I just got an email last night, of the type where it appears to be from eBay (it's not) and it's asking for you to verify some information. The URL in the body appears to be a valid eBay address. And although the email appears to be plain text, it's actually HTML and the "valid eBay address" actually takes you to a non-eBay and non-secure IP address where you're presented with a poorly-worded form asking for name, address, passwords, PayPal username, password, credit card numbers, etc...
All other links on the page go to the valid eBay "help" and "contacts" pages. It looks really official, except for the non-professional grammar.
I wonder how many people fall for this type of scam every day?
It wasn't even sent to the special email address that I use exclusively for my eBay account (my first clue, woohoo!).
And yes, I've already reported it to eBay...
Wot sez we demonstrate the SlashDot Effect(TM) for the thieving bastard?
I've actually driven a couple of Sparrows, on two different occasions. The Atlanta dealer allowed me to test drive them, once just in a parking lot, and a few months later my wife and I drove another one on the road (separately, of course. It's strictly a one-person vehicle).
I must say that I was impressed with the ease of maneuvering it and the get-up-and-go that it had, it was a ball to drive. Tearing through light traffic on Briarcliff Road and freaking out the locals... it was a lot of fun. We thought about buying one, maybe even two of them, had they improved it and actually gone into full production of the planned "Sparrow II". The short range didn't bother me (I live less than a mile from work), and I really like the quirky styling.
My take on it is that the company was just so poorly managed that it would never have made any difference how much money it made, it would never have been profitable. If you take the number of Sparrows and Merlin Roadsters actually produced and divide it into the money they burned through, you find that they sold them for about a tenth of what they spent to build them. Full production-line efficiency and better design would have brought that cost down eventually, but it would take more than price and cool factor to make them profitable.
The huge salaries drawn by the top execs and the leases on their company Bentleys couldn't have much to do with it, could they?:)
By the way... why is this news now, two months after the bankruptcy announcement (March 27), and it wasn't news when I submitted it? Sure, I submitted it to Slashdot on April 1st, but it wasn't a joke.
Hell, their website is long gone, now. We could have taken it down for them and cost Tom a fortune in bandwidth charges!
The BBS scene in Atlanta was pretty big in the late 80s, early 90s... Atlanta is the largest dialing area in the world, so what we couldn't do in quality, we made up in sheer volume. There were an awful lot of BBSes.
I ran Art&Music BBS from summer 1990 to Dec 1995.
Originally it ran only when I wasn't using my computer, a 286/16 with 4MB of RAM and a 40MB drive. When I stopped the BBS software (Searchlight BBS), a batch file took the modem offhook and started Windows 3.0 so I could work (this was the painful beginning of Desktop Publishing on the PC and I was determined to make a living of it). When I exited Windows, the batch looped back and restarted the BBS.
It slowly graduated to being two 386/40s (on a SERIAL LAN! Yeah, on a COM port!) with a couple of hundred MB each and a 5-disk CD changer for file downloads. How my single-line BBS with only MIDI files and fonts for download attracted such a following is beyond me, but I had over 2000 registered users from as far away as Belgium and Japan. Discussion groups were mostly on-topic, with font trading, MIDI discussion and Mac-bashing being the most popular.
A lightening strike took out the whole thing. The surge on the telephone line blew up my Genuine Hayes 9600 external modem, fried both motherboards and burned the serial cable connecting the two computers.
By this time (late 1995) I had been toying with setting up an email gateway to the Internet with the BBS calling into a provider to pick up mail several times a day... but once I actually saw where this Internet thing was going, I never bothered to rebuild the trashed machines. Art&Music faded away without so much as a whimper, and I got a shell account for $18 a month.
The other BBS that was going to be my email provider? It grew up rather suddenly... and became MindSpring, now called Earthlink.
Connery's the only one with substantial face time in the trailer... not surprising, since he's the only one in the cast I've heard of (no, I've never seen "La Femme Nakita").
Sean Connery (Allan Quatermain) Shane West (Tom Sawyer) Peta Wilson (Mina Harker) Jason Flemyng (Dr. Henry Jekyll) Tony Curran (The Invisible Man) Naseeruddin Shah (Captain Nemo) Stuart Townsend (Dorian Grey) Richard Roxburgh ("The Fantom") Max Ryan (Dante Alighieri)
All of the images and movie files on Apple's site are served by Akamai. I had to take the Akamai entries out of my hosts file just to navigate the site, much less download the file.
I think it looks interesting, though I wondered about the Victorian England (1898?) aspect of the story line when I saw the automobile with obviously 1930's design cues. And what's with the six wheels? Four in the front? Been watching "Thunderbirds" re-runs on TechTV?
Jennifer was an awfully popular name where I used to work...
