If it were run by a real bank, I would feel much more comfortable using Paypal than I do now.
Heh, "if it were audited by a real auditer..." I'm guessing that they (Ebay) will want to avoid banks altogether. Banks mean regulation, regulators and other complications they probably don't want.
I'm going to play silly here. What do they really gain?
More money? An auction produces revenue at the sale (Ebay already gets in on this), at the financial transaction (Paypal, post office for money orders, banks, etc) and for shipping.
I'm guessing that they want to control as many of the possible ebay transaction revenue points as possible. Paypal makes sense from that perspective.
Paypal, on the other hand, requires more customer care - I could be wrong on that but I suppose it does.
Outsource it to Amex or some bank. Paypal accounts aren't much more complicated than credit cards in terms of financial sophistication. Ebay can run Paypals servers and everything else can be handled on an outsourced basis by someone else.
The WSJ, Barrons, Finacial Times, et al should be listed as a "criminal skills" site, since I could probably guarantee you 100% readership of one or more of those publications among the executive classes of WorldCon, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Adelphia.
I mean, all those pubs just do is encourage criminal business practices, yes?
Can you imagine having to have corporations sign their own apps (NOT!)
This does make some sense -- we get applications all the time from parent/sibling entities. Naturally we trust them because we're part of the same overarching business entity, but should we?
It might also have value for internal security if the signing mechanism allowed for hierachical keys and a true cryptographic system. As an added layer of security an application or data might be completely encrypted unless your machine/key decrypted it.
I think it might appeal to some IT organizations which have third-party security concerns (defense, healthcare) but I think it might also just seem like a lot more baggage than necessary to other IT organizations for whom security is a more secondary concern.
No, not quite funny, but more curious, because it seems every thread has one or more of the following top-level follups:
What effect will this have on Open Source?
This is good for Linux
This is bad for Linux
Even when the topic isn't really related to software licensing or operating systems (Ask Slashdot: Does New Tide really get shitstains out of poly-cotton briefs better than those other brands?). It's possible to ask about the impact on Open Source if a draft ox in a rice paddy in rural China shits green, but its not terribly germane.
I'm just wondering if there's a bot or if somebody is playing like the 7 Degrees of Open Source or if its really someone who truly can't think about anything other than Open Source.
but, if the software really was that good, what reason would people have to upgrade?
Probably none, but then they could move to a subscription model. Look at it this way -- would you rather pay an annual subscription of 25% of the price of the software and get a bug-fixed but feature stable operating system or would you rather pay 100% every three years AND have to do a forklift upgrade to a buggy OS?
You sound like the whole point of Longhorn is to give Linux the big F-U. Honestly, that might be a side-thought, but the main thought is to improve their OS. You guys bitch and moan about BSOD, but when they say, "OK, lets overhaul the bastard from scratch, and make it better" all you can say is, "but it won't be compatible with..."
A *real* overhaul would eliminate 16 bit compatibility completely and would render questionable keeping even Win32 compatibility.
I don't know why they can't just fix XP to make it "right" -- I'd much rather have XP be pretty much bug/exploit free and 5 years old than I would some of the bullshit ease of use "features", DRM, proprietization and product/service steering that usually take up at least half of MS software engineering resources.
That's what always amazes me about MS -- if they'd actually focus on making the products good instead of focusing on how to lock out competitors and lock-in customers they would not only have better quality but quality itself would lock in customers and push out competitors.
I have a Sony MZE3 Minidisc player (and a home deck too), an Intel Pocket Concert 128M and I keep finding neither one of them perfectly satisfying.
The iPod looks sweet, but the cost seems just too much. In the past 20 years I've owned easily a dozen walkmen (most high-end Sonys) and they always broke -- sometimes the mechanisms gave up, but usually they just got dropped/squished or otherwise manhandled. I can't imagine that computer with HDD could be that much more rugged that after a year or so it didn't crap out too.
I'm going to give this Teac MiniCD MP3 player a try to see what its like. It seems like a good compromise between an MP3 player and Minidisc player -- more music per disc than Minidisc/solid state MP3 and faster recording time and definitely more affordable given the breakability of a $499 iPod.
