Not legal to invalidate warranties based on not using same-branded consumables. That's called "product tying" and is a violation of the Sherman anti-trust act:
In order to invalidate the warranty due to using a 3rd party consumable (battery, ink cartridge, etc) the company must prove that the 3rd party item caused the specific damage being repaired, and must do it on a case-by-case basis.
ISTM that from a legal standpoint, they'd be better off with a warning on the box. Because IMO all batteries including Pano are capable of blowing up, when a Pano battery DOES catch fire, doesn't the fact that they took steps to exclude others from the market indicate increased culpability for fires that do occur?
If they just left it alone, when the battery caught fire the could just point at the stats and say "yeah, LiIon batteries do that sometimes. Sorry. We'll replace the camera." But by issuing this firmware, they have in effect claimed that their batteries are safe but others are not, so they can't use industry stats to show that battery fires are statistically going to happen sometimes, and they may be open for increased liability.
Yeah, that's why my Canon HF100 camcorder pops up an "unable to communicate with battery, Continue? Y/N" message when I use a non-Canon battery.
I'm a huge Canon fan, I just bought an EOS 500D which is my 6th Canon camera and 2nd DSLR, but with their current HD camcorders they've started down the dark path. But at least they will run with the aftermarket battery; the Pano apparently just shuts down.
The safety thing is a load of crap. Every company has had meltdowns even with OEM batteries; Sony, Apple, Dell, HP, Nokia, etc, in laptops, batteries, MP3 players, phones.
I've never bought a single Canon branded battery for any of my cameras, always 3rd party, and I've never had a bit of trouble with any of them, and when I cracked them open at end of life (after several years of use) even the cheapest ones did have proper protective circuitry in them.
The ONLY thing OEMs have to sell their batteries over 3rd party ones is FUD. OEM cameras for my new SLR are $50 at online prices, the cheapos that I bought instead were about $11 each, and they work actually a little better than the original battery that came with the camera. Every time the topic comes up on photography forums, the only argument against is "an aftermarket battery might catch fire and ruin your camera".
When the ubiquitous, well-documented and free product has never let you down, how do you define "higher quality"?
For the vast majority of uses, EITHER product will work splendidly. I use MySQL mainly because it was there when I needed a database, already installed, and there were a TON of tutorials and docs online for it. The systems I wrote are running just fine with tables of hundreds of millions of rows, and up to a few thousand transactions a second. We've never had even the most minor of glitches.
Where's the "higher quality" that I'm supposed to be wanting?
Well then, a lot of people are wrong then. It doesn't mean those of us who know what we're talking about should spend half our time explaining that we're using THIS version of the word or THAT.
I would hope that at LEAST on slashdot you could say "wiki" and have most people realize that wikis were around for a long time before Wikipedia without you having to explain yourself.
Actually I just bought a laptop for my daughter at OD, and it came with dual core, 3GB of RAM and a 250G hard drive for $500. It's a pretty nice looking machine too. Maybe that sounds like "not much ram and not much hard drive" to you, but it sounds pretty good to me. She actually has the highest spec machine in our house right now.
Where exactly do you go to buy the parts you want and build a laptop?
I actually used to own a business building custom laptops. For many years I built all my machines myself. For the last 5 years or so, I just buy prebuilt machines, because I'm not a gamer so even the cheapest of machines is still way more than I need, and I can buy a cheap machine for less than I can buy the parts to build one. I usually price them out, but for 5 years I've wound up just buying one already built.
I'm sure in YOUR case building is the right option, and you didn't say that it was the right option for everyone, but in the larger discussion here, buying a pre-built computer is just fine for many people, even including myself, even though I've built easily hundreds of machines. This may be because I've built so damn many machines that it holds no interest for me anymore; I won't do it unless I'm really getting something that I both need and can't buy.
I actually did buy a laptop at OD about a month ago. I bought it there because laptops are just a damn commodity, they had the one I want and they had the best price. I don't want any support from the store, I just want to give them money and have them give me a laptop, factory sealed, and I'm done with them. Why would I *not* buy a computer there? OK, this article gives one good reason (not wanting to deal with dishonest people) but it sounds like all the office supply stores do the same.
I've actually been buying most of the computer stuff that I don't get from Newegg at either Staples or OD lately, since Circuit City and CompUSA are gone, the only other option is Best Buy and I won't intentionally give them a dime.
It is skewing if they're buying the machine the cheapest way they can get it, then installing OSX or XP. I am absolutely certain that happens in many cases. Maybe MOST cases.
I'm still using my Palm IIIxe. I doubt I'll need anything more than that for a long time.
