Question Friendly TV shopping advice

How the fuck do you screw up the software in a TV so it "doesn't turn on?" That shit should be built into silicon and tested to be bullet-proof before it was burned into the chip!

I can understand the "smart" TV crap getting corrupted and not working or requiring a reload, but the base functions of the TV itself? Gees, that's lame.

There are some TV's that when connected to the internet can be 'flashed' from the company it was made from. I'm not saying that this was the case here. But many use it to add/remove features as with other supposed 'enhancements'.

So yeah, I'd say take it back, it could also be that a minor circuit was malfunctioning, out of tolerance and so forth. What used to be simple technology has become complicated as manufactures seek to interconnect everything globally.

Not the TV shopping advice I was expecting.

Valentine wrote: Not the TV shopping advice I was expecting.

No kidding. I was thinking more along the lines of: "Remember to bring a friend to help carry it!"

NeoMagus wrote:

Valentine wrote: Not the TV shopping advice I was expecting.

No kidding. I was thinking more along the lines of: "Remember to bring a friend to help carry it!"

And another in the getaway car...

Seriously if it is that easy to mess up, and that hard to unscrew yeah stay far away from that brand.

My all time favourite 'it's busted call' that I've taken comes from my time working insurance, a woman called in needing to file claim, started off saying that 'You won't believe me...'. Ok so I start the claim process, it turns out that her car had been wrecked by an elephant, I'll admit I blinked at that. Then looked at the details she'd given me, by now she washalf in tears thinking all kinds of terrible thoughts about cops and filing charges for making a false claim.

My response was that I believed her and we'd get the whole process started. When she asked why I believed her I told her that her call was from northern Florida and that is where most carnies in the states like to winter over, and reason I know that is one of my old friends was a carney.

Nothing like working in a big insurance company to give you an odd sense of humour and firmly held belief that 80% of the human race is to dumb to live.

I took this picture in a neighborhood in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. Elephants show up where you'd least expect them. They're like ninjas that way.

In my young and stupid days I tried a computer help desk as a job. Never again. Never never never again.

Person calls in saying 'the click click box don't work', after 15 min of trying to figure out what the 'click click box' is I discovered that it was a highly technical term used to describe a keyboard, that when pressed made a 'click click' sound. Ok it's the keyboard I thought, nope upon further troubleshooting, it seems the 'click click' box is the monitor, cause the 'click click' sound was there but nothing would show on the monitor no matter how much clicking the 'click click' box made. At this point my highly trained sense of destructive reasoning classified the situation as PEBKAC, Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

It got worse, once my friends discovered my technical talents I became their 24 help line, I loved getting calls at 4am with said friends whining about their lack of a working computer like the world would end if they couldn't log in to play Evercrack. One such friend was convinced that Windows ME was the best OS out there and kept using it, until I destroyed his CD. This same idiot upgraded his PC, new everything but didn't upgrade the power supply, same old 120 watt power supply tried to run an AMD dual core, new Video card, sound card, 2 HDs, 2 CD players, the whole thing was new out of the box but the power supply. He wanted to save some money, so no new power supply. The stench of cooked electronics is well known to me, but the stench of burnt drywall confused me until I pulled it out and saw the burn marks on the wall and case. He wondered if I could fix it somehow.

I was so glad when I left the tech support thing behind me. It took about 3 months for the nervous tic and grinding my teeth to stop whenever I heard the words, 'It'll just take a second to fix right'.

Most tech problems can be prevented, just need 40 ounce ball been hammer, trash bags, duct tape, hacksaw, plastic wrap and a unsupervised landfill, or a few cinder blocks and a boat if you don't have a handy landfill.

