Slashdot Mirror

"How could that be possible?", you must be asking. Surely there are safeguards against that kind of thing, right? Yes, there are. But Sal has been ingenious in finding workarounds for those safeguards. See, for example, how Justin Spence, a shrewd businessman himself who was initially suspect of Sal's integrity, was conned into finishing the deal. Sal doesn't accept credit cards nor Paypal in any form; he wants his money in checks, cashiers checks or money orders. And he often makes believe he hasn't received your payment when in fact he's already cashed it.

Sal's accounts have all been terminated, of course, but he always seems to have one more on the back burner he can use in a pinch. Lately, his wife Michelle Heinlein appears to be actively involved, since in at least one case a check made out to her name was cashed, in one of the scams. Notice the same trading pattern as Sal's former username needforspeed97, starting off good then, once he gets a good reputation, cashing it in for a few thousand dollars before eBay kicks him off. I'm pretty sure this guy Robin, needforspeed, is the same dude too, but Sal of course denies it.

I'll post more info as I can. Watch out for anybody on eBay from PA who sells high-dollar items. Sorry Pennsylvanians, but you've got a scoundrel in your midst. He lives at 1941 W. Passyunk Ave. in Philadelphia, but he sometimes sets his eBay "area" identity as Pittsburgh.

So if I know where he lives, why don't I just go break his legs? Believe me, I've thought about it, but I don't want to do something illegal that'll get me thrown in jail. Besides, he's threatened to shoot me if I come there. So if the threat turns out to be real, I'd either have to kill him or get killed myself, either of which has consequences I don't want to consider. And on top of all that, I'm a coward.

Well anyway, not to be outdone by Justin, I'm digging up my emails now too... here's the most recent thread which shows the same typing style (being very loose with that word here) as his recent threats to Justin. More to follow!

Wow, that was fast! Here he is again... it's after 2AM on the east coast, so he must be sweating bullets! Aren't you, Sal old buddy?

This is getting to be another blog in itself, so let's just follow the story in my existing blog, shall we?

"How could that be possible?", you must be asking. Surely there are safeguards against that kind of thing, right? Yes, there are. But Sal has been ingenious in finding workarounds for those safeguards. See, for example, how Justin Spence, a shrewd businessman himself who was initially suspect of Sal's integrity, was conned into finishing the deal. Sal doesn't accept credit cards nor Paypal in any form; he wants his money in checks, cashiers checks or money orders. And he often makes believe he hasn't received your payment when in fact he's already cashed it.

Sal's accounts have all been terminated, of course, but he always seems to have one more on the back burner he can use in a pinch. Lately, his wife Michelle Heinlein appears to be actively involved, since in at least one case a check made out to her name was cashed, in one of the scams. Notice the same trading pattern as Sal's former username needforspeed97, starting off good then, once he gets a good reputation, cashing it in for a few thousand dollars before eBay kicks him off. I'm pretty sure this guy Robin, needforspeed, is the same dude too, but Sal of course denies it.

I'll post more info as I can. Watch out for anybody on eBay from PA who sells high-dollar items. Sorry Pennsylvanians, but you've got a scoundrel in your midst. He lives at 1941 W. Passyunk Ave. in Philadelphia, but he sometimes sets his eBay "area" identity as Pittsburgh.

So if I know where he lives, why don't I just go break his legs? Believe me, I've thought about it, but I don't want to do something illegal that'll get me thrown in jail. Besides, he's threatened to shoot me if I come there. So if the threat turns out to be real, I'd either have to kill him or get killed myself, either of which has consequences I don't want to consider. And on top of all that, I'm a coward.

Well anyway, not to be outdone by Justin, I'm digging up my emails now too... here's the most recent thread which shows the same typing style (being very loose with that word here) as his recent threats to Justin. More to follow!

Wow, that was fast! Here he is again... it's after 2AM on the east coast, so he must be sweating bullets! Aren't you, Sal old buddy?

This is getting to be another blog in itself, so let's just follow the story in my existing blog, shall we?

I'm in a club at UC Berkeley called Berkeley Innovation. For one of our projects, we attempted to come up with a solution that would reduce the number of switched-on phones entering a lecture hall (to reduce disturbance).

