same here. It's becoming a bigger problem the more marketplace sellers there are.

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Smartwatches: the most useless product yet to be bouyed into semi-relevance by the Apple Hype-train.

This. Exactly this.

I have experienced it first hand with, get this, a genuine ASUS chromebook. The "seller" had stuck their own inventory stickers on the box indicating the computer was a red/gold version, and Amazon shipped me one of these machines, when I open the box I find a blue/white machine. It's the correct model and spec, but *underneath* the incorrectly applied "seller"'s inventory sticker, the ASUS box clearly shows the correct colour of the machine contained in the box. Amazon had commingled the inventory though, and gone off what the "seller"'s sticker said, since it covered the actual ASUS sticker. I kept the machine... which I suppose just supports them continuing this practice, but if it happens with genuine products, what's to stop it from happening with knock-offs as well?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

That's why my Sun 3/110 went away. The joke was I kept it around because it effectively doubled as a space heater...

manufacture date 1986.

It was running continuously (used to be a workstation for an electron microscope system at a university, and in my possession it was a mail server, even well past the point at which replacing it would have been the smart thing to do) except for one hard drive replacement until early 2008.

Even today, I'm 100% sure it would boot without issue if it were turned back on. 3-slot desk-side VME-bus machine with convective cooling and some of the highest quality circuits boards and components I have ever seen in real life. I gave it to a friend, who has definitely used it since then for entertainment purposes, but it no longer does any work for a living.

for you challenged in maths, that's 22 years of continuous use. and as of last know it STILL worked, which, at 30, makes it older than most of you I'll bet.

I have a Lumia 928 on Verizon.

I'm a Verizon customer (i live in northern Vermont, Verizon OWNS this part of the world, if i actually want to have LTE I have no choice), my last sanctioned update was Christmas last year. I have, in fact, run the battery dead since then.

Agreed, the last time I restarted my 928 was because it ran out of Battery. Before the 8.2(denim) update I had some cell-radio failures every once in a while that required a restart to resolve, and camera freak-outs with failure to reinitialize auto exposure, but since the update it has "just worked" all the time, every time, Apps may crash but the system stays up, all feature work as advertised, and it's tough as nails too. I may be moving to an Icon soon, I certainly WILL NOT be getting an Android or iOS device. I admit to occasionally wishing there was the embarrassment of app support those platforms have, but then I realize I have all the time wasters I need and most of the productivity stuff I need and I don't have to deal with all the other bullshit.

So, when do parrots and crows get the vote? I know parrots who are clearly smarter, more emotionally mature, and have better reasoning skills than a depressingly large portion of the US population.

This is nearly identical to my own experience. Of course I have only recently switched to full time Intel hardware usage and spent many a year searching for good ways to run unix-like systems on PPC and 68K machines... and floppies, wow, I remember installing something, maybe it was NetBSD on a IIVX via floppies... and then there was all the fun with A/UX and SunOS and PPCLinux and YellowDog, and BeOS, AIX and all the fun I had with that 604 equipped CHRP reference board, and PPC Amigas, and 68k Amigas running FreeBSD and m68k distros (I think those came on floppies too now that I think about it!) and QNX and Darwin and fuck I don't know what else. I never could get my grubby little hands on a NeXT box though...

Then in 2001 I Installed OSX server 10.1.1 on my Beige G3 tower and never went back. I still have those CDs with the green marker on them saying "OSX Server 10.1.1 ISOs" I may frame them.

Thats about the time I began to spend less time here on Slashdot too...

On a complete randon tanget probability is proof that time is not infinite: if time were infinite all things would have an equal probability of happening. perhaps we don't have large enough samples yet, but there are certian things that are just VASTLY more likely to happen than others and this seems to support a non-infinite timeline.

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