I don't do tech support, but I seem to be pretty good at fixing things if I get my hands on them. However I have NO IDEA how I fix them.
In university my computer was dying, so I got whatever piece I needed (its over 10 years ago, I can't recall all the details), I think it was a memory board. Spent three or four hours working on it getting it working because nothing I did seemed right, however by the end it was doing what I wanted.
My dad came down near the end of the term a few weeks later, and since he's pretty good with computers and knew about my problem, he took a look at it. He has no idea what I did, how it worked, or why it worked. He fixed it by the book.
My computer stopped working.
This was near the end of the term when I had papers due.
I went and did my kludge and got it working again. My dad just shook his head in amazement that whatever I did worked.
I got one of his old but still good computers for Christmas that year.

Being a CSC student people expect me to know how to fix their computers.
I hate dealing with people, I'm not actually that good at using them (though I'm good at programming them), and I'm terrible at fixing them (if I have to I just use google).
I solve this problem by making friends almost exclusively in the CSC department.

Domoviye wrote: I don't do tech support, but I seem to be pretty good at fixing things if I get my hands on them. However I have NO IDEA how I fix them.
In university my computer was dying, so I got whatever piece I needed (its over 10 years ago, I can't recall all the details), I think it was a memory board. Spent three or four hours working on it getting it working because nothing I did seemed right, however by the end it was doing what I wanted.
My dad came down near the end of the term a few weeks later, and since he's pretty good with computers and knew about my problem, he took a look at it. He has no idea what I did, how it worked, or why it worked. He fixed it by the book.
My computer stopped working.
This was near the end of the term when I had papers due.
I went and did my kludge and got it working again. My dad just shook his head in amazement that whatever I did worked.
I got one of his old but still good computers for Christmas that year.

Either you have some subconscious technical skills you don't know about or you are secretly a devisor who uses it to fix things in ways others can't understand.

I had a rather bizarre problem a few years back. One day my computer spontaneously slowed down (not unworkably slow, but irritatingly). Which isn't too bizarre on the face of it, but we could never identify the cause. I brought it to several IT places, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Windows, and that seemed to fix it, is it probably wasn't a hardware issue. God only knows.

So, you're all going to think I'm insane (I spent 12 years on phone support before moving to the next level up, which is going through tech support escalations to find the software bugs they are reporting), but in that time I learnt a few tricks.

1. Use the terms of the user, it is, by far, easier then trying to get them to change what they call things.

2. There is nothing like a game to get "computerphobes" to learn computing. It doesn't matter what, Solitaire, WarCrack, words with friends, if you can find something they want to do on the computer enough to preserver through the learning curve, once you have them past the first "you can do this" barrier, its amazing how fast they'll start learning other things they want to do with it on their own.

3. Unpaid tech support is a job for life, once you solve one problem for your mother she'll never stop giving your details to people you've never meet in your life but somehow your mum knows and she'll happily send your way

Arcanist Lupus wrote: I had a rather bizarre problem a few years back. One day my computer spontaneously slowed down (not unworkably slow, but irritatingly). Which isn't too bizarre on the face of it, but we could never identify the cause. I brought it to several IT places, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Windows, and that seemed to fix it, is it probably wasn't a hardware issue. God only knows.

That would be malware. Probably. That or something running in the background that shouldn't. (<- in general that is malware).

Jarjaross wrote:

Arcanist Lupus wrote: I had a rather bizarre problem a few years back. One day my computer spontaneously slowed down (not unworkably slow, but irritatingly). Which isn't too bizarre on the face of it, but we could never identify the cause. I brought it to several IT places, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Windows, and that seemed to fix it, is it probably wasn't a hardware issue. God only knows.

That would be malware. Probably. That or something running in the background that shouldn't. (<- in general that is malware).

Or Adobe Flash.

Or Oracle Java.

Or some other f*ing Browser plug-in.

Or sh*tting Javascript.

Never ascribe to Malware something that can be explained by idiot internet programers and their "I can't be bothered to test" f*ing scripts.

Anyone with a "ship it and will fix the faults" attitude and millions of site hits should be taken out and have tech support wired into their brains in an irremovable way so anytime they pull this shit its their brains screaming in agony until they fix it. I beat you that would change their "ship it and fix it" attitude quick smart.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote:

Jarjaross wrote:

Arcanist Lupus wrote: I had a rather bizarre problem a few years back. One day my computer spontaneously slowed down (not unworkably slow, but irritatingly). Which isn't too bizarre on the face of it, but we could never identify the cause. I brought it to several IT places, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Windows, and that seemed to fix it, is it probably wasn't a hardware issue. God only knows.

