What? Are you stupid?

Our society has gotten totally over-dependant on being able to go through life with their brains turned-off. It's called "common sense" - use it, people...

Swoopo TV auction screenshot

The site I stumbled upon is called Swoopo. It's an "entertainment shopping" site that at first glance, appears to be a fairly normal auction site with one exception: their prices are VERY low. I looked around the site and it's well designed and even gives you some fancy AJAX type real-time clocks showing time remaining on bids and other tidbits of information. I even found one particular Samsung 46" LCD TV I was interested in and the bid was only $132. Very interesting!

However, in the interest of figuring-out what's going-on, I didn't sign-up and bid. Instead I watched. And watched. And am still watching. Let's just call it the Neverending Auction...

That TV auction I found at 9:05pm on March 29, with only 30 seconds left to bid is STILL going right now, March 30 at 1:30pm. Every time someone bids on the TV, the time is extended anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

And therein lies the genius of Swoopo as a cash generator for its owners.

You see, the auction in question is a "penny auction". This means that every bid raises the auction only 1 cent. Of course, that means that with the bid increment only being a penny, people bid constantly, thus constantly adding time to the auction. It's always in a state of "almost done!" but never gets there.

No problem right? So the auction drags-on for weeks until the hard-end date of April 30 (yes, over a month after I discovered the auction - who knows when it started).

If you read Swoopo's site, you'll see that every bid costs the bidder 75 cents. So, to have your chance at the $200 TV, you raise the bid 1 cent and pay 75 cents in fees. Of course, since the price of the TV is now only 1 cent higher, there are dozens of other users ready to out-bid you, and they do, raising the bid price 1 cent and paying their 75 cents. And the process repeats ad nauseum.

So, let's stop and think about the money involved here. Just using the time that I discovered this particular auction last night when it was $132 and right now as I type this, it's at $208.20. Since each bid only raises the price one penny, we can thus calculate that there have been 7,620 bids just since I've been watching. 7,620 bids at 75 cents each is $5,715 in bid fees alone! And, the auction potentially has weeks to continue taking 75 cent bids!

Imagine if you're Swoopo. You could walk down to your local WorstBuy or any other store and paid the full retail price of $1800 to buy that TV and even if you sold it for the current $208.20 bid price, you'd still have pocketed over $4,000 in pure profit (again, remember that these numbers are just since last night - if the auction opened at $0.01 bid, the number is much higher)! And, it's very likely that the bid price will get driven-up another couple hundred bucks (minimum) thus adding several thousand more dollars in profit from people doing "entertainment shopping".

Anyway, this is genius level stuff from the Swoopo guys and one of those "wish I had thought of it" ideas. The penny auctions give the impression that it's cheaper and easier to bid, when in reality, it works against the bidder who has to constantly re-bid, at 75 cents a pop, to try to stay at the top of the penny pile. For every $100 the bid price goes-up, Swoopo makes $7,500 in bid fees. If that TV in this example goes to $500, sure it'll be a good deal for the winner, but Swoopo will have made more than another $18,000 in bid fees. They got the better end of the bargain IMO.

Oh how I wish I would have thought of that idea...

Digital Apollo book covers the computer technology of the Apollo space missions

One of the amazing pieces of technology which resulted from their work was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) on-board computer which helped the Apollo missions navigate properly. These ancient (in computer time) machines were built from individual transistors and used a type of memory almost nobody has heard of which uses magnetic coils wrapped around a piece of iron. The AGC processor module even had interrupts like modern processors, which allowed certain events to grab the computer's attention for immediate handling.

These computers weight upwards of 70 pounds and had the computing power available today in a small $2 AVR or PIC microcontroller. It's amazing how far computers have come in the past several decades. Yet, while I do enjoy using microcontrollers to build my projects, there's something "utilitarian" about them -- they're not exciting or pushing the envelope like the Apollo Guidance Computer did. Those engineers that got to work on the Apollo missions truly were leading the charge into the future and we are the benefactors of their work today.

Check-out Digital Apollo and read the excerpts to decide if you want to take a tiny step back in time.

Thanks to SparkFun for letting me know this book is available.

Many of you have already heard about the issues with the Seagate 1TB hard drive firmware problems. Basically, if you are affected by the bug, you will not be able to access ANY data on the drive. It's a MAJOR problem that affects a HUGE number of Seagate users.

So, as one would expect, Seagate should provide reasonable support to fix a design defect in their own products, right?

