81–90 of 97 posts
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> As soon as you bring up a refund/warranty errand with the retailer they will offer a 50% discount for the battery in return for you not giving them a 1-star rating. Wait how is that supposed to work - why would you buy another bad battery from them at 50% off? why would they have any say in why review you leave?
I believe it was a 50% refund on the (purchased) battery; not a 50% off coupon on another. That's how I read it anyway.
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Indeed. Force the seller to be the retailer itself and see if you still have this problem... Any other seller is (at a glance) indistinguishable as a legitimate business or a scalper/scammer.. and there's plenty of legitimate businesses operating in the grey area in-between too.
ok, then. A hardware solution. These drives are not mechanicaly serviceable, at least by meer mortals. So pot everything, with all of the fasteners and ports, injection molded with simple breakaway covers, that get removed by snapping them off, little holograms torn, it is now evidentialy used. It wont be worth the effort refurbish in such a way as to look new. got to be worth the trivial extra effort by an oem, just…
Documentation is easy to find online. There's commands giving access to a lot of functionality. Modifying SMART values is trivially done.
Thus, they likely wrote a script that gets the job done in seconds. Attach device to hdd and remove when LED turns red. Done, next.
Seagate could make this a little harder, but hasn't. This is likely the case only because nobody has abused this at a scale before.
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Targeted ads aren't the only kind of ads. Disregarding for a moment that you can do some amount of targetting without collecting PII too.
Some sites can do that. E.g. Hacker News would easily be able to do targeted advertising without collecting any data because it's a self-selected audience. Even someone like The Verge could probably do a decent job (just advertise games and tech stuff). But what the hell would The New York Times advertise? They're back at TV-style cars and perfume advertising which isn't profitable enough to sustain most businesses.…
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Lets look at one regulated area of the EU. Color coding of cables. Colors are defined by what they are used for and their voltage and amp allowed levels. In the USA black can be source while red can be ground, highly deregulated area. EU allows for ease of maintenance because opening the electrical cover allows for quick glimpse of what wires do what. In the US, you need access to the production manual, or a lot of t…
> In the US, you need access to the production manual, or a lot of time with a multi-meter, to know what that black wire really does. This saves money and time by having color coding standards, for the manufacturer and consumer. Excellent example. Let's suppose you pass a law requiring the red wire to be source and the black wire to be ground. Now you go to manufacture your new solar battery system. The system has wi…
Apollo private equity buys a respected but financially struggling baby food company and starts putting asbestos in it to cut costs. After kids start getting sick, nobody really feels better that asbestos was listed on the label and that the free market is going to correct it.
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> In the US, you need access to the production manual, or a lot of time with a multi-meter, to know what that black wire really does. This saves money and time by having color coding standards, for the manufacturer and consumer. Excellent example. Let's suppose you pass a law requiring the red wire to be source and the black wire to be ground. Now you go to manufacture your new solar battery system. The system has wi…
> Listing asbestos as an ingredient is not likely to garner a lot of sales. Apollo private equity buys a respected but financially struggling baby food company and starts putting asbestos in it to cut costs. After kids start getting sick, nobody really feels better that asbestos was listed on the label and that the free market is going to correct it.
Not everyone reads the label, but enough people do that it would be discovered on the first day, if not before the first day as some retailers check for label changes before putting a modified product on their shelves. Any retailer who didn't notice this to begin with would then notice the front page story condemning the company for doing it and all of the products would be removed from the shelves and returned to the manufacturer to save the retailer from the reputation hit of carrying it in their store. The manufacturer's reputation would be destroyed and no one would be willing to carry their products, depriving them of the incentive to do this because it would immediately tank the company, and this would be an obvious outcome to private equity firms who want to make rather than lose money.
Notice that you can currently buy things like arsenic for use as rat poison and this is not a problem because the label tells you that it's arsenic so you know not to use it as a food additive.
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This has happened to me on eBay twice for items marked as "free returns" which claimed to have a hassle-free return process. My response was that they're obligated to return full price, or they can expect me to open a claim with eBay to get it, and that I am for sure giving negative feedback! Both times they caved and gave me 100% refund and told me to just keep the broken item. I still gave negative feedback. I'm no…
> Both times they caved and gave me 100% refund and told me to just keep the broken item. This is because eBay will ALWAYS side with the customer, and the seller will get a ding to boot. Never ever do a return with Chinese sellers, they will use it against you and you will lose your chance to dispute the transaction. If you are sold junk complain to the seller, then if they don't refund you go ahead and raise a dispu…
Well - that’s not my experience!
Case 1 Packages lost, no track’n’trace one vendor sent order once more for no charge, another om gave a 50% discount
Case 2 Product defect, returned it and later received the refund (matching their t&c)
Case 3 (different, but shows customer service is working as expected) Wrong item received Full refund received
In all cases I initiated a dialog, not just posted a bed review (‘keeping the leverage’)
So maybe SOME Chinese shops misbehave, but for sure US and EU shops are similar…
AliExpress is the shop in question…
Just don’t think all are the same !!!
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Some sites can do that. E.g. Hacker News would easily be able to do targeted advertising without collecting any data because it's a self-selected audience. Even someone like The Verge could probably do a decent job (just advertise games and tech stuff). But what the hell would The New York Times advertise? They're back at TV-style cars and perfume advertising which isn't profitable enough to sustain most businesses.…
Fairly sure the New York Times carried adverts for decades before computers existed