If the record stores really want to stay in business, then why don't they do the obvious?
Install a very high speed telecom line and a bank of DVD/CDRW burners. When someone wants the latest album by Shithead (pronounced Shee - thay - hahd; an ancient Celtic term meaning brave and worthy) then they would go to the record store and buy a CD-R or DVD that is burned from the copy that is storage in the store's hard disk RAID array. (Or they would download the album from the record company (and store it on their in-house hard disk RAID bank if it wasn't there already).
The fact is, record stores are going out of business because, they are TOO STUPID to adapt to even simple changes in the business environment.
In other words, I agree, I would love to get out of germany. But I do not know where to go from there!
Might I suggest Israel? Western Canada is also great if you don't want all the baggage (like the permanent war going on in the neighborhood there) associated with being an Israeli. Western Canada has a lot of rain, but that may change over the decades with the coming of global warming and its effect on climate. They're a little light on high tech jobs, but that will change also.
They do have great scenery, great people, great wine, really great weed, and they're close enough to the US to do shopping without being chained to all the American problems and national debt issues.
Then again maybe Germany might be a good place to live until the situation in Iran becomes more liberal and moderate. Under all those burkas, they do have the most beautiful women in the world there. Plus 2/3rds of the population is under thirty. Move all the cement-head mullahs and their secret police morals-squad thugs to Pakistan and Iran could be an interesting place to live.
If, in the future, computer networking is so difficult and full of gotchas and traps and weird little programming tricks that people will need a college degree to do it reliably, then today's engineers have failed miserably.
The whole point of computer 'science' is to make operating, programming, and using computers productively be easy and transparent. It is not to create layers and layers of code, interfaces, and protocols that add massive plateaus of complexity to what is already a discipline wroght with artificial and useless complexity.
This is a key point that no one in the Linux/Unix community seems to understand.
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work.
The giant media corporations have destroyed the idea of copyright themselves by bribing legislators in the USA to change the copyright time period from limited to indefinite. Since they refuse to release copyrighted material into public domain (by permanently extending the copyright period), the consumers refuse to acknowledge their ownership of the copyright by using new digital technology to make extensive and widespread copies.
Corporations don't understand the idea of 'social compact' and never will. In the long run, they will dissolve themselves due to inability to control digital copyright, but they will send many random people to prison to set examples and will destroy many works by encrypting them and refusing to release the decryption keys or allowing the sale of the product.
A local Portland Oregon folk artist, Lew Jones, released a new album several years ago with most of his older work included on the CD in MP3 form.
This was a mixed-mode CD where the audio came first and then the data. Placing the CD in an audio player gives the sound, so there is no blast of noise when the data is placed on the CD first.
Also there were a few selections of other artists from the same small label on the CD in MP3 form.
This is pretty neat and is an example of the RIAA companies should be doing to address this issue. It's too bad that these companies are all run by bozos who have let all the cocaine, limos, bimbos, and rock-star celebrity cloud their business sense.
Another idea would be is to have the original mix tracks on the CD in MP3 form along with a program that allows the buyers to remix to songs differently. Remove that irritating guitar solo, add more reverb on the bass, things like this.
I realize for the first time that I might *not* live to see mankind on mars.
This is no real big deal. It will be on television and it will look exactly like the Hollywood movies from a few years ago have shown it.
There is nothing on Mars. It's a cold as hell, there are no resources, no water, no liveable environment, nothing at all there worth spending all the money to go there.
There is no life there. If scientists spent billions of dollars to find as many microbes on the whole planet that is found here in a spoonful of tap water, it still wouldn't mean anything at all except to a few religious zealots.
The europeans should spend a little more time making love with each other considering their birthrate is far below the sustainability. By the time that they got to mars, there will only be half as many of them as there are now.
Space exploration is just a way to avoid dealing with difficult problems here on Earth.
This reminds me of the old game of 'middle east war' played on a simple calculator.
You do all sorts of number and word tricks until the display "71077345".
Then you ask who wins the war. To get the answer, turn the calculator display upside down.
The preacher looks a the blonde in Sunday School. "What is the name of God?," asked the preacher. The blonde thought for a minute and then said, "Andy!".
"Andy?," asked the astounded preacher, "How do you that?"
"Well, the song goes...Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me..."
WHY are there so many different screw types on a PC?
How does an average person or technician learn what screws go where and what their precise technical names are? (so we know what we are talking about)
I've alway maintained that the real difference between the professional electronic tech and the amateur is that the pro doesn't lose the screws or drops it on a powered circuit board. Sort of like doctors taking extra care not to leave a small spounge inside a person after an operation.
Wow. I hope all the lines at the beginning of the message about the empty parking lots at Fry's were irony.
