Fortunately I was able to make do with the genuine part, though not trivially: there was a weird clock termination difference. It's never easy, is it?
Fortunately I was able to make do with the genuine part, though not trivially: there was a weird clock termination difference. It's never easy, is it?
Also, of course: "instead of bobcat, package contained chair".
Penicillin is probably the best and most well known example.
Reminds me of reading about "Fogbank"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank:
"In March 2007, engineers devised a manufacturing process for Fogbank. Unfortunately, the material turned out to have problems when tested, and in September 2007 the Fogbank project was upgraded to "Code Blue" status by the NNSA, making it a major priority [...]
The experience of reverse engineering Fogbank produced some improvements in scientific knowledge of the process. The new production scientists noticed that certain problems in production resembled those noted by the original team. These problems were traced to a particular impurity in the final product that was required to meet quality standards. A root cause investigation showed that input materials were subject to cleaning processes that had not existed during the original production run. This cleaning removed a substance that generated the required impurity. With the implicit role of this substance finally understood, the production scientists can control output quality better than during the original run."
I have also spent thousands of dollars of my time so I wouldn't have to replace a $3 part.
Some years ago at an IETF one of the talks was about an outfit whose hosting or cloud or something pricing change was designed to prod people towards IPv6. Something like, on contract renewal you could keep the same config, same price, for the next period, but you only get IPv6, or, you could decide you must have IPv4 still, but that's a separate product now, so you need to get your finance people to sign off on the revised billing with the small extra cost for the v4 addresses you'll need as they're no longer baked in. One reason to do this was because v4 addressing does actually cost money, but they also expected it would itself drive migrations to IPv6 and they were correct.
Because "We should fix our thing to work with IPv6" sounds potentially like a fun learning experience whereas "We should talk to our finance department" sounds miserable so they're obviously gonna put a few hours into making IPv6 work rather than take the "easy" option.
IIRC They did have customers who paid for IPv4 after the changes, but the vast majority went IPv6 only.
(not even kidding!)
Don't joke, they exist.
I have a digital mixer for music recording that is also an audio interface for my computer. I had a somewhat known problem where 12 out of the 16 channels stop working.
Turns out what’s going on is the mixer is ‘gating’ the audio signal because the digital gate effect (that is built in) is claiming that it is receiving an input such that it will attenuate the audio signal.
I don’t even know how to diagnose a problem like this. It’s awesome watching someone who does!
That was some repair! Bravo! And fantastic write-up - technical diagram included.
Though I won’t say I was too sad when we got to use a 5GHz touch screen Tektronix instead! It ran Windows XP and was generally super awesome to use.
But then again if it's already dead you can't kill it more.
I live by this, and try my hand at fixing everything that I would otherwise junk. Some of the time, I even succeed!