If the iPod was $199 and had USB I wouldn't mind it. The funny thing about USB is that its only *truly* annoying for "real-time" transfers of a dozen songs where you sit there waiting. Drive mes nuts on my Intel 128M. I wouldn't have a problem moving a couple of gig over, since I could just let it go and come back in a couple of hours.
Not a terrible idea, but it'd be tough to do in the traditional PC single-height drive form factor.
I could see it in a double-height device (small print head that could write on top of the disc), using the "upper tray" for loading consumables. Most of the standalone labeling systems even kind of look like a double-height CD labeler.
I'd bet it'd be tricky to get this into some PC cases, though.
I'm guessing that the sticky labels and their little centering gizmos are probably good enough for most people and for those that they're not good enough for will have the money for one of the many inkjet/heat labelers, often with integrated duplication.
According to most of the sources I've read, the $100 is not only the most popular but the most widely counterfeited denomination.
This would make sense if you consider that much of the developing world, which holds like 60% of the US currency overseas, uses it pretty much as the currency for getting anything meaningful done. If you factor in a cash-based economy that uses or demands US dollars for many transactions (foreign exchange, probably many of them), denominations smaller than $100 don't make sense when you're trying to pay someone thousands of dollars.
I'd guess that the usual situation is to hold quantities of dollars in $100s, but perform small-denomination transactions in the local currency. It's also likely that local governments, perhaps even assuming good intentions, dislike a lot of US currency floating around as it tends to devalue the local currency, if not in terms of exchange rate at least in terms of status/desirability.
Go to any country in the world. Give away a $1, $20 or $100 to whoever wants one. See how many $1 bills you actually give away. See how many $100 bills you actually give away.
If you give away anything but $100 bills, then I'll believe foreigners can't tell American money apart.
OK, I realize I'm (kind of) defending the phone company, but often what's broken isn't the phone company rates but the tarrif structure and process regulators setup.
The first time I asked for a copy of my office's phone account info from the phone company -- several POTS lines, a couple of ISDN BRIs, an ISDN PRI and five DSS trunks -- I expected a page or two detailing the billing for the lines and maybe a page or two for some extras (DID blocks, etc). Naive me, I got what amounted to over *50* pages of billing information, often for each trunk member there were multiple entries for small charges of around $.50 each. I discovered why our phone system maintenance vendor employs a full-time ex-Qwest employee to decipher these things.
Anyway, the telcos deserve a rap on the knuckles for advertising just their tarrif rates, when they know that's not what people are going to be writing checks for. But the regulators and regulatory processes *also* deserve a (bigger) rap on the knuckles for making telephone billing so overly complicated; many of the charges on a phone bill are multi-layer (fed, state, local) taxes and fees.
It also doesn't help that what most non-rural customers pay for phone services isn't what it costs to deliver those services; cross-subsidies between service types further complicate simple pricing. Again thank the regulators.
It'd be nice if one day you could order telecomms services that had a price that you actually paid and could understand instead of a sea of regulutory nonsense.
Merriam-Webster spends too much time confusing fascism with the National Socialism pursued in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.
Contrary to popular opinion, fascism and the search for a "third way" were legitimate intellectual pursuits at the turn of the last century. It was widely believed that democracy was unable to control unfettered capitalism and that socialism wasn't an effective or realistic means of politico-economic organization.
Judging facism by Nazism is about as realistic as judging socialism by the USSR.
I'd wager a reason videophone has never reached any kind of widespread acceptance is that getting decent video over a POTS line isn't happening.
Which kind of makes me wonder why the phone company doesn't push ISDN for residential phone services more aggressively (like subsidizing basic ISDN-compatible phones).
Widespread adoption of ISDN for phones *would* enable a pretty decent adoption of videophones as the bandwidth and latency to support reasonable video would be there.
Re:Us techies know how to deal with it ...
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 2
Give us proof.
what, my anecdotal evidence isn't proof?
How do you "prove" the uptime of hosts that aren't reachable from the internet? I think you're asking for a level of proof that can't be provided to "prove" your point.
Sure, I could be some Pro-Windows, Anti-Unix zealot just lying. I'm not -- I do think UNIX generally is more stable than MS products
Re:Us techies know how to deal with it ...
