So let me get this straight. You declare it "totalled" when it's a perfectly fine piece of hardware. You then take the customer's property, stash it in the back, and eventually give it to some guy who resells it as a mid-end system?
I don't think I said "take the customer's property". Actually I didn't clarify so I'll clear that up now. The customer donates the machine to us for disposal. "Machines left at Business or abandoned will be disposed of as Business sees fit". This almost always means we donate them to the guy that volunteers his time to rebuild new mid-end systems to be donated to low income families in our area. Amaing how you twist that noble cause into theft. You would rather the machine be taken to the dump or left to rot in the owner's attic?
In the event the machine is not economical to repair, we oftentimes let them just donate the machine and call it even. (don't charge them for the diagnosis, usually 15 minutes labor minimum) I'd say that's more than fair, we lose money on those units. Though oftentimes they do buy a new machine from us so we are not entirely without compensation for our techs' time. We will not tell them their machine is totalled when it's a simple fix - we are half service center and half new sales center so we value the trust our customers can place in us to give them an accurate and fair diagnosis. We neither sucker them into paying $350 to repair a system that (working) is worth $200, nor do we tell them their 6 month old machine that needs a $49 PS is totalled and should be donated to us.
Sounds like an organized crime operation to me. I mean, seriously, is this not against the law?
Accepting donations, and donating what you have accepted is not usually considered illegal. Where do you live again?
The DSL service I have gives me a block of 8 (5 usable) IPs, so I have placed the WAP on its own static. My internal network is on a different static, passing through a firewall and router. Wireless users have no more access to my network than anyone on the internet does. I've thought about doing something to limit bandwidth but so far that's not been an issue I need to fix.
The twist here is that the definition of "defect" has a whole new meaning when applied publicly to an Apple product. Pintos and their exploding gas tanks, that is a defect. The top deck of a laptop computer refusing to stay clean in the presense of dirty oily hands, that is not a defect. As is always the case, a few people flip out over little things, (as happens with any product) but in Apple's case the press eats it up like candy and blows it all out of proportion.
If your refridgerator's door handle had the paint start flecking off a year after you bought it, would you expect mobs crying RECALL!, RECALL! ? But look at the tibook paint issue. The press had an absolute party over that. Perfect example of how Apple can do the same thing another company does and yet they attract all the bad P.R.
I don't think it's the mac users that cause this problem. They react just the same as any other consumer with a product they are not completely satisifed with. The problem is how the press picks and chooses what manufacturers' issues are "press-worthy" and get 95% of the publicity as a result.
From Apple's track record, it's easy to see that they voluntarily fix most issues, often times before they even come to public attention. Before the tibook paint issue became such a huge issue, Apple had already changed the formulation of their primer to prevent new units from flaking. By comparison, most other manufacturers won't lift a finger until a class action lawsuit is filed. It's a shame that they work so hard and still get railed on all the time.
heh, you're not getting it. They aren't sending the business to us, they're driving their business to us. Customer breaks it, geek squad breaks it worse, and finally they bring it to us to fix properly.
Home folder is not difficult unless it's encrypted. Gettng access to the other users' registries is the trick. Unless there's a new trick we're not aware of, you cannot scan a user's registry while logged in as a different user. And that's where most of the viruses and spyware hook in. Sure you can remove most of the malware itself, but you're going to get a pile of errors and warnings when that user logs in, as all the malware attempts to load via registry keys and fails with file not found errors.
I leave my WAP open. (of course I have set the administrator's password though) My wap's SSID is "call (my phone number)". So far I've only gotten one call but there are about 1/2 dozen regular users and the odd hit from a new MAC about once a week.
The bandwidth they use is inconsequential. I suppose if a neighbor decided to go wild on bittorrent or something I might have to take action, but for now it's free lunch if you're in my neighborhood. That's the way I'd like it to be everywhere, so it makes sense for me to help it along in any way I can.
The city next door has a public utility that does cable modems among other things. They have set up WAPs on street lights all over town, and if you have cable modem service you can use it to login to any WAP in the city. Coverage is pretty good, close to 100% downtown. It'd be nice if they would support it with tax dollars and open it up completely, but that's not terribly likely to happen. Maybe in a few years.
We do see older machines. Our shop works on both macs and PCs, and I have to say the macs tend to hold their value and usefullness for a good 2x the time the PCs do. We still get people bringing in LCs and Mac Classics, with printer problems etc. Just TRY and find a replacement printer for an LC sometime... So we actually don't dispose of many of them since people just refuse to junk them and they refuse to break. They probably all wind up sitting in people's attics.
Most of the windows boxes that come in with less than windows 2000 we contsider prime candidates for replacement. Same issue, impossible to find drivers for a new printer if you are running 95. Usually in those cases, besides being infected, there are issues that can only be solved by a reformat. If they are very very lucky, a repair-install will work. We try to look at the machine and determine it's value "in working condition", and then compare that to the estimated cost of repair. If the repair cost hits about 80% of the "working condition" value, we consider it totalled and advise them to get a new system.
