You don't even realize you're standing there with metaphorical egg dripping down your face, do you? You were dead wrong. Even LG came to agree with my position and finally divulged the sooper sekret cheat code to actually restore to factory. It's even documented in a video.
My error was UNDER-estimating the dickheadedness of the initial "support"
There's no point trying to twist logic into a pretzel with your what ifs that clearly did not come to pass. There was no particular reason to expect the what ifs either. Perhaps more to the point, the cost of giving it a try was near zero and it resolved the problem. According to TFA, his first attempt to do a reset was from instructions found on the internet. Clearly those instructions were either wrong or meant for a different model. Do you not believe in the KISS principle? Apparently not Occam's razor either.
So it seems the $340 was indeed a fuck off fee. There was a simple and known resolution that they chose not to divulge.
As for the kindergarten comment, that was in reference to your big red button story. I made that clear by quoting from your reply to that argument.
If you're just going to try to talk around the simple fact that time and events have demonstrated my point and refuted yours, don't bother.
Of course they had a few problems to overcome and had to adjust the strength of the magnets down a bit. The first version was great except for the horrible clacking sound they made when they met in the middle.
As someone who started out hacking on 8 bit computers, I agree 100%. Working with ATmega absolutely does re-capture the feel of that. It helps that you can download a comprehensive manual from Atmel.
You can play with the various hardware modules much like you could with the old 8 bit computers.
Arduino provides an IDE, but I prefer to use CLI tools that link in the Arduino libraries.
I can say I certainly would have gotten a computer anyway (my introduction was actually a mainframe), but I don't think my life would have been better without Apple by any means. I did enjoy some Apple ][ hacking.
That's not how it works. Not all boards have a place to connect the JTAG, not even CPU-bearing boards.
Only if they're idiots.
That's not how a repair shop works. The time with the case open might be an hour, but it's also vitally important to do the overhead, like not lose track of where the customer's TV is.
Sure, there's overhead. So slap a repair tag on it matching the customer paperwork. Place it on a designated shelf with the tag visible. If that takes 9 HOURS, the shop is screwed anyway. Although repair shops are not as common as they once were, none ever needed to have a 10 hour minimum charge to be profitable.
That's not how fairness works, either
It isn't how the weak consumer laws in the U.S. work, but it *IS* how fairness works. Anyone who attended kindergarten knows that if you make a mistake you should fix it.
As for the update, I am glad that LG decided after all to divulge the simple yet sooper sekret method of press settings + CH Dwn together, release; Select "wipe data," then "Yes." Wait for "complete;" Power cycle. Somehow it worked without a solder rework station or 10 hours of labor. Might have been nice had they just told him that in the first place rather than "offering" to do that for him for a $340 fuck-off fee. Perhaps it was the bad publicity, perhaps it was a more reasonable and fair minded manager picking up the case.
As for your increasingly absurd suppositions of physically breaking the TV, everyone knows you shouldn't break the screen with a rock (so it is a reasonable expectation for a casual TV owner) and there is no UI or other invitation from the manufacturer to do so.
Even LG came around to agree with my position after a bit of pressure.
It's a shame too. One more generation of fission (the right design) could burn up much of our 'waste' and leave us all better off. For once, our energy production could reduce our pollution problem.
A proper factory reset cannot be blocked by malware. If it was, it's because of a design defect.
A proper factory reset would mean the bootloader (in ROM or flash with the OTP fuse blown) sees the magic handshake (power on while holding volume up and volume down, etc) and would erase the flash and re-write it from a ROM image. Naturally, any updates and apps would need to be re-installed.
So you maintain that this unskilled user somehow hacked the firmware to permit side loading? As opposed to simply using the provided UI to install an app that in retrospect proved to be malware?
Your son had to qualify for a license. He did NOT exhibit the full level of skill expected (though such lapses are far from rare, they are lapses). He knew that hitting other cars is bad. I presume there was insurance as well.
/.'s complaint with apple is that there isn't an official way to take personal responsability and override the protections. LG could have completely eliminated any lasting effect by providing a reliable factory reset function (a common feature of Android devices).
Not necessarily. If the TV is designed as a monolithic processing unit, and the CPU's JTAG is accessible, then that's a reasonable assumption.
Either way, there exists a board that the CPU is mounted on. There will be a JTAG for that board. The CPU will be in the chain.
That actually comes from a "fun" story from my past as a sound tech. I was modifying an old rig, which involved pressing a nice big red button to switch how an amp worked.
