I already disclose more information via my "About Me" page on eBay and my personal web site than eBay discloses to other eBay members. In fact, I've recently pulled a bit of information and some links to keep within eBay's guidelines.
Out of the 100+ auctions that I did in January, half a dozen people didn't pay, some of which have purposely obscured their contact information (no address, wrong phone number). Quite frankly, auctions shouldn't be nearly as anonymous as eBay makes possible.
There can be no real trust without real disclosure.
I like turning bulk snail mail companies in for things like copyright violation. For example, if you do a big mailout that includes a photocopy of a street directory the company that owns the copyright on the map would very much like to sue your arse. I will thell them about you. Another example, I followed one bit of spam once, it was for sci-fi (ish) fonts. Turned out they'd just ripped commercial fonts from wherever. I recognised the Magic: the Gathering font and notified Wizards of the Coast. These days though I don't even read the spam, I just report it using Spamcop...
I agree. In Australia to receive unemployment benefit you have to apply for 10 jobs per fortnight, including one that's done through a "Job Network" centre. Since my liquid assets meant I had to wait before it started I (luckily?) didn't have to find 10 jobs per fortnight over xmas, since there were only about 3 advertised in my field for a whole month. This week I've done well because two government departments appear to be "un-outsourcing", but I am being forced to occasionally "cold call" companies and beg for work. Perhaps the system works better for unskilled labour...
When did companies stop adding features that the customer might want and exclusively add "features" purely designed for the company to increase their revenue?
Real World example; Supermarkets used to try and think of things to make our lives easier. Complimentary trollies. Heavy use of barcodes to make checkout faster. Choice. But the last "feature" added to a local supermarket chain was to add those anti-shoplifting alarm things and now they're considering making you pay a deposit to use a trolley. They've been stedily making the isles narrower to fit in more crap, reducing choice for no apparent reason. A local department store has it's most popular sections (CDs, Videos, games, toys, computers, HiFi) all furthest away from the entrances on the top floor. Don't get me started on the way Ikea is laid out.
So, just when did companies stop adding features that their customers wanted and just focussed on screwing us over?
Since I'm currently getting around 1 spam per hour (on average) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I think that a little focus on spam is a good thing. I like some of the solutions posed and if I wasn't running a firewall with all my unused ports in stealth mode, I'd consider setting up a tarpit (not that a dial-up can help much on this point). Currently I'm spending about 20 minutes a day reporting spam via Spamcop so at least I feel I'm doing something. Not that I get nearly as many "thank you for reporting this to us" messages as I used to.
Unfortunately, most of the media was 5.25" floppies, and not only do I not have a drive anymore, most of them are probably toast.
Actually, you'd be surprised how robust those old DD disks are. I bought someone's complete C64 collection recently and even the disks that were seriously bent (but not creased or folded) still worked first time. Sourcing new 5.25" DD disks to create a GEOS work disk are going to be harder though.
As a person who sells old video games on eBay I have a couple of thoughts. First, many games people believe are only available from abandonware sites are available as originals from eBay, swap-meets, garage sales and classified ads. Also, many are being re-released. While I might download the odd ROM, I also source old originals and buy new updates. Gauntlet is a good example. I recently bought Gauntlet Legends for the Dreamcast, acquired Gauntlet 1 & 2 originals for the C64 and I have previously downloaded the odd Gauntlet ROM. Anyone who claims to be a fan of old computer games and doesn't try to source originals or buy remakes, releases and/or updates is kidding themselves. Real fans would rather have originals. Heck, I've bought originals of old games that I have downloaded ROMs for. Just yesterday I bought Pinball Fantasies for the Gameboy even though I'd downloaded the ROM a while ago. A few weeks back it was the same thing with Qix...
I agree, but for people in more remote locations high dollar value items usually have an equally high postage cost. This means that, for me, anything over $100 really has to be pickup. I'm bidding on a PS2 at the moment because the person is somewhere in the same metro area as me. Not only can I pick it up, but I can ask them to demonstrate that it's working before I pay.
"Whoa, well thank God that's over, I was worried there for a second."
Seriously, the problem and the solution were all neatly bundled up into this story. Hey, I bet a standard Mac can only use 4 IDE devices before you have to add another hard drive controller. *Gasp*. I assume people who need more devices add appropriate upgrades.
