I guess all those round CD things are getting returned because they don't work in cassette players.
All they have to do is provide some sort of incentive for switching to the new format, and before long there will be more people using the new over the old.
There's a big difference between too hot and torching your living room. For the product to be unsafe, one has to determine that it may actually get hot enough to burn something as opposed to cease operating.
Someone tested this and nobody cared that it failed.
Yeah, Microsoft wants all the bad press and costs associated with fixing these xboxes. First of all you don't know what percentage of them are failing. Maybe one of the vendors for one of the 1700 parts screwed up in manufacturing...maybe they replaced a part to try to save on costs...the fact of the matter is you have no idea what happened.
No you can take it back, get a refund, and wait until Microsoft starts releasing fixed xboxes. We're not talking about life saving medical equipment here. I love how people complain about Microsoft not meeting demand. Just pretend it hasn't been released yet and wait for them to meet demand and fix the thing before buying it.
You have no idea if the xbox is unsafe. Unless xboxes start exploding, I'd think they are pretty safe. I agree that products should work...when a product has 1700 independant parts, however, there's a good chance that all of them will not work right on launch.
How is Microsoft not taking responsibility? To my knowledge they have never said they wouldn't fix the broken xboxes. If they don't fix them, they will be sued (as they already are).
I never said replace, I said return. Get it fixed if you really want to keep it.
2) An overheating piece of electronics is a safety hazard. I would rather see lawsuits than news reports of families being burned to death because of the xbox360. I don't want it replaced with another faulty unit. The fault is in the power supply. A replacement currently wouldn't solve the problem because the replacement would have the same power supply as the one I want to return.
You have no idea if it's a hazard or not. I never said there was an issue with the lawsuits either. My post was in response to someone who likened the xbox crashes to bridges collapsing and wings falling off of airliners. That's a ridiculous comparison.
3) Because of the way the number of items was distributed, I had to travel 140 miles to get my xbox, of course I drive a H2 Hummer, which costed me an additional $49 in gasoline. I am not paying another $40 to get it replaced with a faulty item.
Waaah...I wonder if anyone died while driving an H2 Hummer on the last bridge that collapsed. Think anyone who owned a Hummer H2 died when a plane's wings fell off? Dude...it's an xbox. It sucks that it's broken. It sucks that you live in the boonies and that you drive a fuel inefficient vehicle. It sucks that we're still using gasoline and not Mr. Fusion. That doesn't mean broken xboxes are a human tragedy.
The XBoxes locking up has to do with their power supply overheating. Although I haven't heard of any incidents yet, this is indeed a hazard, and there SHOULD be a recall on the PSUs
You have no idea if this is a hazard or not. If the powersupply is the cause of the problem, they should be recalled regardless.
The fact that this is so widespread makes it obvious that they really rushed these out and didn't test them properly.
Yep...this is also why I'm not first in line electing to be a beta tester for the machine. Just about all of these systems have problems when released. The original xbox had a recall on the power adapter, the playstation overheats and warps, the PSP had a problem with faulty screens on launch.
Also, you can't just take it back to the store and get a new one, as there aren't any new ones to get.
I never said get a new one. I said return it to the store. That is, it's relatively easy to get a good degree of satisfaction, and then you wait until they get all the kinks worked out before you get another. If you want to keep it, Microsoft is fixing them...get it fixed. Either way, in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal. It's a broken toy.
Comparing the xbox to a bridge collapsing or an airliner losing its wings is ridiculous, and that's really my original point.
Yet all of these things have happened. Not too mention a person's xbox locking up has much less dire consequences then the things you have listed.
Come on...sure it sucks to get your xbox home and find out it's broken, but really all you have to do is take it back to the store (that is if you don't trust Microsoft to fix it, which they are doing).
Hmmm...I see rebates on small items all the time at stores that sell all sorts of things. These items are also often featured prominently in ads and there are often restrictions on how many rebates you can receive.
I never said all rebates were on loss leaders...just some.
And even if it is for loss leaders, that still doesn't explain why they need to make you mail anything, or pay more now and wait for a rebate.
Ok...didn't try to explain that one. I'm not defending the practice either.
