You don't think they have to do the exact same with cable!?!?! Well you're wrong.
The problem with cable is akin to the same problem you see with satellite except worse since you can't add new cables to send the additional signals with. With cable you also have to deal with cable internet and as you add more bandwidth to it due to consumer demand, you will find the bandwidth for HD channels decreases. So you either get blazingly fast net access, or HD but you can't cram both into the bandwidth available on a single cable. Since satellite doesn't really have the same internet issues, all they really have to do is add another bird and the consumer just has to tack on an extra dish or LNB, but cable would require an entirely new infrastructure to be built for you to convert all of the analog channels to HD and provide a decent internet experience.
If it's a Glaser round, it has a 95% chance of killing anyone it strikes, even if you were to hit them in the hand or other extremities because the damage that it does to flesh is enough to cause one to bleed to death easily.
"make it so that when you try to fix a small problem (say upgrade or install some small application) that you don't end up with having to upgrade more and more of the system."
That is NEVER going to happen and it doesn't take too much thought to figure out why. If you want improved performance out of an application, you also have to be willing to improve the programs/subsystem that application depends upon.
I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same,
because I have seen difference all around,
and now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable,
I want to be a part of the different crowd,
and assert my individuality along with the others
who are different like me
--King Missile "It's Saturday"
Funny you should say that. SOME hallucinogens behave like smart drugs at lower doses. LSD and mushrooms come to mind. LSD becomes a smart drug at 10% of the "psychedelic dosage" and behaves like it's cousin, Hydergine. Mushrooms start acting as an aphrodisiac at about 25% of the psychoactive dosage. Doesn't help me since the psychoactive dose puts my wife straight into sleepy/tired-land for the most part.
"If you can do anything at all to the device without touching the hardware to make it run again it is not bricked. Even if it voids the warranty. Please please please don't confuse the meaning, bricking is game over, everything else is everything else"
I was under the impression that it was bricked if you couldn't bring it back without hacking the hardware. Like with the OpenWRT routers, they are said to be bricked if you install a bad firmware update but you can JTAG them and potentially bring them back. And that context has been around as long as I can remember.
"it could allow anyone to pretend to be a Best Buy employee"
So could having a real BB shirt printed up to look EXACTLY like the real thing but somehow a shirt that's meant to be a joke is more apt to allow crime? I'm sure that's why I see people all the time getting into concerts because they wear black tshirts with white lettering that says "Scrutiny" or "Staph(infection)". Seriously, it costs nothing to get a *realistic* tshirt printed so why one would think that it's more likely to happen with one that's a joke is beyond me.
I've got tons of stories. There's the know-nothing one from a couple years about the 80 year old woman who called me up wanting me to help her get online with her Win95 machine; when told it was too old for me to support she called the cable company and DEMANDED I support it, they talked to the head engineer and he confirmed that it was too old to support. She had called earlier and when I told her to shut down the computer, she turned the monitor off and said "all done". It took me a minute to figure out how she managed to shut down her computer so quickly since sleep mode didn't even work THAT fast.
My FAVORITE, a finger-pointer, is the woman who called us up bitching, whining and moaning that "THIS IS RIDICULOUS, I PAY FOR THIS AND I SHOULD GET BETTER SERVICE THAN ANYONE ELSE"..she couldn't get online and that *gasp* she had to wait to talk to someone. I found out that she was having signal issues but during the conversation she let it slip that she was using Kazaa. Since I had to listen to her bitch that she "was thinking about moving to the other cable provider", I turned the tables and told her that she could consider this her first warning about sharing illegal files online and that if we got a complaint from anyone she would then have her net access permanently revoked. You could hear her tonally shift from bluffing about leaving us to "oh, I'm sooo sorry..I'll never let it happen again", fearing that she might REALLY lose her access and since the other company was TimeWarner, she didn't want to play their by their rules.
I forgot to mention, that the answer is obviously neither "yes" or "no", and that, as we could easily guess, people in general are stupid and thought that there was no solution to the riddle because *they* couldn't think of the answer.
