It would never have helped him - he was using an engineering sample CPU, for heaven's sake!
Having said that, I'm a Linux admin and it causes me no end of frustration when I need to troubleshoot something on Windows and I am painfully reminded that:
- The event log is a PITA to browse through, because you have to double-click on specific events to see the detail. Search doesn't work very well when you're not entirely sure what you should be searching for. - Application software frequently doesn't write to the event log. If you're lucky it keeps its own separate log, if you're unlucky it was written by someone who thinks a log is what you get when you chop down a tree. (How the Hell any bugger ever troubleshoots during the development process I have no idea. Unless the dev build does create logs but some arse-head middle manager decided to turn them off in the production version).
It's not entirely clear, but I hope that the owner tells them to suck on it, and insists on a full refund or repair.
You could easily wind up shooting yourself in the foot. A partial refund (to account for the fact you've had some years use out of a product) is an established way of dealing with something that was sold some time ago.
It'd be a tad different if the OP had bought the unit recently. But that's unlikely as the only PS/3s that have been available new have been the slim ones (which have never supported "Other OS") for some time now.
Unfortunately in the UK (and I think most of Europe), sales of goods law covers the contract between retailer and consumer. Not manufacturer.
Amazon can't (easily) update the firmware of his PS3 to put that feature back again, so their options are pretty limited. The consumer can't get an injunction against Sony to reinstate the feature (because they never had a contract with Sony) and they can't get an injunction against Amazon to reinstate the feature (because it's not physically possible for Amazon to do so).
Myself, I think this demonstrates a huge flaw in current legislation - business to business sales (which Amazon buying a bunch of PS3s from Sony would come under) have nothing like the same level of protection as business to consumer sales. So if a retailer sells a bunch of products which then have functionality removed remotely by the manufacturer - entirely outside of the retailers control - the retailer winds up being held responsible.
- How come the customer was not required to go to court *first* before getting his refund?
Quite often the threat of going to court is enough to make someone pay up.
- What if the retailer had simply said, "No." - What would have happened next?
The customer would have had to take them to court. Though most European countries have a small claims system expressly designed to be reasonably straightforward for dealing with these things.
That might have been the case in the past, but today it's the baby boomers who are into their '60s and starting to think "I've spent 5 years watching my mum slowly lose her mind to Alzheimers|die horribly of some age-related disease|sit for hours in a piss-soaked cushion in a nursing home somewhere. 10 or 15 years from now that could be me."
We're living longer than we ever have, and in so doing we're finding that the things you tend to suffer from when you get old can be a lot nastier, much harder to treat and take a lot longer to kill you. 50 years ago, far fewer people lived long enough to see that.
It sounds borderline nutjob and it's almost entirely irrelevant anyway. The Labour party has remained in power for the last 13 years precisely because those that are still there are fiercely loyal to the party line, up to and including ignoring the electorate where necessary.
My own MP has never once voted against the party line, and she's not the only one by any means.
There is absolutely no point in writing to these people when that's their attitude. You might just as well ask a computer program to think outside the box. Better to just vote the buggers out.
I wonder whether the intentional removal of a major feature which was present at time of purchase, and which for many was the primary reason for said purchase, is in any way actionable.
That's an extremely good question.
IANAL, but AFAIK current consumer law in most countries was drafted when the idea that a manufacturer could change how the item you've bought works, months or even years after you bought it and force you to accept this change if you want to continue using the item was little more than fanciful dystopic science-fiction.
Complicating the issue further is that (certainly in the UK, YMMV) legally speaking, it's the retailer's problem to ensure you get what you paid for, not the manufacturers. So if I went into my local game shop and bought a PS/3 with the express intention of playing games online and running linux on one unit, it's the retailers problem if I can no longer do so through no fault of my own (obviously accounting for any statute of limitations).
TFA didn't dwell on the "removes other OS" feature - that was already well known.