Most AV and spyware scanners have to be run individually on each account on the computer. I find it humorous that viruses have no problem infecting every account on the computer yet you have to remove them one at a time. When we get in a system with say... 7 user accounts (at least twice a month) it's often more cost-effective to just nuke it and start over, rather than paying the tech for 6 hrs of time spent scanning all those accounts. It's ridiculous but that's the reality we deal with all the time. I can't see someone considering the machine totalled, since you could always just nuke and reinstall, but if the customer has lost their restore disks (20% of them have) then tracking down drivers for all their proprietary (usually Dell) hardware is next to impossible and DOES effectively total the computer.
I hate to see perfectly viable and functional hardware rendered totalled like that, but it happens surprisingly often, and I can't help but believe that the manufacturers of the computers plan it that way. They pull neat tricks like using a cheap (underpowered) power supply, and then pull a stunt like swap the location of the power switch and power cord, so you cannot use a stock power supply that might cost $39. No problem, they'll sell you an identical crappy replacement... for $179. So to summarize, they use proprietary cheap components that are guaranteed to fail early, require replacements available only from the manufacturer, and cost 3-4x what they're worth. "planned obsolecense" We take a metal saw and cut the little bit of metal tab on the back of the case that blocks the power switch on the standard supply, and save the customer $100, and they come out with a much better PS that won't die a year from now.
As for the graveyard, we pile up the totalled machines in back and a guy comes by and picks up the lot about once a week. He doesn't get to cherry pick, he has to take it all or none of it. Saves us the trouble of hauling away that which no one wants. I'm not totally clear on what he does with them, but I believe he parts them out either for repair parts or to build new mid-end systems with. We don't throw any full systems in the dumpster, though it gets its fair share of busted components. (hard drives, optical drives, power supplies, etc)
Really, we do. They bring us soooo much business it's funny.
We have determined that the Geek Squad geeks are people hired off the street the day before, and are instructed to look at the computer, and recommend that they buy a new computer. (from Best Buy, of course!)
Every attempt that we are aware of that they have actually tried to fix something, we see it a week later to fix what was wrong, and to fix what the geek broke while trying to fix it.
Some of the latest episodes:
- geek browsed customer's computer to a nasty web site and got it infected with spyware and viruses (two weeks ago) - geek took laptop apart and failed to reconnect cardbus slot connector (that one was today) - geek told customer he needed a new computer when he needed a new power supply (this happens somewhat frequently) - geek told customer he needed a new computer because this one is slow, was actually rampant with spyware and viruses (happens all the time) - geek sold customer another copy of XP because this one was showing it was no longer registerd
The list just goes on and on... funny thing too, we are quite expensive for on-site service compared to others in our area, (we're expensive, but we're good) but the Geek Squad actually is more expensive than we are. I don't see how they get any business, they must have a killer marketing campaign.
From the sounds of it they are either recording the information based on something different that cannot be used to reconstruct the data pattern currently in use at places like the FBI, or they are hashing the results prior to storage. In either case the data they have would be no use to the FBI etc.
I haven't gotten a chance to do much digginng into fingerprint recognition, but it appears to be based on the anomolies in your prints. There's probably a name for them... spots where there are enclosing circles, spots where the patterns "y", defects in the prints due to injury, places where the patterns fold, etc.
While it was good of them to pull the ad from the rotation immediately, they failed in several other ways:
(1) they failed to post a notice or provide links for the removal of the malware. At best in the blog there are references that such removal instructions exist, peppered with a warning that some of them are actually malware themselves. They should have made the fix EASY and FOOLPROOF to obtain after getting their readers infected. It's been how long since they got their subscribers infected and they have done nothing more than to stop more of them from getting infected. They helped to break the computers, they should play an active roll in fixing them.
(2) the impression I got from their posts in their blog was that "oops sorry not our fault, not our advertiser's fault, it's one of the ad companies that subscribed to our advertiser". This is a cop-out. When you provide a service like they do, your advertisement is a bundle that comes with your service, and as such you are responsible for its content. I don't care if it's a 3rd party. You take on the responsibility for the content you deliver, regardless of how you get it. You can have legal arrangements with your content providers that provide YOU with a legal remedy, but the grief passes through you. You get sued, and then you sue the ones upsteam that caused you to get sued. You do not "pass the buck" and point a finger up the chain three levels and say not my problem good luck getting anything out of them, because the consumer has no legal recourse against those people. You as the content provider do have a legal recourse against your advertiser, and they have recourse against their affiliate who caused the problem in the first place. This pass the buck mentality is cheap and lazy, and they should be ashamed for trying to pull it.
It seems that most any time privacy issues are called into question, one group always retreats to the "how dare you interfere" concept. They consider the rules irrlelvent because "the good guys would never abuse their power". If it were up to them it would be a police state, where the police did not have to follow the same laws the rest of us do. But they forget, this is the exact reason we have those laws, to protect the people from abuse by the government. In a perfect world where the government was just and wise, those such laws would not be necessary. But the government is oftentimes neither just nor wise, and in that case I prefer to have the law on my side to protect me from the abuse.