Well, the common knowledge base article from Seagate mentions the bare drives that you would install directly in a computer. What they don't mention, however, is their extensive line of external drives and how they are affected.

I recently bought a 1TB FreeAgent Xtreme and can't find any information on the status of the firmware for the drive, so AS INSTRUCTED, I e-mailed them with my serial number, firmware version, etc. Here is my e-mail:

Hi,

I recently bought:

FreeAgent Xtreme 1TB ST310005FPA2E3-RK
Serial: [deleted]
Revision: 4115

The Drive Detect program does not tell me what model drive is inside the case.

Do I need to update the firmware for the recent issues?

Thanks,
Mike

I purposely made my e-mail clear and concise since I know they are inundated with e-mail regarding this support issue.

And, you're wondering, what was their reply? Their reply was COMPLETELY USELESS and indicates they did not even read the information I provided AT THEIR REQUEST!

from DiscSupport@seagate.com
reply-to donotreply@seagate.com
to
date Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 7:18 PM
subject Seagate Firmware Update
mailed-by seagate.com

hide details 7:18 PM (1 hour ago)

Reply

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data
becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected
products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return
data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is.
However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is
offering a free firmware upgrade.

Please follow this link
(http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931)
to enter the Knowledge Base article(s) detailing the steps to update your
drive.

In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your
data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss
associated with this issue. If your drive is no longer accessible, contact
us directly for further assistance at

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

NOTE: If you have contacted Seagate Support regarding a separate issue or
about another product, please visit
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ to submit an email.
Thank you.

Seagate Support

Hmmm... OK, so they are providing me with the EXACT SAME information I was reading when I got the e-mail address to send a message to if my question is not addressed by the KB article.

Fail, Seagate, you fail. Your tech support is truly as bad as I've heard on every review site. Cross me off your customer list if you can't do better than this crap. I don't need to take the time to find and include my serial number/etc. in an e-mail as you requested only to have it completely ignored and receive a generic, complete garbage cut-and-paste response. No wonder your reputation is falling like a rock.

Oh, and let me say that I know a bit about "support" since I work in the field.

Anyway, that is my response to their "response" (and I barely give them that). If they won't even read my e-mail I took the time to send, I will make sure that everyone I possibly can communicate with knows this and not to expect any sort of real support when buying a Seagate product. All of the other reviews that you've read regarding Seagate's incredibly poor tech support - they're true and this is the proof.

Mike

Because all they are talking about is the frickin' iPhone!!!! Everywhere! Every nook and cranny - every website large or small... iPhone, iPhone, iPhone!

Stupid photos of people waiting in line to buy them -- and not just in one place! People standing in line have been photographed from the largest stores in New York to armpit-ville Arizona.

There are disassembly photos (which were interesting the first time). There are SIM change articles. There are scratch test articles. And there are MORE photos of people standing in line and wearing T-shirts that say "iGot iPhone".

Enough already! I love gadgets and I do like Apple stuff and own several of their products, but come-on people. Do we really need 100% iPhone coverage on every site? It reminds me of when I'm trying to watch TV and the idiot presidential speeches are on and blocking everything I want to watch on every channel.
[Vent mode off]

OK, I'm going to try to calm-down... I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had enough, though!

I'm one of those people who records several bits of information every time I fill-up with gas. Typically, this allows me to compute my mileage and that's about it, but recently, I sold my 2004 Mazda Tribute ES (a re-badged Ford Escape) and decided to have a look at the historical data and see if it would make some interesting graphs.

First, and probably of the most interest to the general population is my graph of the cost of gasoline over the past several years. Most of the fill-ups were done in the same general geographic region (northern Colorado) with an occasional fill-up in Denver or Vail. Typically, you can spot these atypical fill-ups by the size of the fill-up and the number of days since the last one, as the drive to the mountains is around 350 miles each way.

Notice how short the "down" price periods are compared to the "OMG, there's a gas shortage!" periods are. No wonder the oil companies are getting rich and really look like scammers.

The Tribute/Escape is considered a "small SUV" and compared to the behemoth Yukons and Excursions, they are indeed small. Because of that, you'd think that it would get significantly better gas mileage than its larger cousins, but that just isn't really true. You see, Ford was still using a 10-year old engine design in the 2004 models, and without the variable valves and other technological innovations that tend to happen over a TEN YEAR timespan, the engine was, well, a guzzler for its size. The Duratec V6 really showed its age as it dipped to 12 MPG during the winters!