That missing button was a manufacturing defect. It would be unfair to charge the time and materials to correct that to the customer.
Rather, it's the handling and overhead to run the procedure.
If they can't do an hour's work without 9 hours of overhead, they deserve to lose money.
The legal term you're looking for is "due diligence". Viruses, trojans, and rootkits rarely destroy their host, so a reset procedure that rewrites the OS memory from a stored file would have been generally sufficient at the time the TV was designed.
Right. So they apparently failed to exercise due diligence here.
You're effectively asking a manufacturer to anticipate threats a decade in the future,
No, I am expecting them to take into account a threat that was very much in the wild at the time they designed the thing.
The user did nothing but exercise the UI provided by the manufacturer with the level of skill that is to be expected of someone who simply bought a TV (that is, none). Had it been pro video gear, the manufacturer MIGHT have the right to expect better from the owner.
No inventory or rework required. The same JTAG that writes the image will be able to run tests on the boards as well. You seem to be desperately imagining a complicated and difficult procedure (even though you don't seem to know much about it, have you ever used or even SEEN a JTAG programmer in person?) to justify a crazy high cost to do a simple thing. The JTAG will certainly have access to the right parts. The right part is the CPU.
It would be an amazing coincidence that this mythical second failure just happened to occur while the TV was infected, but even so, they could offer to do the re-flash for free but warn that other repairs will be charged at $30/hr plus parts.
As for the rest, viruses and trojans have been with us for decades. Even when the TV was made, rootkits for Android were in the wild. If the reset procedure doesn't work, then the TV is defective by design and LG should fix or replace it without charge.
In truth, the $340 is a fuck off fee. They don't want to be bothered with it but don't want to actually say no, so they charge enough to make sure it isn't worth it to get the TV fixed. At $340, they would make a profit just giving him a refurbished TV and that is probably their actual plan if he calls their bluff.
The TV was designed explicitly for the user with no IT skills whatsoever to be able to install apps including third party apps. I doubt very much that any of the marketing claimed it was OK to throw bricks at it.
If it takes 10 hours to plug in a JTAG programmer, select the model number and press the program button, the tech is nowhere near qualified. The whole thing including opening the back and closing it back up again should take an hour.
And if the device was perfectly suitable for purpose (which included unskilled people downloading new apps to it) it would have a fool-proof way for the end user to recover from bad software (intentionally bad or not).
No need to de-solder anything. JTAG should be sufficient.
Of course, had the device been designed properly in the first place, there would be a recessed button to press in order to load everything from read only memory.
If it didn't cost $340 it might be legit. Also, if there was a service center within any reasonable distance of anything. I went to the service center locator and entered a few valid U.S. zip codes for well populated areas and it couldn't find a single service center within 50 miles of any of them.
So that sounds more like being blown off than offered help.
Why not just give him the instructions for how to actually do a factory reset?
You're still missing it. Fine and dandy to argue that rationality and self control are not the criteria for voting. Right or wrong, it doesn't make him inconsistent.
As for the rest, he said that teens lack emotional control in the heat of the moment, but because voting is not something you must do under the gun, they would not be especially disadvantaged there. He argues that most murders are in the heat of the moment where teens are distinctly disadvantaged.
But in reality, you'll simply make the test writers the real power in the U.S. They may start out well intentioned, but you can bet bial would slip in to the test sooner or later, and it would only grow more biased over time.
You're not quite understanding what is developed in the 16-25 year range. Most succinctly, it's self control. The 16 year old has just as much ability as the 18 year old to carefully consider a choice for an election and cast the vote. What the 16 year old lacks is impulse control in a heat of the moment situation (a common situation when people are killed). The 18 year old isn't THAT good at it either. It's not without precedent, we claim the 18 year old is old enough to be drafted and vote, but not old enough to make good decisions about alcohol.
There's plenty of room to disagree with the position that 16 year olds should vote, but it's not inconsistent.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't even realize you're standing there with metaphorical egg dripping down your face, do you? You were dead wrong. Even LG came to agree with my position and finally divulged the sooper sekret cheat code to actually restore to factory. It's even documented in a video.