Stripping the people of the protection from persicution to make the job of law enforcement simpler is proteting people's fredom and rights by taking them away.
Last I heard most of the moon was mainly made up of silica. It's not like earth where there are vast deposits of a wide variety of reasonably pure materials. There is oxygen trapped there, (silica oxide iirc?) but it's difficult to extract. We are certainly not getting food or water from the moon.
I once read a quote from a nasa engineer, saying something about a pile of dog droppings found on the moon would be the richest source of carbon for miles around. Us being carbon-based life, require carbon in pretty much all our food. There is very little hydrogen on the moon, and that nicely rules out the production of water.
For now I think the astronauts had better pack a lunch.
Waaah, the world didn't protect me, it's the world's fault! I shouldn't be forced to use common sense, the world must protect me! I deserve MONEY from everyone because the world failed to protect me from my ignorance and lack of good judgement!
Morons.
I'm not saying she deserved what she got, but it's sure a lot more challenging to pity someone that behaves like that. No pity from me.
What it all comes down to is, "if the customer is willing to pay more for it, we want to charge them more for it".
From a strictly business perspective, this makes good sense for maximizing proffit. You find the "price point" where (sales volume x price) is the maximum value. You cannot do this with a flat rate price. Of course this assumes you have correctly calculated your price point, and have factored in all the market effects at work.
The flat rate is (correctly) perceived by the consumer as a value over tiered pricing, and that's what the consumer will like more. Jobs realizes this will attract hoards to his new iTunes Video Store as it has with the ITMS, and he will make up the loss from flat rate in volume. I doubt the MPAA is factoring in the scope of how many people will go with the ITVS if it's flat rate, and what that will do to their price point model.
The MPAA is just despirately afraid of not managing to wring every last possible dime out of the consumer. They're just being money-grubbing scum. You can't expect any more than that from them.
If this group was in charge of the appolo missions we'd still be doing near earth orbital testing.
Space is dangerous, expensive, and offers very few good opportunities. If you want to get anywhere you have to take risks. I'm not saying that people should just throw their lives away for nothing, but every trip they make into space breaks new ground and teaches them new lessons. If you want the rewards you have to be prepared to walk away with a bloddy nose now and again, especially in a game like this.
It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe, it's just plain never going to happen. Right now I think we should be happy with 90%. From a purely practical perspective, if a dozen people lose their lives to accellerate the space program 10 years, I would call that a good trade. And I'd be happy to be one of those 12.
I repair macs where I work. I see on average 5 ibooks per week, and just as many powerbooks. I have yet to see one of the macbooks in for service. (though I have fixed a couple pros) It's not uncommon to find an ibook with discoloration below the two palms, I see it on probably 1 in 15 ibooks. This number may be low because people clean up their computer before bringing it in.
The previous case top of the ibook was a fairly (but not completely) smooth surface and was a slightly off shade of white. It was also a very hard plastic and I suspect very chemically inert. When I do have to clean them, they are not terribly difficult to get the grime off from, though it does require some force and use of alcohol. On the ibooks its also somewhat common to see a circular area in the central region of the trackpad, colored slightly lighter than the surrounding area of the trackpad. That's caused by the less used area of the trackpad getting more grimey. Those can be a little more difficult to clean due to the texture of the trackpad. It's also possible to chip the trackpad's sensor surface if you are rough with it.
I also find that I have to clean the palm areas of my powerbook from time to time, usually about once a month as grime starts to build up under my palms and around the trackpad.
These stories about yellowing of the macbooks is somewhat of a surprise, but not really. This is not caused by heat. It's a combination of grime from the user's hands, possibly combined with a chemestry problem between the user's body oils and the plastic of the top case.
I would personally consider this a defect, since it's fairly clear that inadequate research was done by Apple to determine if there was going to be such an issue with their new case design. Also as others have pointed out, Apple makes quite a name for itself as a good looking computer, and issues like this do a lot more harm to the Apple brand than they would to say, Dell. The Apple users tend to be more demanding as to the cosmetic appearance of their computer, and react much more strongly when an issue develops.
This is not the first time a case design has been a problem. Owners of "titanium" powerbook G4s will remember the "tibook paint" issue, where the outer border of the case, a carbon fiber, had problems with the paint easily chipping off and sometimes cracking and flaking off under the user's wrists. There were also issues with watches worn on the wrist causing almost immediate removal of the paint from the CF border. To my knowledge Apple fixed their manufacturing process (new paint or primer?) but did not recall those units despite a lot of upset owners' complaints. With the tibook, the top case was the frame of the computer, onto which everything was assembled. To replace the top case of the tibook was extremely labor intensive. With the ibook, the top case is somewhat easier to replace. Not sure on the macbook. This will factor into Apple's willingness to issue a recall.