I don't really like smart phones. Actually I don't much like cell phones at all, I have one but it's turned off almost all the time unless I need to make a call.
There's still almost no service where I live, unless I go outside, then I can MAYBE make a call and have the signal hold for 30 seconds, if the weather cooperates.
So if I have to replace my PDA, I hope there's something that doesn't require a service contract that I can buy for $200.
Heck, there's a clone builder a few miles from where I work (in Michigan, in the US) that used to (10 years ago) load up EVERY machine that they sold with pirated Windows and tons of software (games, Office, etc). You got a 20 GB hard drive on it (this was a while ago) it was half full of pirated stuff.
I helped a friend spec a machine there, and we told them that we needed legal copies of Windows, Office, and one or two other things, and we did NOT want any other software on the machine. It took them a week to get the software (they didn't have a SINGLE legal copy of Windows or Office in the building!) and they totally screwed up the install, because they normally just Ghosted in the OS (with a pirated copy of Ghost I'm sure) with all the pirated crap on it, and they weren't used to doing bare-bones installs on fresh machines. I wound up having to reinstall everything myself.
This was a place that sold a few thousand PCs a year, with a storefront, in the US. And they did it for years, and I never heard of them getting in any trouble over it.
There are solutions to that. Crypto sign the install. Ping the machines for the key occasionally. If it changes, ask them why. Fire the people who did the changing.
They're a BRANCH OFFICE, they need to play by your rules. If you're paying for their software, and requiring them to use the paid-for version, why would they wipe it and install an identical pirated copy?
That's like saying "Here's a company car to use to go to your meetings" and having the employee say "no, I don't like using paid-for stuff, I'm going to go out on the street, break into an identical car, hot wire it and drive that instead."
This is actually one of the best reasons to use FAT32. Windows automatically configures FAT32 filesystems "optimized for quick removal" - that means that they don't do write caching. With other filesystems, the OS may have data intended to be written to the flash device, but not write it until you tell it you want to dismount the device.
With write caching disabled, if the drive access light has stopped flashing, you're good to just yank the drive. With NTFS or some other filesystem, no, you really need to properly eject the device.
I toyed with NTFS for a while due to wanting one big 8GB TrueCrypt volume, but in the end it was too much of a pain to manually unmount things every time I wanted to take a file over to a friend's machine.
Probably much less so, in fact. Heck, almost every OS has NTFS compatibility these days. exFAT doesn't. Not Macs, not Linux (not licensed anyway, maybe someone has a module for it). Even XP doesn't unless the hotfix has been applied, which had probably happened on all of 300 PCs worldwide.
So it's essentially useless for carrying files around to any randomly selected PC.
NTFS thumb drives are readable widely, by contrast.
Actually, I've not been able to partition many of my flash drives. They appear to have the partitioning burned into them or something. Some I can, some I can't.
nobody has ever remembered anything that wasn't on a website. Without the web, we'd have to invent some other way to preserve our collective memory. Perhaps some sort of flat, fiber based non-volatile memory with pigment-based markings.
If this policy was not disclosed before class started, I'd fight it for sure. I still have all my class notes from 25 years ago when I was in college, and I consider them part of what I paid for when I went to college. I never did and still don't intend to give anyone else access to them. I paid for that knowledge.
If they get to the end of class and then tell you that you have to give back part of what you reasonably thought was what you were paying for, I'd claim breach of an implied contract.
And of course, I'd scan a copy in case they made me give up the original. Of course, anyone who intended to make copies available has already done this, so this policy is completely pointless anyway.
On that note, unless they're making you sign an affadavit to the effect that you're turning over all copies, it's probably a non-issue anyway except from a moral point of view.
They're so full of crap. It's funny how Belkin has "isolated incidents" seemingly several times a year. They obviously have a corporate environment that breeds this sort of thing. I put them on my "evil company, do not buy" permanent list when the news of the spam router came out back in 2003, and haven't bought so much as a cable from them since.
Certainly. A few years ago, their home router firmware would occasionally redirect web page requests to their own web page where they tried to sell you stuff. As far as they're concerned, once you buy their stuff, THEY own YOU.
After their fiasco a few years ago where they decided that it was acceptable to program their home routers to occasionally redirect web requests to their own page to sell people things, they hit my "certified 100% evil" list.
There's no getting off that list. I don't care if they start sending me flowers and candy. Nothing they can do will make me consider giving them a dime again. I don't even buy cables from them; last year I ordered a cable online and waited a week for it rather than buy one locally, because the local place only had Belkin cables in that type.