You're right about Fry's branching into retail electronics from groceries. My point is that the modern electronics business is different enough from groceries so that it would be in their best interest not to run their computer store exactly like a grocerie store.
Fry's electronics is fantastic and fantasticly frustrating at the same time. One opened ten miles away about five years ago in the shell of a giant Radio Shack that went bust. I enjoy going there, but I don't buy as much stuff there as I used to.
Fry's is at their peak now and stuck. They can't grow and their 'grocery store' formula is too successful to fail. My suggestions are methods that they could use to get out of their present dilemma and onto the next level of success.
Research in the 19th century was done by wealthy aristocrats and their eccentric friends. It was considered cool to spend your time investigating areas that had no possible application in the real world. 99.9% of that energy and research was wasted and today we remember only a few of these people like George Boole and Countess Ada Lovelace.
Research today is a huge taxpayer funded collecton of unrelated projects primarily designed to give employment to people who got college degrees with little or no commercial potential (not even enough to pay for the expense of their education) like astrophysics and Mars exploration. If people want this stuff, let them pay for it with their own money, not taxpayer's funds.
One out every ten women get breast cancer. I would like to see every dollar spent on NASA go instead to breast cancer research. Because, frankly, I love women more than I love NASA space engineer geeks. The number of jobs for scientists and technicians would be the same and the benefit to ourselves, our families, and the world would be much better.
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
It's a new century and it's time to move away from this idiot mentality that says that it's OK to be at permanent war and that anything that one does to fight the enemy is cool.
The USA arranged for the USSR to buy defective computer chips that caused a major disaster in a nuclear facility. A disaster that could have caused unpresidented and irreversible environment damage, cost thousands of lives, and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of Cancer.
And this is an example of 'the spooks getting it right'?
This is insane. Americans need to start realizing that their obsession with 'permanent war is good for the economy' is a mental disease that threatens not only them but everyone else in the world. No wonder their entire electronic industry is outsourceing to third world. No one can trust them because they allow themselves to be ruled by people and institutions that are clearly insane.
NASA does the impossible! It has made me sympathetic to the rich assholes who secretly transfer millions of dollars out of the USA to tax havens like Lichtenstein and Cayman Islands.
The Americans insist on pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on this nonsense, even though they have many real and serious problems that need funds.
The entire space program is based on two principals: one is creating super-weapons to blast the shit out of anyone with space-based lasers who dares challenge the right of global corporations to take their money. The second is to provide fat government jobs to white people with science degrees who can't or won't find jobs that provide productive benefit to anyone.
If the rich decide that they don't want to pay for this horseshit anymore, well good luck to them! Let the rest of the people know how you get away with it so that they can do it too.
Two new elements AND a new form of matter? These latest breakthroughs are simply amazing!
I for one salute our science community. Keep up the good work folks.
The most amazing thing about this whole business is the justifications that the scientists use to get all the money for this.
It costs millions, and has no possible direct benefits to the taxpayers who are paying for it. There is even no remote long term benefit from this activity. It's just welfare for white guys with science degrees.
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
Fry's has the potential of becoming one of the big four companies of the information age, along with Amazon, Google, and Yahoo. Deep down, most geeks love Fry's. They just have great difficulty dealing with the layers of stupidity that shroud the company like a great onion.
Becoming the most web-savay electonics retailer would go a lot way for Fry's. They would start to be taken seriously by their customers.
Demanding manuals for placement on the their website would be a logical first step for Fry's in their long journey to becoming the most important electronic retailer in the world. If they do nothing and simply stay the way that they are now, then someone else will figure this all out and leapfrog ahead of them.
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
The comment 'years for additional sales' means that people will be more willing to by Yamaha synthesizers over Roland or Kawai because they know that they can resell them used for more money because the manuals are available online.
Tone module synthesizers are big closed computers that are worth significantly less if the programming information is not available. If the paper manual gets lost, then the often the used equipment buyer is at a real disadvantage.
Yahama addressed that issue by scanning all the manuals for its products and putting them online.
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
The point of the article is that most gadgets these days are unusable, despite the documentation.
I see your point and I was concerned about this very issue when composing the message.
But I believe that having more documentation and deeper technological docs will allow the gadget to be used in productive ways that may be different from that primarily envisioned by the manufacturer.
Plus deep technical docs might show a way to disable the unwanted functionality.
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
It's like this: I can have a small to moderate manual converted to PDF in about an hour with a good scanner and an hour of a staff member's time. All told, maybe $20-$30 of the company's cash per manual. No biggie. Or, I can pay someone to scan and OCR the manual, scan the images, place all the images in the proper places, and two days later have it all working and looking the way it should. All told, a couple hundred bucks per. Looking at that, most companies would say No, period.
