Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tautech]

Discord time ! 

[Specmaster]

I would suggest that one of the real reasons for the big Apples' behaviour has possibly a lot more to do with technologies that they ripped off Samsung and Vice Versa, those 2 have a long history of suing each other for copyright infringement.

Anyone who thinks that there are not people / companies out there right pulling apart the very latest products of Samsung and Apple along with other makes is, quite frankly deluded. It has been going for decades and will continue to be done. I used to work for a well known major manufacturer here in the UK, and they were always doing just. They labs that contained products from competitors that were pulled apart and studied from all aspects in order to see how they worked and then their own products were designed to beat them in every way that it was possible to do so.

It is not as if making the products repairable is really going to damage their ranking / profitability that much, they are by far the top tech company in the world by market value and by turnover as well as profit, they are massively cash rich.

I just don't buy this belief that selling a replacement chip is going to put their security systems at risk, just how does it do that by removing a chip which has clearly suffered corrosion by liquid damage, the soldering in of a manufacturer supplied part going to put anything at risk??? It has nothing at all to do with being a whiny-cheaparse but of a moral view point and also being green before we pollute the earth so it becomes uninhabitable for us to occupy it.

[bd139]

Read up on cryptographic signing and all will be revealed.

I’m out of discord this week. Incident at work. Joy to being on call 

[mnementh]

I find the idea that right to repair can be pooh-poohed by people on this forum frankly astonishing. The same tired old arguments are rolled out again and again. There are many ways that people can perform dangerous modifications to many types of equipment, due to lack of competence and/or substandard parts. Whether it's legal or not will make no difference whatsoever to this; the people that do things like that are fucking morons who have no sense of consequence or personal responsibility.
Arguably giving access to reputable and reliable repair businesses to manufacturers components reduces this risk as there's little doubt that many people try to repair their own stuff when they can't afford what the manufacturer tells them it's gonna cost, which is of course usually a complete new unit.
I rather doubt anything LR has ever repaired has set fire to a tower block or ever will, and to suggest otherwise is disingenuous at best.

The issue is some of the stuff LR classifies as a "repair" is actually a "crutch" which should be used to get the data off the machine and then the machine would be discarded for the sake of data integrity. We're talking board level repair here on things designed with extremely strict timing and transmission lines. Just because it looks like it works doesn't mean it does and can be silently gobbling up your data.

My objection is not the repairs or the criticism of the Genius Bar (I call it the Tard Bar myself) but the basis that you can have a non-objective rabid following of haters. He's basically running the KKK of the repair business waiting for the next opportunity to lynch someone he doesn't like. This works for him and his business as it generates customers and clicks.

As always, be wary of "personalities" as they usually live in front of cults.

We're not pooh-poohing "Right to Repair". We just realize that the way folks like LR want to see it... as free access to parts and free access to technical documentation, the release of which in some cases is probably a National Security issue and is definitely an expensive proposition for the corporations themselves, is ill-advised at best.

Added to that is the basic assumption inherent in the ALWAYS-PRESENT second part of the argument... that these "parts and documentation need to be reasonably-priced", and now you've pretty much guaranteed that any thoughts anybody in the corporate world might be interested are squashed like a bug on a windshield. You and I both know that the unspoken other half of that "parts and documentation need to be reasonably-priced" equation is that the corporation is expected to foot the bill directly.

So now we're arguing that a corporation... which very legal DNA is based on a wholly infernal unconstitutional legal construct designed to protect those who control these corporations from the damage caused by those decisions and sole raison d'être is to accumulate profit at the expense of everyone else... should willingly pay for an entire support system that is in direct competition with themselves on a visceral level.

We really need to look for a different approach than the model LR uses; it serves only to entrench the opinions of the old rich white men who make such decisions and their corporate owners. 

mnem
 

[beanflying]

You expect me to read all that? Surely you jest. 

You guys don't pay me enough to read all that. Rumour has it you guys don't pay me at all.