Oh, there were some sweet expansions for the Amiga -- it's a shame none of the games took advantage of them.
I used to own a CDTV. Only computer I ever regret selling. If I could find a CD32 locally (with Australian power fittings and/or 240V, PAL) I'd own one but they are damn hard to come by here. Meanwhile I've had the opportunity to buy 3 32Xs and 3 MegaCDs.
It's such a shame that the CD32 was a ticky-tacky plastic console. If only it had been hi-fi component style like the CDTV I would have bought one when it first came out... (I was into that look back then, now I don't care so much.)
I've used PayPal, for eBay mostly, for maybe a year. It was a lot of screwing around before they got their International act together and some (most) people trying to pay me with a credit card who don't already have a PayPal account have major problems working out what to do. But I've probably received 20-30 payments through PayPal and made 15 or so myself with no problems.
In contrast, I've had my Citibank credit card frozen because they didn't fill in some Austrac anti-money laundering form. Go back far enough and you'll find out that I'm a Commonwealth Bank customer because some pissant temporary manager at the local National Australia Bank branch blocked in my mother's car in their car park. He came very close to having a brick heaved through his window when he failed to own up to the fact that it was his car.
My fastest computer is a 266MMX with 64MB of RAM. I rarely use more than 20% of the features of any given software product. Where possible, produce a software product that's modular such that features I'm not going to use can be removed. If this means you have a tiny little core product and most of your functionality lives in plug-ins, great.
Keep things optimised. If possible, release your plug-in standards so that real zealots can rewrite some of your modules in assembler for better performance. Don't assume you can get anywhere near fully optimised the first time. Encourage a community where people write routines optimised for all the weird stuff out there. Look at D.net with it's MMX core v's it's 3Dnow! core.
There is a huge user base out there with old PCs. For every 30MHz you shave off the requirements for your product you probably increase your potential market by 10%. A modular app properly optimised over time should find it's minimum system requirements go down not up. If MS worked like this you'd be able to run the core of Windows 2000 on a 386 and basic editing using Word 2000 would only need 4MB of RAM. Not everyone needs to play movies on their PC.
If you're putting functionality of any kind, whether core or UI, into your program that isn't already popular, with obvious "standards", then look around to see what other people are trying to do in the same field. Get to know other developers that are producing complimentary products and agree on small standards so that your products co-operate. Research emerging standards and incorporate them if you were going to do something similar anyway. Who knows, you might strike it lucky and be one of the first to include the next popular feature. I guess I'm saying, don't reinvent the wheel -- if even one person looks like they've come up with a workable solution, help evolve that rather than creating a new religion.
There is obviously an event that can be triggered that causes drop-down menus to disappear. Internet Explorer uses it whenever it finishes loading a page (or even a frame) but Mozilla does not. If I've got a batch of IE windows loading pages I can't use the menu in any other program because it keep disappearing. Don't do this. Whatever it is, don't do it. Assume that users will be running your program in the background and just as you shouldn't pop to the front and/or grab the focus, don't keep collapsing their menus.
Goodness forbid that you want to integrate with Windows further by adding a right click menu to explorer.
If you do this, please make sure you can turn it on and off through an options menu in the program, not just during install.
And speaking of install, be nice to file types. If you want to grab hold of some file extensions, save the previous association and give people a way to restore it. Especially if you're grabbing.gif and.jpg. Equally, give the users an easy way to reassociate your extensions with your program if an app takes them away.
Re:Standard widgets / UI elements
on
Computing Pet Peeves?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Interruption. I should be able to cancel anything the app is doing.
I'll even be more specific. If you have a cancel button, make sure it works, and quickly. There are few things in the computing world more annoying than a cancel button that doesn't do anything.
I remember a Umax scanner with a progress bar that updated only twice during a full-page scan. It sat at nothing for two of the colour passes, then jumped to 66%, then sat there for the last pass, then jumped to 100% then sat there for ages while the data was transferred to the Mac. Every time. Since then I have taken progress bars with a grain of salt.
I think most people agree that the Saturn and the 32X were horrid pieces of hardware to play games on. The Game Gear was a laughable 'portable' system, and the Sega CD was a big joke.
Most people that have never used any of the above would probably agree.