At first we tried to build our own like these kids, until we ran across the cell phone pen. It's sitting right here on my desk, and it works. We even purchased a tried and true cell phone detector that is is very similar to the one they describe (same 30m range), and it even can emit a tone (not just lights). Not trying to put down these students for their efforts (or for the judges, who might rethink their definition of originality), but a little google action would have yielded these devices. Or for that matter, the suckers would bought some of the first prototypes for $1,000! We bought ours for $20. Hmm, maybe I could fund the trip to New Zealand I've always wanted to take by bringing a few of these little gems with me to sell for a 50x profit...

Ha-ha! Thanks for that link. It reminds me of how tech pundits have predicted failure for several recent (post-Jobs' return) Apple products and then failed to step up to eat their own words publicly.

I remember a guy here in Austin who does the saturday morning computer radio show saying the iMac was doomed because it doesn't have a floppy disk drive. Back then it was a safe bet to predict failure for Apple's new products. Not anymore.

I think the only predictions that went the other way on a recent Apple product was for the Cube. People thought that was going to be the hot-shit computer because it was small and had no fans. Although it didn't last long on the market, the resale value of them is still strong---

Apple Cube on Ebay.
Somewhat comparable G4 on Ebay.

Ha-ha! Thanks for that link. It reminds me of how tech pundits have predicted failure for several recent (post-Jobs' return) Apple products and then failed to step up to eat their own words publicly.

I remember a guy here in Austin who does the saturday morning computer radio show saying the iMac was doomed because it doesn't have a floppy disk drive. Back then it was a safe bet to predict failure for Apple's new products. Not anymore.

I think the only predictions that went the other way on a recent Apple product was for the Cube. People thought that was going to be the hot-shit computer because it was small and had no fans. Although it didn't last long on the market, the resale value of them is still strong---

Apple Cube on Ebay.
Somewhat comparable G4 on Ebay.

...when so many cheap movie(film) cameras are out there? Come on, being retro is fun. :-)

Ambition

They don't sell one for $200, but they do sell one for $249. It's absolutely tiny, weighs nothing, and comes in five colors.

And yes, it is selling like hotcakes.

As far as why they're not selling a 15 gig white iPod, I'm sure there are a few reasons:

- 15 gig drives probably cost about the same as 20 gig drives.
- Offering two products which are very close in features tends to confuse the market.
- A 15 gig model that was much cheaper than the current 20 gig version would probably undercut the mini's market.

If you're so price-sensitive that you can't spring for the extra $49 that a mini would cost you, then probably:

- You shouldn't be spending money on a portable music player anyway.
- You should check out eBay.
- You might want to take a look at some cheaper knockoff devices.

I know exactly what you're talking about -- what I was saying was that I'd like the shell of an iPod that's had the CF-form-factor hard drive removed, so that I can put a normal CF card inside it instead. I'm talking about something similar to the situation with the Muvo2 (e.g. this), except I want an iPod Mini shell instead.

I wonder if they'd have the ethics training handbook available.

They have been on sale on eBay for a while now.

Information on the ussurpation from the "person," beknownst as "Federal,"
I attained all my current sustained information and more sources from a verry practical man and would like to share this eMail address for all to question:
contact "revokethetrust [at] yahoo [dot] com" for information.

As well, for those of you not willing to make the contact to derive information to become a Secured Party in their Person, otherwise you can find a great wealth of information from the archives of one user on eBay mostly. I attained this second contact from "revokethetrust [at] yahoo [dot] com", to be aware of the digital works of rare public domain political and law texts provided by a registered seller and user the person "josephus1" at eBay.com.

Among these candid works are various titles and freak topics to our ears, such as...
1815 US Constitution overthrows 1789 US Const
Law Of Nations by Vattel 1805
1854 Citizen Manual. Study Of Rights
Was It Lincoln, or Jeferson Davis The Traitor?
History Of The Supreme Court G. Myers Rare
Black's Law Dictionary 1st Ed. Rare , Blacks
Tyranny Unmasked by John Taylor 1822
1891 Principles Of Constitutional Law, Thomas Cooley
1878 The Republic of Republics Rare Book
1914 Public School Teaches Right Of Secession
1896 Silver and Gold A rare book on the Gold Standard

***Knowing silver and gold premise of law is important to remove one element of "Federal" jurisdiction; not using their fiat money. ***

Rare 1832 Political Class Book
Rare `1834 Exposition Of Constitution

There are too many to name. Anyone willing, some related material is available or otherwise stolen onto Gnutella networks and easily downloaded with eDonkey clients.

