As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff.

This is exactly it. I used to work for a manufacturer that made devices they would often need to repair. They would bill non-warranty labor at $100/hour, plus the cost of parts. Their products were primarily used by professionals, so that was fine when it was being done to repair something that cost between $700-$4,000 new, especially for people who were making money using the product. When they launched a product at a $500 MSRP, though, it started to get harder, and even more so when competition forced them to lower the price to $400. When I left they were about to launch a product targeted at amateurs, originally aiming for a $200 price. It was actually being built by a Chinese competitor, with our software guys contributing to the system and putting our logo on it. Spending $100 labor to repair a $200 device was going to be a tough sell, and when I left the plan for warranty “repairs” was to just give the customer a replacement unit and scrap the defective one. And I’m sure the repair labor rate was going up; they had a hard time hiring qualified technicians at the rate they wanted to pay, and most of the department had quit/moved to new roles when I left, so they were surely having to increase pay and the rate they billed.

When something’s being built on an assembly line mostly by machine and/or low-cost Asian labor, it’s harder for a company to justify paying a skilled technician’s labor in a western country when that makes the cost of repair close to the cost of a new unit.

Stop buying lifetime subscriptions to services! They’re not sustainable!

I’m assuming that change would be Euros, though; can they really use that in Switzerland?

These look like they would’ve all very quickly become incredibly outdated, if they weren’t already by the time they started flying. The only one that looks remotely ready for World War II is the Dewoitine D.513, and that’s still very much the prototype for what’s to come, not the polished products that the British, Americans, Japanese, and Germans would be building by 1940.

I haven’t used them in a while, but they were always our backup when I was in TV news. Probably should make sure my colleagues know since I’m sure basically every TV station and production company would not want this.

The Robin Buss translation

I don’t know what their manufacturing process is like, but I would think they would try to ship as soon as possible when they have units available just for revenue reasons, not delay shipment by a week or two like the article seems to think. Even if it only means they’re shipping a couple dozen a day in the early days!

[email protected]

Weird, seems the photo didn’t come over

I wish they would do an HD release of the show. NBC only ordered it as an SD show for most of the series, because that was the era of the transition and only some shows were ordered for HD and budgeted to use the HD production equipment. The Director of Photography shot the whole thing on 16mm film, though, and framed everything so there was a 16x9 safe shot in case they ever went back to upgrade it for syndication or home release. “All” it would take is re-scanning the original film into HD and taking the edit list from the original version and applying it to the same timecode.

I don’t think there are many shows I can take more than 4 episodes at one time. I remember visiting my cousin, and when I was leaving we watched Arrested Development until it was time to go to the airport. I found it funny and was enjoying it, but by hour 3 I was done and have never been able to get into it since.

Hadn’t checked out the Apple shows yet but also didn’t know they were Bill Lawrence; that bumps them up the list some

Unironically I like that

I think armadillos and prairie dogs harbor the disease. Don’t mess with them!

Edit: armadillos might be leprosy, can’t remember for sure right now

Is it an actual cassette drive or just a flash disk shaped like a cassette drive? Because I don’t think cassette drives normally have storage. But I suppose it could be useful to anyone who still has their C64 cassettes, if they haven’t degraded too much!

Well, it is only a preliminary report. All it seems to be giving us, though, is what happened. The “why” is probably going to be much harder.

They’re saying no mechanical or design flaws since it sounds like one of the pilots cut off the fuel, but in the voice recording both are denying having cut off the fuel, so it still has me wondering how they were able to (apparently) accidentally shut off the fuel during the ascent.

This is ridiculous; I love it

It would be a big, expensive case, and as there are well-funded organisations that rely on the precedent not being set against them in both directions, both sides would get interested third parties funding their legal fees. No one wants that, so Nintendo stick to claiming emulators are illegal on their website

I would assume particularly that no one who has big interests there wants it to go to court because once there’s a ruling and a precedent is set it becomes much harder to change if you’re on the losing side. So, for example, if game publishers lost and it was clearly ruled legal that consumers have a right to make software work with hardware that the software was never intended for, that would make it much harder for publishers to fight emulators without some additional problem like trademark infringement. The advice I’ve heard is unless you can be absolutely certain how a judge will rule, you want to avoid going to court because strange and unexpected things can happen in a courtroom that can be very bad for you.

Never heard of such a thing, but there’s a lot of video trends I don’t understand already