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Toshiba formally and finally exits laptop business
- sparrish 6y agoMy first laptop was a Toshiba 205CDS. Loved it. Bought Toshiba for years until I finally saw the light and moved to Thinkpads.
- thisisnico 6y agobest deal is to buy pre-owned think pads for 1/4th the msrp.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoOr well below. I bought a T41 on eBay for $150 around 2009 and it finally bit the dust last year.
- agloeregrets 6y agoI had a Toshiba Chromebook for a little while and it was fantastic, a machine focused around meeting all the hardware needs to be “good enough” at a reasonable price. It had a great 1080p display, good performance, a good keyboard and great build. All under $300. Oh well. Such is life.
- zumu 6y agoMy first developer laptop was one of these hacked to run Ubuntu. I think I dropped $400 on it. That puppy took me from barista to employed software developer. Afterwards it found a second life as my favorite travel / bedside laptop until a glass of water claimed its life a few years back.
- brailsafe 6y agoAre you happier as a barista or SD? :) I'm only kind of being snarky
- iakov 6y agoIt's a valid question though. So many of my colleagues in software engineering want to be baristas, or bake bread, or grow organic marijuana! But I guess the grass is always greener on the other side.
- mettamage 6y agoFor me not really. Remote work all the way :) It takes a certain kind of person, and I'm part of that group ;-)
- will_pseudonym 6y agoI got a laugh at the "grass is always greener" pun. Thanks :)
- Spooky23 6y agoMy high school job as a barista/sandwich maker/prep guy was probably the best job from a fun POV ever.
- llampx 6y agoNow imagine doing that as a 45 year old
- Spooky23 6y agoLiving on that salary would be misery. But I like talking to people and enjoyed interacting with customers and regulars.
- rhizome31 6y agoLiving without the social stigma associated with IT work (at least in western countries) is also an incentive. So many times I have seen faces changing when I say that I work as a SD. It's a real attraction killer. I even once had a lady who wouldn't believe me because I was "too cool" to do this job.
- bxparks 6y agoAgreed, the Toshiba Chromebook 2 is nice, 4GB RAM, good keyboard, beautiful screen. But the web has become so slow and bloated, it's not very usable anymore. It now works as dedicated recipe terminal in the kitchen. It is still getting ChromeOS updates, until next year I think.
- xxr 6y agoHow well does it do at that job? I've found that recipe websites are some of the most bloated and least performant, up there with network-affiliate-branded news sites.
- digikazi 6y agoI still rock a TCB 2 - the earlier version with only 2GB RAM. I still find it eminently usable and often have 10+ tabs open(1). It hasn't missed a beat since May 2015 although perhaps recently I've started noticing a bit of slowness here and there but nothing major. I'm still using it every day as a bedside laptop; I'll be very sorry to let it go when the time comes. (1) I use it primarily for light browsing, email and YouTube, so it doesn't do any heavy lifting.
- jdeibele 6y agoTwo of my children are still using these. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 is available (swappa.com, eBay, etc.) in 2014 or 2015 versions. The major difference seems to be that the 2015 has backlit keys and is very rare compared to the 2014. I bought protective shells for them and that made a huge difference in longevity. The kids would tend to pick up their computers by the top/screen and could crack the screen or knock a connector loose. The speakers on it are also decent, which my kids appreciate. I really don't see how people can use the typical Chromebook with its 1366 x 768 screen except that it would make you focus solely on what was on screen.
- maxk42 6y agoReal shame. Toshiba always had the best value for low-cost laptops.
- encoderer 6y agoWho else was hacking on a Toshiba Satellite in the 90s?
- gregschlom 6y agoT1950CT for me, writing QBASIC games. Good memories.
- megablast 6y agoToshiba T3100e With batteries the size of your fist, and an orange screen. Building asm projects using masm or tasm. Good times.
- phreeza 6y agoYup, T1900 handed down from an uncle, my first computer!
- dmead 6y agoI was gifted one as a 15 year old. It had 8mb of ram and spent lots of time running warcraft 2. Good times.