I am a former owner of such a tibook, but for me I care much less about appearance and more about performance, so it didn't bother me that much. I took a hard plastic blade and finished the job so the computer at least looked more balanced rather than have two isolated wear spots. My current computer, an "aluminum" powerbook, has to be cleaned periodically to keep the grime off the palmrests.
If the discoloration can be cleaned off with alcohol, it's probably just a grime issue. That discoloration is not the color I am used to seeing though - usually grime is very dark in color, but this appears to be a cream or light yellow. I would tend to suspect a chemical change is occurring in the plastic based on a combination of oils from the user's hands, accellerated by the heat produced by the computer. (this could not be removed with alcohol) Apple may have to change the composition of the plastic of the case, or coat the top deck somehow, to reduce or prevent this problem.
RIAA: "the artist is selling on iTunes and making only half the money he used to on each sale. You are starving the artist by buying from ITMS!"
Any Other Common Person: "Lets see, he's selling 4x the albums at 1/2 the price, so he takes home twice as much money every month. Oh ya that's right, the RIAA doesn't get as big of a cut of the sales either. Waaaah!"
Do you really care if your music CD has a "Vista Compatible" logo on it?
Thought not.
This is different for say, a network card. THAT you would care about.
So, the RIAA types can do as they very well please with their driver malware seeing as it has zero impact on them if they lose a rating they never really had in the first place.
I have a hilarious screenshot of a "windows alert" telling me that it suspects my registry is damaged and it's recommended that I download their registry cleaner and clean my registry. (Click to DOWNLOAD and RUN free Registry Cleaner)
It may have been less entertaining had I not been running Mac OS X.
First, he describes, "Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine."
Then he speculates, "This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov"
If he had read Asimov it wouldn't take long to realize his rules goverend the deliberate behavior of the robots, and does not come into play in accidents or when the robots don't have the ability to sense what's going on around them. Just because your robot implements Azimov's rules doesn't mean it has eyes in the back of its head. This guy crept up behind a piece of active equipment that had no motion/proximity sensors or cameras on it. Try that with a fellow in a batting cage and see how much better you fare. It doesn't matter that the batter didn't mean to crack your skull, you were just being very stupid.
This didn't used to be the case. Large businesses used to be owned by families and had been in the family for many generations. The family chose who would be the next head of the company, even if it was some dimwit son that was going to do the company great harm. The rational was that the heir had a vested interest in the long term well-being of the company, and even if he was inept, he would be good intentioned. Companies flourished due to the dedicated nature of these owners. Given these were the people that keeled over of heart attacks at 50, but in the long run it did the company AND its employees a great deal of good.
Today, it's "ok who's your CEO this year?" They come, cut quality, lower prices, boost sales and cut workforce, give the company a little short-term polish, and then move on to CEO another larger company somewhere else. Meanwhile, a year later, the company they bolstered up on bad foundations collapses due to destruction of infrastructure.
As much as the people despised the Rockafellers and Fords of years gone by, they had the model right for company survival and growth. Keep it in the family, keep dedicated people at the top.
Malware publishers are motivated by the money they get from what they do. It's not about morals, it's not about good business, it's ONLY about money. Money is the most powerful motivator there is. If you wave enough cash in front of a group of people, no matter what they have to do, someone will take you up on your offer.
There will always be takers. So by default we can say that the malware business will remain rotten to the core until it is not only made illegal, but also prossicuted ruthlessly until which point it is neither proffitable nor worth the risks. Right now, there are mountains of money to be made, and little or no risk of prossicution, so it continues unchecked.
Are they being set up with like wire trips, weight sensors, or just plain a man in the ditch with his finger on the button? Given the suicide bombers' mentality, I could see the latter being the most reliable choice. In that case, sending an unmanned vehicle ahead of the rest would be very unlikely to discover or trigger the explosion early.
It would be nice to see a requirement placed on things like this such that the manufacturers (not the resellers) are required to accept returns of products that failed to operate as described on the packaging. In other words, no cop-outs like "may not work on SOME players". If it doesn't say it will not work on a Pioneer 5420, and so I buy it and try it in mine and it doesn't play, they have to accept it back, at the price I paid for it at Sam Goody.
As it is now, they want the consumer to take a gamble on their DRM. That "plays for sure" crap is just propganda. I'd take 'plays for sure' to mean Sony etc guarantee it to work on any player, and that they will provide a full refund if it does not "play for sure". Not the store that sold it, they have no part in this and can't force anyone to do anything, this has to land on the labels.
If they were forced to refund consumers at retail price then every one that was returned would cancel out the sale of what, four of them? Hit them in the wallet if you want to get their attention and force them to play fair ball.
What the DMCA is here for
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Death By DMCA
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· Score: 2
about how whole classes of devices were eliminated, and how others won't even see the light of day as a result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Ahh you just need to keep in mind that the whole goal of the DMCA is to enrichen the.. oh wait that's not it.
encourage innovation. Ya that's it. Help make new technologies flourish, like um.. this one they're crushing now.