Nothing wrong with driving fast; in fact "fast" is totally relative. There IS something wrong with driving too fast for conditions.
This is DEFINED as how fast your vehicle can stop, given its weight, brakes, tires, and the road surface and current conditions, versus how many meters it travels per second, and what the sight line and current visibility is, AND your reaction time.
If you come up to a corner where the sight line is 100 feet, it takes you 1/2 second to respond to something in the road, then "too fast for conditions" is defined as any speed at which your stopping distance plus the distance your car travels in that 1/2 second reaction time is greater than or equal to 100 feet.
You are EXPECTED, as a safe and licensed driver, to ANTICIPATE road conditions - if it's wet and around 0*C or colder, you should be driving as if you will hit ice at any time. "Black ice" should never take you by surprise, you should EXPECT it in conditions where it can occur.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that if they can make it around a corner at 50 MPH without losing traction, then that should be the speed limit there. Being able to control the car is NOT the reason for the speed limit on most corners, it's sight distance.
A couple of years ago, I came around a corner after a storm, and there was a 16 inch diameter hunk of dead tree, about 3 feet long, lying in the road. I was doing about 20 MPH because of the short sight distance and general sticks lying around on the road. I pulled off about 100 feet past it, and got out and went back to push the thing out of the road. Before I got to it, some moron in an SUV came around the corner at about 40 MPH, couldn't stop in time, hit the log, wrecked his front suspension and tore the muffler off his car when he came down again. He's damn lucky he didn't roll the thing, or kill anyone.
Check out how much work, and how little success, really smart teams have with the DARPA challenge of a self-driving car. It's not just around the corner; in fact it's very leading edge research and even then only works in limited situations.
Look at how well maintained the average car is. Do you want to bet your life on whether Billy-Bob down the road does a good job of cleaning the bugs off his infrared sensors tomorrow morning? Or that he doesn't have a windshield leak that's going to cause the car to lose its radar link just as he comes around the corner while he's digging around on the floor for another beer?
Slashdot Mirror
Not legal to invalidate warranties based on not using same-branded consumables. That's called "product tying" and is a violation of the Sherman anti-trust act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
In order to invalidate the warranty due to using a 3rd party consumable (battery, ink cartridge, etc) the company must prove that the 3rd party item caused the specific damage being repaired, and must do it on a case-by-case basis.
ISTM that from a legal standpoint, they'd be better off with a warning on the box. Because IMO all batteries including Pano are capable of blowing up, when a Pano battery DOES catch fire, doesn't the fact that they took steps to exclude others from the market indicate increased culpability for fires that do occur?
If they just left it alone, when the battery caught fire the could just point at the stats and say "yeah, LiIon batteries do that sometimes. Sorry. We'll replace the camera." But by issuing this firmware, they have in effect claimed that their batteries are safe but others are not, so they can't use industry stats to show that battery fires are statistically going to happen sometimes, and they may be open for increased liability.
Yeah, that's why my Canon HF100 camcorder pops up an "unable to communicate with battery, Continue? Y/N" message when I use a non-Canon battery.
I'm a huge Canon fan, I just bought an EOS 500D which is my 6th Canon camera and 2nd DSLR, but with their current HD camcorders they've started down the dark path. But at least they will run with the aftermarket battery; the Pano apparently just shuts down.
The safety thing is a load of crap. Every company has had meltdowns even with OEM batteries; Sony, Apple, Dell, HP, Nokia, etc, in laptops, batteries, MP3 players, phones.
I've never bought a single Canon branded battery for any of my cameras, always 3rd party, and I've never had a bit of trouble with any of them, and when I cracked them open at end of life (after several years of use) even the cheapest ones did have proper protective circuitry in them.
The ONLY thing OEMs have to sell their batteries over 3rd party ones is FUD. OEM cameras for my new SLR are $50 at online prices, the cheapos that I bought instead were about $11 each, and they work actually a little better than the original battery that came with the camera. Every time the topic comes up on photography forums, the only argument against is "an aftermarket battery might catch fire and ruin your camera".
Yup, and now hard drives are cheaper than DVD blanks per GB, and certainly cheaper than blu-ray or hd blanks.
When the ubiquitous, well-documented and free product has never let you down, how do you define "higher quality"?
For the vast majority of uses, EITHER product will work splendidly. I use MySQL mainly because it was there when I needed a database, already installed, and there were a TON of tutorials and docs online for it. The systems I wrote are running just fine with tables of hundreds of millions of rows, and up to a few thousand transactions a second. We've never had even the most minor of glitches.