- carldaddy 6y agoMy first laptop for college was a Toshiba Satellite. This would have been around 2006. It was a great machine at a reasonable price. Never had any issues with it until the battery died like 8 years later.
- dmead 6y agoaye. my grad school machine was a toshiba from that era. sorry to see they're out of the biz.
- bluedino 6y agoMy first laptop was a Satellite 2100 CDT
- 6y ago
- acomjean 6y agoWait. They sold the business to sharp, which renamed it Dynabook. so this isn't entirely new. (Sharp just recently acquired the remaining 19% of Toshiba's notebook company it didn't already own.)
- sct202 6y agoSharp is also largely owned by Foxconn, so they probably have some advantages with production/assembly costs from that.
- zumu 6y agoNot that with Toshiba it was necessarily the case, but are there any Made in Japan laptops left on the market?
- Marsymars 6y agoI think Vaio, Fujitsu, Panasonic.
- basch 6y agoThey should have merged when they had the chance. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3056030/proposed-toshiba-fujitsu-vaio-pc-merger-is-reportedly-collapsing.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3056030/proposed-toshiba-fuj... Looks like the answer is 4 years.
- reaperducer 6y agoBut are they actually made in Japan, or are they just Japanese companies that farm the manufacturing out to China, like everyone else? The last time I was in Yodobashi Camera, I had a hard time finding any electronics that were actually made in Japan. I even asked the staff about it.
- zumu 6y agoIt is increasingly hard to decipher. I haven't checked recently, but a lot of camera factories were still operating in Japan around 10 years ago.
- fomine3 6y agoNEC and Fujitsu was famost PC manufacturer in Japan but they are acquired by Lenovo (partially). But they are still building some PCs (mainly Laptop) in Japan and selling. I don't know whether they are exported. Some ThinkPads are also made on NEC fabs in Japan.
- fraciel 6y agoYo tengo una toshiba satelite 610 desde aproximada mente 6 años y todavia se resiste a naufragar
- devchix 6y agoI had a Toshiba laptop that weighed 80 pounds, a quarter of that was the power adapter and an external drive. The backpack I carried it in could fit a folded yurt. It permanently altered my gait. Good times.
- jmkb 6y agoThe Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1 hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)
- iancmceachern 6y agoThe toughbooks were iconic
- jacquesm 6y agoMost of them still are iconic. Those things are nigh on indestructible and unless you really mean it they will be happy to continue to exist for a very long time. I wonder how recyclers deal with Toughbooks.
- projektfu 6y agoI thought that was Panasonic.
- joshcain 6y agoI thought Toughbooks are made by Panasonic? Did they buy the brand from Toshiba at some point?
- numpad0 6y agoToshiba’s legendary accounting fraud in PC division: https://mobile.twitter.com/zapa/status/1218450189301628928/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/zapa/status/1218450189301628928/p... Darker blue is operational profit and lighter blue is sales total in ¥100mil.(~$mil.) Just like an oscillating power circuitry! Can’t make this up and they couldn’t have been more engineering oriented than this.
- umvi 6y agoCan somebody expound a little more on what the fraud was? Edit: I believe the tweet is referring to the 2015 accounting scandal (listed on wikipedia here[0]), more information on how it happened here[1]. From what I understand, the oscillations come from the fact that corporate leadership handed down profit targets for business unit presidents to meet, with the expectation that failure to meet them = you're fired. So the business unit presidents worked with accountants to fudge the numbers at the end of every quarter to meet the unrealistic targets. Then the numbers would revert back to reality at the start of the next quarter. Corporate leadership was only looking at end-of-quarter numbers so they just kept increasing the (already unrealistic) profit targets year after year? Or maybe they understood what was going on but liked the effect it was having on their stock options/bonuses/whatever, so they kept perpetuating the fraud? But then again, why allow profits to revert back to reality, why not fudge profits all the way to hide the oscillations? My vote is on corporate leadership incompetence. When you have a dictatorship-like culture of strict obedience, you start having an information propagation problem. Your underlings will suppress information they know you won't like (because you'll punish them) and will only feed you the truth when convenient. They will also outright lie if they have to, to save themselves from your wrath. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba#2015_accounting_scanda... [1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshibas-accounting-scandal-how-it-happened.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshi...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baybal2 6y ago
- jacquesm 6y agoThe most impressive laptop I ever owned was a Libretto. It was more than a decade before another laptop came around that gave that same feeling (the Macbook Air).