Wasn't this Apple bashing (well deserved  ) really started about a lack of Fluke UK parts  So many pages and tomes of waffle about the well known fact that Apple SUX 

[Mr. Scram]

Wasn't this Apple bashing (well deserved  ) really started about a lack of Fluke UK parts  So many pages and tomes of waffle about the well known fact that Apple SUX 

I'm shooting Fluke in a few other countries mails to see whether they feel differently. There's not even a maintenance or calibration manual available as far as I can tell. Everything requires shipping it to Fluke to have it done. It's a vendor lock-in more brazen than most. Buying a multi thousand pound tool obviously isn't enough, they really want to milk you dry.

[beanflying]

Wasn't this Apple bashing (well deserved  ) really started about a lack of Fluke UK parts  So many pages and tomes of waffle about the well known fact that Apple SUX 

I'm shooting Fluke in a few other countries mails to see whether they feel differently. There's not even a maintenance or calibration manual available as far as I can tell. Everything requires shipping it to Fluke to have it done. It's a vendor lock-in more brazen than most. Buying a multi thousand pound tool obviously isn't enough, they really want to milk you dry.

These guys are the Aussie Service agents https://www.celemetrix.com.au/

[Mr. Scram]

Bollocks, I just shot a spring into low Earth orbit while disassembling my cheap wonky ratchet. I guess now it's really time to buy a new one.

[Cerebus]

You expect me to read all that? Surely you jest. 

You guys don't pay me enough to read all that. Rumour has it you guys don't pay me at all.

Wasn't this Apple bashing (well deserved  ) really started about a lack of Fluke UK parts  So many pages and tomes of waffle about the well known fact that Apple SUX 

Well there's the problem. People making it about Apple when it is not, it is about the whole culture around corporate profit taking and lack of social responsibility in making products more sustainable. In this instance it was about Fluke but some monomaniacs, as always, divert it to being about Apple.  People make it a discussion about "the team they love to hate" rather than "there's something wrong with the game". If you point out that "team M" is just as bad as "team A" and that the game is at fault, there is always some muppet who still wants to drag the conversation back to ragging on "team A" as if their life depended on it. In the process, truth, objectivity and balance don't get a look in.

Twenty, thirty years ago the same always happened with Microsoft. Microsoft may be have been the epitomisation of corporate evil at the time in their approach to anticompetitive behaviour, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have some good products (they had some pretty lousy ones as well). Nevertheless people would rag on them even if the topic at hand was the stuff they did well. It seems that there are some people who are condemned to define themselves by what they dislike or oppose and fixate on it.

[Mr. Scram]

The unfortunately common tribalist behavior is tiring. There's plenty to be had on this forum too. China versus US. Siglent versus Rigol or any other brand versus another. People pick an arbitrary team and go to war over it and will chomp at anyone saying anything about their brand or the war itself. It seems there's a need to manufacture certainty and binary options in a world that tends to offer neither.

[AVGresponding]

I just ordered a couple of those £3 + shipping 5 digit led meters on fleabay, I plan to fit them as V and I meters on a Kenwood 13.2V 7A DC psu, will report with pics when the deed is done!

[mnementh]

Bollocks, I just shot a spring into low Earth orbit while disassembling my cheap wonky ratchet. I guess now it's really time to buy a new one.

Dismantle an old panel-mount rocker switch for a suitable replacement. I've fixed dozens this way.

mnem
*fix-ily*

[mnementh]

@ThickPhilM:



mnem
 

[mansaxel]

As I'd finished my parenting (moving children between the bed they fell asleep in and the one they're s'posed to wake up in) that cut my Discord participation short I actually went and time-nutted for a bit. Weather here today was sunny and crisp, not too cold, just about freezing so I've been getting on with the GPS move a bit. (the part where bd139 sticks his antenna to the window and declares "Done"  )

I routed the antenna cable down, in under the garage, so that it shows up under the raised flooring in the machine room. There it'll meet a lighting arrestor and then continue up inside the cabinet that holds my computers. The antenna and lighting arrestors have N sockets, and the receiver has BNC. I had to cut the cable to get it through the plastic conduit that protects it going in, and I needed a short BNC-N cable for the last bit.

