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Bad Spelling Pays on eBay
peebeejay writes "People say that as long as they're understood, spelling is unimportant. These people are unwittingly making others a lot of money online, according to this article in the NY Times (DNA sample and clean boxers required). So, aside from clarity and respect for your reader, there's another good reason to either spell correctly or use a spellchecker: get bidders to find your eBay items and give you their money! Or you can go ahead and see how many people bid on your 'labtop computers,' 'camras,' and 'earings.'"
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I've always said that the best (and worst) thing about eBay is that it's full of stupid people. It's not just bad spelling that can get you the bargains, often people under-price their "Buy it now" items, or advertise things incorrectly, i.e. "This laptop has a 500MHz processor", but the model number they've stated suggests it's a 1GHz.
This 'feature' isn't going to go away because the NYT has mentioned it. The problem comes from clueless people, who will still be clueless now! I doubt people deliberately mis-spell items on eBay and now are thinking "perhaps I should spell things correctly from now on"
P.S. Remember to take full advantage, if you find cluelessness on eBay, "View Seller's Other Items" might be your key to many more bargains!
perl -e 'print "Just another Perl newbie\n";'
It's incredible to me that this late in the GUI game, I still can't just select text anywhere in Windows, right-click and select "Check Spelling". Anyone hook this up for GNOME yet?
At Apple, we developed a "styled text pane" GUI component for a hypermedia documentation browser (not HTML, in 1993) as part of the corporate switch to a C++ toolkit. We threw hooks for spellcheck and themes (a la CSS) into the class, and argued that the component ought to be part of the toolkit itself, for *every* text display in the OS, which would mean every app, entirely standard. I heard that the design was part of Apple's plans right through the demise of the Bento initiative, which drowned our approach like a rat on the Titanic. So now every app reinvents the wheel, and it takes forever to crawl back to steel-belted radials.
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make install -not war
I woke up to the news that some people went canoeing yesterday, during a wind advisory, without life vests, and apparently not knowing how to swim, and one guy drowned. Not to be callous about such a tragedy, but the phrase "survival of the fittest" did cross my mind.
I think this story beats mine, though.
The phrase that starts "a fool an his money..." also seems to apply.
(Oh, and I spell checked this because I'm smart enough to know I'm stupid.)
I think it's a liability for the seller, but a windfall for the buyer. For example, I was searching for a rare item that was part of a series of collectables named after the "millennium". The seller had the product misspelled as "milennium" and had much fewer bids and I was able to pick it up for a fraction of its worth. I guess it depends upon whether you want the buyer or seller to be uneducated. The former works if you're trying to scam someone; the latter works if you're looking for a good deal.