Well, you could go to /dev/null for the functionality they've delivered for me so far.

Your question implies that similar functionality (in the sense of a product that's purchasable, not vapor and that will work as advertised) is actually available somewhere else.

I believe there's a British firm that markets the same hardware, that actually gives a crap about the customer, but unfortunately you're not going to get two working GBEN ports from them either - it's the same device.

No idea where to tell you to turn.

Yeah, I'm still waiting on my "Early June" delivery of a GuruPlug+ from an order in May. It's spec'ed great. Too bad you can only use the Gigabit Ethernet at 10/100.

They think they're going to sell me a "professional upgrade kit" to make it meet the spec they advertized when they billed my card. Bullshit.

So let's say you want to do something you need to rely on: home music server, 24/7 monitoring applications, security. If you haven't laid in a spare, are you going to wait over 3 months for a replacement when it breaks. N.B.:WHEN it breaks.

Run far and fast from GlobalScale!

Why expend so much effort to piss a customer off at your company? Couldn't they have just put up an order page that said "Fsck You, Customer!"?

It's a great idea to get a tour from a dosant. Ours was ex-NSA, and the commentary is was fantastic. There's more than one Enigma there, and also the American version of the Cryptographic Bombe, which broke the 4-wheeled Enigma code. Brings a whole new meaning to "brute force computing".

Sad to say, I agree. Get a Sheevaplug (from someone other than the quite unresponsive Global Scale Technologies), a USB disk that spins down and do a file server that draws about 6 watts.

If you've got software to do productive work on it, you could donate it to World Computer Exchange or freecycle it locally for even less carbon debt - either of these options would give someone less fortunate a hand.

Definitely not trying to say I'm smarter.

When you look at human factors problems, typically "smart" doesn't enter into it in the sense that someone is "not smart enough to perform this task".

In fact, smarts can be a root cause: if everyone on the design team is blindingly smart, they may also be completely blind to the interpretation users make of their product in the marketplace.

This is typically solved with user research (not to be confused with marketing research) and design. Many companies study the out-of-box experience since that's when the user's initial impressions of a product are formed. Ever open an Apple product to find yourself delighted? That's a researched, designed experience.

What first impressions of Moto and Android did this OOB make on my wife? (We both already knew Verizon are asshats).

Hi Coward - goodonya for not signing your name to an ignorant comment. Says more about you than about me.

I work in human factors, so you're in my domain now.

It's really not stupid to pull a tab marked "PULL". It wouldn't have been difficult to mark the tab "PULL - battery" or not mark it "PULL" at all.

  - Smart people designed, built and operated radiation therapy machines that killed people that live in my state.
  - Smart people designed, built and blew up the Space Shuttle Challenger by launching when it was too cold.

These are human factors problems caused when innate human psychology meets poor design:

- Generalizing knowledge in a domain: Wife and I have both seen "pull" tabs in plenty of brand new products where you have to pull the tab out to get the product to begin to work. That's what we thought it was.

- Taking the only instructions at face value: the label "PULL" and "Don't Cut" is used here to mean both "PULL" and "DON'T PULL!". Am I stupid for not getting "DON'T PULL!" out of "PULL"?

Hope your day's going better than mine!

jddj

If they could slice it up like one of those "all edge pieces" brownie pans, everyone would get beachfront property!!

Me too - I was just out of college at the time.

I thought it was very "fake geekery" at the time, Disnified bullshit, like everything else Disney puts out.

When the movie came out, I'd already been doing optical special effects for a while, and thought the "everything on black" opticals looked cheap and lame - not up to the high standard set by Doug Trumbull with 2001, Silent Running, etc. over a decade before. The work didn't even look as good as Star Wars.

There were maybe a half-dozen CGI scenes, which looked pretty cool to me, but that's about all I could say for the movie.

The plot insulted my intelligence, even then.

The first "all-CGI space footage" movie was, AFAIK, "The Last Starfighter", which featured another insulting plot, though the very cool Robert Preston appears in a key role.

So many of the films of the next 30 years would be weak exercises in filmmaking as excuses to get time on a supercomputer or grid. We shouldn't be celebrating this low-water-mark.

Puhleeze. I like Jonathan Demme probably more than the next guy, but at least go back to the wellspring of military weirdness...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056218/

He said glass. He works in healthcare IT and would probably be able to tell the diff between a needle, a bone shard and an RFID implant of some kind.

This woman sounds pretty nuts.

That said, I've got a colleague, ex-military, NOT a crank, who says the US Army implanted a glass-tube into his hand much like the one pictured - without his knowledge or consent. It was implanted while he was out during an unrelated surgery.

The implanted tube irritated him enough that he was regularly scratching it, and he eventually dug it out of his skin - and was surprised to see the foreign object.

The same guy has never spouted any nutty theories to me, never was paranoid about being tracked - just mentioned this experience.

For my part, I figured it was the Army experimenting with ways to inventory their humans, and maybe to posthumously ID them.

is that "Pee on Viewer"? Sorry, I don't keep up with all the fetishes...

I basically like my Droid, but it's not without numerable faults.

The touchscreen isn't great (even forgiving that it doesn't do multi-touch like iPod/iPhone). When you're browsing a regular web page (something the Droid is up to, with its nice screen and good browser), sometimes the links are just too close to resolve the difference between them. Lots of frustrating touch...back...touch...back action going on.