- znpy 6y agoToshiba also had their thin and light (portége z820 iirc) way before slot of other competitors (the only real competitor was the hp folio 13 iirc).
- jacquesm 6y agoAh, and I forgot to mention the Compaq Aero and the Sony Vaio. I did own the former, not the latter. That was the first computer I owned that earned itself back inside of a month.
- pjc50 6y agoLibretto 30 owner clocking in. It was amazing to have a portable device that fit in a "poacher" pocket and could browse the web and play mp3 files in 1998. It couldn't do both at the same time.
- barrkel 6y agoToshiba Portege, at about 1.1kg IIRC, was pretty incredible, around the time the Macbook Air first came out, lighter than the Air but with a DVD drive. It was my travel work laptop, before netbooks became a thing. It felt quite plastic though, nothing like a Macbook Air (which I got pretty soon after). Mechanical drive too, I seem to recall - I still have it upstairs and have it pencilled in as a first Linux laptop for my son.
- shard 6y agoThe Libretto! I had completely forgotten about my Libretto 100, which I carried with me to class and took notes on, as well as used in the field to debug HW issues, using the small dock and connecting field HW to the serial port. I took that quirky little laptop all over the world with me in my travels. It was thick and sturdy, so I wasn't too concerned about protecting it, as opposed to the ultraportable laptops nowadays, which are so thin and wide that I have to mind what happens to it. There was also a small and friendly community of Libretto owners which would share tips; I recall disassembling the laptop and soldering on more memory, based on some guides from people in the Libretto mailing list.
- ilyas121 6y agoWild, I remember when I lived in Morocco, Toshiba laptops were all that I saw.
- theklub 6y agoToshiba protege m400 tablets were a god damn nightmare and forever tarnished the brand for me.
- renewiltord 6y agoFunny. The first laptop I saw was my dad's clunky old Portege (from the '90s?). Tried to bring it back to life the other day but it looks like the disk is dead and I didn't care _that_ much.
- ubermonkey 6y agoToshiba was fucking HUGE in the 1990s. I had a couple back in those days. They were good machines for the time. Then IBM became king with the ThinkPad.
- danielscrubs 6y agoThey where awful. Build quality was shoddy, bad touchpad and fan noise through the roof.
- ubermonkey 6y agoYou're saying they were awful in the mid 90s, or they became awful later? Because the machines I had in '96 or so were solid.
- danielscrubs 6y agoAwful in 2005
- hyperpl 6y agoAt least personally, I always considered Toshiba laptops to be the bottom of the barrel in terms of quality. I don't recall a time when thinkpad (at least before Lenovo bought them) could have been considered inferior?
- megablast 6y agoToshiba went to shit, but in the early days they were at the top.
- chaoticmass 6y agoThey were quite good in the early to mid 90's but by 2000 and onward they were pretty bad as far as quality. I worked in a computer store that did also did repair and there were a few problems you'd always see on Toshibas: power button failure (ribbon cable on the inside would get damaged or just come loose) and power connector failures (the barrel connector would come unsoldered on the inside).
- dasb 6y agoI loved my ~2008 Toshiba Satellite. Rest in peace, old friend.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoMine's still in service (as a stationary machine for video comsumption.)
- knifepatrol 6y agoMy first laptop was a Toshiba around 2003. It was pretty great at the time, but laughably heavy and clunky by today’s standards (I still have it for some reason...) RIP
- pjmorris 6y agoMy first work laptop was a Toshiba. We went through so much together that I nicknamed it R2D2.
