Fixing Macs door to door • Hacker News Board

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#171

Post by themadturk » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

sq_ wrote: post #164

yardie wrote: post #96

One of the things I miss by reading this post is how empowered CSRs were back in those days. Today, everything is scripted and highly metricized. Going through the customer service line today will get you the run around and lot of toothless solutions. No one can do anything and even "escalation" mostly means handing you off to another powerless CSR to continue the runaround. This post reminds me of my youth. I had a…

It does seem like Apple and a few other companies still manage to do a half-decent job today. It takes a lot of running around through the phone tree and putting up with people going through the long script of solutions you already tried, but if you can get a few rungs up the escalation ladder you get to people who can make things happen, still. Definitely not the same as it was, though :(

I've had several opportunities to experience AppleCare+, both remotely and at Apple Stores, and have to say they've all been satisfactory. My most recent repair was after a bunch of things came rapidly together to cause milk to spill on my MacBook Air keyboard. I took the machine in the Apple Store, they dispatched it to the repair facility and took my credit card information to cover the $300 deductible. The machine was in repair for less than a day, and the charge to my credit card was only $100. AppleCare+ is the only extended warranty that's been worth the money.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#172

Post by someguydave » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

SoKamil wrote: post #137

Jonmade wrote: post #118

Reading these stories about fixing Macs in the 90s is like unearthing a treasure trove of tech lore. Who would have thought that a day job could lead to encounters with high society, complete with inkjet printers turning into unexpected smoke machines, and a twist of fate leading to a starring role in the world of digital piracy? It's fascinating how these tales intertwine technology with the thrill of adventure, alm…

Did you use LLM to write this comment? It felt a little bit unnatural to my eye so I put it into gptzero and it spit out a 91% of probability that this was generated.

is he engagement farming?

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#173

Post by rmason » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:04 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #95

rmason wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very important to know the area. Because I grew up in Detroit I know where to go and where not to go. Downtown the billionaire Dan Gilbert owns a huge chunk of buildings. He has his own security force and cameras literally covering every square inch. It's worth it to know exactly where those cameras end because the criminals do and that is where you are most often to encounter them.

Keep in mind that cameras don't mean anything in today's world because law enforcement doesn't care about any crime short of a murder. Maybe cameras still have a chilling effect on law-abiding people but criminals have since wisened up to it.

I cannot speak to other areas but in Detroit cameras have made a huge difference. In Gilbert's case he wants the area around his buildings safe. Detroit police are understaffed but Gilbert's cops augment the force and work closely with them. It matters to them if someone gets mugged or assaulted and they have the manpower to keep up. I've left bars at 2 am and walked to my car feeling very safe. I cannot say that about SF or Chicago anymore.

Detroit police have launched Operation Greenlight and placed cameras with cooperating merchants mostly gas stations where a high levels of crimes occur. Part of the agreement with the merchant is they promise a high level of response when there's a crime in progress. Detroit dropping down the national list on carjackings I believe is a direct result of Operation Greenlight.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#174

Post by qingcharles » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

refulgentis wrote: post #162

qingcharles wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird, I must have repaired hundreds of computers. Hundreds of backups, reinstalls, but never once did I come across any porn. This was around 1995 though, so it was very early days of the Internet, and pre-digital cameras. Now, in the early 2000s I had to buy dozens of smartphones to test out an SMS relay (SMSC). I bought them all on eBay. Like 70% of them had homemade porn of the owners on them still...!

The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it. yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

This was 2004 through 2005.

This was the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925205401/http://txtstar.co...

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#175

Post by refulgentis » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #169

refulgentis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it. yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

Early 2000’s we’re talking phones like the Nokia 6600 https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nokia-6600-review/ > You can also capture the moment on video with the handset's video recorder, which renders brief (10-second), fuzzy images and lo-fi audio. The 6600 stores clips as QCIF files in resolutions of either 176x144 or 128x96, and you can play them using the phone's onboard RealOne player. We got an undeniable kick out of…

That's why serial exaggerators are corrosive to a community. Yeah, did phones with a video camera exist? Yup. You would have had to be there, know the 8-step fermi estimate chain for the likelihood for a multitude of reasons. (ex. these were slow, terrible beasts extremely difficult to use, they'd very rarely be a heat of the moment option, and if you were preparing, there were a multitude of 100x quality options that anyone who had a video shooting phone then would have had)

Even then you have no defense for taking them too literally, there could be 1000 reasons you're actually just angry and taking it out on them, have a personal dislike, etc.

Another way to talk about why it's clear: inter-alia, multiple rich "bored housewives" throwing themselves at computer repairmen is about as likely as obtaining multiple smart phones with video capabilities and videos and selfshot porn videos on them in the early 2000s. Much less when you start throwing stuff in like "actually I was warned of [the housewives x computer repairman problem] before I took the job!" Lmao.