The Saturn is the best 2D console ever produced. The 32X is the most innovative upgrade ever produced, bringing (at the time) the nearest thing to arcade 3D there was. The Game Gear was a colour, backlit portable Sega Master System and the Sega CD set the ball rolling on CD-based consoles (don't confuse crap FMV games with the hardware). What was wrong with these were high price points and lack of committment on Sega's behalf. Also, the Game Gear had some battery life issues. If Sega had never released the Saturn, sure the 32X would have struggled against the PSX, but developers wouldn't have been screwed around and who knows how popular the 32X would have been.
As the owner of a a Mega Drive, Mega CD II and Mega 32X, I thought I'd weigh in a little.
The hardware itself is what I would consider the pinnacle of Innovative hardware development in video games. Unfortuantely it proved that expansions for video game consoles are never received well. Imagine that you own a SNES and a game you really want to play comes out for the 32X, on CD (say, Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, which was never released). You don't just go off and buy a single console, you have to buy a Mega Drive first, then a 32X and a Mega CD. While upgrades really benefit existing owners, too many in a row before you pack all the features into one product will look out potential new owners.
The Neptune was cancelled -- it would have produced a 32X/Genesis all-in-one unit. The backwards compatibility for the Saturn that was considered ultimately proved too difficult to bring to market by the time it was obvious that 3D and the PSX had won.
However, if you actually look at what was done with a system that started as a pretty average 16 bit console, how the CD add-on suddenly gave developers 600 times more storage, plus some extra audio hardware and sprite scaling. If you look at how the 32X turned a 16 bit system into a 32 bit system, adding more colours, 3D, etc. If you look at how these upgrades all interacted, letting developers tap into whatever hardware they wanted. Then you see that Sega produced some superb hardware. Hardware that, when you look at the level of innovation involved, hasn't been equalled before or since.
For the history of the 32X, which is much more interesting than any of the games for it (with the possible exception of Kolibri), I recommend this site.
Let's say you buy version 1 of a product. It has feature X. Then comes version 2 of that product and it does not have feature X. You have no right to tell the company that makes the product that they must include feature X. You only have the right to buy it or not.
Surely it's up to the company if they want to produce something people will buy or not. I know that you're seeing a difference between a product that just can't do X v's one that can do X if you make an illegal modification, but assume there's no difference when you make your purchasing decision.
Remember, there are all ready plenty of laws restricting you from modifying other stuff, particularly anything that plugs into the mains, so this isn't a new invasion of your whatever. As for creating things from scratch, you're not allowed to make fireworks without a licence either, even if they can be made with stuff you can purchase in a supermarket.
This isn't life-or-death technology. You're not adapting a dialisis machine for your unique condition. These are stupid movies and computer-generated pop stars.
For some reason consumers just accept this kind of stuff when it comes to electronics.
Two reasons;
The people that can't do anything about this don't understand what the hell is going on, and
The people that do understand what's going on find ways around it or avoid it altogether.
As one of the latter, I can now choose between not buying an Xbox or keeping an eye on Lik-Sang (et al) for some sort of adapter or mod-chip. Currently I choose not to buy an Xbox.
(Notes: I'm in Australia so Lik-Sang can still get stuff through to here, however their service sucks -- I bought a hybrid rumble pak / memory pak for my N64 and it doesn't work. Returning it will cost me more than I paid for it, Lik-Sang will not pay for shipping on faulty items. Moreover, the Xbox isn't out here yet and quite frankly I don't have the space for it in my room.)
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Out of the 100+ auctions that I did in January, half a dozen people didn't pay, some of which have purposely obscured their contact information (no address, wrong phone number). Quite frankly, auctions shouldn't be nearly as anonymous as eBay makes possible.
There can be no real trust without real disclosure.
I like turning bulk snail mail companies in for things like copyright violation. For example, if you do a big mailout that includes a photocopy of a street directory the company that owns the copyright on the map would very much like to sue your arse. I will thell them about you. Another example, I followed one bit of spam once, it was for sci-fi (ish) fonts. Turned out they'd just ripped commercial fonts from wherever. I recognised the Magic: the Gathering font and notified Wizards of the Coast. These days though I don't even read the spam, I just report it using Spamcop...
I agree. In Australia to receive unemployment benefit you have to apply for 10 jobs per fortnight, including one that's done through a "Job Network" centre. Since my liquid assets meant I had to wait before it started I (luckily?) didn't have to find 10 jobs per fortnight over xmas, since there were only about 3 advertised in my field for a whole month. This week I've done well because two government departments appear to be "un-outsourcing", but I am being forced to occasionally "cold call" companies and beg for work. Perhaps the system works better for unskilled labour...