- rhizome31 6y agoLol, mine is simply nicknamed "Toto", which here in France is the equivalent of "foo" and also a naughty child character in jokes.
- baybal2 6y agoSO, even the Japanese now prefer less boring styled laptops?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ussrlongbow 6y agoI remember Toshiba AC100 back in 2011 (afair) with tegra cpu and 3G modem weighting about 800 grams. Originally shipped with Android without marketplace, became more or less usable after installing Ubuntu on it. They really could win a niche of ultraportable laptops.
- ht_th 6y agoMy first laptop was a Toshiba T3100e from the late 1980s. It still works! I remember the fun I had playing games, learning to program in basic, and writing reports with WordPerfect 4.2.
- blitmap 6y agoI really loved the Toshiba Radius 12 I had several years ago, with a 2160p display. It very much kicked ass at gaming, too. Toshiba had potential.
- oska 6y agoMy father had a computer store that sold Taiwanese desktop clones and Toshiba laptops in the late 80s. The article says that Toshiba were manufacturing laptops from 1985. I'm pretty sure we were selling them in 1987 so I didn't realise quite how close to the start we were. They were very good laptops at the time - their only real competitor was the Compaq laptop range and I'd argue that the Toshibas were better, although I'm obviously biased. Just looking now at wikipedia, I'm sure that we sold the T1000 [1] and T1200 [2] but I'm not sure if we ever sold the T1100 [3] (their first model). We also sold the T3100 [4] which had a gas plasma screen that was quite a wondrous thing at the time. It was also very expensive. They were mostly bought by higher level executives as a status symbol. My father kept one for personal use too. It was a very profitable business to be in at the time - margins were high, unlike the razor-thin margins of today. But my dad didn't capitalise on it as well as he should have. He overpaid his sales staff when they really weren't having to make much of an effort to sell such a hot item. And he didn't pay enough attention to the accounts so that when the recession of the early 90s arrived and government departments stopped buying he hit a cashflow problem and the company went bust. But there were a few good years before that and I still remember the Toshiba laptops of that time quite fondly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1000 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1200 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T3100
- f00zz 6y agoWasn't there a US import ban on Toshiba products for a few years back in the 80s, apparently because they sold parts to the Soviet Union?
- oska 6y agoMaybe? I don't know. My father's business wasn't in the US.
- jzwinck 6y agoPart of Toshiba was banned from selling into the US for two years at the end of the 80's for selling machines to the USSR which were used to make quiet propellers for submarines. https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923 https://apnews.com/aad45a6f2de8d599d97242394be65923 This response by the US would have hurt both Japan and the US, while not so much affecting the USSR who already had their quiet propellers. It probably did hurt US consumers, but it didn't end up hurting the US government which ignored its own ban! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/toshiba-machine-exporting-to-us-months-after-bans-signing/cdede8cf-cb12-49c0-a197-4cea3cd9c6a2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/12/15/t...
- aidenn0 6y agoFirst laptop I ever used (or saw for that matter) was a Toshiba T1200. That thing must have weighed 10lbs, but it was a marvel at the time.
- theodric 6y agoGood riddance
- grawprog 6y agoThat's too bad. I had toshiba laptop from 2008-2014 or 2015 or so. It was probably my longest lasting and hardest treated one. That thing carried me all through school, travelled to yellowstone and all around BC, was taken to camp sites and used during field work. I regularly threw it in a backpack with no case or anything packed in with a bunch of stuff and carried it well over a few hundred km over the years like that. I'm still not sure exactly what's wrong with it. The original hard drive ended up with a corrupted MBR, then the replacement drive i put in ended up with the same thing within a day. I just ended up retiring it and getting a new one. Though for a while though i was keeping that thing on life support by running a linux distro partitioned across 4 usb flash drives just so i could keep using it for a bit longer. I managed to recover everything off the drives that way too. By comparison, the acer i replaced it with ended up needing a screen replacement within 2 years and that thing just pretty much hung out at home.
