing Notepad++ which has an algorithm that attempts at figuring out what was the original encoding of the text file when opening it.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.9.2.html

If it doesn't work, you can try selecting manually the couple of Chinese encodings available in the 'encoding' menu to see which one works.

edit: When I take the string you sent and paste it in Notepad++ then change encoding to Chinese/GB2312(simplified) I get proper characters with no '???', which is a good sign: 脙驴麓脦脭脣脨脨

As others have mentioned, cheap smartphones are a pretty risky purchase. Overall quality is very low and the manufacturers have little incentive to actively support those. They tend to last about a year before dying definitely.

On another hand, a refurbished phone that was a flagship 18 month ago (for example a Samsung Galaxy S5) will come at around 10,000THB and will easily last you 2+ years and provide immensely better performance and compatibility.

I remember when this news was hot.

The head of the forensic science department even vouched for the thing, completely misunderstanding the result of their own double blind test. It was really worrying.

Media didn't get the test either, despite the whole thing being high school level of science.

The test was basically 4 boxes in a big field. One of them with a charge of explosive. The 'bomb' operator had to use the device to figure out which box contained the explosive. They tested about a dozen times and the operators got it 'right' 20% of the time. That was actually LESS than pure chance (25%)

But somehow politicians and media concluded that it meant the device could still detect bombs in 20% of the cases, so that was better than not having anything. No, dummies! The 20% meant that this device doesn't do any better than just picking something randmly. It will never improve detection of bombs... and will probably instill a misplaced confidence when it doesn't detect a bomb that's actually there.

Aside from the somewhat questionable upgrade process, what exactly is people's issue with Win10? I see I Don't Want It over & over again - why?

People tend to react strongly to being forced into doing something. Despite what other posters might imply, Windows 10 is probably one of the smoothest windows upgrade ever. Issues are very rare.

However, because Microsoft has decided to resort to very dubious means to get users to upgrade, the backlash is violent.

If you keep it just rational, the best recommendation is still to upgrade to windows 10.

Shockwave Plug-in is what is needed on certain sites that uses a certain type of content called 'Flash'.

It was very popular in the past (because it provided the same result regardless of the browser) but is riddled with performance and security issues and is now being abandoned. For example Apple iPhones and iPads don't support it.

These crashes probably happen on one (or maybe a couple) of specific websites you visit which still use that technology.

This article below explains a few ways of trying to fix it:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/how-stop-shockwave-flash-crashing-in-google-chrome-summary-3332967/

However, I would simply recommend you to completely disable this plug-in because chances are it's only used on those sites to display some advertising.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/pro-tip-how-to-disable-flash-in-chrome/

You can use this website to check which channel/time will the matches be:

http://www.livesoccertv.com/match/1904485/england-vs-wales/

According to them that game will be on Channel 3 tonight.

Until now all games have been shown either on Channel 3 (#33 on TrueVisions), Channel 3 Family (#13) and Channel 3 SD (#28). Commentary was available in English.

The more details you can give about the issue, the more chance you will have to get an answer.

Right now, we only know you have Windows 10 and that chrome crashes. That's really not enough.

Does it happen randomly or when you are doing something specific?

Is there an error message?

What is the 'chrome plugin' you are talking about?