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure the Netcraft numbers don't lie, but they only measure webservers. *All* of our Win2k machines have long uptimes and none has ever bluescreened. They get restarted for security updates and that's about it.
Admittedly the work of most of them is file/print and it isn't going to kill them, even with roughly 3/4 TB of disk per system, but even the busier systems (Exchange, SQL server, Web server) don't die on us.
I think Win2k deserves more credit for uptime than it usually gets.
From the AU posts in this topic, it sounds like the "censorship" is merely a government PR gesture and doesn't represent an active attempt to block content.
I wonder if maybe the fact that they won't release the list is due to the fact that there isn't one. Think of the time and effort that would be required to actually build and maintain a halfway accurate list of proscribed content. If the postings of the Aussies are right and the censorship laws are merely a "pro-family" political gesture, then its likely they're not making the effort.
They may also just be buying a list from a censorware vendor, whose contract prohibits disclosure as a trade secret, not to mention the political implications of a law whose enforcement mechanism relies on a third party.
Its the same reason people shop at Fry's or anywhere else -- when you balance the equation of convenience, location, price, selection, staff, policies, and so on, for many things it balances out to be pretty much the best option, sometimes the only option.
I try to avoid it if I can, even going to more upscale shops, but even when customer service isn't Best Buy Awful, they're still ingratiating college drop outs who are just training for the big league of automobile and photocopier sales.
My brother-in-law was an operations manager at a couple of the bigger stores in Minnesota (where they have their Corporate Death Star Headquarters).
Everything you said about this I've heard him say, along with a continuing battle to keep the employees from either ripping the store off themselves or doing it in cooperation with the customers. Considering most of the employees look like they were recruited from a reform school, none of it surprises me -- disgusts and insults, yes, surprises, no.
Is the debit card liability limit a federal or widespread state law, or merely the banking industry's halfhearted attempt to convince people they're safe to use?
My bank sent me a debit card about 5 years ago, live, pre-activated without my authorization. I wouldn't accept it because I consider them dangerous -- it's too easy to see one's cash drained and then a long and difficult period of fighting with the bank over what charges are legit and what aren't.
At least with a credit card its the bank's money and they have a real interest in seeing that the fraud is investigated. When it's MY money that's gone, nobody has an interest in it but me.
I have two phones, and between them they are everything I need. When I'm working, I carry a Nokia 9210, and when I'm out chilling with friends or clubbing, I carry a Sony Ericsson T66.
Jeeezus. Do you have purses for every occasion, too?
I'm not advocating socialized medicine. Just pointing out that the perception of unchecked profiteering by the medical industry will eventually lead to a great socialization of medicine, which will in turn limit the appeal of investing huge amounts of capital when the ROI is either eliminated or stretched into 20 years instead of 5 or 10.
I think most people agree that something needs to be done to reign in medical costs -- whether its on the demand side (people learn to live with limited treatments) or on the supply side (regulated margins, less profit).
I'd personally advocate structural changes to the medical realm -- give RNs and Nurse Practitioners much broader ability to actually practice medicine, such as the ability to do in-office medical procedures like mole removal, stitches and the ability to write perscriptions for a broad array of drugs.
There's room for all sides to move -- drug companies ARE guilty of gouging and anticompetitive behavior. Patients are guilty of cost-is-no-limit expectations for medical care. Doctors are guilty of holding the practice of medicine hostage to their professional and financial gain.
Considering that Robert Mugabe is -- despite the stiff competition continent-wide -- the leading klepto-autocrat in Africa, is it any surprise? He's willing to steal elections and kill the only productive segment of his economy in the blantantly dishonest name of "land reform."
Why should it be at all surprising that he's willing to go after journalists who expose his regime? I suppose it is surprising to starry-eyed marxists who still buy into the collective bullshit of African anti-colonial revolution.
All the more shameful is Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the rest of the putatively democratic ANC's refusal to speak out against Mugabe and his thugs.
Maybe now that western journalists are actually starting to get a firsthand taste of Mugabe-style government they'll wipe the haze from their eyes and start doing the kind of reporting that might help bring an end to the politically correct refusal to believe that an African govenrment can do no wrong, especially if it involves whitey getting his.
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If it were run by a real bank, I would feel much more comfortable using Paypal than I do now.