That would be malware. Probably. That or something running in the background that shouldn't. (<- in general that is malware).

Or Adobe Flash.

Or Oracle Java.

Or some other f*ing Browser plug-in.

Or sh*tting Javascript.

Never ascribe to Malware something that can be explained by idiot internet programers and their "I can't be bothered to test" f*ing scripts.

Anyone with a "ship it and will fix the faults" attitude and millions of site hits should be taken out and have tech support wired into their brains in an irremovable way so anytime they pull this shit its their brains screaming in agony until they fix it. I beat you that would change their "ship it and fix it" attitude quick smart.

While we are on the topic of people that need to be covered in BBQ sauce and tossed naked in a room with 20 hungry wolverines, how about those idiots in marketing?

'New and improved', 'Intuitive interface', 'Minimal memory footprint', 'Easy to install', 'Documentation lite', 'No setup required'. Somehow those...things in marketing are never held responsible for the pack of lies they sold to the consumer, nope it's always tech support's fault.

I swear aliens could fly down and nuke the city the computer is in and some moron would still insist that it's tech support's job to fix it cause it was sold to them with an extended warranty that covers anything.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote:

Jarjaross wrote:

Arcanist Lupus wrote: I had a rather bizarre problem a few years back. One day my computer spontaneously slowed down (not unworkably slow, but irritatingly). Which isn't too bizarre on the face of it, but we could never identify the cause. I brought it to several IT places, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Windows, and that seemed to fix it, is it probably wasn't a hardware issue. God only knows.

That would be malware. Probably. That or something running in the background that shouldn't. (<- in general that is malware).

Or Adobe Flash.

Or Oracle Java.

Or some other f*ing Browser plug-in.

Or sh*tting Javascript.

Never ascribe to Malware something that can be explained by idiot internet programers and their "I can't be bothered to test" f*ing scripts.

Anyone with a "ship it and will fix the faults" attitude and millions of site hits should be taken out and have tech support wired into their brains in an irremovable way so anytime they pull this shit its their brains screaming in agony until they fix it. I beat you that would change their "ship it and fix it" attitude quick smart.

Those things you mentioned are MALWARE!

To say those are malware is also saying that any program is malware such as what this site runs on, so format your computer and leave the harddrive blank to protect yourself.

Those programs were made for a specific use as is malware. Malware does not readily identify itself. It attaches itself to certain programs or files as an executable to run in the background. So if you were to install it by clicking on a *say a file, then it could run a program and connect itself to Adobe, by poor coding, from previous versions of it.

I hated Tech support in that people who called expected us to magically fix the problem that they put on their computer. We were not allowed to delve into the reg keys to try and find them. If we could not easily do a system restore (and that was after win98) then it was a *backup your data if you can and format it. I even had to do a priests because he was having popups of porn sites come up. So yeah.

Those are programs and you don't need them to still get malware.

It's nice when it works, a buddy of mine was a electronics tech on Athabaskan during Desert Storm and he swore up and down that the CIWS system hated him. When the radar was mounted on the test bench it would always work, installed it would always fail randomly.

After much hair pulling and cursing it was found to be the angle which the radar was mounted on the test bench. On the bench a connector stayed put, mounted it was slowly being pulled out when the mount was at a certain angle, the connector was pulled just far enough the CIWS would fail sooner or later, of course since the connector was never pulled all the way out no obvious sign of failure, so pull the unit drag it down to test bench it would be working fine once hooked up.

Solution, duct tape. Duct tape can fix anything.

Better story was the perils of management not understanding what techs do, same cruise new 2nd Lieutenant got it into his head to surprise the radar techs during a test, idiot ignores the warning signs/tape climbs up on top the hanger convinced that the techs are lazing around. He came within 10 seconds of sticking his head in the path of the radar beam.