Usually you wanna be thinking about the cumulative probability of what they say, not the one-off probability.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#176

Post by NoZebra120vClip » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:10 PM UTC

christoph wrote: post #92

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That job put me in contact with a criminal gang who went on to supply with me dozens of GBs of stolen hard drives that I used to create what was probably the largest warez FTP Statements like this seem to agree with the anti-piracy groups' narrative about piracy being closely related to organized crime, a claim that initially seemed questionable to me.

Back in the VCD/SVCD/DVD/PS1/PS2 days, piracy was absolutely heavily interwoven with organised criminal gangs. I couldn’t comment on the current state, but I’d be surprised if there was enough money in media piracy for organised crime to even glance at it, given the vast and easy profits now available in narcotics and fraud. “HK silvers” were industrially pressed and printed CDs and DVDS you could buy in any market s…

Well, I had personal contact with several large-scale pirates, and AFAIK, they were not involved with organized crime, they were merely well-placed to do high volume transactions.

My first job I had a peer, a low-level contracting employee. We worked in the NOC of a regional ISP. Therefore our backbone was a powerful T1-T3 in the early 90s, and we had comparatively massive storage capacity. This fellow was basically college-age, and he amassed a gigantic repository of pirated software which he termed "AHAB". Most of the other staff in the office knew about his AHAB repository, and he distributed the stuff via anonymous FTP. Often we would partake in such AHAB hauls, but I tried to stay away and stay ignorant of the inner machinations of this stuff. I was ostensibly a legit employee for a legit ISP.

Then not too much later, still mid-90s, I went to work for a VAR of SPARCstation clones. The IT boss guy was a prolific pornographer. He was well-known on the relevant Usenet groups by a pseudonym. I had no trouble figuring out his identity, and his office was obviously set up so coworkers couldn't find out about all the porn he viewed on the job. His big Sauder desk was facing the door and the monitor was not visible by anyone in the room except him. So he also took advantage of the employer's decent Internet connection and our sizeable Novell storage network, to store his porn and trade it, I guess for free, with other Usenet posters.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#177

Post by Aachen » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:17 PM UTC

febeling wrote: post #86

Reminds me that what we really crave is authenticity. It’s the number one rule for writing. Also shows why AI content is so pointless.

Interesting remark to me. I was thinking the whole time what parts may be made up. I'm a really bad judge of sarcasm, let alone actually dishonest content. In the end I'm inclined to believe the whole thing, but it's not particularly authentic, just quite different from my life and therefore interesting. (Some parallels also, as I've done computer fixing for some friends of friends.)

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#178

Post by Nextgrid » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:25 PM UTC

smith7018 wrote: post #131

qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

I also did this in the 2000s and while it was fun to peer into their lives, the amount of porn I was forced to see on elderly people's machines was... not great. Especially during those rare occurrences where they wanted to watch what I was doing to "learn how to use the computer." Just awkward all around.

Had a similar experience. Long ago when I was younger and poorer I offered IT support on my country's equivalent of Craigslist.

Fairly well-off elderly chap wanted me to fix his laptop - was an underpowered machine that somehow got Vista installed on it (but no graphics drivers, so everything was in 640x480) so was unusably slow.

Now the proper answer to that would be to just tell him to buy a new computer, but I didn't want to let him down so I figured this machine might be salvageable with a lightweight Linux distro.

Couple months pass by and then I get a call. He's asking why videos aren't working. I ask him what website it was - "double-you double-you double-you... dot... x... hamster... dot com".

Now I didn't particularly care about his extracurricular activities, got him to curl|bash a script I wrote on the spot to get SSH access and installed the Flash player I forgot and sent him on his way. I was surprised he'd just openly admit to it though.

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#179

Post by lannisterstark » Sat, Jan 06, 2024, 11:35 PM UTC

wnolens wrote: post #128

qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

I did window cleaning in the 2000s and went inside many rich folks homes. It was my favorite part of the job. But I had a much different experience. They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives, and very proud of their homes which were often fully custom to their spec. Most had built a successful business. Perhaps my curiosity went a long way to flatter them, or they saw themselves in me - young and h…

>They were kind, more humanizing than middle class housewives

Honestly most "rich rich" people I've come across are like that. Most "snobby" rich people are not honestly that rich at all, comparatively, or are very new money etc. (think of "dude who sold their startup for 20 million").

Re: Fixing Macs door to door

#180

Post by matheusmoreira » Sun, Jan 07, 2024, 1:16 AM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #48

I did this in the mid 90s. It was really fun to see inside a lot of rich people's houses, the sort that have libraries so big they need those ladders with wheels on to scoot around. I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe. One American woman had brought her inkjet from the USA and I hooked it up to a decent convertor, but it wasn't one that converted the frequen…

> I was hit on by several bored housewives, including one that answered the door in her open robe.

Not sure I believe that.