My error was UNDER-estimating the dickheadedness of the initial "support"
There's no point trying to twist logic into a pretzel with your what ifs that clearly did not come to pass. There was no particular reason to expect the what ifs either. Perhaps more to the point, the cost of giving it a try was near zero and it resolved the problem. According to TFA, his first attempt to do a reset was from instructions found on the internet. Clearly those instructions were either wrong or meant for a different model. Do you not believe in the KISS principle? Apparently not Occam's razor either.
So it seems the $340 was indeed a fuck off fee. There was a simple and known resolution that they chose not to divulge.
As for the kindergarten comment, that was in reference to your big red button story. I made that clear by quoting from your reply to that argument.
If you're just going to try to talk around the simple fact that time and events have demonstrated my point and refuted yours, don't bother.
Of course they had a few problems to overcome and had to adjust the strength of the magnets down a bit. The first version was great except for the horrible clacking sound they made when they met in the middle.
As someone who started out hacking on 8 bit computers, I agree 100%. Working with ATmega absolutely does re-capture the feel of that. It helps that you can download a comprehensive manual from Atmel.
You can play with the various hardware modules much like you could with the old 8 bit computers.
Arduino provides an IDE, but I prefer to use CLI tools that link in the Arduino libraries.
Not their problem. Their job is to report what consumers might expect from normal usage. Apparently that would be battery life all over the place.
It's Apple's job to figure that out and improve the battery life. I'm sure CR will dutifully test an updated model and report on it.
I can say I certainly would have gotten a computer anyway (my introduction was actually a mainframe), but I don't think my life would have been better without Apple by any means. I did enjoy some Apple ][ hacking.
That's not how it works. Not all boards have a place to connect the JTAG, not even CPU-bearing boards.
Only if they're idiots.
That's not how a repair shop works. The time with the case open might be an hour, but it's also vitally important to do the overhead, like not lose track of where the customer's TV is.
Sure, there's overhead. So slap a repair tag on it matching the customer paperwork. Place it on a designated shelf with the tag visible. If that takes 9 HOURS, the shop is screwed anyway. Although repair shops are not as common as they once were, none ever needed to have a 10 hour minimum charge to be profitable.
That's not how fairness works, either
It isn't how the weak consumer laws in the U.S. work, but it *IS* how fairness works. Anyone who attended kindergarten knows that if you make a mistake you should fix it.
As for the update, I am glad that LG decided after all to divulge the simple yet sooper sekret method of press settings + CH Dwn together, release; Select "wipe data," then "Yes." Wait for "complete;" Power cycle. Somehow it worked without a solder rework station or 10 hours of labor. Might have been nice had they just told him that in the first place rather than "offering" to do that for him for a $340 fuck-off fee. Perhaps it was the bad publicity, perhaps it was a more reasonable and fair minded manager picking up the case.
As for your increasingly absurd suppositions of physically breaking the TV, everyone knows you shouldn't break the screen with a rock (so it is a reasonable expectation for a casual TV owner) and there is no UI or other invitation from the manufacturer to do so.
Even LG came around to agree with my position after a bit of pressure.
It's a shame too. One more generation of fission (the right design) could burn up much of our 'waste' and leave us all better off. For once, our energy production could reduce our pollution problem.
A proper factory reset cannot be blocked by malware. If it was, it's because of a design defect.
A proper factory reset would mean the bootloader (in ROM or flash with the OTP fuse blown) sees the magic handshake (power on while holding volume up and volume down, etc) and would erase the flash and re-write it from a ROM image. Naturally, any updates and apps would need to be re-installed.
You're making that up.
So you maintain that this unskilled user somehow hacked the firmware to permit side loading? As opposed to simply using the provided UI to install an app that in retrospect proved to be malware?
Your son had to qualify for a license. He did NOT exhibit the full level of skill expected (though such lapses are far from rare, they are lapses). He knew that hitting other cars is bad. I presume there was insurance as well.
/.'s complaint with apple is that there isn't an official way to take personal responsability and override the protections. LG could have completely eliminated any lasting effect by providing a reliable factory reset function (a common feature of Android devices).
Not necessarily. If the TV is designed as a monolithic processing unit, and the CPU's JTAG is accessible, then that's a reasonable assumption.
Either way, there exists a board that the CPU is mounted on. There will be a JTAG for that board. The CPU will be in the chain.
That actually comes from a "fun" story from my past as a sound tech. I was modifying an old rig, which involved pressing a nice big red button to switch how an amp worked.
That missing button was a manufacturing defect. It would be unfair to charge the time and materials to correct that to the customer.
Rather, it's the handling and overhead to run the procedure.
