There's a Sucker Converted Every Minute 395
Ponca City, We love you writes "Once the US converts from analog to digital broadcasting next February, those who receive their signals over the air will need a converter box for older, non-digital models. Government-approved converter boxes sell for $60 or less and a government-issued $40 rebate coupon is available for the asking but that hasn't stopped companies like the Ohio-based Universal TechTronics from offering supposedly free converter boxes. The gimmick: the box is free, as long as you pay $88 for a five-year warranty, plus $9.30 shipping. Universal TechTronics seems to specialize in 'high-tech' products of questionable value, marketing the Cool Surge portable air cooler, 'a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents, or freon are needed' that uses the same energy as a 60-watt light bulb. It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer. What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately?"
Re:I like Vista (Score:1, Interesting)
It could be the fact you need a dual core machine with 2 gigs to browse the web now.
What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you mean other than those $60 converter boxs and $40 Government coupons that expire in less than 80 days after people receive them? The coupons are a great deal for the importers and sellers, but in reality the customer ends up paying about whet they would if there were no coupon program, perhaps more when you realize they pay sales tax on the entire ticket price. In a world where I can buy a DVD player in a local store for $29 or less, these much simpler converter boxes should not be costing $60.
Bathtub Curve (Score:5, Interesting)
Retailers love to offer 5 year extended warranty because of the Bathtub Curve [wikipedia.org].
Basically if a product does n't fail within one year then the probability it failing within five year years is very very low.
This curve applies very well to consumer electronics with the added advantage that they depreciate in value quickly too.
Re:Maybe the (Score:5, Interesting)
Absurd.
Re:I like Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
My laptop with vista is noticeably faster than my desktop with XP (with the exception of network transfer speed), even though they have the same specs (2.1ghz core 2 duo, 2gb ram. The desktop has a better videocard).
For me at least XP seems to get much slower with age while vista does not do so. Yah, a fresh install of XP is blinding fast, even more so than Ubuntu IMO, but after several weeks just slows to a crawl (yah I scandisk, reg clean, defrag, spyware/virus check, etc) while Vista takes a couple days to get fast (due to indexing and prefetching, or whatever they call it).
Re:Best Tech Scam (Score:5, Interesting)
They've moved to eBay. A year or two ago, I was trying to find some new speakers. I spent several hours clicking around the various brands and types on eBay, and for kicks (maybe because I'm slightly evil) I'd place a few opening bids on obviously high-end items, knowing I'd lose the auction. The next morning I had "congrats! You've won!" email in my inbox, and an invoice for $78 for a pair of DR-SL-900 [ebay.com] speakers. It took me all of 10 minutes to figure out that these were a scam [google.com]. I offered to pay the relisting fees as a good netizen, expecting something like $5:
And promptly got this note back:
After replying that that was a ripoff, I got back a note detailing the various fees they paid, which totaled $30. Where'd the extra $15 come from? After that, I told them I'd researched the product, and that they could initiate the dead-beat bidder process, so I could take the negative feedback and be on my merry way.
I got this response:
I told them "no deal," and they opened an "unpaid item dispute" against me. I put in the dispute that they were a scam, and about an hour later the dispute was closed for the reason: "payment has been received." Hah. I was actually waiting for them to leave me positive feedback...
So I learned my lesson: Always research before you bid on eBay, even if the bid's not serious. ;-)
Re:Kinoki Foot Pads (Score:1, Interesting)
I seem to remember reading someone wrapped carrots with the pads just to prove that anything will make them blacken from "toxins".
Little known fact: carrots were originally a super-dark purple that is effectively described as black. It wasn't until selective breeding in the 15-th or 16-th century that we got orange carrots.
Hey, who can forget... (Score:4, Interesting)
...laser rot? You could buy a green Magic Marker for about $20, paint the edges of your CDs with it, and not worry about the laser rotting the bits off.
Or the $400 Denon Cat5 cable only last week?
And there was a $10 gadget heavily advertised in general-interest magazines in the Seventies, especially Sunday supplements, that was designed to LOOK as if you could pirate cable TV with it. You just hooked it up to the antenna terminals on your TV and presto, you would get "the same type of programs you'd get on cable" -- i.e., sports, movies, news -- but you wouldn't have to pay monthly bills "because you're not getting cable!" What it was, was a rabbit-ears antenna with a plastic disk in the middle shaped like a dish antenna.
The prose in the ad was a masterpiece of subtlety. There was not a single misstatement of fact in it, but innumerable people read as a pitch for something like the pirate HBO setups that were in the news then.
rj
Re:Heat pumps work both ways. (Score:5, Interesting)
Boy, you got that right.
I worked on the HVAC design of a big modern house in the Dallas/Ft Worth suburbs (summer design temperature 105F/40C). It had a Great Room with a 12 ft high, 60 ft long glass window (the entire wall, floor to ceiling) facing West, overlooking a reflecting pool. (not much reflief from the hot afternoon sun in that layout) The building had lots of windows, skylights, glass elevator, glass stairs, even some glass floors. Interesting design, but about 3 times the A/C you would otherwise expect for a house that size.
To be fair, it didn't inefficiently pump the heat to the hot outside air, but had a system of water-source heat pumps using ground-tempered water pumped in a closed loop through about sixteen 150 ft deep wells. (the architect refused to have visible condensing units for cooling or gas vents/chimneys for heating)
Re:Best Tech Scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get it. Why did you offer any money to someone trying to scam you?
How did you figure out it was a scam, other than the cheap price?
It all sounds good but the details don't make sense to me.
Free project boxes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Water-free water, pay only $9.99 shipping! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not making this up: according to a recent Washington Post story [washingtonpost.com], "Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as `concentrated water' -- at $33.50 for a two-ounce bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to . . . water."