Heh, "if it were audited by a real auditer..." I'm guessing that they (Ebay) will want to avoid banks altogether. Banks mean regulation, regulators and other complications they probably don't want.
I'm going to play silly here. What do they really gain?
More money? An auction produces revenue at the sale (Ebay already gets in on this), at the financial transaction (Paypal, post office for money orders, banks, etc) and for shipping.
I'm guessing that they want to control as many of the possible ebay transaction revenue points as possible. Paypal makes sense from that perspective.
Paypal, on the other hand, requires more customer care - I could be wrong on that but I suppose it does.
Outsource it to Amex or some bank. Paypal accounts aren't much more complicated than credit cards in terms of financial sophistication. Ebay can run Paypals servers and everything else can be handled on an outsourced basis by someone else.
The WSJ, Barrons, Finacial Times, et al should be listed as a "criminal skills" site, since I could probably guarantee you 100% readership of one or more of those publications among the executive classes of WorldCon, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Adelphia.
I mean, all those pubs just do is encourage criminal business practices, yes?
Can you imagine having to have corporations sign their own apps (NOT!)
This does make some sense -- we get applications all the time from parent/sibling entities. Naturally we trust them because we're part of the same overarching business entity, but should we?
It might also have value for internal security if the signing mechanism allowed for hierachical keys and a true cryptographic system. As an added layer of security an application or data might be completely encrypted unless your machine/key decrypted it.
I think it might appeal to some IT organizations which have third-party security concerns (defense, healthcare) but I think it might also just seem like a lot more baggage than necessary to other IT organizations for whom security is a more secondary concern.
-
What effect will this have on Open Source?
- This is good for Linux
- This is bad for Linux
Even when the topic isn't really related to software licensing or operating systems (Ask Slashdot: Does New Tide really get shitstains out of poly-cotton briefs better than those other brands?). It's possible to ask about the impact on Open Source if a draft ox in a rice paddy in rural China shits green, but its not terribly germane.I'm just wondering if there's a bot or if somebody is playing like the 7 Degrees of Open Source or if its really someone who truly can't think about anything other than Open Source.
...that posts "Effect on open source?" to every new thread?
but, if the software really was that good, what reason would people have to upgrade?
Probably none, but then they could move to a subscription model. Look at it this way -- would you rather pay an annual subscription of 25% of the price of the software and get a bug-fixed but feature stable operating system or would you rather pay 100% every three years AND have to do a forklift upgrade to a buggy OS?
You sound like the whole point of Longhorn is to give Linux the big F-U. Honestly, that might be a side-thought, but the main thought is to improve their OS. You guys bitch and moan about BSOD, but when they say, "OK, lets overhaul the bastard from scratch, and make it better" all you can say is, "but it won't be compatible with ..."
A *real* overhaul would eliminate 16 bit compatibility completely and would render questionable keeping even Win32 compatibility.
I don't know why they can't just fix XP to make it "right" -- I'd much rather have XP be pretty much bug/exploit free and 5 years old than I would some of the bullshit ease of use "features", DRM, proprietization and product/service steering that usually take up at least half of MS software engineering resources.
That's what always amazes me about MS -- if they'd actually focus on making the products good instead of focusing on how to lock out competitors and lock-in customers they would not only have better quality but quality itself would lock in customers and push out competitors.
I have a Sony MZE3 Minidisc player (and a home deck too), an Intel Pocket Concert 128M and I keep finding neither one of them perfectly satisfying.
The iPod looks sweet, but the cost seems just too much. In the past 20 years I've owned easily a dozen walkmen (most high-end Sonys) and they always broke -- sometimes the mechanisms gave up, but usually they just got dropped/squished or otherwise manhandled. I can't imagine that computer with HDD could be that much more rugged that after a year or so it didn't crap out too.
I'm going to give this Teac MiniCD MP3 player a try to see what its like. It seems like a good compromise between an MP3 player and Minidisc player -- more music per disc than Minidisc/solid state MP3 and faster recording time and definitely more affordable given the breakability of a $499 iPod.