Solution, need smarter 2nd Lieutenant. Cannot be implemented, a smarter 2nd Lieutenant is by definition a 1st Lieutenant.

Solution, need smarter 2nd Lieutenant. Cannot be implemented, a smarter 2nd Lieutenant is by definition a 1st Lieutenant.

Ain't that the truth, for if they didn't make 1st Lieutenant they never learned as a 2nd Lieutenant. Bet he was a West Pointer also.

~Archangel~ wrote: It's nice when it works, a buddy of mine was a electronics tech on Athabaskan during Desert Storm and he swore up and down that the CIWS system hated him. When the radar was mounted on the test bench it would always work, installed it would always fail randomly.

It was a well known fact on my high school robotics team that robots get performance anxiety. You can take a robot that was running perfectly on the practice field and put it in a match and it will suddenly start responding awkwardly or not at all. Remove it from the field and you will be unable to reproduce the problem.

And no, such things could not always be subscribed to wireless connection issues (although that was most likely a common culprit).




My favorite story of robotics design stupidity was the stupid radios. The robots used one particular radio to communicate with the drivers. It was in the kit of parts, and not optional. The radios had on them a large "security button" which when pressed would enable security functions that rendered the radio non-functional for our purposes, and required that we removed the radio and plugged it into a computer to reset it. One time after we were bring the radio back from resetting because someone had accidentally pressed the button one of our mentors walked up and said "What does this button do?" And before we had a chance to stop him... after getting the radio reset the second time, the mentor affixed a plexiglass cover to the radio, which cut down on the problem. But it did not end the problem, because the playing field that year had large bumps on it, and if you drove over the hill in a wrong way, it turned out that the security button had enough mass to press itself. Once we figured that out, we cut the stupid button off the radio for good.

Of course the solution is to work in bomb disposal,

This means you never have an officer breathing down the back of your neck...

Astrodragon wrote: Of course the solution is to work in bomb disposal,

This means you never have an officer breathing down the back of your neck...

Breathing down your neck, no, harassing you with requests for updates over the radio, yes, and from some place of safety where they can bitch and complain about your lack of progress while sending some poor private out for another cup of Tim's cause the last one didn't have enough cream...

That's why I kinda liked my job as a 35F then 55G (MOS). One mistake and nobody within a certain radius would care.

Warren wrote: Of course you know what CIWS stands for right? "CHRIST IT WON'T SHOOT!"

But it wants to. It really, really wants to. (Remembering some hotshot pilot from the UK who got permission to overfly our ship fast enough and low enough to get R2's undivided attention.)

Warren wrote: In the navy my ship got the original test bed CIWS unit back in 1985.

Had to be earlier than that, as it was already installed on the Scott when I reported aboard that year. Then again, the "Ayatollah" class did have some special snowflake installations.

Ib12us wrote: That's why I kinda liked my job as a 35F then 55G (MOS). One mistake and nobody within a certain radius would care.

35F is Intelligence right? Did you ever find any signs of it?

55G...ok google...holy crap! I'm jealous, I want to play with nukes! On second thought considering my habit of tinkering, or practical jokes it's a good thing Canada doesn't have those. Still I want one, heck I want several, just the thing to bring to work when it's time for the wage review.

~Archangel~ wrote:

Ib12us wrote: That's why I kinda liked my job as a 35F then 55G (MOS). One mistake and nobody within a certain radius would care.

35F is Intelligence right? Did you ever find any signs of it?

You insult me dear sir. That was the technical side who worked the cables and such for repair, calibration. They combined it with the 55G later on.

Just saw where you were saying Intel. That MOS has been re-designated it seems. Back in the 80's it was for weapons, so I suppose they did some more reclassification of the older and no longer used acronymsclassifications.

Oh and I can deliver you one very quickly. What were your coordinates again?