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So let me get this straight. You declare it "totalled" when it's a perfectly fine piece of hardware. You then take the customer's property, stash it in the back, and eventually give it to some guy who resells it as a mid-end system?
I don't think I said "take the customer's property". Actually I didn't clarify so I'll clear that up now. The customer donates the machine to us for disposal. "Machines left at Business or abandoned will be disposed of as Business sees fit". This almost always means we donate them to the guy that volunteers his time to rebuild new mid-end systems to be donated to low income families in our area. Amaing how you twist that noble cause into theft. You would rather the machine be taken to the dump or left to rot in the owner's attic?
In the event the machine is not economical to repair, we oftentimes let them just donate the machine and call it even. (don't charge them for the diagnosis, usually 15 minutes labor minimum) I'd say that's more than fair, we lose money on those units. Though oftentimes they do buy a new machine from us so we are not entirely without compensation for our techs' time. We will not tell them their machine is totalled when it's a simple fix - we are half service center and half new sales center so we value the trust our customers can place in us to give them an accurate and fair diagnosis. We neither sucker them into paying $350 to repair a system that (working) is worth $200, nor do we tell them their 6 month old machine that needs a $49 PS is totalled and should be donated to us.
Sounds like an organized crime operation to me. I mean, seriously, is this not against the law?
Accepting donations, and donating what you have accepted is not usually considered illegal. Where do you live again?
The DSL service I have gives me a block of 8 (5 usable) IPs, so I have placed the WAP on its own static. My internal network is on a different static, passing through a firewall and router. Wireless users have no more access to my network than anyone on the internet does. I've thought about doing something to limit bandwidth but so far that's not been an issue I need to fix.
The twist here is that the definition of "defect" has a whole new meaning when applied publicly to an Apple product. Pintos and their exploding gas tanks, that is a defect. The top deck of a laptop computer refusing to stay clean in the presense of dirty oily hands, that is not a defect. As is always the case, a few people flip out over little things, (as happens with any product) but in Apple's case the press eats it up like candy and blows it all out of proportion.
If your refridgerator's door handle had the paint start flecking off a year after you bought it, would you expect mobs crying RECALL!, RECALL! ? But look at the tibook paint issue. The press had an absolute party over that. Perfect example of how Apple can do the same thing another company does and yet they attract all the bad P.R.
I don't think it's the mac users that cause this problem. They react just the same as any other consumer with a product they are not completely satisifed with. The problem is how the press picks and chooses what manufacturers' issues are "press-worthy" and get 95% of the publicity as a result.
From Apple's track record, it's easy to see that they voluntarily fix most issues, often times before they even come to public attention. Before the tibook paint issue became such a huge issue, Apple had already changed the formulation of their primer to prevent new units from flaking. By comparison, most other manufacturers won't lift a finger until a class action lawsuit is filed. It's a shame that they work so hard and still get railed on all the time.
heh, you're not getting it. They aren't sending the business to us, they're driving their business to us. Customer breaks it, geek squad breaks it worse, and finally they bring it to us to fix properly.
Home folder is not difficult unless it's encrypted. Gettng access to the other users' registries is the trick. Unless there's a new trick we're not aware of, you cannot scan a user's registry while logged in as a different user. And that's where most of the viruses and spyware hook in. Sure you can remove most of the malware itself, but you're going to get a pile of errors and warnings when that user logs in, as all the malware attempts to load via registry keys and fails with file not found errors.
I leave my WAP open. (of course I have set the administrator's password though) My wap's SSID is "call (my phone number)". So far I've only gotten one call but there are about 1/2 dozen regular users and the odd hit from a new MAC about once a week.
The bandwidth they use is inconsequential. I suppose if a neighbor decided to go wild on bittorrent or something I might have to take action, but for now it's free lunch if you're in my neighborhood. That's the way I'd like it to be everywhere, so it makes sense for me to help it along in any way I can.
The city next door has a public utility that does cable modems among other things. They have set up WAPs on street lights all over town, and if you have cable modem service you can use it to login to any WAP in the city. Coverage is pretty good, close to 100% downtown. It'd be nice if they would support it with tax dollars and open it up completely, but that's not terribly likely to happen. Maybe in a few years.
We do see older machines. Our shop works on both macs and PCs, and I have to say the macs tend to hold their value and usefullness for a good 2x the time the PCs do. We still get people bringing in LCs and Mac Classics, with printer problems etc. Just TRY and find a replacement printer for an LC sometime... So we actually don't dispose of many of them since people just refuse to junk them and they refuse to break. They probably all wind up sitting in people's attics.
Most of the windows boxes that come in with less than windows 2000 we contsider prime candidates for replacement. Same issue, impossible to find drivers for a new printer if you are running 95. Usually in those cases, besides being infected, there are issues that can only be solved by a reformat. If they are very very lucky, a repair-install will work. We try to look at the machine and determine it's value "in working condition", and then compare that to the estimated cost of repair. If the repair cost hits about 80% of the "working condition" value, we consider it totalled and advise them to get a new system.