One girl's name was spelled Ginnifer, so we called her GEEnifur. Another one (same shift, same department) was the usual spelling, so to keep from confusing the other girl, we called her JAYnifer.
So a new girl is hired, works right in the same room as the other two, and her name turns out to be Jennifer... I tagged her OTHERfer the first day. Her boyfriend even started calling her that.
When Otherfer moved on to a better job, someone from another department took her old job. Her name? Natch, I dubbed her ANOTHERfer right away.
I'd already decided on YETANOTHERfer had they hired another one, but I've long since moved on m'self.
You're probably thinking of "Ghost From the Grand Banks" , about a project to raise the Titanic 100 years after its sinking (2012, for the historically-challenged). One of the characters invents a self-cleaning windshield for automobiles; his one claim to fame. I remember it involving an ultrasonic vibration technique... I couldn't find my copy.
I got the warning from GoDaddy, and the same day I received the "it looks like a bill but it's really not" from Verisign. I generally read this stuff when I get it out of the box, but had I been in a big hurry that day and had I NOT gotten the warning from GoDaddy (and it was still fresh on my mind), I would probably have just put it on the "pay this" pile and a check would have gone out. I don't write the checks, and the person that does would have just assumed it was to be paid. Sure, it has the logo and such in plain view, but the fact of the matter is that Verisign counts on the harried business person passing it off to accounts payable, then off to the mailroom and back to them with nobody the wiser until after the fact. Then it's a bitch to straighten out, so they get a lot of domains back.
The real "duh" for mine, though... the expiration date on the letter is 3/31 (no year). Respond soon! Your domain registration expires March 31!
My registration indeed expires on March 31st... of 2004.
Sunny Beaches!
It transferred at an average speed of 600kps! And I'm in a little town in the north Georgia mountains, 80 miles from Atlanta. E-freakin'-GAD! What kinda connection is that thing on?
I'd bail, dude. Take the best offer, find some places for your buddies if you have the opportunity, but look out for number one and BAIL.
I'm going through the exact same decision-making process right now. The ISP I've been a part of for nearly a year has made some really BAD financial decisions in the last few months, and hasn't been able to pay some rather important bills, and was cut off by the local phone company (yesterday at 14:30ish). Dead in the water, it seems. I'm optimistic that the powers that be will dilligently search for hats to pull rabbits out of, but I'm only going to be that optimistic until Monday.
I have no offers and no prospects. Hell, I hadn't even thought about it until yesterday. But talent and work ethic will prevail, I won't stay unemployed long. And even a failed dotcom looks good on a résumé (as long as you weren't management), right?
Our sysadmin is a daily/. reader... Chad, chime in if ya want. At least we're on topic!
Slashdot Mirror
All other links on the page go to the valid eBay "help" and "contacts" pages. It looks really official, except for the non-professional grammar.
I wonder how many people fall for this type of scam every day?
It wasn't even sent to the special email address that I use exclusively for my eBay account (my first clue, woohoo!).
And yes, I've already reported it to eBay...
Wot sez we demonstrate the SlashDot Effect(TM) for the thieving bastard?
Here ya go:
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/ebayISAPI.dll?UPdate
The electric 914 in one of your links was built by Clare Bell... who also used to work for Corbin Motors. Small world!
I've actually driven a couple of Sparrows, on two different occasions. The Atlanta dealer allowed me to test drive them, once just in a parking lot, and a few months later my wife and I drove another one on the road (separately, of course. It's strictly a one-person vehicle).
I must say that I was impressed with the ease of maneuvering it and the get-up-and-go that it had, it was a ball to drive. Tearing through light traffic on Briarcliff Road and freaking out the locals... it was a lot of fun. We thought about buying one, maybe even two of them, had they improved it and actually gone into full production of the planned "Sparrow II". The short range didn't bother me (I live less than a mile from work), and I really like the quirky styling.
My take on it is that the company was just so poorly managed that it would never have made any difference how much money it made, it would never have been profitable. If you take the number of Sparrows and Merlin Roadsters actually produced and divide it into the money they burned through, you find that they sold them for about a tenth of what they spent to build them. Full production-line efficiency and better design would have brought that cost down eventually, but it would take more than price and cool factor to make them profitable.
The huge salaries drawn by the top execs and the leases on their company Bentleys couldn't have much to do with it, could they? :)
By the way... why is this news now, two months after the bankruptcy announcement (March 27), and it wasn't news when I submitted it? Sure, I submitted it to Slashdot on April 1st, but it wasn't a joke.
Hell, their website is long gone, now. We could have taken it down for them and cost Tom a fortune in bandwidth charges!
No funny ears or noses, no transporters, no holodeck. An ensemble cast, humor, action... the works.