Just spent an hour building the short cable, routing it down through the floor of the computer rack, connecting it to the arrestor, making a ground cable to go from the ground rail to the arrestor, and pondering the "fun" of terminating a N plug onto RG58 while crouched up in a ball below the raised floor. There's not much room there, and the coolant pipes pass through where I'm supposed to sit. Wonderful.

OTOH, the part where I pulled the cable through conduit had me scurrying from the roof down into the machine room and back up some 5 times; a three-ladder climb with some acrobatics.

[mnementh]

Good exercise. And when it doesn't work the first time (because you posted about it in here before it was all up & running ), you'll have more. 

mnem
"Murphy's a bitch, and she has puppies."

[AVGresponding]

I have a tube full of BD121s or something like, a big-assed heatsink, and 1kAh of SLAs.

Add an inverter and we have UPS time!

Sadly my stand-alone 12V inverter is only 600W, and my 1500VA ups is 24V... decisions, decisions!

[mansaxel]

Yeah, I was pretty cooked from running up and down this afternoon. Felt I had to dress for sitting still (because one does a bit of that too) which is a bit more than comfortable for speed-climbing ladders.  Hoping that tomorrow we'll know if I get better reception at the new site, which I believe will be the case. Also, the GPS will be on UPS mains as well, so it'll stay running. Finally, I get closer to the TE with my 10MHz output.

[mnementh]

You are willing to buy and put up with a cheap POS battery that has half the design life and half the real capacity (yes, deliberate exaggeration, but still nowhere near the same quality from your no-name supplier) as an original battery, you have that right. You do NOT have the right to EXPECT a manufacturer to help you do it. You ALSO don't have the right to expect them to supply you a part that requires expert installation when they don't know what kind of 1d10t you might be, and in their experience, those who want to DIY ARE 1d10ts, because they are NOT buying what Apple is selling, which is the Apple Ecology I've already described.

THAT  is the core problem... people buying Apple because "it's the hawtness" and hating them because it's not what they really want, which is "the new hawtness" without actually having to pay for it.

You don't have the right to expect them to support you in that unreasonable desire, or to design their product such that parts are easily replaceable just because you don't like it. Their design is what they're selling; the "sleek seamless thing" design is their stock in trade, FFS.

Same is true of the screen, and I've bought more than a few 3rd party screens... they are NOT anywhere near as good glass or digitizers. PERIOD. And the same is true of the buttons. They incorporate a security feature. That security feature was asked for by the majority of their customers. Your edge use-case is irrelevant here.

If you want the "Apple Hawtness", buy Apple product and be happy with it. If not, buy something else; Samsuck and Lucky GoldStar will gladly take your money. But FFS, stop bitching that Apple is Apple.

It's not like you didn't KNOW their phone/tablet/PC/dong polisher/WTF-ever was hermetically sealed when you bought it; it's a FUCKING ADVERTISED FEATURE.

mnem
Just say "No, thank you."

What I'm saying is yes, Apple is known for their stock-in-trade of being sealed and sleek etc, but none of that removes their stance on the right to repair. I'm NOT on about the right to buy and fit poorly designed items from 3rd parties, but the right to having your device fixed by Apple or authorised agents BUT using genuine Apple replacement parts built to the same spec as originally fitted, the same is true for batteries then there wouldn't be a possible Grenfell 2, at a sensible and affordable price and within a reasonable time frame.