"If Yahoo! wants to gain credibility for their QA section, they need to introduce paid overseers that cross-check answers"
That's absolutely the truth. A while back I happened to be searching for the answer to a riddle that was circulating about what turns a polar bear's fur white, makes men cry, and several other things...all of it written almost like a poem. The problem was the the answer was written as a poem and despite the fact that it was obvious that someone not only thought about the answer but wrote it down as a poem in response to the same rhythm of the riddle, everyone instead focused on a technicality in the riddle "Can you guess the riddle?" instead of "can you guess the answer?" and so the answer accepted by yahoo and all the idiots there was "No"..despite the fact that it could also be answered "Yes"(because it *also* doesn't ask if you can correctly guess if you play on their technicality).
THIS is why I use Google as my search engine and not Yahoo.
I should add: I don't bother telling them any more. I got tired of complaining years ago. If I don't like something I vote with my dollars, not words. If they don't notice the lost income then that's their deal, not mine. If they gave me some form of payment, discount or the like to give them feedback then I might have considered it, otherwise they're going to be left in the dark.
I'm not talking about one episode. I'm talking about almost every single visit I've had since the store opened. The first few months were alright but after that it was like pulling teeth. So screw them.
We'll be stuck with Best Buy which means I won't be buying anything locally any more because I boycott that place even if they have a killer sale on something I must have. The last time I remember being there I went in to buy an HP financial calculator and the only salesperson in the whole place that I could find ignored me over some couple that wound up not buying the computer they were asking about. I wound up not buying the calculator from them since I was ignored and went elsewhere. Haven't been back since I think.
A TI-994/A was my first computer as well but it wasn't the first that I programmed by any means. The best thing about the TI was that it had incredible sound and graphics. It only took a single command to turn an alphanumeric(or otherwise) character into your own custom graphic. I remember coding my own version of Tron's light cycles with that; since it was that easy I laid out how the cycles would have to move and created separate graphics/characters so that instead of moving bits around the screen for smooth scrolling, I could simply have my program print "abc" for the cycle in one phase and "def" for the next, then "ghi", etc..
BTW, they did have PEEK and POKE for the TI but it was in "advanced BASIC" which required owning a floppy drive that only cost about $200, IIRC. I never did own one of those and soon gave it up when someone sold me an Atari 4/800(forget which) for cheap; which gave me the ability to do assembly coding which is a skill I still use today, even if the opcodes are much different.
"Yeah, and how many people do you know who have hacked cable boxes? I don't know any, and I have some pretty geeky friends"
I worked in cable for a while a couple years ago and there are without a doubt people with the knowledge and equipment to stay one step ahead of the game. I never busted any of them that I met because they were hackers, not businesses looking to make money. To this day I have yet to see a particular hack by those guys that truly(and I mean TRULY) wiped PPV from cable boxes among other things. And by that I mean that they had the hack but they don't seem to have released it into the wild.
"Sure, for on-site work I was billing myself out at $60/hr and they were billing out at $20/hr. Sounds great, right? Sure it does; until you realize it takes them 5 hours to perform the tasks I can perform in 1 and mine won't be a cobbled together nightmare."
That's exactly what I use to keep my clients, and you may want to do this as well. I have a blurb that appears once a month on a local mailing list that basically says that I charge more than the kid down the street, or their family member, etc. but I also don't take 4 hours to do a 1 hour job and my work is guaranteed(plus 25+ years experience helps as well). This inevitably lands me the people who are tired of taking their computers into the shitty shop in their neighborhood, or dealing with Cousin Joe and when I wow them with my expertise, they never go elsewhere. I have to say that I do one thing that few people in our field would want to do though...I offer everyone, not just my regular clients, free over-the-phone/email diagnosis AND if it's easy and they are skilled enough to do it, I tell them how to fix it free as well. This means that they don't get charged if all they need to do is enter safe mode and do a system restore. Sure, I get a few calls that don't make me money but I get clients that trust me enough that they'd pay $600 for a laptop that cost $750 3 years ago because they know my support is worth it.(and yes, I have a client that did buy a laptop like that)
$150/hr here for my time. Seems a bit harsh though to charge $350/hr...not that I don't want it but as they say, "It's not what you can charge for your work that counts, it's what you can GET".
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You don't think they have to do the exact same with cable!?!?! Well you're wrong.