It could be that this story is a dupe and this article was written in July before the Nano was released. Also, it must be my imagination that an Apple product is #3.
The store cares because discounted items are often loss leaders. You advertise cases of coke for $2.00 a piece with a limit of two. Many people come to the store because of the advertised low price, the store takes a hit on the cases of coke; but the store is betting people will also leave with a full load of groceries.
Therefore the store wants 10 people to come and buy two and definitely cares if one person comes and buys 20. Now, typically computers aren't used as loss leaders, but often media is. I guarantee you the store would care if you went in and bought all of the heavily discounted media and then bought nothing else. That is why rebates are often limited to one or two per household...this keeps you from doing that.
This has been modded interesting? You and the mods do realize that slashdot consists of a lot people right? Look at your userid, 179136. Mine is considerably higher. That's not to say that every account is a different person who posts regularly, but don't you think enough people post where it might just be possible for there to be more than one group? You know maybe one group which hates all ads and another which said they wouldn't mind targeted text ads?
Do you have proof that its the same people? Did you catalog userids on previous posts saying they wouldn't mind targeted text ads and compare them with userids of people who say they block them?
You aren't by chance an employee or a shareholder are you? You seem awfully concerned for Google's wellbeing...a little too concerned if you ask me.
1. I love MySQL! 2. Who cares? Postgres is and always has been better. 3. I used to use MySQL, but now I don't. 4. I used to not use MySQL, but now I do. 5. If you use MySQL you are stupid. 6. If you do not use MySQL you are stupid. 7. Only Nazis and CowboyNeal use MySQL. 8. Did anyone say goatse.cx?
But I don't beleive that it's a consperiacy against Linux. I beleive it's just complacency, laziness, apathy, and other crap like that.
So why does it cost more to get a computer without an operating system from Dell then with? It's not exactly a conspiracy against Linux, but I do think it is a conspiracy. In fact, during the DoJ trial (you know the one where Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist) it came out that Microsoft was forcing OEMs to sell only Windows by telling them that if they didn't, Microsoft would jack up their OEM rates for Windows.
The Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution is descended from a similar clause of Magna Carta in which the King of England agreed (in the year 1215 A.D.) that "No Freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful Judgment of his peers, or by the Law of the Land." Thus, the core historical meaning of the Due Process Clause is that the government cannot deprive anyone if the Law of the Land forbids it. In other words, neither the King nor an American President may take away your life, liberty, or property if the law denies him that power.
Key here is "law of the land." Do you actually expect the FBI to call people up and go, "Um yeah make sure you're around a 3:00pm tomorrow because we're going to raid your house."? If the FBI was lawfully granted a warrant for the raid and seizure, then due process was followed. Since this guy is spamming, presumably illegally, seizing his computers as evidence doesn't seem to far out of whack to me.
Privacy issues aside, different rates for different people make sense. This is because different cars based on their weight do different amounts of damage to the road. Thus heavier cars should be taxed more than lighter cars. Likewise hybrids could get a tax exemption (they damage the roads too, but we should be encouraging people to buy them). Also what about people that use gas but don't travel much on public roads?
Granted heavier cars use more gas, but I don't believe the difference used makes up for the additional damage done. In these cases people driving lighter cars pay a disproportionate amount of the tax.
Taxing gas is a hack because they don't currently have a good way of taxing people based on where/how they actually drive.
You could implement a similar tax now by using the car type and mileage readings, but it wouldn't exactly be fair. For example what if I live near another state and do half my driving in it?
This doesn't mean I support tracking everyone at great expense...I'm just saying that different rates for different people isn't a horrible thing.
Getting MythTV installed is not the hard part. The hard part is getting it to do what I want it do, and get it do it without crashing. That is correcting the over/underscan on my TV, getting the right resolution and frame rate, getting it not to skip, getting the audio to sync, getting brightness, contrast, and black crush correct, etc. etc. etc.
Peoples' mileage may vary, but in my experience getting everything right and having a perfect picture displayed with perfect audio was an overwelming challenge. My parent post is the result of me doing some research because I finally got so fed up with it. I was like, "I'm going to find a working reference system where each component that needed to be purchased was clearly outlined, and then use a Myth based distro to run it." I indeed found that, and noticed that these people...the people who went to the trouble of producing a specific distro and testing and coming up with a specific reference system can't even watch live TV. I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.
