"I mean how hard is it to get one of the people, put them in a room, and have them tell you whether or not you plugged in a router?"
They might guess that if they can hear transformer hum.
Which is why a lot of these sorts of put-them-in-a-room tests (which have happened on occasion) deliberately play a humming or other "electrical" sound, desynched with the actual wireless signal (the source of which is often not even visible). If the person responds to the lights and sounds they see, then it's all fake or psychosomatic. If the person responds not to the lights and sounds but to the real wireless signal, then they've really got wireless sensitivity.
So far, they've ALL responded to the lights and sounds.
Of course, not only is quality of product important...but, Has Ubisoft heard about the World Wide Recession?!?!?!?!
What, and miss a chance to scape their favorite goat? Please, industries with piracy have been known to blame piracy for all the lost sales, even when their sales go UP. Evidently the 'correct' amount of sales is a magical space number given to the executive by a spotted man in a UFO, and any inability to reach that number is caused by piracy, quality of economy and product be damned.
Way back when, games for 6502 CPUs used to have all sorts of copy protection, I mean they even tried having deliberately, but uniquely damaged floppies as copy protect....
Including copy protection schemes which caused the customer's legally-purchased software to damage his legally-purchased hardware. How many Commodore 1541s went into the shop because someone decided making the read head slam against a hard stop was key to good copy protection? Even when I wasn't very techy, I knew my drive making an unholy RAT-A-TAT-TAT like it was moonlighting as a machine gun was a BAD thing. And when I found out that cracks didn't do that, loaded faster, and loaded fine from my beloved MSD SD-2? I used the cracks.
These days I just skip CDs and games that have a rep for killing things or otherwise having onerous copy protection. There's enough good stuff out there that I can fill my free time without having to sacrifice hardware or a stable Windows to the copy protection gods. And UbiSoft was already on my "do not buy" list - these guys used to use StarForce, remember?
These sounds just don't actually bother most people, and are mentally backgrounded the same way that AC is backgrounded.
I know some Anonymous Cowards can be boring, but I haven't backgrounded them quite yet. In other news, I can tune out air conditioning.:)
Unlike these bogus 'wifi' people, who are 'disabled' by something that has never been demonstrated to be preceptable by human beings.
And things which have been, under other names, present for years or in some cases decades. I appreciate that there's diseases that are misdiagnosed and others that we haven't properly diagnosed yet, but a lot of chemically or electromagnetically sensitive people have no problems being around the things that cause them endless torment as long as they don't know it's there, like when it's under a different name.
Years ago, people were cursed, or had the evil eye placed upon them, or were harried by a demon. While some of them I'm sure had legitimate diseases, some were just patients in search of a disease. Now that demons and magic aren't blamed for medical conditions (by the general public), the magic of the modern era - technology, specifically computer technology, is the newest source of demons.
You could consider investing in more reliable cellulose-based storage media. You'll find that a lot of popular ebooks have been translated into this "paper" format over the last, oh, 500 years and there's a good chance that your city even has one or more brick-and-mortar retailers who specialize in them.
"It's a non-volatile storage medium. It's very rare. You should have one." - Blank Reg
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
So the next John Titor hoax will be a guy who drives his time-traveling convertible back from 40 years in the future so he can... take grade-school penmanship classes?
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
Most likely. I find it hard to panic about any evil attack plan when step 1 is "Have the ability to wipe a major city off the map." If you can do that one, you'll probably just wipe a major city off the map, rather than attempt to jury-rig your city-wiping technology to do something else.
How are the Belkins doing? In the early days of N, they were the only ones that actually worked as advertised. Dunno about now.
Good question. And one I can't answer. All the Belkins we have are G, as far as I remember. The caprice of a supplier or owner, I guess. As far as general use, all I know is that while we sell less Belkin than Linksys or DLink, I can't remember a Belkin ever coming back.
Turn in your geek card now! You turned down an offer for the hottest sex of your life with an eastern european woman? Most of us geeks merely dream of this happening...
