Dave Winer talks about it for the web, and I think the same is happening on the hardware side.
When I came back in September in Paris, I powered back on my network drive and nothing happened. Not a single light, no spinnin’. I thought “oh yeah, those shitty power supply, I guess I’ll have to change it”. Changed it, nothing. At that point I had two options:
– send the network drive to LaCie to fix it.
– open the damn enclosure to see if the standard hard-drive inside is working or if the enclosure died.
I knew about the second option because I’m used to computer technology but searching the web 20 minutes gives you the answer too. FYI.
The -terrible- support tells me that I have to send my network drive back and that they will fix it. However, all my data will be erased. Because they simply format the disc and change the enclosure. They don’t even bother.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. No.
I guess I will not hear your dead ass anymore, blue HAL.
I opened the enclosure with my legendary screwdriver skills (four or five screws to unscrew, insane), put the hard-drive in a 20 bucks SATA enclosure which is as hard as putting two bricks of Lego together. It’s so hard and complex to do that an 8 year old could do it. I switched on the all thing, the hard-drive is fine. The network enclosure somehow had died.
I wasn’t that pissed because I wasn’t going to loose anything really important or a massive amount of data (maybe 100 Gb with 40% already backed up). I was pissed that the “service” from the company was to erase my data and not give a shit about me. Guys, we don’t buy storage to have storage, we buy storage to put stuff in it. So you need to care about it too.
Of course, opening the enclosure voided the guaranty but I had all my data back and that’s what I wanted.
I hate this trend where “they take care of you” which means that you just get so stupidly scared that you don’t even do something as simple as opening with a screwdriver a fucking box. Don’t you ever tell me you are a geek or a nerd if the only thing you do in front of defective computer stuff is to go whine to a store with your “broken” device.
It makes people believe that computers are stuff made of Angel’s sweat and powered by God’s blood. So here’s the truth: COMPUTERS ARE DUMB MACHINES WITH SCREWS AND ARE VERY STURDY AS LONG AS YOU DON’T IMMERGE THEM IN THE WATER OR JUMP ON THEM.
It’s so easy today. It’s never been that easy to change parts on computers, thanks to solid standards like USB or SATA and something that we don’t talk about: the incredible Taiwan’s engineer’s work of unification, security and simplification of motherboards, chipsets etc. Mad props to these men and women. So much has been done for us.
20 years ago you had to read a shitty English translation of instructions to move a damn jumper on a motherboard from J1 to J3 to just be able to use a hard-drive on another machine. And maybe it wasn’t J1 because the 1 was actually a badly written 2.
It is so easy now and yet, all-in-one computers are spreading, where if a single thing goes wrong or that you simply want to update a part, you have to go to the middleman and get on your knees. “Oh lord, please save him!!!! PLEASE”. Well, no.
People often compare that with cars and garages. You never fix your car yourself today, you go to a garage. It’s not even an option these days. But what people miss is that a car is not a computer. It’s big, dirty, inconvenient to operate, you need special tools. Here, I’m talking about a simple box with four effing screws. Opening it and taking care of it saved my data, which was the goal. No car has your photos or anything personal. If your library in the living room needed some fixing you wouldn’t ship the all thing. You would fix it or put your books on the side and buy new furniture if the wood is that rotten.
It’s not about saving money -I had to buy another network drive at the end- it’s about freedom and trusting yourself. Doing it instead of waiting for it, avoiding responsibilities and complaining about support.
In the computer and hardware world, we’re giving up on being adults at an alarming rate.