The problem with cable is akin to the same problem you see with satellite except worse since you can't add new cables to send the additional signals with. With cable you also have to deal with cable internet and as you add more bandwidth to it due to consumer demand, you will find the bandwidth for HD channels decreases. So you either get blazingly fast net access, or HD but you can't cram both into the bandwidth available on a single cable. Since satellite doesn't really have the same internet issues, all they really have to do is add another bird and the consumer just has to tack on an extra dish or LNB, but cable would require an entirely new infrastructure to be built for you to convert all of the analog channels to HD and provide a decent internet experience.
If it's a Glaser round, it has a 95% chance of killing anyone it strikes, even if you were to hit them in the hand or other extremities because the damage that it does to flesh is enough to cause one to bleed to death easily.
"make it so that when you try to fix a small problem (say upgrade or install some small application) that you don't end up with having to upgrade more and more of the system."
That is NEVER going to happen and it doesn't take too much thought to figure out why. If you want improved performance out of an application, you also have to be willing to improve the programs/subsystem that application depends upon.
I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same,
because I have seen difference all around,
and now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable,
I want to be a part of the different crowd,
and assert my individuality along with the others
who are different like me
--King Missile "It's Saturday"
I just noticed that. This is a sign that modding negatively needs to be painful since the ignorance clearly is not.
Mod parent Insightful
its=it's
"Well yeah, hallucinogens aren't really what they're suggesting here, I'd hope."
Funny you should say that. SOME hallucinogens behave like smart drugs at lower doses. LSD and mushrooms come to mind. LSD becomes a smart drug at 10% of the "psychedelic dosage" and behaves like it's cousin, Hydergine. Mushrooms start acting as an aphrodisiac at about 25% of the psychoactive dosage. Doesn't help me since the psychoactive dose puts my wife straight into sleepy/tired-land for the most part.
"but... learn to read."
Practice what you preach, buddy. The parent was agreeing with the GP.
"If you can do anything at all to the device without touching the hardware to make it run again it is not bricked. Even if it voids the warranty. Please please please don't confuse the meaning, bricking is game over, everything else is everything else"
I was under the impression that it was bricked if you couldn't bring it back without hacking the hardware. Like with the OpenWRT routers, they are said to be bricked if you install a bad firmware update but you can JTAG them and potentially bring them back. And that context has been around as long as I can remember.
Mod parent +1 Scarily Insightful(and Funny).
There is no "potential to lose copyright by not defending it" at least in the U.S. You are thinking of "trademark".
"it could allow anyone to pretend to be a Best Buy employee"
So could having a real BB shirt printed up to look EXACTLY like the real thing but somehow a shirt that's meant to be a joke is more apt to allow crime? I'm sure that's why I see people all the time getting into concerts because they wear black tshirts with white lettering that says "Scrutiny" or "Staph(infection)". Seriously, it costs nothing to get a *realistic* tshirt printed so why one would think that it's more likely to happen with one that's a joke is beyond me.
Ever heard of mod parent -1 Redundant?
I've got tons of stories. There's the know-nothing one from a couple years about the 80 year old woman who called me up wanting me to help her get online with her Win95 machine; when told it was too old for me to support she called the cable company and DEMANDED I support it, they talked to the head engineer and he confirmed that it was too old to support. She had called earlier and when I told her to shut down the computer, she turned the monitor off and said "all done". It took me a minute to figure out how she managed to shut down her computer so quickly since sleep mode didn't even work THAT fast.
My FAVORITE, a finger-pointer, is the woman who called us up bitching, whining and moaning that "THIS IS RIDICULOUS, I PAY FOR THIS AND I SHOULD GET BETTER SERVICE THAN ANYONE ELSE"..she couldn't get online and that *gasp* she had to wait to talk to someone. I found out that she was having signal issues but during the conversation she let it slip that she was using Kazaa. Since I had to listen to her bitch that she "was thinking about moving to the other cable provider", I turned the tables and told her that she could consider this her first warning about sharing illegal files online and that if we got a complaint from anyone she would then have her net access permanently revoked. You could hear her tonally shift from bluffing about leaving us to "oh, I'm sooo sorry..I'll never let it happen again", fearing that she might REALLY lose her access and since the other company was TimeWarner, she didn't want to play their by their rules.
I forgot to mention, that the answer is obviously neither "yes" or "no", and that, as we could easily guess, people in general are stupid and thought that there was no solution to the riddle because *they* couldn't think of the answer.
