The microchip stores nothing but a serial number. I don’t quite understand the design that you would need a vendor to maintain a database between the serial and owner information, why not just store owner phone number like a traditional dog tag?
It's a permanent primary key into "an" owner database. Unfortunately, there are 40+ databases as there are that many registration companies. I don't even know if there's a unified interface to query all of them simultaneously. Does anyone know how the queries work if a pet be registered in some small or obscure registry that's not supported by every shelter/agency?
Beyond some size, antique items become less valuable, because of the sheer headaches of moving and storing them. This thing qualifies. Antique Teletype machines are not very expensive. People have bought Linotype machines for $200. Trying to find a home for a locomotive is very tough. (When the Pacific Locomotive Society lost their lease at Hunter's Point Naval Station, they had a big problem. Most of their fleet is now stored at Brightside on the Niles Canyon Railway.)
Like pianos. Unless they are very good, their value tends to go in the negative numbers with time, as you have to move them somehow.
In my parents place, an apartment in a second floor, there's an upright Yamaha that my dad bought in the late 70s or early 80s. I think they brought them in through the stairs, but like 10 years ago an elevator was added to the building lobby, and I don't think there is enough space to move it around. I think the piano will remain with the apartment forever :D
Pianos also have a shelf life. It’s usually a couple of decades depending on use and maintenance levels, but eventually maintaining it turns into just building a whole new piano in the same box
I get the value over time, but the original store owner bought it when it was brand new, so I wonder if Sony didn't have a lot of sales even in Japan, and this one guy was the only one who had the money and that one Sony guy got insanely lucky it was exactly what they wanted. I'm trying to read between the lines of how the previous owner is describing it and the fact that this TV was so rare some people thought it was fake.
Kind of wild and a little emotional to think that two robot companies off Route 128 ended up with such different fates — Kiva Systems became Amazon Robotics, while iRobot’s Amazon deal was blocked by Lina Khan and now it’s being sold off to a foreign company.
You know Lina Khan lead FTC blocked the deal, but if you check the thread, huge amount of folks aren’t aware of this fact.
As an owner of 2 iRobot Roomba I feel so “protected” now, they may become a brick or spy of a foreign company.
But if you dig hard enough, there's actually links to more evidence of why it is that complicated... so I don't think it was necessarily intentionally done as a method of lock-in, but where's the outrage in that? /s
"Complicated file format has legitimate reasons for being complicated" just doesn't have the same ring to it as a sensationalized accusation with no proof.
"You have opened your Word 97 document in Office 2003. The quirks have been removed, so it might look different now. Check every page before saving as docx."
"You have pasted from a Word 97 document into an Office 2003 OOXML document. Some things will not work."
If you want a look at how this (doesn't) work in practice, just look at Libreoffice. I once made 3 hours worth of comments on a Word doc, and as soon as I saved it, they all vanished into thin air.
And for the pedantic, yes it warns you when saving as a .docx that "not all features are supported", but it does that every time, for every document, so nobody pays attention to it or has any idea what it even means. To me the way it handles this is just completely unacceptable.
Office could freely continue to support their old proprietary formats if they wanted.
In an ideal world a converter would generate E.G. a 1200 PPI render of each page, then compare it to a similar render as provided in the nearest rendition in the allowed simple new format. Those could be diffed to produce a highlight of areas that changed.
The software could then ask if the transcription from one format to the other was close enough, or if there were some corner case that wasn't good enough.
Bonus points, collect feedback if the end user is willing to submit examples.
having a lot of intend to keep it complicated and cause vendor locking and comply in bad faith
and this being very easy to archive just by not trying to improve on a status quo and creating a standard where you are the only one to decide what goes in where. Or other simple things like intentionally putting a senior engineer you know tends to painfully overweening things but keep it in a working state, etc. etc. Just by management decisions done in a higher level then the project you can pretty reliable mess up things in various ways as needed pretty reliable as long as you have enough people to choose from.
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