- keanebean86 6y agoI got a ~$250 Toshiba in 2012 for college. I added a small SSD and 4GBs ram so maybe $350 total. A few years later I replaced the CD drive with a hard drive since the SSD filled up pretty quick. I still use it daily 8 years later. My only complaint is the cheap plastic case has deteriorated so it's partially held together by tape now. I also had to replace the screen hinges a few years ago. But compared to the Acer before it (2008 bad Nvidia GPU) and my wife's trash HP laptop the Toshiba has been worth every penny.
- Crazyontap 6y agoSame experience here. Those laptops have been really reliable. A shitty courier company apparently loaded a fridge over one corner of my laptop while transporting it (don't ask why or how it happened) and the end result was the laptop broke at the corner (imagine loading 200kg on side of a fibre glass plate). Long story short the hinge popped off, the laptop's display bottom totally teared up and yet lo and behold it's still working since the last 5 years. It looks like a Frankenstein laptop but it works flawlessly and never has given me any issues. My asus laptop on the other hand.. :/
- yread 6y ago
- wildpeaks 6y agoEnd of an era, their laptops used to be everywhere.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 6y agoMy first ever laptop, and in fact first ever computer that I did not share with someone else was a Toshiba Satellite A100 that I purchased when I was 22. I actually needed it for a job I got (not having a computer provided was in hindsight a bad sign) and the company was so bad I left in 3 months. The Toshiba was a decent laptop though until 3 years later I switch to a Macbook, and have had Macbooks since. It seems many other people followed that same path so sad as it is, it's not a surprise.
- moneywoes 6y agoReminds me of When sony quit
- metah 6y agoEnd of an era, I guess. My first ever computer was a Toshiba T1910 in the mid 90s. Monochrome, Running windows 3.1.
- W-Stool 6y agoMy first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 around 1987. I thought I was quite the high roller traveling around with that thing. MSDOS and a 640x200 display - those were the days.
- IOT_Apprentice 6y agoI worked for Toshiba America. The story is the CEO at the time told his underlings "I cannot report such earnings to our shareholders". His executives then went ahead and cooked the books. Beyond that, Toshiba was a company in crisis. They announced all sorts of forward looking partnerships via press releases and had powerpoints about them, but allocated ZERO budget to implement them. They ordered their existing units (seemingly hundreds of business units) to stay the course on obsolete and non-competitive products that were not generating revenue any longer. Their cloud and "chip to cloud" plans were Potemkin villages, devoid of tech or investment. Their PC division was non-competitive with flash storage, even though Toshiba's disk division INVENTED flash storage (and that was unpopular in that division--it went to market with much opposition, driven by ONE guy). Toshiba basically played fortress Japan, where they made handshake deals with other moribund Keiretsu would just cross sell to each other. They were being out innovated on all fronts, and were paralyzed to make the big changes, as the culture was one of never rocking the boat, and hanging on till retirement. The dream was to retire and perhaps be asked to consult back to the company. The same thing was going on with the other firms there, like Sony et al. Disruption, the cloud, open source and innovation just destroyed a firm with an amazing historical legacy.
- jariel 6y agoThis is a really intriguing artefact of specific cultures. Clearly, there are benefits to 'Failure is Not Tolerated' cultures, it is interesting how people can pull rabbits out of hats when they have to. That said, if they are up against a real wall, they will be pulling the rabbits out their rears (ie fraud) and it will be a problem. But then you get a secondary effect: a kind of 'coverup cancer' which spreads through the social system, nobody willing to let it surface. The European CEO of Japanese Olympus has a pretty intriguing story about this. Uncanny stuff about the depth of the fraud, like being in an episode of Twilight Zone. The corruption is way, way more than just a few leaders - it's entire networks of systems and leaders, everyone covering for one another. I suspect there are vast systematic hidden problems in Japan. Germany has a little bit of this. For some cultures, it's hard to understand the actual value of 'Chapter 11'. It's really an amazing bit of commercial policy that bankruptcy protection. Someone needs to write a book on all the various ways we hide problems. The US Fed takes on Trillions of toxic assets. The Canadian economy prints money to new migrants buying homes as a form of 'spending the future now' in a giant Ponzi scheme. China makes up numbers willy nilly. Japanese hide it inside private networks. Etc..
