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O Holy Crap

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Re: O Holy Crap

#191

Post by ejb999 »

crystaln wrote: post #130
ejb999 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, bulbs are now all complete crap - they used to last decades. Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed. Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace…

What kind of bulbs are you using? LED bulbs should last a decade.

my led bulbs in the house are burning out every 18 months or so - no way they last 10 years - not even close.

Re: O Holy Crap

#192

Post by Damogran6 »

eternityforest wrote: post #186
Damogran6 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a nespresso Machine last year...worked great....hooked up to Wifi and the phone app and had it firmware update and it turned it into a brick. They sent me a replacement that works great and is entirely ignorant of the outside world (and will stay that way.)

Are you on a network with some kind of firewalling or tracker blocking? I wonder if they are programmed to stop working if they can't phone home after exiting dumb mode? Or if there's an activation step they never planned to need recovery from failure of?

I don’t think it was intentional, talking to their tech support, there was no way to restore it to function. I suspect a bricked firmware update.

Re: O Holy Crap

#193

Post by mschuster91 »

eternityforest wrote: post #67
jtbayly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metal, vs plastic gears. Bigger vs tiny electric motor. Metal vs plastic moving parts in contact with the fruit. Plug-in vs battery powered. These are the things that I would place money on as the reasons the 70 year old one is still functioning, and none sold today will work in 5 years. (I’ve never looked at one of these items. I’m just guessing. But I’d still place money on it.)

Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then. Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big. The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode. The trouble is findi…

> The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts.

Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the current surges due to reaching the end position. The problem is, they also use cheap-ass plastic gears on an apparently pretty strong motor... my old Surefeed from five years ago is still going strong, but the newer revision (which is, admittedly, easier to clean) failed after not even a year because the motor had shred the gears and could no longer detect if the lid was fully closed or opened, making noise for so long that the cat refused to use it.

Fucking hell, these things cost 150€+ apiece. Two contact switches and wiring would have cost them less than ten cents. Now they have to pay for the cost of handling the warranty claim... but I'd rather like to have a well-designed product in the first place.

(Oh, and it doesn't like rechargeable C cell batteries either, because they apparently saved the dollar that would have given them a boost voltage regulator, so you're stuck buying disposable alkaline batteries)

Re: O Holy Crap

#194

Post by Damogran6 »

inkcapmushroom wrote: post #187
Damogran6 wrote: post #166

I think there are a LOT of societal ills with sending too many people to College...who then get MBAs. You're going to want to use what you earned, right? So you're gonna maximize profit and shareholder value. Individually, none of them are particularly egregous. A little less sugar for your dollar, a sticky subscription on your credit card, A Washing machine that doesn't QUITE live as long as it should. But in aggreg…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir Those MBA types have been cutting corners on quality for a while...

It’s not that it’s been happening, it’s that it’s happening in such volume.

Re: O Holy Crap

#195

Post by ejb999 »

oblio wrote: post #110
ejb999 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, bulbs are now all complete crap - they used to last decades. Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed. Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace…

Your anecdata is bad. Even after the conspiracy was discovered, incandescent bulbs still had a much lower life expectancy than LED lights. It's simple physics :-)

perhaps in theory - not in real life.

Re: O Holy Crap

#196

Post by lodi »

wonderwonder wrote: post #122
nosianu wrote: post #82

I don't quite know what to say to what I found near the end in this article: > Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)... I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads: > looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sha…

You are right but this very much reinforces the saying "it's very expensive to be poor". $99 for a coffee grinder is a lot of money for most people. At the US minimum wage it's almost 17 hours of work, after taxes are taken out. So all they can afford is the cheaper version but then they have to consistently purchase a new one so end up paying more over time. Pretty interesting phenomenon.

Vimes' boots theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Re: O Holy Crap

#197

Post by reallydontask »

collinvandyck76 wrote: post #38

Under the Christmas tree this year: another Cuisinart electric kettle. Same model as always, this year recommended by wirecutter. They last two to three years and then break in various ways. This is our third one :( My dad gave me the advice "buy cheap now and be guaranteed to buy it again at least once if not more, or wait, save up, and buy the more expensive thing only once" as I was becoming an adult. I've tried t…

I've heard it as:

buy cheap, buy twice

Unfortunately, it seems that now it's:

buy expensive, get some shitty cloud enabled feature, still buy twice.

Re: O Holy Crap

#198

Post by mschuster91 »

bumby wrote: post #133
eternityforest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then. Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big. The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode. The trouble is findi…

> I would gladly use 10k lines of code to save one moving part or one switch This creates a whole new reliability problem. Software reliability is notorious for its interface failures and there can be many more of those modes (where hardware typically has a few wear-out style failures). I think about my relatively high-end TV that seems to always struggle with software updates without any glitches. It seems like we'v…

> It seems like we've just been lulled into accepting software glitches as the price of having software control everything. Luckily, most of the software is not safety critical.

And the thing is, somehow every vendor seems to skip out on ensuring a working out-of-band upgrade process - despite U-Boot bringing everything you need with it to provide recovery via whatever means you want. Ethernet, USB, a serial debug port... hell, I did A/B partition support and bootloader checks with a watchdog years ago, hacked together in an afternoon but able to first attempt booting from the fresh firmware, if that failed three times it would attempt the B partition containing the old image, and if that failed it would attempt booting from a recovery partition that was intelligent enough to bring up the base board with enough networking to be able to bring up a web server and accept a signed firmware image.

Or, if that's too complex, a fucking button that the user has to hold and it will boot into the recovery image directly.

It's not rocket science, it's not even much effort, all you need is a fucking week at least and a couple of cents for a switch. Pure penny pinching, and I hate companies that produce hardware that can turn to e-waste because of it.

Re: O Holy Crap

#199

Post by JoeAltmaier »

unregistereddev wrote: post #173
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. My three-generation appliance store sold me a fancy dishwasher that wouldn't release soap - the little door jammed against the wire rack in operation, opened a quarter inch and finished with a wad of gummy soap still inside. No way it could ever work. The store claimed it was 'supposed to work that way'. Lame.

I've seen this problem before. While it's not a smart design, it usually works. Your racks are likely not pushed all the way into the dishwasher. It's possibly an installation problem; if the dishwasher is not level, gravity will pull the racks towards the door. Try adjusting the feet under the kickplate to raise the front of the dishwasher.

Nah. I returned it, for one that didn't need me to fix it's defects.

Re: O Holy Crap

#200

Post by bingaling »

crystaln wrote: post #146

Pyrex is a great example of the problem here. Original PYREX was borosilicate glass which is extremely resistant to shattering due to temperature differences and therefore excellent for cooking. The brand and reputation of quality was established. Time to profit. The brand was sold and gutted. The material was replaced with cheaper soda lime glass, which if you google “exploding Pyrex” you will discover is dangerousl…

Yep confirming/restating, for kitchenware, lowercase pyrex == tempered, capital PYREX == borosilicate.
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