Man, if it ever becomes necessary to fly to the former Soviet Union from North America to meet a strange woman just for a geek to get laid, you can HAVE my geek card!
To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.'
This isn't as bad as some of these "exposes" they run on PC repair shops, but I would dispute it should take minutes to fix.
Ditto. Particularly on a notebook. I work in a shop, my buddy works in another. IMHO, both shops are honest. Here's how that would work:
MINE: Warn the customer that we may not be able to get certain parts, if it's not one of the ones we have a registered tech for. Explain possible costs. I'll do an examination, but I probably won't take a screwdriver to it on bench. Those screws tiny and easily losable - and crawling on the floor looking for a 1/2 cm black screw in a brown carpet ain't something customers like being the audience for.
Plus, on some notebooks the second stick of RAM is under the keyboard, and setting up the expectation I'm going to check ALL the RAM for them can be a bad idea. I can't dismantle the whole thing on the front bench. In this case, we'd have to book the PC in and have a full diagnostic done on it. The RAM problem would be found, but there would be a base labor charge. Wouldn't be free, and wouldn't be right away. We're busy, and it'll have to wait for a tech to have a free spot on his bench.
A desktop? I'll usually open one of those and take a look inside as a matter of course, since it's almost always just removal of a side panel.
THE OTHER SHOP: On the bench? Never. The frontline people there aren't allowed to open PCs, even though most are qualified to. If it can't be fixed in 5 minutes in Windows, they're NOT allowed to do it. That's what the commissioned techs in the back are for. Booked in, base labor charge.
Are there similar horror stories about car repair?
I can't tell if this post is being honest or clever or both, so I'll just treat it as an innocent question:
Car repair is the iconic industry for scammers. Every single local and national news show ever has had a segment in which a woman (note: always a woman) drives a car with a loose spark plug or something trivial to various repair shops. The shakedown is almost always:
1) Most shops cite major part failure. At least one of these will name a part the car doesn't have.
2) Half the shops replace said parts and charge for the labor and parts. The other half don't replace anything but still charge for parts and labor.
3) One shop will be particularly obnoxious, suggesting multiple part failure or that a complete engine overhaul is required.
4) One shop will find the problem immediately and only charge a token amount for the work done.
Bonus: The woman comes back to the particularly obnoxious shop, camera crew in tow, and catches the owner or mechanic on camera, confronting him about the scam. Blurred face is a common feature of this segment, as is said person saying "No comment!" and closing an office door on the cameraman.
OS Upgrade and Update (=install Win and run wind. update) = $90
Data transfer up to 9.4 GB (=burn two prol. cheapo DVD-R) = $60
Well, if it's done half-assed like you describe, then yes, those prices are unfair. But I think spending ANY money for someone else to fuck things up is an unfair price, even if it's two cents.
As long as it's not done half-assed, I don't really see much of a problem with those two prices. Done right, an OS install requires:
1) At least a brief diagnostic of the hardware. Visual inspection, running diagnostic programs, etc.
2) Installing the OS.
3) Downloading and installing the latest drivers for all the hardware, even the obscure five-year-old unlabelled PCI devices some people seem to collect.
4) Downloading and installing all the service packs and updates. (Or, semiregular slipstreaming of install disks, which takes time and resources and thus costs money.)
5) Testing from within the OS to make sure everything's OK, probably even a burn-in period.
And properly done, burning DVDs for backing up can take a long time. It doesn't always but, for instance, if the PC's flaky and you can't burn disks with it, you might need to: Image the drive to a test drive, change filesystem permissions so you can access the files, then divide them into DVD-sized chunks, THEN burn and verify them.
In both cases I'm working fairly consistently. There is some waiting time, and I can maybe juggle two installs (if you brought it to my workshop - I can't even do that if I'm onsite), but it's not like it's a matter of pushing a button and collecting laurels.