- stretchwithme 6y agoWe had a Trashiba system 20 years ago. The case was impossible to open.
- cubix 6y agoTheir "I checked my notebook" commercials in the 90's are memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSycqXoxIzI No company would even joke about behaving like that on an airplane today.
- jfb 6y agoI always lusted after a T3100. God, that was an amazing machine.
- spiltketchup 6y agoMy dad had a Toshiba back in the day and I thought it was the coolest laptop in existence. I now have had a Macbook for the past 7 years, but I have nothing bad to say about Toshiba laptops.
- _emacsomancer_ 6y agoI still have an old ca. 2008 Toshiba Satellite laptop running as a sort of media centre for the exercise room. My first laptop.
- bondolo 6y agoThe only things I liked about my early 2000s Toshiba laptop were the physical volume control knob and manual wifi switch. Software controlled volume seemed so stupid in comparison. I still think laptops should have both if these switches as well as a physical camera and microphone switch. You can't ( realistically) hack past an air gap.
- rmason 6y agoI had several generations of Qosmio laptops and they were exceptionally good high performance machines. A bit pricey but for the use I gave them a great value.
- danans 6y agoAlmost 2 decades ago my daily driver was a Toshiba Portege running redhat. My first post college laptop. Despite the effort of required to get it running, it served me well and had great design for its day.
- xioxox 6y agoI have a Toshiba Portege R500 in a cupboard somewhere. It was a very impressive machine. It's extremely light at less than a kg (particularly compared to others at the time). It has an SSD (albeit on some weird interface). The keyboard is also rather nice. The most interesting part is the transflective screen which works in direct sunlight. One nice point was that Toshiba repaired it free of charge when the screen broken off due to a korfball incident. It's a shame they've exited when they used to have such innovative machines.
- jamil7 6y agoMy one and only windows pc was a toshiba laptop, the thing overheated so much that the exhaust grill plastic cracked and broke off leaving a side of the laptop exposed.
- goatinaboat 6y agoI think I still might have my old Toshiba laptop somewhere. Installed Debian on it via ZMODEM. Good times.
- tomhoward 6y agoHow the world changes. I reckon all the laptops I was exposed to in the early-mid 90s through school and my father’s work were Toshibas, to the point where I may even have thought Toshiba was the only company that made laptops. Seeing this news today, my reaction is “Toshiba still makes laptops?”
- abhayhegde 6y agoThere was a time when the Toshiba laptops were the top priority for laptops and it is strange how the turntables.
- dewarrn1 6y agoIt's a shame because they made such outstanding products at one time. I was given a Toshiba laptop as I headed off to college in 1995, and it still boots (to Windows 3.11) 25 years later.
- cabinguy 6y ago100%. My first business was buying/refurbishing/selling used laptops. I bought/sold tens of thousands. Toshiba was by far the best. IBM was 2nd. Now they’re both gone.
- knolax 6y agoI don't understand the wild leap of logic other comments in this thread are making where "Company X does fraud" becomes "Japanese work culture leads to fraud". You could easily make similar shoddy arguments with any country but it seems HN seems intent on only wheeling out the "tHeIR cUlTuRe Is bAd" argument when nobody from that culture is around to defend it.
- hattori31 6y agoI live and in work in Japan many years now. Its not even just HN. Its everywhere English language is used. Its entertaining seeing these. Japan is this place where everyone can parrot any stupid thing they heard on the internet endlessly. Its the place for which you can draw conclusions out of your ass in an attempt to understand this "exotic different culture" and people will do the same and everyone circlejerks happily. There is no balance and normal people. Its either paradise or hell depending on the subject and the speakers feelings toward Japan. I am happy there are people who understand this idiocity and I am sad there are not enough globalized people from this country to say something back in these forums.
- benatkin 6y ago:( https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/582967-doge https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/582967-doge