Where's the "higher quality" that I'm supposed to be wanting?
Well then, a lot of people are wrong then. It doesn't mean those of us who know what we're talking about should spend half our time explaining that we're using THIS version of the word or THAT.
I would hope that at LEAST on slashdot you could say "wiki" and have most people realize that wikis were around for a long time before Wikipedia without you having to explain yourself.
Actually I just bought a laptop for my daughter at OD, and it came with dual core, 3GB of RAM and a 250G hard drive for $500. It's a pretty nice looking machine too. Maybe that sounds like "not much ram and not much hard drive" to you, but it sounds pretty good to me. She actually has the highest spec machine in our house right now.
Where exactly do you go to buy the parts you want and build a laptop?
I actually used to own a business building custom laptops. For many years I built all my machines myself. For the last 5 years or so, I just buy prebuilt machines, because I'm not a gamer so even the cheapest of machines is still way more than I need, and I can buy a cheap machine for less than I can buy the parts to build one. I usually price them out, but for 5 years I've wound up just buying one already built.
I'm sure in YOUR case building is the right option, and you didn't say that it was the right option for everyone, but in the larger discussion here, buying a pre-built computer is just fine for many people, even including myself, even though I've built easily hundreds of machines. This may be because I've built so damn many machines that it holds no interest for me anymore; I won't do it unless I'm really getting something that I both need and can't buy.
I actually did buy a laptop at OD about a month ago. I bought it there because laptops are just a damn commodity, they had the one I want and they had the best price. I don't want any support from the store, I just want to give them money and have them give me a laptop, factory sealed, and I'm done with them.
Why would I *not* buy a computer there? OK, this article gives one good reason (not wanting to deal with dishonest people) but it sounds like all the office supply stores do the same.
I've actually been buying most of the computer stuff that I don't get from Newegg at either Staples or OD lately, since Circuit City and CompUSA are gone, the only other option is Best Buy and I won't intentionally give them a dime.
It is skewing if they're buying the machine the cheapest way they can get it, then installing OSX or XP. I am absolutely certain that happens in many cases. Maybe MOST cases.
had a pirated copy of XP installed on them. Well, I bet 50+% of them did. And another half of those, within a month.
I'm still using my Palm IIIxe. I doubt I'll need anything more than that for a long time.
I don't really like smart phones. Actually I don't much like cell phones at all, I have one but it's turned off almost all the time unless I need to make a call.
There's still almost no service where I live, unless I go outside, then I can MAYBE make a call and have the signal hold for 30 seconds, if the weather cooperates.
So if I have to replace my PDA, I hope there's something that doesn't require a service contract that I can buy for $200.
Heck, there's a clone builder a few miles from where I work (in Michigan, in the US) that used to (10 years ago) load up EVERY machine that they sold with pirated Windows and tons of software (games, Office, etc). You got a 20 GB hard drive on it (this was a while ago) it was half full of pirated stuff.
I helped a friend spec a machine there, and we told them that we needed legal copies of Windows, Office, and one or two other things, and we did NOT want any other software on the machine. It took them a week to get the software (they didn't have a SINGLE legal copy of Windows or Office in the building!) and they totally screwed up the install, because they normally just Ghosted in the OS (with a pirated copy of Ghost I'm sure) with all the pirated crap on it, and they weren't used to doing bare-bones installs on fresh machines. I wound up having to reinstall everything myself.
This was a place that sold a few thousand PCs a year, with a storefront, in the US. And they did it for years, and I never heard of them getting in any trouble over it.
Well, here, now you can't say you've never seen or heard of that:
There's a pretty serious trojan going on for Mac OS X right now that you contract by running a pirated copy of iWorks 2009.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9126609
There are solutions to that. Crypto sign the install. Ping the machines for the key occasionally. If it changes, ask them why. Fire the people who did the changing.
They're a BRANCH OFFICE, they need to play by your rules. If you're paying for their software, and requiring them to use the paid-for version, why would they wipe it and install an identical pirated copy?
That's like saying "Here's a company car to use to go to your meetings" and having the employee say "no, I don't like using paid-for stuff, I'm going to go out on the street, break into an identical car, hot wire it and drive that instead."
This is actually one of the best reasons to use FAT32. Windows automatically configures FAT32 filesystems "optimized for quick removal" - that means that they don't do write caching. With other filesystems, the OS may have data intended to be written to the flash device, but not write it until you tell it you want to dismount the device.
With write caching disabled, if the drive access light has stopped flashing, you're good to just yank the drive. With NTFS or some other filesystem, no, you really need to properly eject the device.