Most AV and spyware scanners have to be run individually on each account on the computer. I find it humorous that viruses have no problem infecting every account on the computer yet you have to remove them one at a time. When we get in a system with say... 7 user accounts (at least twice a month) it's often more cost-effective to just nuke it and start over, rather than paying the tech for 6 hrs of time spent scanning all those accounts. It's ridiculous but that's the reality we deal with all the time. I can't see someone considering the machine totalled, since you could always just nuke and reinstall, but if the customer has lost their restore disks (20% of them have) then tracking down drivers for all their proprietary (usually Dell) hardware is next to impossible and DOES effectively total the computer.
I hate to see perfectly viable and functional hardware rendered totalled like that, but it happens surprisingly often, and I can't help but believe that the manufacturers of the computers plan it that way. They pull neat tricks like using a cheap (underpowered) power supply, and then pull a stunt like swap the location of the power switch and power cord, so you cannot use a stock power supply that might cost $39. No problem, they'll sell you an identical crappy replacement... for $179. So to summarize, they use proprietary cheap components that are guaranteed to fail early, require replacements available only from the manufacturer, and cost 3-4x what they're worth. "planned obsolecense" We take a metal saw and cut the little bit of metal tab on the back of the case that blocks the power switch on the standard supply, and save the customer $100, and they come out with a much better PS that won't die a year from now.
As for the graveyard, we pile up the totalled machines in back and a guy comes by and picks up the lot about once a week. He doesn't get to cherry pick, he has to take it all or none of it. Saves us the trouble of hauling away that which no one wants. I'm not totally clear on what he does with them, but I believe he parts them out either for repair parts or to build new mid-end systems with. We don't throw any full systems in the dumpster, though it gets its fair share of busted components. (hard drives, optical drives, power supplies, etc)
Really, we do. They bring us soooo much business it's funny.
We have determined that the Geek Squad geeks are people hired off the street the day before, and are instructed to look at the computer, and recommend that they buy a new computer. (from Best Buy, of course!)
Every attempt that we are aware of that they have actually tried to fix something, we see it a week later to fix what was wrong, and to fix what the geek broke while trying to fix it.
Some of the latest episodes:
- geek browsed customer's computer to a nasty web site and got it infected with spyware and viruses (two weeks ago)
- geek took laptop apart and failed to reconnect cardbus slot connector (that one was today)
- geek told customer he needed a new computer when he needed a new power supply (this happens somewhat frequently)
- geek told customer he needed a new computer because this one is slow, was actually rampant with spyware and viruses (happens all the time)
- geek sold customer another copy of XP because this one was showing it was no longer registerd
The list just goes on and on... funny thing too, we are quite expensive for on-site service compared to others in our area, (we're expensive, but we're good) but the Geek Squad actually is more expensive than we are. I don't see how they get any business, they must have a killer marketing campaign.
From the sounds of it they are either recording the information based on something different that cannot be used to reconstruct the data pattern currently in use at places like the FBI, or they are hashing the results prior to storage. In either case the data they have would be no use to the FBI etc.
I haven't gotten a chance to do much digginng into fingerprint recognition, but it appears to be based on the anomolies in your prints. There's probably a name for them... spots where there are enclosing circles, spots where the patterns "y", defects in the prints due to injury, places where the patterns fold, etc.
While it was good of them to pull the ad from the rotation immediately, they failed in several other ways:
(1) they failed to post a notice or provide links for the removal of the malware. At best in the blog there are references that such removal instructions exist, peppered with a warning that some of them are actually malware themselves. They should have made the fix EASY and FOOLPROOF to obtain after getting their readers infected. It's been how long since they got their subscribers infected and they have done nothing more than to stop more of them from getting infected. They helped to break the computers, they should play an active roll in fixing them.
(2) the impression I got from their posts in their blog was that "oops sorry not our fault, not our advertiser's fault, it's one of the ad companies that subscribed to our advertiser". This is a cop-out. When you provide a service like they do, your advertisement is a bundle that comes with your service, and as such you are responsible for its content. I don't care if it's a 3rd party. You take on the responsibility for the content you deliver, regardless of how you get it. You can have legal arrangements with your content providers that provide YOU with a legal remedy, but the grief passes through you. You get sued, and then you sue the ones upsteam that caused you to get sued. You do not "pass the buck" and point a finger up the chain three levels and say not my problem good luck getting anything out of them, because the consumer has no legal recourse against those people. You as the content provider do have a legal recourse against your advertiser, and they have recourse against their affiliate who caused the problem in the first place. This pass the buck mentality is cheap and lazy, and they should be ashamed for trying to pull it.
It seems that most any time privacy issues are called into question, one group always retreats to the "how dare you interfere" concept. They consider the rules irrlelvent because "the good guys would never abuse their power". If it were up to them it would be a police state, where the police did not have to follow the same laws the rest of us do. But they forget, this is the exact reason we have those laws, to protect the people from abuse by the government. In a perfect world where the government was just and wise, those such laws would not be necessary. But the government is oftentimes neither just nor wise, and in that case I prefer to have the law on my side to protect me from the abuse.