Actually, I run linux on the desktop and am a linux system administrator by trade. However, I believe it's linux Multimedia that's not ready for prime time. Other people may think differently, but in my opinion multimedia support is one of linux's worst points. Linux is great if you want to run open office, firefox, thunderbird, etc...and you get to do so in a relatively secure virus/spyware free environment. However, you want to start playing video...recording video, playing DVDs, etc and things get ugly real quick.
What I'm trying to say is don't let your experiences with MythTV tarnish your entire view of linux. I had serious troubles with it and I run linux on the desktop and run linux servers for living.
I hear a lot of people talking about this, but I've never seen an implementation that works as well as Tivo. Take MythTV for example. This is a group that has tried to make an easy to install linux distro based on knoppix and MythTV.
On this page they also detail a whole list of problems with their "reference" system. Some of these issues are minor...others like not being able to watch live tv are in my opinion major.
My point here is that despite what people say, the home brew PVR is not easy to do. I know I've tried. I've also had friends who have tried. Furthermore, many people who claim it's easy to do typically do so by making serious sacrifices. I've seen and experienced a wide array of issues. Some of these issues are related to playback...both audio and video. For example there can be crap on the screen, sometimes the playback stutters, sometimes the audio is out of sync, etc. In the case of my friends who said they got it working, I went over there to watch TV and they had all sorts of issues getting stuff to play (similar to things I experienced).
In the case of the system detailed above (with more people working on it for more time than I'd care to spend) they still lack the basic function of watching live tv.
Contrast with Tivo where you plug it in and it just works. Granted a homebrew HTPC has potential, but as of yet I've not seen that potential realized.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess all those round CD things are getting returned because they don't work in cassette players.
All they have to do is provide some sort of incentive for switching to the new format, and before long there will be more people using the new over the old.
There's a big difference between too hot and torching your living room. For the product to be unsafe, one has to determine that it may actually get hot enough to burn something as opposed to cease operating.
Someone tested this and nobody cared that it failed.
Yeah, Microsoft wants all the bad press and costs associated with fixing these xboxes. First of all you don't know what percentage of them are failing. Maybe one of the vendors for one of the 1700 parts screwed up in manufacturing...maybe they replaced a part to try to save on costs...the fact of the matter is you have no idea what happened.
No you can take it back, get a refund, and wait until Microsoft starts releasing fixed xboxes. We're not talking about life saving medical equipment here. I love how people complain about Microsoft not meeting demand. Just pretend it hasn't been released yet and wait for them to meet demand and fix the thing before buying it.
You have no idea if the xbox is unsafe. Unless xboxes start exploding, I'd think they are pretty safe. I agree that products should work...when a product has 1700 independant parts, however, there's a good chance that all of them will not work right on launch.
How is Microsoft not taking responsibility? To my knowledge they have never said they wouldn't fix the broken xboxes. If they don't fix them, they will be sued (as they already are).
1) Stores can't replace out of stock items.
I never said replace, I said return. Get it fixed if you really want to keep it.
2) An overheating piece of electronics is a safety hazard. I would rather see lawsuits than news reports of families being burned to death because of the xbox360. I don't want it replaced with another faulty unit. The fault is in the power supply. A replacement currently wouldn't solve the problem because the replacement would have the same power supply as the one I want to return.
You have no idea if it's a hazard or not. I never said there was an issue with the lawsuits either. My post was in response to someone who likened the xbox crashes to bridges collapsing and wings falling off of airliners. That's a ridiculous comparison.
3) Because of the way the number of items was distributed, I had to travel 140 miles to get my xbox, of course I drive a H2 Hummer, which costed me an additional $49 in gasoline. I am not paying another $40 to get it replaced with a faulty item.
Waaah...I wonder if anyone died while driving an H2 Hummer on the last bridge that collapsed. Think anyone who owned a Hummer H2 died when a plane's wings fell off? Dude...it's an xbox. It sucks that it's broken. It sucks that you live in the boonies and that you drive a fuel inefficient vehicle. It sucks that we're still using gasoline and not Mr. Fusion. That doesn't mean broken xboxes are a human tragedy.