My time is worth something. If I'm charging per hour and you hand me a Vista box with half a gig of RAM and Norton installed, I'm gonna charge for the time I gotta sit there and wait for it to boot.
For a lot of things, if you break an appointment the day of the appointment (or even the day before), you're still charged a minimum even though the person you were going to see doesn't "do" anything, because you prevented him from doing something else.
In the boonies, $45 for an onsite isn't surprising. I did some side tech work when I lived there and pretty much couldn't charge above $25/hr for it. Now I work at a for-real computer place in a for-real city and the onsite work starts at $90/hr.
When we examined it, we discovered technicians had soldered the memory bus pins together to recreate the original fault. Evnova later claimed it believed we were from a rival repair company.
So they catch onto the fact that it's not a genuine customer and they think that a bit of criminal damage is the best thing to do?
A lie, trying to cover their asses. Man, that's just EVIL. I usually can't be arsed to solder something even when it might fix the issue. Like hell I'd do it to break something!
Tip jar? Heh, I remember being a technician in college and getting some lovely "tips" from gracious female students after rescuing their term papers from the aether. Ahhh, memories.
(Emphasis mine.) Great, now I have this image in my head of women in Regency era clothing sipping tea and discussing how they forgot to back up their hard drives.
"$7.25/hr isn't a sane amount of money for a computer technician in the US."
That's why you need a tip jar.
Let's see what tips I've got, being a tech in a computer store....
1) $10 every four or five months,
2) $20 maybe once a year,
3) repeated offers to get in on a pyramid scheme,
4) an offer to witness me convert religions and, when I declined, a promise that the offerer would pray that I would see the light, as I might die tomorrow and be cast into the firey pit with all the other unsaved,
5) an offer to go to a certain motel at a certain time to meet some people for a reason the person wasn't willing to entirely clarify beyond "It's easy money!",
6) a suggestion that the customer's Eastern European niece was a real nice girl and I should e-mail her, maybe start a relationship,
7) and a dude who said I could burn a copy of his 'barely legal cheerleaders being spanked' porn collection.
Maybe history is repeating itself, if the first test they did caused some sort of temporal loop at the atomic level and that's what's been causing all the subsequent problems.
What, how many times? Dozens? Hundreds? You mean I've been working at the same job for over a century now, but only got about one year's worth of paychecks?! To hell with black holes destroying the Earth, that's nothing compared to this!
It's sad to expect that purchasing a product built on the first draft of a protocol, rather than an IEEE standard, will be forward compatible.
Though they do write that word "Draft" damn tiny. It's all RANGEBOOSTER N! and N ULTRA RANGEPLUS! in large fonts.
And even the fine print is misleading. "Built on the latest 802.11n Draft technology!" "Upgrade to the newest 802.11n Draft wireless system!" The precise meaning of "draft" is never explained, anywhere; the word "standard" is only conspicuous in its absence. I know that a person should research, but in a world with programs like Windows Vista and Photoshop CS, people are used to random irrelevant words and symbols being bolted onto things in lieu of version numbers. The word "draft" is no different. It conjures up brief images of a source of cold air, or being made to serve in the army, or college students joining professional sports teams. "Draft" as in "rough draft" is just never thought of unless you already know what Wireless N is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientists estimate that at least 30% of the bulk is made up of Collectors edition Daikatana boxes.
The world shall not be complete until there's a Captain Planet episode where John Romero makes the ocean his bitch.
"I mean how hard is it to get one of the people, put them in a room, and have them tell you whether or not you plugged in a router?"
They might guess that if they can hear transformer hum.
Which is why a lot of these sorts of put-them-in-a-room tests (which have happened on occasion) deliberately play a humming or other "electrical" sound, desynched with the actual wireless signal (the source of which is often not even visible). If the person responds to the lights and sounds they see, then it's all fake or psychosomatic. If the person responds not to the lights and sounds but to the real wireless signal, then they've really got wireless sensitivity.