Ib12us wrote:

~Archangel~ wrote:

Ib12us wrote: That's why I kinda liked my job as a 35F then 55G (MOS). One mistake and nobody within a certain radius would care.

35F is Intelligence right? Did you ever find any signs of it?

You insult me dear sir. That was the technical side who worked the cables and such for repair, calibration. They combined it with the 55G later on.

Just saw where you were saying Intel. That MOS has been re-designated it seems. Back in the 80's it was for weapons, so I suppose they did some more reclassification of the older and no longer used acronymsclassifications.

Oh and I can deliver you one very quickly. What were your coordinates again?

Try 46.047517, -64.087190, it'll be close enough, just give me 30min warning so I can setup the lawn chair and get some good sunblock on. Oh and setup the BBQ, cause hot dogs, beer and nukes, the perfect combination.

Have a nice day. Kinda long but yeah. For quicker go to the 3 minute mark.

When studying at Uni (late 1990s), I once encounted a fellow student having trouble turning a computer on. They were jabbing the Turbo and Reset buttons, but it hadn't occurred to them to try pressing the rather large square button to the side...

If you want to make a computer system bulletproof, install it in a school IT suite. I spent several years as a school IT technician, and discovered numerous coins / sweet wrappers wedged in floppy drives (not to mention dust covers), blanking plates removed (not just the plastic ones but the sharp metal ones behind them!), keyboards with the letters "creatively" rearranged (usually so the QWERTY row instead spells out a variety of four letter words, but one enterprising pupil had somehow managed to move every letter one place to the right without being noticed - now THAT's creativity!), voltage selector switches flipped (unsurprisingly a PSU expecting 110V isn't too impressed with receiving 240V...), castrated mice (often they'd remove the metal ball, separate it from the rubber covering, then place the rubber covering back in the slot - I once spent a merry evening supergluing the access covers on... which of course then required going around the IT suites every half term with a screwdriver, as physically opening up the mice was the only way to clean the rollers), and in suites where two rows of computers were placed back to back, doing various combinations of KVM swapping.

Schools are also a great place to learn about backup routines and restoring from tape ("You think you last had it three months ago? Bad luck - we only keep two weeks worth of backups!"), plus password resets (in two schools, passwords for the administration network were set to the users' DoB as the staff tended to forget their passwords more frequently than the pupils...)

Oh, and the eternal game of cat-and-mouse with the web filters...

mittfh wrote: keyboards with the letters "creatively" rearranged (usually so the QWERTY row instead spells out a variety of four letter words, but one enterprising pupil had somehow managed to move every letter one place to the right without being noticed - now THAT's creativity!),

Do you think that's bad? I'll give you... the Internationally Messed-Up Keyboard Layout.

First, let's establish a bit of background. Back in the Eighties and early Nineties there was no standard layout for Brazilian Portuguese keyboards. A few computer makers attempted to create their own layouts, but they didn't catch (in part because they were really, really stupid). Most people used US-layout keyboards (there were a log of gray-market computers with smuggled parts -- including keyboards -- going around), using a variety of tricks to be able to type accented characters (eventually, with the rise of Windows, they settled on using the US-International layout -- Microsoft even made it the default for Brazilian editions of Windows for a while)

But there WAS a Portuguese (Iberian) layout, which sometimes got imported to Brazil. It wasn't a bad layout, but it was pretty rare around here. And eventually, a Brazilian standard (different from the Portuguese standard in a number of details which weren't obvious at first glance).

Well...a customer asked me to look at their computer which was "acting up," with several keys behaving oddly. I promptly realized that Windows was set up to use the US-International layout, despite the computer having what seemed to be a Brazilian keyboard (the big hint was the "Ç" key besides the "L"). I changed the layout... the "Ç" key started working, but there were other keys that did not work correctly. At some point I thought that it might be the uncommon Portuguese layout and tried THAT one... and it was still messed up.

Eventually I figured out the problem: they had a Portuguese layout keyboard, but the computer was set up (as per the common default of the time) as US-International. Some enterprising worker attempted to "fix" the issue by moving the keycaps around... resulting in a layout that didn't match EITHER the Brazilian or Portuguese layouts.

