Posts by oldenoughtoknowbetter

Costco's doing it right

Initially people swarmed and some bought way more than they needed of TP, cleaners, rice, formula, etc.

Wiped out all the shelves so people wanting to make normal purchases couldn't.

Later as stocks started coming in, many of the stores restricted people to 1 per.

Now that shelves are filling up, some people want to return what they hoarded.

Costco and other stores are saying, "Nope, don't want it back." And good for them.

I don't care if you were buying for a school, church, your friends and family, or because you thought you could make a buck while people were in need.

If you bought too much either because you panicked or because you're greedy, no one wants you returning your potentially virus infected stuff.

You bought it, it's your problem now.

Self inflicted wounds well earned

I can actually see this service being potentially desired.

Being able to remotely open my garage for a delivery or let a neighbor borrow a tool, or many other reasons I might be interested in.

But this company I won't do business with.

The asshat CS rep that pulled this crap admits in their forum that it was about the reviews:

"Yes, it was about badmouthing the product that I spent nearly 2 years working on, in the community that I'm trying to foster before giving me any chance at resolving the situation."

Even though he claims he won't do it again, as immature as he acted why should I trust him.

And it looks like company management supports their thin-skinned overly sensitive rep more than they do their customer base. That's an interesting business strategy; for failure. Management should support their reps, who should actually support their clients.

Between the Amazon reviews going heavily negative and posters on their own forum suggesting alternative products I'm guessing their days are numbered, as they should be.

Rush to judgement much?

Although the quotes and reporting could have been less flippant, it doesn't mean you shouldn't think before spewing more simpleness.

If you take apart what was being said, there is a lot of validity.

The heart-rate statement, taken differently: Most IoT devices aren't that interesting by themselves to the "bad guys". The temperature reading on a thermo sensor just usually isn't that interesting to most outside the user using it. But if you can breach it, then you might alter the reading or pivot and move up to more valuable devices and data.

It is also true that most IoT devices don't have the memory/storage/cycles to provide robust defenses. Even when designed, built and deployed with a hardened posture very few have the ecosystem and mature processes that are needed to update when a new vulnerability is found.

The model of having devices report to an up-to-date monitoring platform everything they are doing so that alerts and directed responses can be managed by something powerful enough to do it, is worth evaluating.

Designed to walk away on its own

We got a few to try out. Some users want an "Enterprise" tablet, something that they can treat like a tablet but still have a full dock-able workstation, etc.

Got the idea that maybe one would make a nice device for a new guest check-in kiosk in our lobby, something that could sit on a pedestal that people could touch or type on. Then we looked at how to secure it.

For this price they couldn't include a slot for a lock?

Motozine flashback

I haven't trusted Kodak, and have viewed Motorola with caution, since I bought enough of the motozine ZN5s for each member of the family when they first came out.

Just needed phones that could text and thought the cameras would be handy.

It is hard to imagine poorer quality that they delivered.

One had 1/2 its features dead when unboxed, another went into a reboot loop after less than 2 weeks of gentle use. Between optical issues, and a list of other failed features, all 4 original were replaced in less than a year, two of them twice. When one of the kids fell in the stream with his, I didn't think he'd lost anything of value.

Moved onto Samsung and HTC smartphones after that.

A couple of Moto Gs I picked up last year have done well, but I recently passed on the 2nd gen X because of my motozine memories. Sad when I compare those to heavy use I gave a StarTAC years ago.

Vendor in decine

Well, I used to buy Toshiba laptops, my first 3 were.

Then I got tired of needing to replace every docking station, power adapter and it seemed like everything else when I got a new model. So I changed brands.

Guess they've found another way to drive away customers.

I have an old Sony WEGA that I have no problem doing a little searching to find an old manual for. I'm in the market for new TV, Toshiba just made sure they won't be on the short list.