So far, they've ALL responded to the lights and sounds.
I thought CDs were those coasters AOL used to send you.
Coasters? I used them to scare birds!
Of course, not only is quality of product important...but, Has Ubisoft heard about the World Wide Recession?!?!?!?!
What, and miss a chance to scape their favorite goat? Please, industries with piracy have been known to blame piracy for all the lost sales, even when their sales go UP. Evidently the 'correct' amount of sales is a magical space number given to the executive by a spotted man in a UFO, and any inability to reach that number is caused by piracy, quality of economy and product be damned.
Way back when, games for 6502 CPUs used to have all sorts of copy protection, I mean they even tried having deliberately, but uniquely damaged floppies as copy protect....
Including copy protection schemes which caused the customer's legally-purchased software to damage his legally-purchased hardware. How many Commodore 1541s went into the shop because someone decided making the read head slam against a hard stop was key to good copy protection? Even when I wasn't very techy, I knew my drive making an unholy RAT-A-TAT-TAT like it was moonlighting as a machine gun was a BAD thing. And when I found out that cracks didn't do that, loaded faster, and loaded fine from my beloved MSD SD-2? I used the cracks.
These days I just skip CDs and games that have a rep for killing things or otherwise having onerous copy protection. There's enough good stuff out there that I can fill my free time without having to sacrifice hardware or a stable Windows to the copy protection gods. And UbiSoft was already on my "do not buy" list - these guys used to use StarForce, remember?
These sounds just don't actually bother most people, and are mentally backgrounded the same way that AC is backgrounded.
I know some Anonymous Cowards can be boring, but I haven't backgrounded them quite yet. In other news, I can tune out air conditioning.:)
Unlike these bogus 'wifi' people, who are 'disabled' by something that has never been demonstrated to be preceptable by human beings.
And things which have been, under other names, present for years or in some cases decades. I appreciate that there's diseases that are misdiagnosed and others that we haven't properly diagnosed yet, but a lot of chemically or electromagnetically sensitive people have no problems being around the things that cause them endless torment as long as they don't know it's there, like when it's under a different name.
Years ago, people were cursed, or had the evil eye placed upon them, or were harried by a demon. While some of them I'm sure had legitimate diseases, some were just patients in search of a disease. Now that demons and magic aren't blamed for medical conditions (by the general public), the magic of the modern era - technology, specifically computer technology, is the newest source of demons.
If I'm 80 and can still get a hot 25 year old to have sex with me that doesn't make me a pervert it makes me lucky.
Now, now. Why can't you be both?
This thought makes me want to join the army and start another world war. wow. You just completely derailed my day...thanks.
The trick isn't to start the war - it's to end it. The ladies love a winner!
You could consider investing in more reliable cellulose-based storage media. You'll find that a lot of popular ebooks have been translated into this "paper" format over the last, oh, 500 years and there's a good chance that your city even has one or more brick-and-mortar retailers who specialize in them.
"It's a non-volatile storage medium. It's very rare. You should have one." - Blank Reg
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
So the next John Titor hoax will be a guy who drives his time-traveling convertible back from 40 years in the future so he can... take grade-school penmanship classes?
If hating a company that lies, cheats, and steals its way to the top is a "disease", then I don't want to be well.
If you hate anything so much that you injure yourself or your cause in the process of avoiding it, then yes, you have a disease.
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
Most likely. I find it hard to panic about any evil attack plan when step 1 is "Have the ability to wipe a major city off the map." If you can do that one, you'll probably just wipe a major city off the map, rather than attempt to jury-rig your city-wiping technology to do something else.
How are the Belkins doing? In the early days of N, they were the only ones that actually worked as advertised. Dunno about now.
Good question. And one I can't answer. All the Belkins we have are G, as far as I remember. The caprice of a supplier or owner, I guess. As far as general use, all I know is that while we sell less Belkin than Linksys or DLink, I can't remember a Belkin ever coming back.