The same can be said for other manufacturers who have a similar outlook, the time has come to act responsibly, the planet cannot accept this amount of built-in throwaway concept. I do not for a single moment believe Louis Rossman would ever fit cheap counterfeit and dangerous parts in his repairs, this is why he and so many others are lobbing congress for the right to be able to access genuine parts so the original design integrity is maintained throughout the products' life. He and others are not seeking to have access to the code so that they can rewrite code, all they want is for the parts to be made accessible at sensible prices without the need for software locks etc. So if a digitizer is at fault, or the chip that handles the digitizer is faulty, then getting those parts etc from Apple and replacing them does not involve them in having access to the software so the software integrity remains 100% intact and no breach in security is made.

There is a whole world of "knee-deep in the hoopla" in what you suggest. Please bear with me; this is at least a 3-flagon move...

First off... I do not hold LR's "standards" in the high regard you do. I've seen him call "fixed" repairs I wouldn't let out the door under ANY circumstances; I would literally remove all of it and tell the customer it couldn't be repaired safely or reliably. I have no doubt that if he knew he could get away with it, he'd install the cheap shit; especially if he could phrase it as a "this is an almost as good (it's not) clone part; it costs 1/3 the real thing" decision and make it the customer's choice. I honestly have no doubt he does this off-screen all the time. He's a fucking carny barker, NOT a technician or disgruntled engineer as he might have you believe.

Now into the real hoopla...

Your analogy is faulty; the technology in question is NOT a necessity like a car or truck, it is a LUXURY. PERIOD. What they manufacture does not NEED to exist. As such, it is unreasonable to try and hold the manufacturers of such gear to the "repairability" standards reasonable for a car or house or furnace, for example. Even THOSE necessities are being driven by the corporate "The bottom line is the bottom line" mentality into providing repair as a "replace a module" rather than "replace a single part" scenario. As long as we as a species continue to worship the almighty Corporation, they will never change that mentality; repair rather than turnover is the antithesis of their very DNA.

Driven by customer demand, the technology involved in modern "portable computing" devices has been forced to develop some pretty sophisticated security technology of its own; many of these technologies are provided in hardware "jellybeans" that are like a sausage grinder: The signal goes in, a different signal comes out, but don't you DARE look at what goes on inside. Due to demands for end-user privacy, there is some VERY sensitive security-related technology in a modern phone or tablet... as in "National Security" type sensitive. The technology in many cases is such that a manufacturer is prohibited by contract or even international treaties or National Security regulations from selling that part EXCEPT as a component in a completed product. Keeping track of this is another thing that is EXPENSIVE, as is the need to keep how YOUR systems connect to that technology privileged.

Simply providing a schematic diagram of that is in many cases one of the first keys a ne'er-do-well needs to start exploiting that security.

And now we come down to the final bit... cost. Maintaining the kind of security a manufacturer like Apple needs comes with a lot of different kinds of cost; there's money, there's R&D IP, there's managing the physical security of the product being manufactured during manufacture & assembly by 3rd parties such that cheap copies of your product aren't released by other parties before you can deliver.

One of the key strategies in that particular aspect is also the most costly: compartmentalizing in the same way as we and Germany did during our wartime atomic weapons development. In a mass-production scenario, this means buying assemblies in huge lots, which then have to be meticulously accounted for until they're permanently part of that product. That has evolved into a completely different attitude towards repair than we consider normal for automobiles; that the BEST means of assuring security is to MAKE SURE EVERY PART MANUFACTURED ONLY COMES TO YOU. You have 110% of your assemblies made; you manufacture your 100% quantity of product, you save 10% for manufacturing failure rework and warranty repair, and you keep the rest for your service centers. PERIOD. Once you've done that transaction, the product is DONE. PERIOD. Not revisiting means no worries of countefeit parts made using your designs, and you can say with 100% confidence that any parts not installed by your ASPs is counterfeit.

By working this way, yes you annoy some people who think you should provide your luxury product at a price they consider reasonable... but you completely eliminate a huge security concern in OTHER PEOPLE'S ACCOUNTING of your sensitive hardware, while at the same time sidestepping a whole new and expensive ecosystem in "being a parts counter".