So, I then wondered if I tended to drive any less when the price of gasoline went-up. Apparently, since I generally drive to work and back and rarely take "optional" lengthy drives, my use is relatively steady regardless of the price per gallon.

So, there you have it. Real-world mileage from a small SUV driven for real reasons by a real person. Not quite what the EPA ratings of 18/23 on the sticker would indicate. It's a good thing they're re-doing the MPG rating system in 2008.

And, if you're really interested, here is my 2004 Mazda Tribute ES V6 AWD Automatic PDF which includes the graphs and the data I used. Please note that I'm not a statistician, so if there's a mistake or some other data I can compute, let me know and I'll see if I can fix/add it.

Allright - maybe it's not a big crime and actually I find it more funny than anything. I live in Fort Collins, CO which is a smallish college town in northern Colorado. The town is very often rated a "top place to live" in some major list every year. For example, the last list, produced by CNN Money, declared the town the #1 place to live.

So, I found it amusing when I saw the car in the photos below. This old Explorer has been sitting on a corner that I drive-by daily for over a month. Presumably, it's for sale although you wouldn't know it due to the lack of obvious signs. However, from time to time, I've seen people who stopped and were inspecting it. Nothing out of the ordinary.

That is, until this past weekend. Apparently, the stock wheels that the Explorer had are a valuable commodity. As I drove to work on Monday, I saw the now-common sight of the white car sitting on the corner. As I approached it, however, I noticed that the wheels were missing. Somebody stole the stock wheels and left it sitting in the dirt!

As if that isn't funny enough, apparently the genius(es) who perpetrated this heinous crime in the fine city of Fort Collins, weren't paying enough attention and let the car fall onto the jack they were using, which can still be seen sitting under the front "wheel". I guess that nothing is free and they paid for the wheels with the jack.

For more Colorado car craziness, check this article.

In this era of "the customer is always wrong" and total concentration on short-term quarterly profits and greed by companies, I had begun to think that the concept of customer service is really dead. Actually, more than a few times, I've been known to say that the only leverage we have as customers in American society today is the ability to dispute a payment on a credit card. A recent call to Logitech, my preferred brand of keyboards and mice for many years, proved to be a very pleasant and positive experience, so maybe we cannot announce that Mr. Customer Service is in the pine box quite yet. Here's the story...

When Logitech announced the G15 "gamer's keyboard" I knew I wanted one. It has a nice LCD display on it, which games, media players, or other applications can display data on (for example, iTunes will display the song title, artist, etc.) along with a nice rotary encoder volume control and the usual media control keys. It has a bank of 18 programmable macro keys, which I admittedly don't use a ton but can be handy for automating things. However, the killer feature that I had to have was the backlight!

I had the keyboard backlight option on my Apple Powerbook and I loved it. Like most gamers or computer nerds, I often exist in a room that has dim lighting as a matter of preference when viewing a computer screen. The Powerbook's keys were illuminated such that the letters actually lit-up unlike the cheap LED keyboards you often find which just have light coming from around the edges of the keys. Well, the new Logitech G15 had the same kind of backlighting except it'd be for my desktop machine -- it was now officially on my "buy" list.

When the keyboard was released, I found a decent sale on it, so I grabbed one of the very early releases of the keyboard. It arrived and everything was great. The software, even though it was version 1, worked as expected and didn't give me any problems. Various cool little applications began appearing to display things on the LCD and my current addiction, errr, game of choice, World of Warcraft, even introduced official support for the display in the 1.11 patch. I was happy with my new ultra deluxe keyboard.

Skip forward about six months to a couple of weeks ago. My G15 has been performing completely as expected, which is pretty much what a keyboard should do. However, I'm noticing on the keys that I frequently use, the black coating is starting to wear thin and in some cases, making the letters just a blurry mess when backlit. I could see that the keys themselves are made of a translucent plastic that is then coated with a black, opaque coating to block the blue backlight except where it's desired. Hmm... I was thinking that for a $75 premium keyboard, this should not be happening.

I went to the Logitech website and found a customer service phone number to call. They had fairly standard hours and naturally, when I was calling (from one timezone over) they were closed. I called-back the next morning and within a couple telephone button presses to answer brief questions ("are you using Windows or OS X", etc.) I was talking to a real, actual human being! The total time to talk with someone was probably no more than 90 seconds. The guy who answered the phone spoke english and was clear and easy to understand. I mention that because many of you will be familiar with tech-support departments being staffed in other countries with hard-to-understand accents (think Dell).