Sincerily,
Alpha Troll

Fortunately, eBay seems to be working on this problem. Their announcement on July 16 says they will soon allow sellers to answer potential buyers' questions without the seller having to reveal his email address. It's about time.

Some day your management will realize that the expensive servers they're buying really aren't worth that much. It shouldn't take that long to realize that you're paying too much for what has now become commodity hardware.

My favorite book on Apollo 11 was given to me by my grandmother. She was a journalist covering the launch for Florida Today (the local paper here on the Space Coast).

It's the Apollo 11 Press Kit.

I'm pretty lucky to have it. I loved looking through it when I was 13. I don't know where someone else could get a copy of one nowadays... hm, google...

Apparently someone just sold one for $200 dollars , so I guess you could buy one.

Or you could download the 9 MB .pdf file of it from the aforementioned Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (thanks for the informative link, snake_dad!)

cheers,
krysith

Why? Because it's white and sleek looking, if it's white and sleek looking it's got to be worth any price. Paper Chinese Throwing Star for sale on Ebay

Near as I can tell, there's literally Nothing To See Here.

3rd - "sellers chosen for the pilot have to ensure copyright protection for the content and meet service-level agreements." If I wrote it, it's got copyright protection. That's what copyright does - protects my work when I create it. Or are they talking about some DRM scheme? It's not clear.

4th- If DRM is required, how does it get put on? Will someone send me a Windows-Only exe to screw with my track? Do I have to send a wav somewhere? Again not clear.

Ebay. Stick with what you do. Leave the failing at a Digital Music Store to everyone else.

I checked out the site (accessible at music.listings.ebay.com) and couldn't figure out what format the files come in. Anyone want to buy a song and find out?

Surf and ye shall find.

YABE handles all aspects of the auction: the auction listing, emails, financial transaction and shipping, all for one flat fee sales commission

Or, AuctionDrop is the original eBay drop-off service, with 3,400 convenient drop-off locations in The UPS Stores across the United States.

Just by the least expensive wireless keyboard (or at least the part that connects to the PC either by USB or PS/2) you can find. You can pick up one here from eBay. Becareful, those $0.01 priced keyboards come with $18 or $35 of shipping. You got to love the honest sellers on eBay. :D

you can find lots of cheap keyboards here

item# | title | price | time left
1234 | IBM T20 | 250 | 2 days
2345 | Sony Vaio | 300 | 3 days
...

(Where's the equivalent of the Kelley Blue Book for computer hardware, anyhow?)

Right here.

(see, I can *almost* be funny...)

Dude, you can get gmail invites for 99 cents. Look through these listings. If you paid 20 bucks you got ripped off.

all this means is that there will be plenty of cheap VAX crap on ebay!

Why are tape drives so expensive??

Got any idea where I can get a sub 300$ tape backup system?

This has lessened significantly in recent years, but still, when their tech is desirable, it's typically out of the reach of the high end (as in knowledge) individual user. Pisses me off to no end that when they come out with something that could be used, they miss the individual.

Thank God that Sun hardware never becomes truly obsolete, eh? Visit AnySystem to get yourself some amazingly cheap hardware. And keep an eye on their ebay auctions. I've seen more than one E8500 go for ~$3000! That's 8 processors, 9x(8Gig) fibre channel disks, multiple network cards, 6-8 GIGS of RAM, and lots of other goodies! Just slap a "free Solaris 9" copy on there and run with it! I just wish I had a few extra grand for this sucker. Now if Sun would *just* provide a cheaper version of their RayStation Server Software, I'd have my entire apartment complex wired! ;-)

This has lessened significantly in recent years, but still, when their tech is desirable, it's typically out of the reach of the high end (as in knowledge) individual user. Pisses me off to no end that when they come out with something that could be used, they miss the individual.