Re:Kinoki Foot Pads (Score:3, Interesting)
You think Kinoki foot pads are a scam? Well, I've got one that may just top that.
In magazines I've bought off the newsstands, I've seen an ad for a company purporting to have a machine that makes some kind of "enhanced" water, which supposedly has all kinds of miraculous health benefits. They have testimonials from people whose arthritic fingers were freed up, cancers beaten down, and the like. Now, the machine supposedly works by rapidly heating and cooling ordinary water, with the end result being that the angle of the hydrogen bonds is changed to 114 degrees (the natural angle is 104.4). The enhanced water is supposed to somehow be easier for the body to use in fighting disease. They even claim that adding a few drops to whatever else you drink can have healthful benefits.
Now, the ad doesn't come right out and say what this water processor costs, they instead urge you to write for more information. But, they WILL sell you a bottle of the enhanced health water, in a champaigne-style bottle no less, for something like $30 a pop.
As absurd as these claims might be, the REALLY sad thing about this is that the magazines they advertise in are SCIENCE -oriented... Science Illustrated, Popular Science, Discover, and others...
By the way, from what I've read, the machine is little more than a glorified distiller, and the pseudo-science claims of the company have been thoroughly debunked. (One such debunking: http://www.chem1.com/CQ/johnellisbunk.html [chem1.com].)
Re:Best Tech Scam (Score:4, Interesting)
There's tons of money to be made in the audiophile market. Just apply a little creativity along with some technobabble, then price it higher than anybody else. It won't be long before forum posts start praising your products as producing "warmer" sound.
Some of my favorites:
I've tried for years to tell these people that these companies are a big scam, but audiophiles are a daft group. I'm about ready to give up the argument and run a scam myself. Someone is making a fortune off them, and it might as well be me.
Re:I like Vista (Score:1, Interesting)
(Hint: Vista is your memory manager. Why should it waste cycles loading and un-loading files so you can have "free" ram when it can just, you know, keep some in memory until a program actually asks for the space?)
The problem with Vista is that is does waste cycles loading and un-loading files.
Instead of working like every other cache system in the world, Superfetch tries to guess what files you might need in RAM. Based on the complaints, it appears that it guesses wrong most of the time.
What this does is needlessly keep the hard drive seeking to load files, then when the user does ask for a file to be opened, they have to wait until the Vista-initiated disk activity stops before their request gets serviced. That's just bad design, and it gets worse because of how much more power this causes laptops to use.
Last, when users turn off this feature, the system becomes more responsive to their requests. If that isn't a sign that the caching algoritm in Superfetch isn't broken, I'm not sure what would be.
Re:Another irrational MS Hater (Score:2, Interesting)
There's always Linux for compute-intensive jobs, however.
Well, I'm running Ubuntu Hardon at home where it is mainly used by my wife for browsing purposes. I reasoned that for browsing the web you don't need more than the AMD 3200+ 1gb I put in there.
Strangely it manages to get completely swamped with talking to my wireless router when I take it far enough away from it.
I confess that I probably managed to screw with it and I should just do a clean install like I used to to with windows; it is just some anecdotal evidence to the point that you can slow down any box running any OS.
Re:Tech Scam (Score:1, Interesting)
A pricey stone to demagnetize DVDs.
Or this thing:
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/demagnetization.html
At least it has a blinky light on it.
Spells over the web (Score:3, Interesting)
This is my most recent favorite: http://www.fastspells.com/ [fastspells.com]
It's a pretty standard web shopping cart system, where you buy spells. Not that you can perform, mind you. You're paying for them to do hoodoo. No proof or anything, but they do guarantee their work.
My favorite part is that they link out to a review site, ratethecaster.com, an independent site that says how good they are. Which just happens to be on the same IP.
BEST SCAM EVAR!!!
Dasani concentrate (Score:3, Interesting)
There really is "Dasani concentrate". "Dasani" is purified tap water to which some minerals have been added. The mineral mix is sold to bottlers by the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. This is the standard Coca-Cola business model; Coke works the same way.
Re:Best Tech Scam (Score:3, Interesting)
Your version sounds more accurate.
And all just from reading his own post :>
I really have to wonder why the heck people make lowball bids like that anyway. It's a total waste of everyone's time. ESPECIALLY if you're just going to try to back out if your lowball bid wins.
To go colloquial on your ass : to be a dick. Best case scenario, you just cost the next-highest bidder money. Some people enjoy spending other people's money like that, a lot. This does not only happen on lowball bids ... Sometimes these people will bid very high as a form of a thrillride ... If they win, they will try to back out.
Lowball bidders = morons.
Well, not really. The actual moron is the guy who lists an auction with the low price below what he would reasonably sell the item for. Of course eBay encourages you to do this with the fee structure, and psychologically speaking it's easier to hook a bidder that'll go sky-high early with a $1 bid. It is, however, quite dishonest. The seller better sell for lowball prices too if that happens.
Also, bidders who bid multiple times on the same item instead of using the autobid feature the way it was intended = morons. Unfortunately, there are a HELL of alot of these morons around.
Well ... More than one school of thought on these; For one thing, you might change what you are willing to pay from one day to the next. This is legitimate. Also, you might want to avoid unscrupulous sellers who have sock puppet accounts driving up the price on their own auctions just to raise the autobid of bidders. This may even be worth eating the eBay fees if you get it wrong, if you do it often enough. And then, of course, it's the same tactic that sniping relies on; don't let other bidders know how high you are willing to go, but try to get the best price with a shot in the final seconds (or slowly increasing nonautobid bids).
Re:I like Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
In the troll's defense, XP does suffer from disk fragmentation. In the past I've either moved to 64KB clusters or ran JKDefrag nightly. Is Vista better in this regard?
Re:I like Vista (Score:3, Interesting)