I told the service agent that I had one of the early G15 keyboards and that the paint was wearing off on some of the keys already. I had read that Logitech was replacing these very early units because a component was left out of the paint mixture which caused it to wear prematurely and mentioned that to him. He only asked for the serial number and part number from the bottom of the keyboard and placed me on hold for a couple minutes while he looked into it.

Upon returning to the call, he mentioned that they'd be happy to send me a brand-new unit at no charge. I didn't even have to return the old unit, or jump through some hoops with faxing the purchase receipt or other paperwork to him. He verified the production date/batch via the serial number and without question, fixed the problem and didn't even charge me shipping to send the new unit out! He asked me to cross-out the serial number on the defective unit and that I was "free to do with it what I please".

I received the new unit about 1.5 weeks later via DHL. It was a retail packaged, sealed G15 - not a white-box or refurbished unit like many manufacturers send for warranty replacement. I'll be placing the new G15 on my main gaming machine now and moving the "defective" unit to my servers in the basement, which is gross overkill for some machines that don't get much more than 1 hour per year of typing, but I don't really feel that it's right to sell the old G15 considering that Logitech asked nothing of me to replace it.

So, that's my long story -- I am as pleased as possible with the handling of the incident and I'll be informing Logitech of that on the e-mail survey they will send me (which I agreed to in advance). It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate supporting a good company even it it costs a few bucks more. I've always been a Logitech user, as I prefer their mice designs to the other brands, but you can bet that now, I'll probably never stray from the brand. My time (and frustration) are worth money to me and the fact that I didn't have to haggle with the service agent or take time to return the old unit is worth much more than the few bucks I paid more for the quality branded keyboard (and that's not even counting the features the G15 has which are not available elsewhere).

Kudos to Logitech -- I hope that many more companies learn from this and realize that not all of us are bottom-feeding Wal-Mart shoppers looking to save 10 cents on an item that's been cheapened and crappily designed with no support or warranty.

The oil companies are constantly turning their pockets inside-out in order to appear sympathetic with consumers, all the while proclaiming that they do not make money from the increased prices and merely pass the costs on.

If that's true, why is Exxon about to surpass Microsoft, the most cash-rich non-financial company for the past many years or possibly longer? It's no secret that Microsoft basically prints money with software and has used questionable market tactics to gain their position at the top of the greed pile, so seeing Exxon rise so quickly recently should raise your eyebrows (and possibly turn your stomach at the sheer level of unadulterated greed).

Although a $3 billion cash gap remains between Exxon and Microsoft, Exxon is producing cash at a faster pace; its cash holdings could eclipse Microsoft's within a couple of months. In the first quarter, Exxon's total cash rose by $3.3 billion, while Microsoft saw total cash increase just $261 million.

So, the next time you see those poor oil companies talking about just how hard they work to keep things affordable, especially after they pay a CEO $400 MILLION to RETIRE, remember poor Microsoft and think how they must feel.

As if there was any doubt in your mind that America's legal system is bloated, over-complicated and full of corruption, here is some more proof: someone actually applied-for and received a patent for building a tin-can and string telephone. The type kids have built and played with for decades. The telephone that pretty much anyone alive can tell you about.

Now, you don't have to worry about Johnny Lawyer knocking on your door because your kids built one of these fantastic inventions in their treehouse because the patent has expired. However, it should make you think about just how stupid the legal system has become that someone would even consider paying to file such a ludicrous patent.

It's my understanding, and IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) that a patent idea should be a non-obvious way to build, design, or create something. It should be novel, at least at the time of the filing (we have to allow for this because over time, things that appear to be "magic" today will be commonplace in 20 years). A patent describes the method, technique, or apparatus in such a way that someone reasonably skilled in the field or art should be able to understand the concept in sufficient detail to recreate something similar to the described idea.

In this case, on February 17, 1978, two Illinois "inventors" applied-for and received the patent for the string and tin-can telephone. Now, again, IANAL, but it seems to me that children have been building these "devices" for decades, so there is (or should be) plenty of prior-art which would precede this concept, thus causing the patent office to reject the idea. The idea, at least in 1978, was not novel or ingenious. The people reasonably skilled in the field of tin-can telephones are 8 year old children. Can you see the stupidity?

Maybe this patent filing is simply the result of the "inventors" having too much time and/or money and they wanted to see if they could get such a ludicrous patent issued. I'm sure that, if they actually tried to press for intellectual property infringement in court, the patent would be ruled invalid, but still...