Thank God that Sun hardware never becomes truly obsolete, eh? Visit AnySystem to get yourself some amazingly cheap hardware. And keep an eye on their ebay auctions. I've seen more than one E8500 go for ~$3000! That's 8 processors, 9x(8Gig) fibre channel disks, multiple network cards, 6-8 GIGS of RAM, and lots of other goodies! Just slap a "free Solaris 9" copy on there and run with it! I just wish I had a few extra grand for this sucker. Now if Sun would *just* provide a cheaper version of their RayStation Server Software, I'd have my entire apartment complex wired! ;-)

go to ebay and search for DNA synthesizer. Anyone can buy one for less than the price of many computers.

Solutions for pennies.

What project are you working on again? Would remote access to a machine running 10.3 be useful, assuming that a similar device as the one you were working on was plugged into the USB on that machine?

Also, if you check out Ebay's completed items search, you can get a pretty good idea of the average going rate for an item. Not sure if this link will work, but here's the results of a $1-$300 search I just did for completed Apple auctions: results

A used PowerBook is pretty handy. We're using older PowerBooks as secondary "office application" computers next to our Linux boxes.

Most of the successful businesses are not ideas, they are execution. Look at successful Internet companies right now: online marketplace, online bookseller that's not selling electronics and a lot more, large-scale information archival and retrieval system. Every once in a while you have Edison-like geniuses coming up with brilliant ideas that turn the world around and occasionally make their inventors rich, but more often than not, it's the execution, not the idea that matters.

And don't forget that Draper is not the only one, as NYT article states, he's one of the few people that would invest in half-baked startups, but nevertheless in the venture world he's still one of many. And there's $70 billion dollars out there ready to be invested into the next venture. VCs got a bit tough lately with dot bomb and everything, but the money is still out there, and there are fewer ideas, than there are brains.

If it has a video out, it will have Macrovision enabled to stop you recording a decent copy.

Has everyone forgotten that you still have this kind of copy protection?

PANASONIC DVD-S31 DVD RECORDER AND PLAYER PLAYERS on eBay for US $24.50

(Do NOT bid. The seller made the same mistake I did; that's really just a low-end player.)

Or, say, a second iMac in that same range.

The most interesting thing is that this is the third Mac OS X release to include more than 150 new features.

Apple is already anticipating Microsoft will copy them, just check out the Shirts from WWDC!

Also notice how little features each windows released comes with, even though they are released every 3 years. Well according to MS 'longhorn' will be more stable, of course only if you have 2 gigs of RAM.

I'd like to point all of you slashdotters who aren't as lazy as I am to this link-
http://search.ebay.com/broken-ipod_W0QQfromZR8QQsb rsrtZlQQsosortorderZ2QQsosortpropertyZ3
Anyone who doesn't have a decent mp3 player yet.. why not buy a broken iPod and make some use out of it with this offer, eh? *nudge nudge*..**

**I am in no way affiliated with Dell XD!

There are other places that do this, but this is the one.

make his counter go all the way around to zero again.

I am predicting a sharp increase in the number of broken ipods selling for $50

cheers- raga

Actually, no not quite unless you're talking about the 40 GB hard drive variety

This dell/ipod makes no sense. I mean really, is there one person here that would trade a working ipod for a $100 coupon towards anything dell makes? Even if Apple didn't have such a loyal following, on engineering alone the ipod wins. Add in the fact that music from the iTunes music store IFAIK won't download to anything but an iPod and this is a pretty stupid offer. It's like asking a Mac user to switch from OS X to Windows XP. What in the world made the people at Dell think this would ever work?

I sure the folks in Cupertino are having a big laugh over it.

You should be able to get something between $80 and $150 for it, depending on its condition. Probably a better bet than using it as a trade in and then trying to sell the Dell (for which you might make a profit of $100 if you're able to find someone who'd be willing to buy it full price on eBay. There are people who are that stupid, I've seen them on eBay, but they're not that numerous.)

However, Dell will give me $100 rebate on their device, if I send in an iPod, then

• Send me a device, from which I understand at the best case scenario is slightly of less quality.
• turn around and sell the iPod for about $200
• make a tidy profit off of their device
• make a tidy proffit off of the iPod

Ummmm, yeah reight Dell, I'm gonna give up my iPod (assuming I had one). I must be missing something!