There's a reason for the old joke about "If you built a '57 Chevy out of parts, it would cost 1/4 million dollars" or whatever the numbers are now: being a parts distributor is a WHOLE ECOSYSTEM unto itself, and it is the keeping track of and storing those parts for resale that is what makes that collection of '57 Chevy parts so fucking expensive.

And finally... you wind up with the ages-old argument over what price for parts is "reasonable". If you actually had to pay cost of manufacture & delivery from overseas plus actual cost of SECURE warehousing, accounting, picking and shipping/restocking of say a new LCD/Digitizer... you'd realize that while the new part probably only costs 2-3x what the cheap clone part cost... it is the SECURE HANDLING that costs real money.

Now... add on top of that... the cost of managing all the training and reference to assist hacks like LR in "repairing" the completed product that is in fact your bread and butter... shit, you'd be building whole Universities to train people to properly repair these things. To train people to go to work doing cheap repairs of the luxury item which is your bread & butter, and which you KNOW that once they have that education, 4 out of 5 are going to install the cheap clone parts and fuck you up the arse, while at the same time costing you aggravation in dealing with illegitimate repairs as if they should be warrantied, and even worse, tarnishing your reputation with the people who actually HAVE bought into the whole aspirational "Upwards" branding that is your stock in trade.

You think an iPwn is expensive NOW? Adding the whole ecosystem of support ecosystems you suggest would TRIPLE the pricetag. 

You don't REALLY think a corporation would EAT that cost just to make a few whiny cheapasses happy, do you...?

mnem
*a not-whiny cheapass*

You expect me to read all that? Surely you jest. 

Just the blue bits. And the black bits.

mnem

[Specmaster]

You expect me to read all that? Surely you jest. 

You guys don't pay me enough to read all that. Rumour has it you guys don't pay me at all.

Wasn't this Apple bashing (well deserved  ) really started about a lack of Fluke UK parts  So many pages and tomes of waffle about the well known fact that Apple SUX 

Well there's the problem. People making it about Apple when it is not, it is about the whole culture around corporate profit taking and lack of social responsibility in making products more sustainable. In this instance it was about Fluke but some monomaniacs, as always, divert it to being about Apple.  People make it a discussion about "the team they love to hate" rather than "there's something wrong with the game". If you point out that "team M" is just as bad as "team A" and that the game is at fault, there is always some muppet who still wants to drag the conversation back to ragging on "team A" as if their life depended on it. In the process, truth, objectivity and balance don't get a look in.

Twenty, thirty years ago the same always happened with Microsoft. Microsoft may be have been the epitomisation of corporate evil at the time in their approach to anticompetitive behaviour, but that doesn't mean that they didn't have some good products (they had some pretty lousy ones as well). Nevertheless people would rag on them even if the topic at hand was the stuff they did well. It seems that there are some people who are condemned to define themselves by what they dislike or oppose and fixate on it.

You are right about the game being at fault, but I think that people hit on team A because their products are primarily aimed at the domestic consumer market and hence the heavy bias towards form over function, and in the case of team M (being Fluke) their product is very much aimed at the corporate / trades market so team M should be more understanding about selling parts to people like us who are not complete novices and therefore likely to do something stupid and dangerous. I agree that parts should not be made available to the general public in the domestic market, but they could and should available to repair houses where should know what they are doing.

[mnementh]

And now we've gone recursive; my original argument re: FLUKE having to hold their ASPs to yet an even HIGHER standard than fApple due to the fact that their product is used as process control in manufacturing and by people who routinely go poking around in high-voltage for a living. Maintaining that Cat III safety STANDARD requires special handling in not only the manufacturing, but ANY repair process of the product AFTER that manufacture.

This means that to maintain the safety level that FLUKE made their name on, extraordinary measures are required in the service; extremely complex procedures that would NOT be apparent to folks who do consumer electronics repair which would require special training that FLUKE has EVERY RIGHT to restrict to a handful of ASPs that they can keep an eye on to perform those repairs correctly.