I'll tell you right now. They turn them with SCIENCE!!!
What a strange name for a holy symbol. Does it give a bonus to the turn attempt or to the number of undead affected?
Only psionic liches, but them it really messes up. They can't even bend a spoon when it's around.
Turn in your geek card now! You turned down an offer for the hottest sex of your life with an eastern european woman? Most of us geeks merely dream of this happening...
Man, if it ever becomes necessary to fly to the former Soviet Union from North America to meet a strange woman just for a geek to get laid, you can HAVE my geek card!
To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.'
This isn't as bad as some of these "exposes" they run on PC repair shops, but I would dispute it should take minutes to fix.
Ditto. Particularly on a notebook. I work in a shop, my buddy works in another. IMHO, both shops are honest. Here's how that would work:
MINE: Warn the customer that we may not be able to get certain parts, if it's not one of the ones we have a registered tech for. Explain possible costs. I'll do an examination, but I probably won't take a screwdriver to it on bench. Those screws tiny and easily losable - and crawling on the floor looking for a 1/2 cm black screw in a brown carpet ain't something customers like being the audience for.
Plus, on some notebooks the second stick of RAM is under the keyboard, and setting up the expectation I'm going to check ALL the RAM for them can be a bad idea. I can't dismantle the whole thing on the front bench. In this case, we'd have to book the PC in and have a full diagnostic done on it. The RAM problem would be found, but there would be a base labor charge. Wouldn't be free, and wouldn't be right away. We're busy, and it'll have to wait for a tech to have a free spot on his bench.
A desktop? I'll usually open one of those and take a look inside as a matter of course, since it's almost always just removal of a side panel.
THE OTHER SHOP: On the bench? Never. The frontline people there aren't allowed to open PCs, even though most are qualified to. If it can't be fixed in 5 minutes in Windows, they're NOT allowed to do it. That's what the commissioned techs in the back are for. Booked in, base labor charge.
Are there similar horror stories about car repair?
I can't tell if this post is being honest or clever or both, so I'll just treat it as an innocent question:
Car repair is the iconic industry for scammers. Every single local and national news show ever has had a segment in which a woman (note: always a woman) drives a car with a loose spark plug or something trivial to various repair shops. The shakedown is almost always:
1) Most shops cite major part failure. At least one of these will name a part the car doesn't have.
2) Half the shops replace said parts and charge for the labor and parts. The other half don't replace anything but still charge for parts and labor.
3) One shop will be particularly obnoxious, suggesting multiple part failure or that a complete engine overhaul is required.
4) One shop will find the problem immediately and only charge a token amount for the work done.
Bonus: The woman comes back to the particularly obnoxious shop, camera crew in tow, and catches the owner or mechanic on camera, confronting him about the scam. Blurred face is a common feature of this segment, as is said person saying "No comment!" and closing an office door on the cameraman.
OS Upgrade and Update (=install Win and run wind. update) = $90 Data transfer up to 9.4 GB (=burn two prol. cheapo DVD-R) = $60
Well, if it's done half-assed like you describe, then yes, those prices are unfair. But I think spending ANY money for someone else to fuck things up is an unfair price, even if it's two cents.
As long as it's not done half-assed, I don't really see much of a problem with those two prices. Done right, an OS install requires:
1) At least a brief diagnostic of the hardware. Visual inspection, running diagnostic programs, etc.
2) Installing the OS.
3) Downloading and installing the latest drivers for all the hardware, even the obscure five-year-old unlabelled PCI devices some people seem to collect.
4) Downloading and installing all the service packs and updates. (Or, semiregular slipstreaming of install disks, which takes time and resources and thus costs money.)
5) Testing from within the OS to make sure everything's OK, probably even a burn-in period.
And properly done, burning DVDs for backing up can take a long time. It doesn't always but, for instance, if the PC's flaky and you can't burn disks with it, you might need to: Image the drive to a test drive, change filesystem permissions so you can access the files, then divide them into DVD-sized chunks, THEN burn and verify them.