TFA explained that the update tended to stop the affected units from doing anything useful - eg. playing games, connecting to the Internet. Which I'm sure does have the side effect that installing an alternate OS will no longer work, but I don't think this is quite how most people interpreted Sony's original description.
We also have a small claims court, whereby relatively simple claims of low monetary value (below £5,000 IIRC) can be heard by a judge in an environment that's designed to be not-too-intimidating to the layman. This system caps the legal costs that can be claimed at a very low figure in order to eliminate the issue you describe.
50x slower than the real thing as sold by IBM today? Or 50x slower than the real thing as sold by IBM 30 years ago?
If the latter, then I don't see a problem. If the former, then I see a huge problem for IBM regarding existing customers who are quite happy with the performance of their 30 year old mainframe but can no longer justify paying the annual maintenance fees.
(That being said, the developers of Hercules themselves admit that IBMs license for OS/390 is legally tied to IBM hardware, so it's hard to see why a business would want to migrate their systems to Hercules-on-x86 only to incur the wrath of a thousand lawyers).
I don't know if my experience is typical, but the last time I worked with a compliance manager was a thoroughly painful experience.
The whole point of having a bunch of processes which organisations are supposed to comply with is that those processes prevent certain Bad Things from happening. In order for those processes to be effective, they either need to cover every conceivable scenario (no such process has ever been written), or they need to be followed with an understanding of what they're trying to achieve and to the spirit of the process rather than just the letter.
This particular compliance manager (and I have no idea if it's typical of people in that role, but I suspect it is) didn't really seem to grasp that - or if she did, she didn't care. As long as the process was followed to the letter, she was happy. Any suggestion for doing anything which may have been what the process was trying to achieve but wasn't officially sanctified as part of it would be shot down (more effort, the company wasn't obliged to do it). Frankly, she could have been replaced with an automated system fairly easily were it not for the fact that her job had to exist for legal reasons.
There is nothing in the owners manual that would tell me that you have to hold in the start/stop button in to stop it, I looked. That is beyond bullshit. I want a car that turns off when I tell it to, I will deal with the lack of power steering (you don't need it at 120mph)
Don't you believe it. A power-steering pump puts a huge extra load on the steering wheel that simply isn't there if your vehicle doesn't have power steering. If it's fitted, you want it working.
Though you probably shouldn't be steering that heavily at 120mph anyway...
In any reasonably mature market (which cars definitely are), it's damn difficult to build a superior product. Particularly when there are so many variables which can be tweaked and changing them impacts other aspects.
Make the car look better? How will that impact aerodynamics? Which will impact fuel economy...
Better build quality so bits don't fall off? OK, but that'll cost more money which will have to be either recouped in the sale price or swallowed by the manufacturer, resulting in lower per-vehicle profits (and it may take years for the general public to notice your improvements).
Better after-sales service? Possible, but difficult when the after-sales is dealt with by franchised dealerships you have limited control over. And most people shouldn't be having to rely on it anyway.
Easier to service? You'll win friends among drivers (who will surely appreciate lower servicing bills), and your warranty repairs will become cheaper because there will be less labour involved. But you'll also risk alienating your franchised dealers who make a lot of money from plugging in the Mysterious Box to the OBD port and getting more detailed diagnostics than a generic one will give. Furthermore, would any extra cost involved in development and manufacture outweigh this? For that matter, is it even possible to design a car that's a doddle to service while remaining in line with all the various bits of legislation in the markets you want to sell it?
And when the terrorists find a disaffected white nutcase who wants to go down in history as the world's biggest terrorist, he'll walk right by the line of PhD students who are being strip searched for having the wrong skin color.
The way you say this, anyone would think that the terrorist threats faced today are being organised by a very clever, very resourceful organisation that can do more or less whatever it wants.