The most important thing to remember about taking laptops apart is to be fairly gentle with the flimsy bits. If they won't give, theres probably a screw somewhere you missed. DIY warranties will probably never happen, but even parts that seem like they ought to be expensive (like laptop keyboards are under $20 on ebay. I don't know about you, but $20 is a small price to pay to avoid put-on-hold tech-support hell.

I believe MSDN Universal is only around $375

While you are certainly entitled to your belief, I fear that you are wrong, by almost a order of magnitude.

An MSDN Universal subscription from Microsoft runs $2,799 (new subscription)... however they can be had for much less if you look on eBay for instance.

If a Subscription was $375 I'd have one myself instead of using the stripped versions (and cheap) I have been using for side projects.

Oops, somebody pointed out that I got the title wrong. It's Tempest X.

I think I found it on ebay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=62053&item=8114230739&rd=1

Enjoy!

At my job, I am one of two web developers. Besides us, there are the two owners and our systems admin. The owners want to become a viable commercial hosting service with secure storefronts, etc. Fine says me.

The problem lies in that one of the two owners (The husband) is a pig-headed idiot. Recently he asked us to implement a RAID solution for the webserver (notice the lack of an 's' at the end of webserver). Not a problem says sysadmin and myself, we come up with the plan, and present it to him, it involves RAID-5, blah, blah, blah, all the standard normal stuff that people do...He quickly scoffs at the idea, hands us a OLD P.O.S. with a couple 10'ish gig drives and says make it out of this and use RAID-1, and promises to order some large drives for the machine, so we can implement his RAID-1 solution but insists that nobody in their right mind would ever use RAID-5...

We of course are like what the hell? You want something that is enterprise level, and expect us to make it out of this P.O.S.???

We resign ourselves to doing the best we can with it and get a crummy webserver up and running with Slackware.. It is not the fastest machine, but it works for now. We currently have no RAID, becuase the large drives he said he would order have not been ordered for 2 months.

A couple weeks ago, we are talking about a file server for our internal software, etc. and he loves the idea..GREAT!!! So we spec out a modest system that will fulfill our needs and he says, oh I have a perfectly good fileserver at home that you guys can use to make it, and the COOL thing about it is that it runs on something similar to (but not) this. We research his little linux memory card thing and yes, it is cool, however it is not capable of doing what we need to have it do, and from what we can find out about it online it is not capable of performing one of the tasks without substantial work being done, the least of which is compiling and installing netatalk (which is no big deal) for some machines that cannot connect via Samba (MacOS 9 that would require DAVE that he is not willing to purchase).

So we add in the 2 120-Gig Drives to the PII/166 with 64M RAM that he gave us to make a file server from and find out that

• Floppy drive is bad
• 1 on-board IDE controller is shot
• CD-ROM Drive is broken

So we switch out to some other P.O.S. motherboard he has lying around and find that it has some popped caps, so it won't work either.

We eventually come up with a working P.O.S. motherboard, put some WRONG entries in the BIOS to make it recognize the 120Gig Drives and install a 4.xG drive to use as the system drive running samba and netatalk. All is looking well...

So we get FreeBSD installed today and are in the process of setting up the Xserver so he can have his GUI, since he doesn't know jack about the command line and then we are going to implement his RAID-1 that he loves so well on this machine also. We are stoked to say the least that after all that hassle we have a working system and FreeBSD sees the entirity of the 120G drives...

So he comes into work today and sees XWindows (twm) up and running and asks what we are doing, and we tell him, making the file server like we had talked about. He asks what it is running and we tell him FreeBSD 5.2.1 and we are finishing the config, then implementing the RAID and it will be ready to go. This is where it gets good.

He flies off the handle and says, did I tell you to use FreeBSD?? We are like...ummmmmmm...we talked about that memory card thing and explained to you why it wouldn't work and therefore have implemented a solution that fits our needs like we talked about. His response was "I told you

Unfortunately, I can't find any mention on A-W's web site.

Half.com says 'June 2005,' and Amazon says 'February 2004,' which seems unlikely... :-)

Still, if it's useful I suppose there's no point in waiting a year for the new edition...

On sale for cheap on eBay.