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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 290 responses total. |
keesan
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response 91 of 290:
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Jan 25 23:21 UTC 2006 |
Kiwanis sell TVs from the 70s and even the 60s (with tubes). Nobody watches
TV there, they are just sold. Is there some way I can look up online the
cheapest possible business option? The person who decided to pay for this
cable service won't pay for an ISP for himself (but does pay for grex). His
logic escapes me. He could get broadband for kiwanis at 1/4 the price, set
up computers with adsl modems, and sell those for more than TVs.
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marcvh
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response 92 of 290:
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Jan 25 23:45 UTC 2006 |
Yeah, www.comcast.com. I don't think they support lynx though.
I'm trying to think of what the free market price of a forty-year-old TV
with no remote, a 300 ohm antenna input, a fussy tuner that requires constant
adjustment of knobs that nobody has heard of like "horizontal hold", and so
on. Unless it's some sort of collector's item, I'm thinking it's negative
since it's full of hazardous materials that cost money to have disposed.
I certainly hope they're not selling them to people who lack the money
(or the willingness) to properly dispose of it when it breaks.
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keesan
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response 93 of 290:
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Jan 26 01:45 UTC 2006 |
We sold one turqouise one maybe from the 50s (when was turquose faddish?).
And they still sometimes get in small portables BW (7 or 9" diagonals).
People come to Kiwanis looking for antiques. Reel-to-reel tape decks
fetch a lot, as do good turntables. There is a jukebox for sale.
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slynne
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response 94 of 290:
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Jan 26 14:09 UTC 2006 |
Sindi, the broadcast only option is not one they advertise. You have to
call them and ask about it specifically.
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marcvh
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response 95 of 290:
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Jan 26 14:28 UTC 2006 |
It's not advertised, but it is listed on their web site (in my area anyway)
as "limited cable service."
Turntables are an example of an old technology which is still of some
value, and also which is sufficiently durable that old ones are still
useful. Television is not.
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twenex
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response 96 of 290:
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Jan 26 14:36 UTC 2006 |
I heard somewhere that sales of turntables are actually increasing.
Old TV's not usable? Au contraire. Until High Definition Digital Television
stomps all over bog-standard analogue transmissions, even old black and white
televisions will be USABLE, if not particularly desirable.
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marcvh
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response 97 of 290:
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Jan 26 17:08 UTC 2006 |
I didn't say they are not usable, I said they are not useful.
Relic TVs may still work, but they don't do anything that can't be done
better by newer TVs. They have parts that tend to wear out over time
and can't be serviced in a cost-effective fashion any more. Newer TVs
are better in every way and are very cheap.
Turntables, by contrast, don't have consumable components like tubes
and may still be possible to fix basic parts like needles and such. New
turntables are not readily available, and what there is caters to the
high end (DJs who scratch records, or audiophiles who don't mind paying
$1000 for a really good turntable.) That means an old turntable is
still useful for some people.
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slynne
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response 98 of 290:
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Jan 26 18:17 UTC 2006 |
Well. I have a couple of seriously old tv sets. One of them, I have had
for over 10 years and it was already so old when I got it that it had
been placed in the bathroom in my parents master bedroom. My Dad said
that he wanted to be able to watch TV while taking a bath but I have a
feeling based on how quickly my mother was willing to give me the set
that that wasnt actually the case. It wasnt so old that it had tubes
though. Anyways, it is still working and is up in my guest bedroom.
I currently have four TV sets in my house. I am thinking about buying a
new one though because all four are pretty old. Then, I think I will
get rid of three of the others and just have two.
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keesan
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response 99 of 290:
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Jan 27 05:16 UTC 2006 |
Old TV sets are cheaper than cheap new ones - they are free. We gave away
our only TV set last week to Kiwanis. It worked fine but there was nothing
we wanted to watch. And lots of good books in the library.
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tod
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response 100 of 290:
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Jan 27 17:13 UTC 2006 |
Dont the older TV's suck more electricity?
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nharmon
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response 101 of 290:
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Jan 27 17:25 UTC 2006 |
They're the SUVs of televisions.
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marcvh
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response 102 of 290:
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Jan 27 17:49 UTC 2006 |
Yeah, more hazmats too. And I don't understand how this organization
makes money by giving away TVs for free; volume maybe?