By the way, don't get me started on French keyboards. That's the stupidest layout I have ever seen. Not because the AZERTY thing -- that I can forgive. But who the hell thought it would be a good idea to have the comma and period in the uppercase block? And a lot of other inconvenient stuff. I hear that back before laptops took over most of the market, there was a fairly good market for Portuguese-layout keyboards in France -- because it's actually MUCH EASIER to type in French with a Portuguese keyboard than with the French one.

I remember back in the day also Sir Lee that companies would sell stickies you could put on keys with whatever language they were setting it up for.

From my understanding Asian, Chinese, Japanese and such were one of the hardest as they used a hiragana system.

Just doing a search for images, ugh.

Oh and congrats on figuring out what the problem was.

Yeah being in Canada we have our keyboards set with a bi-lingual option. As a result if you aren't careful you can find the keys switched to the other language. Usually right in the middle of typing something.

Anyways back in the dark ages, ie when I was learning to be a tech, we had had some really good hackers, most were semi-harmless but one guy just loved playing jokes. Like remapping keyboards, just before you needed the computer in question to print out your 20 page report. He'd remap keys like reversing 'c' and 'v', or 'r' and 't' so when you looked at it, it wasn't obvious just looked like a simple typo. So you'd retype your password again to log in, and again. Then call IT to reset your password, which still wouldn't work. By this time the practical joker would be sniggering so loud you'd figure out that he was responsible.

My revenge involved rewiring his project so he ended up passing 7000 volts from a bad set of transformers through his oscilloscope when he expected to be seeing 700 mV output.

Hey I asked him if he checked everything before he turned it on. I love the smell of burning resistors in the morning.

Still was better than my idiot lab partner, I think he was trying to kill me and a few other people. Was working on 230/440 3 phase circuit and something went odd. I check everything and think I see the problem, so I tell my partner to switch off the power. He said 'power's off', so I reach in and BLAM. I end up looking at the ceiling on the bench behind me, my arms hurt and there's a odd taste in my mouth. After I checked myself out, I asked my idiot lab partner how do you spell 'off', when he spelled it correctly I asked why was the power 'on' when he told me it was 'off'. His response was 'I dunno'. I then tried beating some sense into him with a 800 page textbook. He left the course after he handed someone a charged 1800v capacitor contacts first. This was my beginning of my ever growing lack of faith in humanity.

I'm a Linux Sys Admin. While in college for networking and tech support, I had a classmate in my Linux 201 course run: root rm -r * THREE SEPARATE TIMES. For those not familiar with Linux command line operations, this is like going into Windows on the Admin account and deleting the System32 folder. He failed that class.

lduke1990 wrote: I'm a Linux Sys Admin. While in college for networking and tech support, I had a classmate in my Linux 201 course run: root rm -r * THREE SEPARATE TIMES. For those not familiar with Linux command line operations, this is like going into Windows on the Admin account and deleting the System32 folder. He failed that class.

Sounds like someone I knew in my course that ran [deltree *.*] to get rid of unwanted files on the advice of the joker hacker in my class.

Ah the good old MS-DOS days.

Which reminds me I need to get caught up on my Bastard Operator From Hell reading. I wish I could've gotten away with a hundredth of what the BOFH gets away with.

lduke1990 wrote: I'm a Linux Sys Admin. While in college for networking and tech support, I had a classmate in my Linux 201 course run: root rm -r * THREE SEPARATE TIMES.

Tune: Camptown Races

rm -rf *
Doo dah, doo dah!
rm -rf *
Doo doo dah day!

At least most Linux systems will prevent you doing sudo -rf /* (the approximate equivalent of deltree /y c: - delete everything on the hard drive [worse: any mounted drive / partition you have write access to]) - but of course running sudo rm -rf * in any folder is not a good idea: remove recursively (i.e. in this folder and all subfolders) with force (don't ask for confirmation) * (standard wildcard meaning everything).