There is no fucking chance whatsoever this applies to Al Qaida. Frankly, if it was, we'd have seen far more attacks and they'd have been far more successful. As it stands, the US and the UK have had precisely one major co-ordinated, successful attack each. Here in the UK we've also had a handful of utterly pointless attacks (come on - what idiot decided that driving a car full of gas cylinders into an airport in Glasgow, of all places, would result in anything more than a heavy kick in the head and/or testicles?).
If you want an example of what happens when you have a clever, resourceful terrorist organisation attacking you, look at the IRA in the 1970's/80's.
Assuming he really did take the computer apart and remove the hard disk (rather than the entire PC), it's entirely plausible the owner would think their computer was broken and might take a while to get around to having someone look at it. Longer than it would take for the police to come knocking, at least.
I thought that, actually. From what we see of the current state of malware being reported on here, I would think the whole "write a trojan" is utterly unnecessary - it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone were to reply to this confirming it's possible to get very cheap a remote-control trojan application which gets past most virus scanners for use against a single targeted individual.
AIUI, kiddie fiddlers and those associated with them aren't exactly popular in your average UK prison.
I wouldn't think job prospects are that good for people who get out, either:
"I see your CV ends abruptly two years ago. Can you explain what you've been doing in that time?" "I've been in prison for trying to frame a man up for child porn." "Cheerio."
I see people on here who try to claim that the UK isn't rapidly running to being a dictatorship, but bullshit laws like this are exactly what I'm talking about. Every time the US walks a yard towards totalitarianism, the UK sprints 100 yards closer to it.
50 years ago the different countries were racing to see who could be the best - now they're racing to see who can be the worst.
The problem is, our democracy is essentially an elected short-term dictatorship whereby those who are elected are spending much of their time trying to make their term as long as possible, by whatever means necessary.
Right now the government is trying to make as many government interactions as possible done over the Internet. You have to pay extra and meet tighter deadlines if you want to file a paper tax return, if you lose your job and need to claim benefits you are now being encouraged to do so online, and many jobcentres have been closed with a sign left on the door saying "Go to the website". Yet at the same time they want a "3 strikes and you're off the Internet. Without the benefit of being able to go in front of a judge."
AFAICT, we are rapidly reaching the point where having your Internet cut-off could easily render you a non-person within a couple of weeks - particularly if you work from home.
I'm pretty sure they do if they plan to break in and arrest you at 4 in the morning, but if they just knock and say they'd like to "ask a few questions", no.
That being said, how difficult do you imagine it would be to get a warrant when you've got a hard disk full of kiddie porn?
why would they search Karttunen's house after arresting the guy he was trying to frame?
The guy being framed probably filed a police report on the theft.
If the guy being framed is anything like most computer users, he'll just think there's "something wrong" with the computer and it'll take him a few days - minimum - to get around to having someone look at it.
As long as Karttunen had the hard drive in the hands of the police within 24-48 hours of removing it, it's a fairly safe bet the police would get there first.
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
Let's look at this in context.
In order to write this comment, I looked at the Telegraph's list of implicated MPs. I gave up counting after I hit 120 MPs and I wasn't even halfway down the page (and yes, I did exclude names where it said "... did not claim"). Frankly, I think it would have been easier to get a list of MPs who weren't implicated and deduct that from the total number of MPs.
Many have repaid money voluntarily. Of those that haven't, how many have been asked to repay money? A dozen? Two dozen? A fraction of the number involved, of that I'm sure.
How many are being investigated by the police? 5, last time I checked.
Now, if you or I were to be caught red-handed in a high-profile tax swindle publicised in a national newspaper, do you honestly believe there's less than a 5% chance we'd be prosecuted if we "agreed to repay the money"?
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Slashdot Mirror
You really need to get laid.
It would never have helped him - he was using an engineering sample CPU, for heaven's sake!
Having said that, I'm a Linux admin and it causes me no end of frustration when I need to troubleshoot something on Windows and I am painfully reminded that:
- The event log is a PITA to browse through, because you have to double-click on specific events to see the detail. Search doesn't work very well when you're not entirely sure what you should be searching for.