If the iPod was $199 and had USB I wouldn't mind it. The funny thing about USB is that its only *truly* annoying for "real-time" transfers of a dozen songs where you sit there waiting. Drive mes nuts on my Intel 128M. I wouldn't have a problem moving a couple of gig over, since I could just let it go and come back in a couple of hours.
I mean, didn't anyone else automatically make this connection?
I'm sure we'll find out that there's been a bunch of sightings in the Himalayas as well due to Nessie picking up the Yeti in the UFO.
Not a terrible idea, but it'd be tough to do in the traditional PC single-height drive form factor.
I could see it in a double-height device (small print head that could write on top of the disc), using the "upper tray" for loading consumables. Most of the standalone labeling systems even kind of look like a double-height CD labeler.
I'd bet it'd be tricky to get this into some PC cases, though.
I'm guessing that the sticky labels and their little centering gizmos are probably good enough for most people and for those that they're not good enough for will have the money for one of the many inkjet/heat labelers, often with integrated duplication.
According to most of the sources I've read, the $100 is not only the most popular but the most widely counterfeited denomination.
This would make sense if you consider that much of the developing world, which holds like 60% of the US currency overseas, uses it pretty much as the currency for getting anything meaningful done. If you factor in a cash-based economy that uses or demands US dollars for many transactions (foreign exchange, probably many of them), denominations smaller than $100 don't make sense when you're trying to pay someone thousands of dollars.
I'd guess that the usual situation is to hold quantities of dollars in $100s, but perform small-denomination transactions in the local currency. It's also likely that local governments, perhaps even assuming good intentions, dislike a lot of US currency floating around as it tends to devalue the local currency, if not in terms of exchange rate at least in terms of status/desirability.
Go to any country in the world. Give away a $1, $20 or $100 to whoever wants one. See how many $1 bills you actually give away. See how many $100 bills you actually give away.
If you give away anything but $100 bills, then I'll believe foreigners can't tell American money apart.
OK, I realize I'm (kind of) defending the phone company, but often what's broken isn't the phone company rates but the tarrif structure and process regulators setup.
The first time I asked for a copy of my office's phone account info from the phone company -- several POTS lines, a couple of ISDN BRIs, an ISDN PRI and five DSS trunks -- I expected a page or two detailing the billing for the lines and maybe a page or two for some extras (DID blocks, etc). Naive me, I got what amounted to over *50* pages of billing information, often for each trunk member there were multiple entries for small charges of around $.50 each. I discovered why our phone system maintenance vendor employs a full-time ex-Qwest employee to decipher these things.
Anyway, the telcos deserve a rap on the knuckles for advertising just their tarrif rates, when they know that's not what people are going to be writing checks for. But the regulators and regulatory processes *also* deserve a (bigger) rap on the knuckles for making telephone billing so overly complicated; many of the charges on a phone bill are multi-layer (fed, state, local) taxes and fees.
It also doesn't help that what most non-rural customers pay for phone services isn't what it costs to deliver those services; cross-subsidies between service types further complicate simple pricing. Again thank the regulators.
It'd be nice if one day you could order telecomms services that had a price that you actually paid and could understand instead of a sea of regulutory nonsense.
Merriam-Webster spends too much time confusing fascism with the National Socialism pursued in Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.
Contrary to popular opinion, fascism and the search for a "third way" were legitimate intellectual pursuits at the turn of the last century. It was widely believed that democracy was unable to control unfettered capitalism and that socialism wasn't an effective or realistic means of politico-economic organization.
Judging facism by Nazism is about as realistic as judging socialism by the USSR.
I'd wager a reason videophone has never reached any kind of widespread acceptance is that getting decent video over a POTS line isn't happening.
Which kind of makes me wonder why the phone company doesn't push ISDN for residential phone services more aggressively (like subsidizing basic ISDN-compatible phones).
Widespread adoption of ISDN for phones *would* enable a pretty decent adoption of videophones as the bandwidth and latency to support reasonable video would be there.
Give us proof.
what, my anecdotal evidence isn't proof?
How do you "prove" the uptime of hosts that aren't reachable from the internet? I think you're asking for a level of proof that can't be provided to "prove" your point.