Real World example; Supermarkets used to try and think of things to make our lives easier. Complimentary trollies. Heavy use of barcodes to make checkout faster. Choice. But the last "feature" added to a local supermarket chain was to add those anti-shoplifting alarm things and now they're considering making you pay a deposit to use a trolley. They've been stedily making the isles narrower to fit in more crap, reducing choice for no apparent reason. A local department store has it's most popular sections (CDs, Videos, games, toys, computers, HiFi) all furthest away from the entrances on the top floor. Don't get me started on the way Ikea is laid out.
So, just when did companies stop adding features that their customers wanted and just focussed on screwing us over?
Since I'm currently getting around 1 spam per hour (on average) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I think that a little focus on spam is a good thing. I like some of the solutions posed and if I wasn't running a firewall with all my unused ports in stealth mode, I'd consider setting up a tarpit (not that a dial-up can help much on this point). Currently I'm spending about 20 minutes a day reporting spam via Spamcop so at least I feel I'm doing something. Not that I get nearly as many "thank you for reporting this to us" messages as I used to.
BTW: I like Sophos too, but a personal licence is around A$295.
As a person who sells old video games on eBay I have a couple of thoughts. First, many games people believe are only available from abandonware sites are available as originals from eBay, swap-meets, garage sales and classified ads. Also, many are being re-released. While I might download the odd ROM, I also source old originals and buy new updates. Gauntlet is a good example. I recently bought Gauntlet Legends for the Dreamcast, acquired Gauntlet 1 & 2 originals for the C64 and I have previously downloaded the odd Gauntlet ROM. Anyone who claims to be a fan of old computer games and doesn't try to source originals or buy remakes, releases and/or updates is kidding themselves. Real fans would rather have originals. Heck, I've bought originals of old games that I have downloaded ROMs for. Just yesterday I bought Pinball Fantasies for the Gameboy even though I'd downloaded the ROM a while ago. A few weeks back it was the same thing with Qix...
I agree, but for people in more remote locations high dollar value items usually have an equally high postage cost. This means that, for me, anything over $100 really has to be pickup. I'm bidding on a PS2 at the moment because the person is somewhere in the same metro area as me. Not only can I pick it up, but I can ask them to demonstrate that it's working before I pay.
Seriously, the problem and the solution were all neatly bundled up into this story. Hey, I bet a standard Mac can only use 4 IDE devices before you have to add another hard drive controller. *Gasp*. I assume people who need more devices add appropriate upgrades.
Remind me to introduce you to the concept of "marketing" one day...
I used to own a CDTV. Only computer I ever regret selling. If I could find a CD32 locally (with Australian power fittings and/or 240V, PAL) I'd own one but they are damn hard to come by here. Meanwhile I've had the opportunity to buy 3 32Xs and 3 MegaCDs.
It's such a shame that the CD32 was a ticky-tacky plastic console. If only it had been hi-fi component style like the CDTV I would have bought one when it first came out... (I was into that look back then, now I don't care so much.)
I've used PayPal, for eBay mostly, for maybe a year. It was a lot of screwing around before they got their International act together and some (most) people trying to pay me with a credit card who don't already have a PayPal account have major problems working out what to do. But I've probably received 20-30 payments through PayPal and made 15 or so myself with no problems.
In contrast, I've had my Citibank credit card frozen because they didn't fill in some Austrac anti-money laundering form. Go back far enough and you'll find out that I'm a Commonwealth Bank customer because some pissant temporary manager at the local National Australia Bank branch blocked in my mother's car in their car park. He came very close to having a brick heaved through his window when he failed to own up to the fact that it was his car.
Keep things optimised. If possible, release your plug-in standards so that real zealots can rewrite some of your modules in assembler for better performance. Don't assume you can get anywhere near fully optimised the first time. Encourage a community where people write routines optimised for all the weird stuff out there. Look at D.net with it's MMX core v's it's 3Dnow! core.
There is a huge user base out there with old PCs. For every 30MHz you shave off the requirements for your product you probably increase your potential market by 10%. A modular app properly optimised over time should find it's minimum system requirements go down not up. If MS worked like this you'd be able to run the core of Windows 2000 on a 386 and basic editing using Word 2000 would only need 4MB of RAM. Not everyone needs to play movies on their PC.