- Application software frequently doesn't write to the event log. If you're lucky it keeps its own separate log, if you're unlucky it was written by someone who thinks a log is what you get when you chop down a tree. (How the Hell any bugger ever troubleshoots during the development process I have no idea. Unless the dev build does create logs but some arse-head middle manager decided to turn them off in the production version).
It's not entirely clear, but I hope that the owner tells them to suck on it, and insists on a full refund or repair.
You could easily wind up shooting yourself in the foot. A partial refund (to account for the fact you've had some years use out of a product) is an established way of dealing with something that was sold some time ago.
It'd be a tad different if the OP had bought the unit recently. But that's unlikely as the only PS/3s that have been available new have been the slim ones (which have never supported "Other OS") for some time now.
Unfortunately in the UK (and I think most of Europe), sales of goods law covers the contract between retailer and consumer. Not manufacturer.
Amazon can't (easily) update the firmware of his PS3 to put that feature back again, so their options are pretty limited. The consumer can't get an injunction against Sony to reinstate the feature (because they never had a contract with Sony) and they can't get an injunction against Amazon to reinstate the feature (because it's not physically possible for Amazon to do so).
Myself, I think this demonstrates a huge flaw in current legislation - business to business sales (which Amazon buying a bunch of PS3s from Sony would come under) have nothing like the same level of protection as business to consumer sales. So if a retailer sells a bunch of products which then have functionality removed remotely by the manufacturer - entirely outside of the retailers control - the retailer winds up being held responsible.
Note: IANAL.
Questions about the EU:
- How come the customer was not required to go to court *first* before getting his refund?
Quite often the threat of going to court is enough to make someone pay up.
- What if the retailer had simply said, "No."
- What would have happened next?
The customer would have had to take them to court. Though most European countries have a small claims system expressly designed to be reasonably straightforward for dealing with these things.
That might have been the case in the past, but today it's the baby boomers who are into their '60s and starting to think "I've spent 5 years watching my mum slowly lose her mind to Alzheimers|die horribly of some age-related disease|sit for hours in a piss-soaked cushion in a nursing home somewhere. 10 or 15 years from now that could be me."
We're living longer than we ever have, and in so doing we're finding that the things you tend to suffer from when you get old can be a lot nastier, much harder to treat and take a lot longer to kill you. 50 years ago, far fewer people lived long enough to see that.
It sounds borderline nutjob and it's almost entirely irrelevant anyway. The Labour party has remained in power for the last 13 years precisely because those that are still there are fiercely loyal to the party line, up to and including ignoring the electorate where necessary.
My own MP has never once voted against the party line, and she's not the only one by any means.
There is absolutely no point in writing to these people when that's their attitude. You might just as well ask a computer program to think outside the box. Better to just vote the buggers out.
I wonder whether the intentional removal of a major feature which was present at time of purchase, and which for many was the primary reason for said purchase, is in any way actionable.
That's an extremely good question.
IANAL, but AFAIK current consumer law in most countries was drafted when the idea that a manufacturer could change how the item you've bought works, months or even years after you bought it and force you to accept this change if you want to continue using the item was little more than fanciful dystopic science-fiction.
Complicating the issue further is that (certainly in the UK, YMMV) legally speaking, it's the retailer's problem to ensure you get what you paid for, not the manufacturers. So if I went into my local game shop and bought a PS/3 with the express intention of playing games online and running linux on one unit, it's the retailers problem if I can no longer do so through no fault of my own (obviously accounting for any statute of limitations).
TFA didn't dwell on the "removes other OS" feature - that was already well known.
TFA explained that the update tended to stop the affected units from doing anything useful - eg. playing games, connecting to the Internet. Which I'm sure does have the side effect that installing an alternate OS will no longer work, but I don't think this is quite how most people interpreted Sony's original description.