"If Yahoo! wants to gain credibility for their QA section, they need to introduce paid overseers that cross-check answers"
That's absolutely the truth. A while back I happened to be searching for the answer to a riddle that was circulating about what turns a polar bear's fur white, makes men cry, and several other things...all of it written almost like a poem. The problem was the the answer was written as a poem and despite the fact that it was obvious that someone not only thought about the answer but wrote it down as a poem in response to the same rhythm of the riddle, everyone instead focused on a technicality in the riddle "Can you guess the riddle?" instead of "can you guess the answer?" and so the answer accepted by yahoo and all the idiots there was "No"..despite the fact that it could also be answered "Yes"(because it *also* doesn't ask if you can correctly guess if you play on their technicality).
THIS is why I use Google as my search engine and not Yahoo.
I should add: I don't bother telling them any more. I got tired of complaining years ago. If I don't like something I vote with my dollars, not words. If they don't notice the lost income then that's their deal, not mine. If they gave me some form of payment, discount or the like to give them feedback then I might have considered it, otherwise they're going to be left in the dark.
That's a damn good analogy.
I'm not talking about one episode. I'm talking about almost every single visit I've had since the store opened. The first few months were alright but after that it was like pulling teeth. So screw them.
We'll be stuck with Best Buy which means I won't be buying anything locally any more because I boycott that place even if they have a killer sale on something I must have. The last time I remember being there I went in to buy an HP financial calculator and the only salesperson in the whole place that I could find ignored me over some couple that wound up not buying the computer they were asking about. I wound up not buying the calculator from them since I was ignored and went elsewhere. Haven't been back since I think.
A TI-994/A was my first computer as well but it wasn't the first that I programmed by any means. The best thing about the TI was that it had incredible sound and graphics. It only took a single command to turn an alphanumeric(or otherwise) character into your own custom graphic. I remember coding my own version of Tron's light cycles with that; since it was that easy I laid out how the cycles would have to move and created separate graphics/characters so that instead of moving bits around the screen for smooth scrolling, I could simply have my program print "abc" for the cycle in one phase and "def" for the next, then "ghi", etc..
BTW, they did have PEEK and POKE for the TI but it was in "advanced BASIC" which required owning a floppy drive that only cost about $200, IIRC. I never did own one of those and soon gave it up when someone sold me an Atari 4/800(forget which) for cheap; which gave me the ability to do assembly coding which is a skill I still use today, even if the opcodes are much different.
"Yeah, and how many people do you know who have hacked cable boxes? I don't know any, and I have some pretty geeky friends"
I worked in cable for a while a couple years ago and there are without a doubt people with the knowledge and equipment to stay one step ahead of the game. I never busted any of them that I met because they were hackers, not businesses looking to make money. To this day I have yet to see a particular hack by those guys that truly(and I mean TRULY) wiped PPV from cable boxes among other things. And by that I mean that they had the hack but they don't seem to have released it into the wild.
"Sure, for on-site work I was billing myself out at $60/hr and they were billing out at $20/hr. Sounds great, right? Sure it does; until you realize it takes them 5 hours to perform the tasks I can perform in 1 and mine won't be a cobbled together nightmare."
That's exactly what I use to keep my clients, and you may want to do this as well. I have a blurb that appears once a month on a local mailing list that basically says that I charge more than the kid down the street, or their family member, etc. but I also don't take 4 hours to do a 1 hour job and my work is guaranteed(plus 25+ years experience helps as well). This inevitably lands me the people who are tired of taking their computers into the shitty shop in their neighborhood, or dealing with Cousin Joe and when I wow them with my expertise, they never go elsewhere. I have to say that I do one thing that few people in our field would want to do though...I offer everyone, not just my regular clients, free over-the-phone/email diagnosis AND if it's easy and they are skilled enough to do it, I tell them how to fix it free as well. This means that they don't get charged if all they need to do is enter safe mode and do a system restore. Sure, I get a few calls that don't make me money but I get clients that trust me enough that they'd pay $600 for a laptop that cost $750 3 years ago because they know my support is worth it.(and yes, I have a client that did buy a laptop like that)
$150/hr here for my time. Seems a bit harsh though to charge $350/hr...not that I don't want it but as they say, "It's not what you can charge for your work that counts, it's what you can GET".