In both cases I'm working fairly consistently. There is some waiting time, and I can maybe juggle two installs (if you brought it to my workshop - I can't even do that if I'm onsite), but it's not like it's a matter of pushing a button and collecting laurels.
My time is worth something. If I'm charging per hour and you hand me a Vista box with half a gig of RAM and Norton installed, I'm gonna charge for the time I gotta sit there and wait for it to boot.
For a lot of things, if you break an appointment the day of the appointment (or even the day before), you're still charged a minimum even though the person you were going to see doesn't "do" anything, because you prevented him from doing something else.
(yeah, I know they could yank the drive and put it in another machine but run with it for a minute here...)
Not only that, but all the clever spy stuff they installed wouldn't work if you did that.
Honestly, I'd rather see forced music classes than a forced A+ certification class, at least a love of music can last a lifetime.
So can a hatred of something, which is what I find students are more likely to get in any forced appreciation class.
45$ for an onsite visit?
We charge roughly 175$ per hour (185 CHF).
In the boonies, $45 for an onsite isn't surprising. I did some side tech work when I lived there and pretty much couldn't charge above $25/hr for it. Now I work at a for-real computer place in a for-real city and the onsite work starts at $90/hr.
When we examined it, we discovered technicians had soldered the memory bus pins together to recreate the original fault. Evnova later claimed it believed we were from a rival repair company.
So they catch onto the fact that it's not a genuine customer and they think that a bit of criminal damage is the best thing to do?
A lie, trying to cover their asses. Man, that's just EVIL. I usually can't be arsed to solder something even when it might fix the issue. Like hell I'd do it to break something!
Tip jar? Heh, I remember being a technician in college and getting some lovely "tips" from gracious female students after rescuing their term papers from the aether. Ahhh, memories.
(Emphasis mine.) Great, now I have this image in my head of women in Regency era clothing sipping tea and discussing how they forgot to back up their hard drives.
"$7.25/hr isn't a sane amount of money for a computer technician in the US."
That's why you need a tip jar.
Let's see what tips I've got, being a tech in a computer store....
1) $10 every four or five months,
2) $20 maybe once a year,
3) repeated offers to get in on a pyramid scheme,
4) an offer to witness me convert religions and, when I declined, a promise that the offerer would pray that I would see the light, as I might die tomorrow and be cast into the firey pit with all the other unsaved,
5) an offer to go to a certain motel at a certain time to meet some people for a reason the person wasn't willing to entirely clarify beyond "It's easy money!",
6) a suggestion that the customer's Eastern European niece was a real nice girl and I should e-mail her, maybe start a relationship,
7) and a dude who said I could burn a copy of his 'barely legal cheerleaders being spanked' porn collection.
Maybe history is repeating itself, if the first test they did caused some sort of temporal loop at the atomic level and that's what's been causing all the subsequent problems.
What, how many times? Dozens? Hundreds? You mean I've been working at the same job for over a century now, but only got about one year's worth of paychecks?! To hell with black holes destroying the Earth, that's nothing compared to this!
It's sad to expect that purchasing a product built on the first draft of a protocol, rather than an IEEE standard, will be forward compatible.
Though they do write that word "Draft" damn tiny. It's all RANGEBOOSTER N! and N ULTRA RANGEPLUS! in large fonts.
And even the fine print is misleading. "Built on the latest 802.11n Draft technology!" "Upgrade to the newest 802.11n Draft wireless system!" The precise meaning of "draft" is never explained, anywhere; the word "standard" is only conspicuous in its absence. I know that a person should research, but in a world with programs like Windows Vista and Photoshop CS, people are used to random irrelevant words and symbols being bolted onto things in lieu of version numbers. The word "draft" is no different. It conjures up brief images of a source of cold air, or being made to serve in the army, or college students joining professional sports teams. "Draft" as in "rough draft" is just never thought of unless you already know what Wireless N is all about.