We also have a small claims court, whereby relatively simple claims of low monetary value (below £5,000 IIRC) can be heard by a judge in an environment that's designed to be not-too-intimidating to the layman. This system caps the legal costs that can be claimed at a very low figure in order to eliminate the issue you describe.
50x slower than the real thing as sold by IBM today? Or 50x slower than the real thing as sold by IBM 30 years ago?
If the latter, then I don't see a problem. If the former, then I see a huge problem for IBM regarding existing customers who are quite happy with the performance of their 30 year old mainframe but can no longer justify paying the annual maintenance fees.
(That being said, the developers of Hercules themselves admit that IBMs license for OS/390 is legally tied to IBM hardware, so it's hard to see why a business would want to migrate their systems to Hercules-on-x86 only to incur the wrath of a thousand lawyers).
I don't know if my experience is typical, but the last time I worked with a compliance manager was a thoroughly painful experience.
The whole point of having a bunch of processes which organisations are supposed to comply with is that those processes prevent certain Bad Things from happening. In order for those processes to be effective, they either need to cover every conceivable scenario (no such process has ever been written), or they need to be followed with an understanding of what they're trying to achieve and to the spirit of the process rather than just the letter.
This particular compliance manager (and I have no idea if it's typical of people in that role, but I suspect it is) didn't really seem to grasp that - or if she did, she didn't care. As long as the process was followed to the letter, she was happy. Any suggestion for doing anything which may have been what the process was trying to achieve but wasn't officially sanctified as part of it would be shot down (more effort, the company wasn't obliged to do it). Frankly, she could have been replaced with an automated system fairly easily were it not for the fact that her job had to exist for legal reasons.
There is nothing in the owners manual that would tell me that you have to hold in the start/stop button in to stop it, I looked. That is beyond bullshit. I want a car that turns off when I tell it to, I will deal with the lack of power steering (you don't need it at 120mph)
Don't you believe it. A power-steering pump puts a huge extra load on the steering wheel that simply isn't there if your vehicle doesn't have power steering. If it's fitted, you want it working.
Though you probably shouldn't be steering that heavily at 120mph anyway...
Rubbish.
In any reasonably mature market (which cars definitely are), it's damn difficult to build a superior product. Particularly when there are so many variables which can be tweaked and changing them impacts other aspects.
Make the car look better? How will that impact aerodynamics? Which will impact fuel economy...
Better build quality so bits don't fall off? OK, but that'll cost more money which will have to be either recouped in the sale price or swallowed by the manufacturer, resulting in lower per-vehicle profits (and it may take years for the general public to notice your improvements).
Better after-sales service? Possible, but difficult when the after-sales is dealt with by franchised dealerships you have limited control over. And most people shouldn't be having to rely on it anyway.
Easier to service? You'll win friends among drivers (who will surely appreciate lower servicing bills), and your warranty repairs will become cheaper because there will be less labour involved. But you'll also risk alienating your franchised dealers who make a lot of money from plugging in the Mysterious Box to the OBD port and getting more detailed diagnostics than a generic one will give. Furthermore, would any extra cost involved in development and manufacture outweigh this? For that matter, is it even possible to design a car that's a doddle to service while remaining in line with all the various bits of legislation in the markets you want to sell it?
And when the terrorists find a disaffected white nutcase who wants to go down in history as the world's biggest terrorist, he'll walk right by the line of PhD students who are being strip searched for having the wrong skin color.
The way you say this, anyone would think that the terrorist threats faced today are being organised by a very clever, very resourceful organisation that can do more or less whatever it wants.
There is no fucking chance whatsoever this applies to Al Qaida. Frankly, if it was, we'd have seen far more attacks and they'd have been far more successful. As it stands, the US and the UK have had precisely one major co-ordinated, successful attack each. Here in the UK we've also had a handful of utterly pointless attacks (come on - what idiot decided that driving a car full of gas cylinders into an airport in Glasgow, of all places, would result in anything more than a heavy kick in the head and/or testicles?).