We had a great show like that, but Fox cancelled it after only half a season.
I ran Art&Music BBS from summer 1990 to Dec 1995.
Originally it ran only when I wasn't using my computer, a 286/16 with 4MB of RAM and a 40MB drive. When I stopped the BBS software (Searchlight BBS), a batch file took the modem offhook and started Windows 3.0 so I could work (this was the painful beginning of Desktop Publishing on the PC and I was determined to make a living of it). When I exited Windows, the batch looped back and restarted the BBS.
It slowly graduated to being two 386/40s (on a SERIAL LAN! Yeah, on a COM port!) with a couple of hundred MB each and a 5-disk CD changer for file downloads. How my single-line BBS with only MIDI files and fonts for download attracted such a following is beyond me, but I had over 2000 registered users from as far away as Belgium and Japan. Discussion groups were mostly on-topic, with font trading, MIDI discussion and Mac-bashing being the most popular.
A lightening strike took out the whole thing. The surge on the telephone line blew up my Genuine Hayes 9600 external modem, fried both motherboards and burned the serial cable connecting the two computers.
By this time (late 1995) I had been toying with setting up an email gateway to the Internet with the BBS calling into a provider to pick up mail several times a day... but once I actually saw where this Internet thing was going, I never bothered to rebuild the trashed machines. Art&Music faded away without so much as a whimper, and I got a shell account for $18 a month.
The other BBS that was going to be my email provider? It grew up rather suddenly... and became MindSpring, now called Earthlink.
All of the images and movie files on Apple's site are served by Akamai. I had to take the Akamai entries out of my hosts file just to navigate the site, much less download the file.
I think it looks interesting, though I wondered about the Victorian England (1898?) aspect of the story line when I saw the automobile with obviously 1930's design cues. And what's with the six wheels? Four in the front? Been watching "Thunderbirds" re-runs on TechTV?
Jennifer was an awfully popular name where I used to work...
One girl's name was spelled Ginnifer, so we called her GEEnifur. Another one (same shift, same department) was the usual spelling, so to keep from confusing the other girl, we called her JAYnifer.
So a new girl is hired, works right in the same room as the other two, and her name turns out to be Jennifer... I tagged her OTHERfer the first day. Her boyfriend even started calling her that.
When Otherfer moved on to a better job, someone from another department took her old job. Her name? Natch, I dubbed her ANOTHERfer right away.
I'd already decided on YETANOTHERfer had they hired another one, but I've long since moved on m'self.
Second shift was a lot of fun in that place.
You're probably thinking of "Ghost From the Grand Banks" , about a project to raise the Titanic 100 years after its sinking (2012, for the historically-challenged). One of the characters invents a self-cleaning windshield for automobiles; his one claim to fame. I remember it involving an ultrasonic vibration technique... I couldn't find my copy.
I got the warning from GoDaddy, and the same day I received the "it looks like a bill but it's really not" from Verisign. I generally read this stuff when I get it out of the box, but had I been in a big hurry that day and had I NOT gotten the warning from GoDaddy (and it was still fresh on my mind), I would probably have just put it on the "pay this" pile and a check would have gone out. I don't write the checks, and the person that does would have just assumed it was to be paid. Sure, it has the logo and such in plain view, but the fact of the matter is that Verisign counts on the harried business person passing it off to accounts payable, then off to the mailroom and back to them with nobody the wiser until after the fact. Then it's a bitch to straighten out, so they get a lot of domains back.
The real "duh" for mine, though... the expiration date on the letter is 3/31 (no year). Respond soon! Your domain registration expires March 31!
My registration indeed expires on March 31st... of 2004.
Sunny Beaches! It transferred at an average speed of 600kps! And I'm in a little town in the north Georgia mountains, 80 miles from Atlanta. E-freakin'-GAD! What kinda connection is that thing on?
Coolness! That actually worked!
I'd bail, dude. Take the best offer, find some places for your buddies if you have the opportunity, but look out for number one and BAIL.
/. reader... Chad, chime in if ya want. At least we're on topic!
I'm going through the exact same decision-making process right now. The ISP I've been a part of for nearly a year has made some really BAD financial decisions in the last few months, and hasn't been able to pay some rather important bills, and was cut off by the local phone company (yesterday at 14:30ish). Dead in the water, it seems. I'm optimistic that the powers that be will dilligently search for hats to pull rabbits out of, but I'm only going to be that optimistic until Monday.
I have no offers and no prospects. Hell, I hadn't even thought about it until yesterday. But talent and work ethic will prevail, I won't stay unemployed long. And even a failed dotcom looks good on a résumé (as long as you weren't management), right?
Our sysadmin is a daily