Sure, I could be some Pro-Windows, Anti-Unix zealot just lying. I'm not -- I do think UNIX generally is more stable than MS products
I'm sure the Netcraft numbers don't lie, but they only measure webservers. *All* of our Win2k machines have long uptimes and none has ever bluescreened. They get restarted for security updates and that's about it.
Admittedly the work of most of them is file/print and it isn't going to kill them, even with roughly 3/4 TB of disk per system, but even the busier systems (Exchange, SQL server, Web server) don't die on us.
I think Win2k deserves more credit for uptime than it usually gets.
From the AU posts in this topic, it sounds like the "censorship" is merely a government PR gesture and doesn't represent an active attempt to block content.
I wonder if maybe the fact that they won't release the list is due to the fact that there isn't one. Think of the time and effort that would be required to actually build and maintain a halfway accurate list of proscribed content. If the postings of the Aussies are right and the censorship laws are merely a "pro-family" political gesture, then its likely they're not making the effort.
They may also just be buying a list from a censorware vendor, whose contract prohibits disclosure as a trade secret, not to mention the political implications of a law whose enforcement mechanism relies on a third party.
Its the same reason people shop at Fry's or anywhere else -- when you balance the equation of convenience, location, price, selection, staff, policies, and so on, for many things it balances out to be pretty much the best option, sometimes the only option.
I try to avoid it if I can, even going to more upscale shops, but even when customer service isn't Best Buy Awful, they're still ingratiating college drop outs who are just training for the big league of automobile and photocopier sales.
My brother-in-law was an operations manager at a couple of the bigger stores in Minnesota (where they have their Corporate Death Star Headquarters).
Everything you said about this I've heard him say, along with a continuing battle to keep the employees from either ripping the store off themselves or doing it in cooperation with the customers. Considering most of the employees look like they were recruited from a reform school, none of it surprises me -- disgusts and insults, yes, surprises, no.
He's out and very grateful to be out.
Is the debit card liability limit a federal or widespread state law, or merely the banking industry's halfhearted attempt to convince people they're safe to use?
My bank sent me a debit card about 5 years ago, live, pre-activated without my authorization. I wouldn't accept it because I consider them dangerous -- it's too easy to see one's cash drained and then a long and difficult period of fighting with the bank over what charges are legit and what aren't.
At least with a credit card its the bank's money and they have a real interest in seeing that the fraud is investigated. When it's MY money that's gone, nobody has an interest in it but me.
I have two phones, and between them they are everything I need. When I'm working, I carry a Nokia 9210, and when I'm out chilling with friends or clubbing, I carry a Sony Ericsson T66.
Jeeezus. Do you have purses for every occasion, too?
I'm not advocating socialized medicine. Just pointing out that the perception of unchecked profiteering by the medical industry will eventually lead to a great socialization of medicine, which will in turn limit the appeal of investing huge amounts of capital when the ROI is either eliminated or stretched into 20 years instead of 5 or 10.
I think most people agree that something needs to be done to reign in medical costs -- whether its on the demand side (people learn to live with limited treatments) or on the supply side (regulated margins, less profit).
I'd personally advocate structural changes to the medical realm -- give RNs and Nurse Practitioners much broader ability to actually practice medicine, such as the ability to do in-office medical procedures like mole removal, stitches and the ability to write perscriptions for a broad array of drugs.
There's room for all sides to move -- drug companies ARE guilty of gouging and anticompetitive behavior. Patients are guilty of cost-is-no-limit expectations for medical care. Doctors are guilty of holding the practice of medicine hostage to their professional and financial gain.
Considering that Robert Mugabe is -- despite the stiff competition continent-wide -- the leading klepto-autocrat in Africa, is it any surprise? He's willing to steal elections and kill the only productive segment of his economy in the blantantly dishonest name of "land reform."
Why should it be at all surprising that he's willing to go after journalists who expose his regime? I suppose it is surprising to starry-eyed marxists who still buy into the collective bullshit of African anti-colonial revolution.
All the more shameful is Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the rest of the putatively democratic ANC's refusal to speak out against Mugabe and his thugs.
Maybe now that western journalists are actually starting to get a firsthand taste of Mugabe-style government they'll wipe the haze from their eyes and start doing the kind of reporting that might help bring an end to the politically correct refusal to believe that an African govenrment can do no wrong, especially if it involves whitey getting his.