I toyed with NTFS for a while due to wanting one big 8GB TrueCrypt volume, but in the end it was too much of a pain to manually unmount things every time I wanted to take a file over to a friend's machine.
Probably much less so, in fact. Heck, almost every OS has NTFS compatibility these days. exFAT doesn't. Not Macs, not Linux (not licensed anyway, maybe someone has a module for it). Even XP doesn't unless the hotfix has been applied, which had probably happened on all of 300 PCs worldwide.
So it's essentially useless for carrying files around to any randomly selected PC.
NTFS thumb drives are readable widely, by contrast.
Actually, I've not been able to partition many of my flash drives. They appear to have the partitioning burned into them or something. Some I can, some I can't.
nobody has ever remembered anything that wasn't on a website. Without the web, we'd have to invent some other way to preserve our collective memory. Perhaps some sort of flat, fiber based non-volatile memory with pigment-based markings.
If this policy was not disclosed before class started, I'd fight it for sure. I still have all my class notes from 25 years ago when I was in college, and I consider them part of what I paid for when I went to college. I never did and still don't intend to give anyone else access to them. I paid for that knowledge.
If they get to the end of class and then tell you that you have to give back part of what you reasonably thought was what you were paying for, I'd claim breach of an implied contract.
And of course, I'd scan a copy in case they made me give up the original. Of course, anyone who intended to make copies available has already done this, so this policy is completely pointless anyway.
On that note, unless they're making you sign an affadavit to the effect that you're turning over all copies, it's probably a non-issue anyway except from a moral point of view.
They're so full of crap. It's funny how Belkin has "isolated incidents" seemingly several times a year. They obviously have a corporate environment that breeds this sort of thing. I put them on my "evil company, do not buy" permanent list when the news of the spam router came out back in 2003, and haven't bought so much as a cable from them since.
Certainly. A few years ago, their home router firmware would occasionally redirect web page requests to their own web page where they tried to sell you stuff.
As far as they're concerned, once you buy their stuff, THEY own YOU.
After their fiasco a few years ago where they decided that it was acceptable to program their home routers to occasionally redirect web requests to their own page to sell people things, they hit my "certified 100% evil" list.
There's no getting off that list. I don't care if they start sending me flowers and candy. Nothing they can do will make me consider giving them a dime again. I don't even buy cables from them; last year I ordered a cable online and waited a week for it rather than buy one locally, because the local place only had Belkin cables in that type.
No more need to supercool RAM on seized computers in order to extract passwords - the RAM will just naturally hold state for hours.
If they're going to use this, (some) people are going to want to have more secure operating systems that don't leak security data all over the place.
Nothing wrong with driving fast; in fact "fast" is totally relative. There IS something wrong with driving too fast for conditions.
This is DEFINED as how fast your vehicle can stop, given its weight, brakes, tires, and the road surface and current conditions, versus how many meters it travels per second, and what the sight line and current visibility is, AND your reaction time.
If you come up to a corner where the sight line is 100 feet, it takes you 1/2 second to respond to something in the road, then "too fast for conditions" is defined as any speed at which your stopping distance plus the distance your car travels in that 1/2 second reaction time is greater than or equal to 100 feet.
You are EXPECTED, as a safe and licensed driver, to ANTICIPATE road conditions - if it's wet and around 0*C or colder, you should be driving as if you will hit ice at any time. "Black ice" should never take you by surprise, you should EXPECT it in conditions where it can occur.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that if they can make it around a corner at 50 MPH without losing traction, then that should be the speed limit there. Being able to control the car is NOT the reason for the speed limit on most corners, it's sight distance.
A couple of years ago, I came around a corner after a storm, and there was a 16 inch diameter hunk of dead tree, about 3 feet long, lying in the road. I was doing about 20 MPH because of the short sight distance and general sticks lying around on the road. I pulled off about 100 feet past it, and got out and went back to push the thing out of the road. Before I got to it, some moron in an SUV came around the corner at about 40 MPH, couldn't stop in time, hit the log, wrecked his front suspension and tore the muffler off his car when he came down again. He's damn lucky he didn't roll the thing, or kill anyone.
Check out how much work, and how little success, really smart teams have with the DARPA challenge of a self-driving car. It's not just around the corner; in fact it's very leading edge research and even then only works in limited situations.
Look at how well maintained the average car is. Do you want to bet your life on whether Billy-Bob down the road does a good job of cleaning the bugs off his infrared sensors tomorrow morning? Or that he doesn't have a windshield leak that's going to cause the car to lose its radar link just as he comes around the corner while he's digging around on the floor for another beer?