Stripping the people of the protection from persicution to make the job of law enforcement simpler is proteting people's fredom and rights by taking them away.
Last I heard most of the moon was mainly made up of silica. It's not like earth where there are vast deposits of a wide variety of reasonably pure materials. There is oxygen trapped there, (silica oxide iirc?) but it's difficult to extract. We are certainly not getting food or water from the moon.
I once read a quote from a nasa engineer, saying something about a pile of dog droppings found on the moon would be the richest source of carbon for miles around. Us being carbon-based life, require carbon in pretty much all our food. There is very little hydrogen on the moon, and that nicely rules out the production of water.
For now I think the astronauts had better pack a lunch.
Waaah, the world didn't protect me, it's the world's fault! I shouldn't be forced to use common sense, the world must protect me! I deserve MONEY from everyone because the world failed to protect me from my ignorance and lack of good judgement!
Morons.
I'm not saying she deserved what she got, but it's sure a lot more challenging to pity someone that behaves like that. No pity from me.
What it all comes down to is, "if the customer is willing to pay more for it, we want to charge them more for it".
From a strictly business perspective, this makes good sense for maximizing proffit. You find the "price point" where (sales volume x price) is the maximum value. You cannot do this with a flat rate price. Of course this assumes you have correctly calculated your price point, and have factored in all the market effects at work.
The flat rate is (correctly) perceived by the consumer as a value over tiered pricing, and that's what the consumer will like more. Jobs realizes this will attract hoards to his new iTunes Video Store as it has with the ITMS, and he will make up the loss from flat rate in volume. I doubt the MPAA is factoring in the scope of how many people will go with the ITVS if it's flat rate, and what that will do to their price point model.
The MPAA is just despirately afraid of not managing to wring every last possible dime out of the consumer. They're just being money-grubbing scum. You can't expect any more than that from them.
If this group was in charge of the appolo missions we'd still be doing near earth orbital testing.
Space is dangerous, expensive, and offers very few good opportunities. If you want to get anywhere you have to take risks. I'm not saying that people should just throw their lives away for nothing, but every trip they make into space breaks new ground and teaches them new lessons. If you want the rewards you have to be prepared to walk away with a bloddy nose now and again, especially in a game like this.
It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe, it's just plain never going to happen. Right now I think we should be happy with 90%. From a purely practical perspective, if a dozen people lose their lives to accellerate the space program 10 years, I would call that a good trade. And I'd be happy to be one of those 12.
I repair macs where I work. I see on average 5 ibooks per week, and just as many powerbooks. I have yet to see one of the macbooks in for service. (though I have fixed a couple pros) It's not uncommon to find an ibook with discoloration below the two palms, I see it on probably 1 in 15 ibooks. This number may be low because people clean up their computer before bringing it in.
The previous case top of the ibook was a fairly (but not completely) smooth surface and was a slightly off shade of white. It was also a very hard plastic and I suspect very chemically inert. When I do have to clean them, they are not terribly difficult to get the grime off from, though it does require some force and use of alcohol. On the ibooks its also somewhat common to see a circular area in the central region of the trackpad, colored slightly lighter than the surrounding area of the trackpad. That's caused by the less used area of the trackpad getting more grimey. Those can be a little more difficult to clean due to the texture of the trackpad. It's also possible to chip the trackpad's sensor surface if you are rough with it.
I also find that I have to clean the palm areas of my powerbook from time to time, usually about once a month as grime starts to build up under my palms and around the trackpad.
These stories about yellowing of the macbooks is somewhat of a surprise, but not really. This is not caused by heat. It's a combination of grime from the user's hands, possibly combined with a chemestry problem between the user's body oils and the plastic of the top case.
I would personally consider this a defect, since it's fairly clear that inadequate research was done by Apple to determine if there was going to be such an issue with their new case design. Also as others have pointed out, Apple makes quite a name for itself as a good looking computer, and issues like this do a lot more harm to the Apple brand than they would to say, Dell. The Apple users tend to be more demanding as to the cosmetic appearance of their computer, and react much more strongly when an issue develops.
This is not the first time a case design has been a problem. Owners of "titanium" powerbook G4s will remember the "tibook paint" issue, where the outer border of the case, a carbon fiber, had problems with the paint easily chipping off and sometimes cracking and flaking off under the user's wrists. There were also issues with watches worn on the wrist causing almost immediate removal of the paint from the CF border. To my knowledge Apple fixed their manufacturing process (new paint or primer?) but did not recall those units despite a lot of upset owners' complaints. With the tibook, the top case was the frame of the computer, onto which everything was assembled. To replace the top case of the tibook was extremely labor intensive. With the ibook, the top case is somewhat easier to replace. Not sure on the macbook. This will factor into Apple's willingness to issue a recall.