Where possible.
There is obviously an event that can be triggered that causes drop-down menus to disappear. Internet Explorer uses it whenever it finishes loading a page (or even a frame) but Mozilla does not. If I've got a batch of IE windows loading pages I can't use the menu in any other program because it keep disappearing. Don't do this. Whatever it is, don't do it. Assume that users will be running your program in the background and just as you shouldn't pop to the front and/or grab the focus, don't keep collapsing their menus.
And speaking of install, be nice to file types. If you want to grab hold of some file extensions, save the previous association and give people a way to restore it. Especially if you're grabbing .gif and .jpg. Equally, give the users an easy way to reassociate your extensions with your program if an app takes them away.
I always assumed that while trying to connect, the progress bar showed you how long you had before a timeout.
I remember a Umax scanner with a progress bar that updated only twice during a full-page scan. It sat at nothing for two of the colour passes, then jumped to 66%, then sat there for the last pass, then jumped to 100% then sat there for ages while the data was transferred to the Mac. Every time. Since then I have taken progress bars with a grain of salt.
The Saturn is the best 2D console ever produced. The 32X is the most innovative upgrade ever produced, bringing (at the time) the nearest thing to arcade 3D there was. The Game Gear was a colour, backlit portable Sega Master System and the Sega CD set the ball rolling on CD-based consoles (don't confuse crap FMV games with the hardware). What was wrong with these were high price points and lack of committment on Sega's behalf. Also, the Game Gear had some battery life issues. If Sega had never released the Saturn, sure the 32X would have struggled against the PSX, but developers wouldn't have been screwed around and who knows how popular the 32X would have been.
The hardware itself is what I would consider the pinnacle of Innovative hardware development in video games. Unfortuantely it proved that expansions for video game consoles are never received well. Imagine that you own a SNES and a game you really want to play comes out for the 32X, on CD (say, Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, which was never released). You don't just go off and buy a single console, you have to buy a Mega Drive first, then a 32X and a Mega CD. While upgrades really benefit existing owners, too many in a row before you pack all the features into one product will look out potential new owners.
The Neptune was cancelled -- it would have produced a 32X/Genesis all-in-one unit. The backwards compatibility for the Saturn that was considered ultimately proved too difficult to bring to market by the time it was obvious that 3D and the PSX had won.
However, if you actually look at what was done with a system that started as a pretty average 16 bit console, how the CD add-on suddenly gave developers 600 times more storage, plus some extra audio hardware and sprite scaling. If you look at how the 32X turned a 16 bit system into a 32 bit system, adding more colours, 3D, etc. If you look at how these upgrades all interacted, letting developers tap into whatever hardware they wanted. Then you see that Sega produced some superb hardware. Hardware that, when you look at the level of innovation involved, hasn't been equalled before or since.
For the history of the 32X, which is much more interesting than any of the games for it (with the possible exception of Kolibri), I recommend this site.
Surely it's up to the company if they want to produce something people will buy or not. I know that you're seeing a difference between a product that just can't do X v's one that can do X if you make an illegal modification, but assume there's no difference when you make your purchasing decision.
Remember, there are all ready plenty of laws restricting you from modifying other stuff, particularly anything that plugs into the mains, so this isn't a new invasion of your whatever. As for creating things from scratch, you're not allowed to make fireworks without a licence either, even if they can be made with stuff you can purchase in a supermarket.
This isn't life-or-death technology. You're not adapting a dialisis machine for your unique condition. These are stupid movies and computer-generated pop stars.
- The people that can't do anything about this don't understand what the hell is going on, and
- The people that do understand what's going on find ways around it or avoid it altogether.
As one of the latter, I can now choose between not buying an Xbox or keeping an eye on Lik-Sang (et al) for some sort of adapter or mod-chip. Currently I choose not to buy an Xbox.(Notes: I'm in Australia so Lik-Sang can still get stuff through to here, however their service sucks -- I bought a hybrid rumble pak / memory pak for my N64 and it doesn't work. Returning it will cost me more than I paid for it, Lik-Sang will not pay for shipping on faulty items. Moreover, the Xbox isn't out here yet and quite frankly I don't have the space for it in my room.)