The XBoxes locking up has to do with their power supply overheating. Although I haven't heard of any incidents yet, this is indeed a hazard, and there SHOULD be a recall on the PSUs
You have no idea if this is a hazard or not. If the powersupply is the cause of the problem, they should be recalled regardless.
The fact that this is so widespread makes it obvious that they really rushed these out and didn't test them properly.
Yep...this is also why I'm not first in line electing to be a beta tester for the machine. Just about all of these systems have problems when released. The original xbox had a recall on the power adapter, the playstation overheats and warps, the PSP had a problem with faulty screens on launch.
Also, you can't just take it back to the store and get a new one, as there aren't any new ones to get.
I never said get a new one. I said return it to the store. That is, it's relatively easy to get a good degree of satisfaction, and then you wait until they get all the kinks worked out before you get another. If you want to keep it, Microsoft is fixing them...get it fixed. Either way, in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal. It's a broken toy.
Comparing the xbox to a bridge collapsing or an airliner losing its wings is ridiculous, and that's really my original point.
Yet all of these things have happened. Not too mention a person's xbox locking up has much less dire consequences then the things you have listed.
Come on...sure it sucks to get your xbox home and find out it's broken, but really all you have to do is take it back to the store (that is if you don't trust Microsoft to fix it, which they are doing).
Try taking a bridge back to the store.
Hmmm...I see rebates on small items all the time at stores that sell all sorts of things. These items are also often featured prominently in ads and there are often restrictions on how many rebates you can receive.
I never said all rebates were on loss leaders...just some.
And even if it is for loss leaders, that still doesn't explain why they need to make you mail anything, or pay more now and wait for a rebate.
Ok...didn't try to explain that one. I'm not defending the practice either.
It could be that this story is a dupe and this article was written in July before the Nano was released. Also, it must be my imagination that an Apple product is #3.
Naaaa...must be PC bias.
The store cares because discounted items are often loss leaders. You advertise cases of coke for $2.00 a piece with a limit of two. Many people come to the store because of the advertised low price, the store takes a hit on the cases of coke; but the store is betting people will also leave with a full load of groceries.
Therefore the store wants 10 people to come and buy two and definitely cares if one person comes and buys 20. Now, typically computers aren't used as loss leaders, but often media is. I guarantee you the store would care if you went in and bought all of the heavily discounted media and then bought nothing else. That is why rebates are often limited to one or two per household...this keeps you from doing that.
There has got to be room in this metaphor somewhere for pirates.
Aaarrrr matey!
This has been modded interesting? You and the mods do realize that slashdot consists of a lot people right? Look at your userid, 179136. Mine is considerably higher. That's not to say that every account is a different person who posts regularly, but don't you think enough people post where it might just be possible for there to be more than one group? You know maybe one group which hates all ads and another which said they wouldn't mind targeted text ads?
Do you have proof that its the same people? Did you catalog userids on previous posts saying they wouldn't mind targeted text ads and compare them with userids of people who say they block them?
You aren't by chance an employee or a shareholder are you? You seem awfully concerned for Google's wellbeing...a little too concerned if you ask me.
I kept read that as poker chips, and couldn't figure out for the life of me what technology was in IBM servers that would be utilized in a poker chip.
1. I love MySQL!
2. Who cares? Postgres is and always has been better.
3. I used to use MySQL, but now I don't.
4. I used to not use MySQL, but now I do.
5. If you use MySQL you are stupid.
6. If you do not use MySQL you are stupid.
7. Only Nazis and CowboyNeal use MySQL.
8. Did anyone say goatse.cx?
You can do that with an "older" version of DOS or with FreeDOS. Why would someone need and pay for a new version of DOS?
What does conspiracy have to do with paranoia? A conspiracy is an agreement to perform an illegal act...which is exactly what Microsoft has done.
But I don't beleive that it's a consperiacy against Linux. I beleive it's just complacency, laziness, apathy, and other crap like that.
So why does it cost more to get a computer without an operating system from Dell then with? It's not exactly a conspiracy against Linux, but I do think it is a conspiracy. In fact, during the DoJ trial (you know the one where Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist) it came out that Microsoft was forcing OEMs to sell only Windows by telling them that if they didn't, Microsoft would jack up their OEM rates for Windows.