If you want an example of what happens when you have a clever, resourceful terrorist organisation attacking you, look at the IRA in the 1970's/80's.
Assuming he really did take the computer apart and remove the hard disk (rather than the entire PC), it's entirely plausible the owner would think their computer was broken and might take a while to get around to having someone look at it. Longer than it would take for the police to come knocking, at least.
I thought that, actually. From what we see of the current state of malware being reported on here, I would think the whole "write a trojan" is utterly unnecessary - it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone were to reply to this confirming it's possible to get very cheap a remote-control trojan application which gets past most virus scanners for use against a single targeted individual.
Oh come on. The media are all sorts of things but even they would draw the line at something like this for an april fools' joke.
AIUI, kiddie fiddlers and those associated with them aren't exactly popular in your average UK prison.
I wouldn't think job prospects are that good for people who get out, either:
"I see your CV ends abruptly two years ago. Can you explain what you've been doing in that time?"
"I've been in prison for trying to frame a man up for child porn."
"Cheerio."
I see people on here who try to claim that the UK isn't rapidly running to being a dictatorship, but bullshit laws like this are exactly what I'm talking about. Every time the US walks a yard towards totalitarianism, the UK sprints 100 yards closer to it.
50 years ago the different countries were racing to see who could be the best - now they're racing to see who can be the worst.
The problem is, our democracy is essentially an elected short-term dictatorship whereby those who are elected are spending much of their time trying to make their term as long as possible, by whatever means necessary.
Right now the government is trying to make as many government interactions as possible done over the Internet. You have to pay extra and meet tighter deadlines if you want to file a paper tax return, if you lose your job and need to claim benefits you are now being encouraged to do so online, and many jobcentres have been closed with a sign left on the door saying "Go to the website". Yet at the same time they want a "3 strikes and you're off the Internet. Without the benefit of being able to go in front of a judge."
AFAICT, we are rapidly reaching the point where having your Internet cut-off could easily render you a non-person within a couple of weeks - particularly if you work from home.
Wait, this is UK, do they even need a warrant?
I'm pretty sure they do if they plan to break in and arrest you at 4 in the morning, but if they just knock and say they'd like to "ask a few questions", no.
That being said, how difficult do you imagine it would be to get a warrant when you've got a hard disk full of kiddie porn?
why would they search Karttunen's house after arresting the guy he was trying to frame?
The guy being framed probably filed a police report on the theft.
If the guy being framed is anything like most computer users, he'll just think there's "something wrong" with the computer and it'll take him a few days - minimum - to get around to having someone look at it.
As long as Karttunen had the hard drive in the hands of the police within 24-48 hours of removing it, it's a fairly safe bet the police would get there first.
So you missed the results of the expenses enquiry then. Sort of hard given all the news coverage it got.
Plus, newspapers don't contain "damming evidence" they contain editorialised content designed to sell newspapers.
Let's look at this in context.
In order to write this comment, I looked at the Telegraph's list of implicated MPs. I gave up counting after I hit 120 MPs and I wasn't even halfway down the page (and yes, I did exclude names where it said "... did not claim"). Frankly, I think it would have been easier to get a list of MPs who weren't implicated and deduct that from the total number of MPs.
Many have repaid money voluntarily. Of those that haven't, how many have been asked to repay money? A dozen? Two dozen? A fraction of the number involved, of that I'm sure.
How many are being investigated by the police? 5, last time I checked.
Now, if you or I were to be caught red-handed in a high-profile tax swindle publicised in a national newspaper, do you honestly believe there's less than a 5% chance we'd be prosecuted if we "agreed to repay the money"?
No UK government investigation has found any evidence of any wrongdoing for anything in at least the last ten years - even when the previous six weeks have been wall-to-wall damning evidence reported in every UK newspaper, TV channel and website regardless of its usual political stance.
Didn't they get to number six with "Baby I Want your Love Thing"?