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mcnally
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response 103 of 290:
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Jan 27 18:01 UTC 2006 |
Maybe it's a loss leader. You give the television away but charge
a nickel for the coaxial cable that goes with it, thus practically
guaranteeing a nickel in revenue for each one you sell.. ;-)
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marcvh
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response 104 of 290:
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Jan 27 18:26 UTC 2006 |
Not coaxial, 300 ohm twin-lead (the stuff that was obsolete twenty years
ago.) You can get a 2m Monster Cable twin-lead cable for $85. I think
you can still use it to hook up your Pong game (but you shouldn't, since
sets of that era had horrendous burn-in problems.)
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tod
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response 105 of 290:
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Jan 27 19:13 UTC 2006 |
re #102
The free section of craigslist tends to do the same thing..give away TV's and
monitors
The reasoning behind it is that usually these are broken items which cost you
money to properly dispose of.
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keesan
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response 106 of 290:
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Jan 27 20:02 UTC 2006 |
Kiwanis does not give away free TVs, we do. We find them at the curb. This
one only needed the power cord replaced. Jim spliced on a plug end instead.
One time he found a TV/DVD player at the curb, with a little note from the
garbage collectors saying they could not take it for free. So he took it home
to fix and was really disappointed that it already worked. I use it to watch
library DVDs.
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nharmon
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response 107 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:42 UTC 2006 |
This response has been erased.
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nharmon
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response 108 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:42 UTC 2006 |
What do you do with TVs you find on the curb that are too broke to fix?
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tod
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response 109 of 290:
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Jan 27 21:56 UTC 2006 |
Hook them into Jones the dolphin.
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keesan
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response 110 of 290:
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Jan 28 00:31 UTC 2006 |
We don't take home TVs from the curb normally, just if a friend wants one,
which only happened once and that one was fixable. The cut cord was a
giveaway.
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gull
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response 111 of 290:
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Jan 30 04:42 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:98: I once replaced a 1990 RCA TV that had already died with a
1980s Sylvania one that still worked. (This was in about 1996.) I
find that newer TVs give a better picture but the build quality is
lousy. RCA, in particular, has apparently forgotten how to solder
properly.
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keesan
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response 112 of 290:
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Jan 30 14:04 UTC 2006 |
Lots of the TVs donated to Kiwanis get fixed there by soldering some bad
joint.
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nharmon
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response 113 of 290:
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Jan 30 14:25 UTC 2006 |
What happens to the ones that can't be repaired?
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keesan
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response 114 of 290:
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Jan 30 16:04 UTC 2006 |
They get put behind the dump truck. I don't know where they go next. The
unsellable or unusable computer monitors and computers get sold at 5 cents/lb
to someone who reuses or recycles them. THe printers go in the dump truck
along with books and floppy disks and cables. (We recycle our own cables as
copper, and books as paper, and printers we spend 30 min taking apart into
unrecyclable plastic, and recyclable steel, copper and aluminum).
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marcvh
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response 115 of 290:
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Jan 30 19:15 UTC 2006 |
Those prices would make me very concerned about whether the un-sellable
monitors are being properly disposed of. Normally it costs more money to
properly deal with the hazardous materials in an old monitor than you can
get out of recycling and/or salvage.
On my own front, I had to have a Comcast service call over the weekend
for a signal outage issue. Over the course of analysis I discovered
that the ground loop isolator I put on my cable TV line is responsible
for introducing ghosting and other signal degredation, and the amplifer
I put on the line (to try to reduce the degredation) seemed to be
over-driving my cable modem. The service tech wanted to remove them
both, but unfortunately that re-introduces a ground loop and the famous
60 Hz hum.
This is on a setup where everything is relatively new and is done
"right"; the electricity and cable TV both enter the home at the same
point, and both are properly grounded to the same point. Unfortunately
something still causes a loop; I guess it's a mismatch in impedance
and/or resistance, I'm not an EE so I was never totally clear on the
point.
It appears that the only cost-effective solution is to lift the ground
on my amplifiers, which solves the problem perfectly but is a bad idea.
About the only other thing I can think of is trying to add some
shielding around the isolator in the hope that it will lessen the degree
to which it's allowing OTA to leak into my CATV signal.
Anyway, the lesson of all this is that the future of home networking is
lots of annoying conflicts. I consider myself somewhat above-average in
terms of the amount of time, money and knowledge I'm willing to bring to
the table and yet I still feel stymied. So, in the future, everything
will work together, except that it will have little niggling problems
that make it all come crashing down.
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