Key here is "law of the land." Do you actually expect the FBI to call people up and go, "Um yeah make sure you're around a 3:00pm tomorrow because we're going to raid your house."? If the FBI was lawfully granted a warrant for the raid and seizure, then due process was followed. Since this guy is spamming, presumably illegally, seizing his computers as evidence doesn't seem to far out of whack to me.
It should be if your livelihood is doing something that is illegal.
Privacy issues aside, different rates for different people make sense. This is because different cars based on their weight do different amounts of damage to the road. Thus heavier cars should be taxed more than lighter cars. Likewise hybrids could get a tax exemption (they damage the roads too, but we should be encouraging people to buy them). Also what about people that use gas but don't travel much on public roads?
Granted heavier cars use more gas, but I don't believe the difference used makes up for the additional damage done. In these cases people driving lighter cars pay a disproportionate amount of the tax.
Taxing gas is a hack because they don't currently have a good way of taxing people based on where/how they actually drive.
You could implement a similar tax now by using the car type and mileage readings, but it wouldn't exactly be fair. For example what if I live near another state and do half my driving in it?
This doesn't mean I support tracking everyone at great expense...I'm just saying that different rates for different people isn't a horrible thing.
Aggregating this data for traffic monitoring doesn't really introduce any privacy problems.
This approach was used to find OJ Simpson's White Bronco ten years ago, so it's nothing new.
Was this sarcasm? Seems to me that this could be a serious privacy problem.
Yeah considering there aren't laws around movie ratings, which is kinda the point really.
http://www.filmratings.com/questions.htm
Getting MythTV installed is not the hard part. The hard part is getting it to do what I want it do, and get it do it without crashing. That is correcting the over/underscan on my TV, getting the right resolution and frame rate, getting it not to skip, getting the audio to sync, getting brightness, contrast, and black crush correct, etc. etc. etc.
Peoples' mileage may vary, but in my experience getting everything right and having a perfect picture displayed with perfect audio was an overwelming challenge. My parent post is the result of me doing some research because I finally got so fed up with it. I was like, "I'm going to find a working reference system where each component that needed to be purchased was clearly outlined, and then use a Myth based distro to run it." I indeed found that, and noticed that these people...the people who went to the trouble of producing a specific distro and testing and coming up with a specific reference system can't even watch live TV. I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.
Actually, I run linux on the desktop and am a linux system administrator by trade. However, I believe it's linux Multimedia that's not ready for prime time. Other people may think differently, but in my opinion multimedia support is one of linux's worst points. Linux is great if you want to run open office, firefox, thunderbird, etc...and you get to do so in a relatively secure virus/spyware free environment. However, you want to start playing video...recording video, playing DVDs, etc and things get ugly real quick.
What I'm trying to say is don't let your experiences with MythTV tarnish your entire view of linux. I had serious troubles with it and I run linux on the desktop and run linux servers for living.
I hear a lot of people talking about this, but I've never seen an implementation that works as well as Tivo. Take MythTV for example. This is a group that has tried to make an easy to install linux distro based on knoppix and MythTV.
http://mysettopbox.tv/
They even are working on producing a reference system to make it super easy.
http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=44
On this page they also detail a whole list of problems with their "reference" system. Some of these issues are minor...others like not being able to watch live tv are in my opinion major.
My point here is that despite what people say, the home brew PVR is not easy to do. I know I've tried. I've also had friends who have tried. Furthermore, many people who claim it's easy to do typically do so by making serious sacrifices. I've seen and experienced a wide array of issues. Some of these issues are related to playback...both audio and video. For example there can be crap on the screen, sometimes the playback stutters, sometimes the audio is out of sync, etc. In the case of my friends who said they got it working, I went over there to watch TV and they had all sorts of issues getting stuff to play (similar to things I experienced).
In the case of the system detailed above (with more people working on it for more time than I'd care to spend) they still lack the basic function of watching live tv.
Contrast with Tivo where you plug it in and it just works. Granted a homebrew HTPC has potential, but as of yet I've not seen that potential realized.