I am a former owner of such a tibook, but for me I care much less about appearance and more about performance, so it didn't bother me that much. I took a hard plastic blade and finished the job so the computer at least looked more balanced rather than have two isolated wear spots. My current computer, an "aluminum" powerbook, has to be cleaned periodically to keep the grime off the palmrests.
If the discoloration can be cleaned off with alcohol, it's probably just a grime issue. That discoloration is not the color I am used to seeing though - usually grime is very dark in color, but this appears to be a cream or light yellow. I would tend to suspect a chemical change is occurring in the plastic based on a combination of oils from the user's hands, accellerated by the heat produced by the computer. (this could not be removed with alcohol) Apple may have to change the composition of the plastic of the case, or coat the top deck somehow, to reduce or prevent this problem.
I believe the design of the new macbooks should b
RIAA: "the artist is selling on iTunes and making only half the money he used to on each sale. You are starving the artist by buying from ITMS!"
Any Other Common Person: "Lets see, he's selling 4x the albums at 1/2 the price, so he takes home twice as much money every month. Oh ya that's right, the RIAA doesn't get as big of a cut of the sales either. Waaaah!"
Do you really care if your music CD has a "Vista Compatible" logo on it?
Thought not.
This is different for say, a network card. THAT you would care about.
So, the RIAA types can do as they very well please with their driver malware seeing as it has zero impact on them if they lose a rating they never really had in the first place.
I have a hilarious screenshot of a "windows alert" telling me that it suspects my registry is damaged and it's recommended that I download their registry cleaner and clean my registry. (Click to DOWNLOAD and RUN free Registry Cleaner)
It may have been less entertaining had I not been running Mac OS X.
First, he describes, "Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine."
Then he speculates, "This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behavior was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov"
If he had read Asimov it wouldn't take long to realize his rules goverend the deliberate behavior of the robots, and does not come into play in accidents or when the robots don't have the ability to sense what's going on around them. Just because your robot implements Azimov's rules doesn't mean it has eyes in the back of its head. This guy crept up behind a piece of active equipment that had no motion/proximity sensors or cameras on it. Try that with a fellow in a batting cage and see how much better you fare. It doesn't matter that the batter didn't mean to crack your skull, you were just being very stupid.
This didn't used to be the case. Large businesses used to be owned by families and had been in the family for many generations. The family chose who would be the next head of the company, even if it was some dimwit son that was going to do the company great harm. The rational was that the heir had a vested interest in the long term well-being of the company, and even if he was inept, he would be good intentioned. Companies flourished due to the dedicated nature of these owners. Given these were the people that keeled over of heart attacks at 50, but in the long run it did the company AND its employees a great deal of good.
Today, it's "ok who's your CEO this year?" They come, cut quality, lower prices, boost sales and cut workforce, give the company a little short-term polish, and then move on to CEO another larger company somewhere else. Meanwhile, a year later, the company they bolstered up on bad foundations collapses due to destruction of infrastructure.
As much as the people despised the Rockafellers and Fords of years gone by, they had the model right for company survival and growth. Keep it in the family, keep dedicated people at the top.
Malware publishers are motivated by the money they get from what they do. It's not about morals, it's not about good business, it's ONLY about money. Money is the most powerful motivator there is. If you wave enough cash in front of a group of people, no matter what they have to do, someone will take you up on your offer.
There will always be takers. So by default we can say that the malware business will remain rotten to the core until it is not only made illegal, but also prossicuted ruthlessly until which point it is neither proffitable nor worth the risks. Right now, there are mountains of money to be made, and little or no risk of prossicution, so it continues unchecked.
Don't expect this to change any time soon.
Are they being set up with like wire trips, weight sensors, or just plain a man in the ditch with his finger on the button? Given the suicide bombers' mentality, I could see the latter being the most reliable choice. In that case, sending an unmanned vehicle ahead of the rest would be very unlikely to discover or trigger the explosion early.
It would be nice to see a requirement placed on things like this such that the manufacturers (not the resellers) are required to accept returns of products that failed to operate as described on the packaging. In other words, no cop-outs like "may not work on SOME players". If it doesn't say it will not work on a Pioneer 5420, and so I buy it and try it in mine and it doesn't play, they have to accept it back, at the price I paid for it at Sam Goody.
As it is now, they want the consumer to take a gamble on their DRM. That "plays for sure" crap is just propganda. I'd take 'plays for sure' to mean Sony etc guarantee it to work on any player, and that they will provide a full refund if it does not "play for sure". Not the store that sold it, they have no part in this and can't force anyone to do anything, this has to land on the labels.
If they were forced to refund consumers at retail price then every one that was returned would cancel out the sale of what, four of them? Hit them in the wallet if you want to get their attention and force them to play fair ball.
about how whole classes of devices were eliminated, and how others won't even see the light of day as a result of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Ahh you just need to keep in mind that the whole goal of the DMCA is to enrichen the.. oh wait that's not it.
encourage innovation. Ya that's it. Help make new technologies flourish, like um.. this one they're crushing now.