If they can't do an hour's work without 9 hours of overhead, they deserve to lose money.
The legal term you're looking for is "due diligence". Viruses, trojans, and rootkits rarely destroy their host, so a reset procedure that rewrites the OS memory from a stored file would have been generally sufficient at the time the TV was designed.
Right. So they apparently failed to exercise due diligence here.
You're effectively asking a manufacturer to anticipate threats a decade in the future,
No, I am expecting them to take into account a threat that was very much in the wild at the time they designed the thing.
The user did nothing but exercise the UI provided by the manufacturer with the level of skill that is to be expected of someone who simply bought a TV (that is, none). Had it been pro video gear, the manufacturer MIGHT have the right to expect better from the owner.
No inventory or rework required. The same JTAG that writes the image will be able to run tests on the boards as well. You seem to be desperately imagining a complicated and difficult procedure (even though you don't seem to know much about it, have you ever used or even SEEN a JTAG programmer in person?) to justify a crazy high cost to do a simple thing. The JTAG will certainly have access to the right parts. The right part is the CPU.
It would be an amazing coincidence that this mythical second failure just happened to occur while the TV was infected, but even so, they could offer to do the re-flash for free but warn that other repairs will be charged at $30/hr plus parts.
As for the rest, viruses and trojans have been with us for decades. Even when the TV was made, rootkits for Android were in the wild. If the reset procedure doesn't work, then the TV is defective by design and LG should fix or replace it without charge.
In truth, the $340 is a fuck off fee. They don't want to be bothered with it but don't want to actually say no, so they charge enough to make sure it isn't worth it to get the TV fixed. At $340, they would make a profit just giving him a refurbished TV and that is probably their actual plan if he calls their bluff.
In many cases, they were there first. This is gentrification on steroids.
The TV was designed explicitly for the user with no IT skills whatsoever to be able to install apps including third party apps. I doubt very much that any of the marketing claimed it was OK to throw bricks at it.
If it takes 10 hours to plug in a JTAG programmer, select the model number and press the program button, the tech is nowhere near qualified. The whole thing including opening the back and closing it back up again should take an hour.
And if the device was perfectly suitable for purpose (which included unskilled people downloading new apps to it) it would have a fool-proof way for the end user to recover from bad software (intentionally bad or not).
No need to de-solder anything. JTAG should be sufficient.
Of course, had the device been designed properly in the first place, there would be a recessed button to press in order to load everything from read only memory.
No, he deserves a consumer electronics device that can be reliably reset to factory by the end user.
If it didn't cost $340 it might be legit. Also, if there was a service center within any reasonable distance of anything. I went to the service center locator and entered a few valid U.S. zip codes for well populated areas and it couldn't find a single service center within 50 miles of any of them.
So that sounds more like being blown off than offered help.
Why not just give him the instructions for how to actually do a factory reset?
Oddly, even if he DID speak to Alexa, it wouldn't mean much. Some people talk in their sleep and later wake with no memory of it.
I will if you look up reliability. It may not be the most efficient source of food but you can't get laid off from it
And you have to have the resources in place to exploit it.
You're still missing it. Fine and dandy to argue that rationality and self control are not the criteria for voting. Right or wrong, it doesn't make him inconsistent.
As for the rest, he said that teens lack emotional control in the heat of the moment, but because voting is not something you must do under the gun, they would not be especially disadvantaged there. He argues that most murders are in the heat of the moment where teens are distinctly disadvantaged.
But in reality, you'll simply make the test writers the real power in the U.S. They may start out well intentioned, but you can bet bial would slip in to the test sooner or later, and it would only grow more biased over time.
The problem in your suggestion is that it's still two wolves deciding what's for dinner, just that the sheep gets no vote.
Perhaps the other things people depending on government help vote on would be things that enable them to make a bigger contribution in the future.
You're not quite understanding what is developed in the 16-25 year range. Most succinctly, it's self control. The 16 year old has just as much ability as the 18 year old to carefully consider a choice for an election and cast the vote. What the 16 year old lacks is impulse control in a heat of the moment situation (a common situation when people are killed). The 18 year old isn't THAT good at it either. It's not without precedent, we claim the 18 year old is old enough to be drafted and vote, but not old enough to make good decisions about alcohol.
There's plenty of room to disagree with the position that 16 year olds should vote, but it's not inconsistent.
There are much better ways to dispose of old CRTs and they're much easier on the mice.