Thinking about things like always wearing gloves so body oils can't form a trace across points with a potential to carry high potential and other clean room precautions, just for a start. FFS, even putting the wrong fuse in one of these meters will make it NO LONGER Cat III safe. I give it a 50/50 chance LR knows or even cares about any of this.

Now think about the kind of repairs we like to do...  Is it any wonder FLUKE doesn't want to talk to us ?

They operate on a whole 'nuther level, man. They don't have time to eff around with us; we're not their customer. People who can buy a cabinet full of NEW FLUKE are their customer. The rest of us can talk to one of their authorized vendors or ASPs; who CAN BUY AND HAVE a cabinet full of NEW FLUKE.

mnem
Reality bites.

[Mr. Scram]

And now we've gone recursive; my original argument re: FLUKE having to hold their ASPs to yet an even HIGHER standard than fApple due to the fact that their product is used as process control in manufacturing and by people who routinely go poking around in high-voltage for a living. Maintaining that Cat III safety STANDARD requires special handling in not only the manufacturing, but ANY repair process of the product AFTER that manufacture.

This means that to maintain the safety level that FLUKE made their name on, extraordinary measures are required in the service; extremely complex procedures that would NOT be apparent to folks who do consumer electronics repair which would require special training that FLUKE has EVERY RIGHT to restrict to a handful of ASPs that they can keep an eye on to perform those repairs correctly.

Thinking about things like always wearing gloves so body oils can't form a trace across points with a potential to carry high potential and other clean room precautions, just for a start. FFS, even putting the wrong fuse in one of these meters will make it NO LONGER Cat III safe. I give it a 50/50 chance LR knows or even cares about any of this.

Now think about the kind of repairs we like to do...  Is it any wonder FLUKE doesn't want to talk to us ?

They operate on a whole 'nuther level, man. They don't have time to eff around with us; we're not their customer. People who can buy a cabinet full of NEW FLUKE are their customer. The rest of us can talk to one of their authorized vendors or ASPs; who CAN BUY AND HAVE a cabinet full of NEW FLUKE.

mnem
Reality bites.

We are going in circles. You could be a Keysight engineer and Fluke would still not sell these parts to you. They don't give a shit about who you are. They just don't seem to sell parts without also selling a repair even though the US website states "Availability of replacement parts is a key element in providing quick turnaround and product support for customers who perform their own maintenance. By providing quality parts we will help return your Fluke products to peak performance". Yet Keysight, TTi and many others have no issue selling parts so the "standards" argument falls through too. The most likely explanation is that they lock in customers because they can. We don't need to make it any prettier than it is. Money makes the world go round.

[mnementh]

And why should they? Your theoretical Keysight engineer is NOT a fucking FLUKE ASP; they don't HAVE TO talk to him, just like they don't have to talk to us. You're just mad they won't let you to play with the cool kids. 

mnem
Tautology: It's what's for dinner.

PPS:


https://imgur.com/gallery/2aRiEro

mnem
 

[Mr. Scram]

https://imgur.com/gallery/2aRiEro

mnem
 

Taking the bus can't be that expensive.

[mnementh]

https://imgur.com/gallery/2aRiEro

mnem
 

Taking the bus can't be that expensive.

Uhhh... yeah. It's not the travel, it's the shower gifts.  In recent generations, the expectations of what is "customary" have gotten pretty high in most circles.

mnem
Also, it's a freaking joke.

[Mr. Scram]

And why should they? Your theoretical Keysight engineer is NOT a fucking FLUKE ASP; they don't HAVE TO talk to him, just like they don't have to talk to us. You're just mad they won't let you to play with the cool kids. 

mnem
Tautology: It's what's for dinner.

I feel we're moving the goalposts here. The argument was they don't just talk to anybody and the response is that they don't talk to anyone at all. Unless they also get to sell a juicy repair.

Btw I'm a Time Lord now.