Another alternative would be for the companies to ask users to scan the manuals that they don't have in digital format (for older products) and upload the scans (as GIF or PDF) to the companie's website. Then when each product's manual arrives from the field they could remove it from the list of manuals that they need, the list also being on the website.
This would require the company both being intelligent, interacting with their customer base, and often maintaining their website. Few companies would meet these difficult qualifications.
It's an example of what makes Amazon so different and wonderful.
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Manufacturers need to learn that in the information age (which is now!) they need to put more and more info on their websites.
Every product manual should be on the website in PDF!
Even the products that are ten to fifteen years old!
For an example of the best example of providing info, look at Yamaha. They have scanned every manual for every music synthesizer model and variation that they have made and have put these scans (in PDF format) on their web site for free download. Considering that this is refers to several hundred models each with manuals that have several hundred pages, this is incredible customer support!! I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Yamaha musical instrument new or used, for fear that I couldn't operate it.
Plus they did it knowing that it would take years to pay off in additional sales. Great company.
Now for the chumps! Fry's Electronics gets the price here. Every product , yes every product in the store should have a manual on-line on their website.
And,
Every product that they have ever sold in the past ten years should have the manual on their web site. Plus, there should be links to information that people always need to know when they buy stuff there. Like, what type of memory does this motherboard that is on sale this week use? And, 'Can I use this other type of memory for the motherboard that I bought at Fry's three years ago?'.
Usually at Fry's, nobody knows what the answer to your question is. So people buy the wrong product, can't figure out how to get it working, scoop up most of the parts, and bring it back for a refund. Then they put most of the parts back in the box, put shrinkwrap cellophane around it, and stick it back on the shelves at full price.
The only way to tell if the product at Fry's is a dud is by the ratio of returned units to the previously unsold ones. If half the boxes are user returns, don't buy it or you too will probably be back to return it. Like the saying goes: 'A trip to Fry's is two trips to Fry's'. This monkeyshit mentality wouldn't be so bad if you're not driving fifteen miles each way.
And they could reduce this nonsense by demanding that each supplier provide a manual in PDF form and a list of FAQ that could be put on the Fry's website before the product goes on sale there.
But would they do it, no ef'in way. They just don't give a fuck!
I'm finding that more and more websites only work with IE. For example, Ebay refuses to accept my password from Opera7 and works fine with IE.
I went to a site yesterday to research a sound box. (Applied Research Technology of Boston, MA) When I clicked on a list box, I was always sent to the Adobe Acrobat download site (the Acrobat icon was near the list box).
I wrote a message to the people who did the website and they wrote back that they couldn't repair the site for browsers that only had 2-3% of the market.
Huh? Why shouldn't a list box work correctly? Why should Ebay of all people not work with Opera 7?
There really is no excuse for this nonsense.
In still more news, Wackenhut and Correction Corporation of America have determined that locking up black kids in private prisons for possession of ten cents worth of marijuana is a positive influence on society.
Slashdot Mirror
If the record stores really want to stay in business, then why don't they do the obvious?
Install a very high speed telecom line and a bank of DVD/CDRW burners. When someone wants the latest album by Shithead (pronounced Shee - thay - hahd; an ancient Celtic term meaning brave and worthy) then they would go to the record store and buy a CD-R or DVD that is burned from the copy that is storage in the store's hard disk RAID array. (Or they would download the album from the record company (and store it on their in-house hard disk RAID bank if it wasn't there already).
The fact is, record stores are going out of business because, they are TOO STUPID to adapt to even simple changes in the business environment.
Let's get together and make SCO urine cakes!
Time to put our piss where our mouth is...
uh..something like that...you know what I'm saying..
In other words, I agree, I would love to get out of germany. But I do not know where to go from there!
Might I suggest Israel? Western Canada is also great if you don't want all the baggage (like the permanent war going on in the neighborhood there) associated with being an Israeli. Western Canada has a lot of rain, but that may change over the decades with the coming of global warming and its effect on climate. They're a little light on high tech jobs, but that will change also.
They do have great scenery, great people, great wine, really great weed, and they're close enough to the US to do shopping without being chained to all the American problems and national debt issues.
Then again maybe Germany might be a good place to live until the situation in Iran becomes more liberal and moderate. Under all those burkas, they do have the most beautiful women in the world there. Plus 2/3rds of the population is under thirty. Move all the cement-head mullahs and their secret police morals-squad thugs to Pakistan and Iran could be an interesting place to live.
If, in the future, computer networking is so difficult and full of gotchas and traps and weird little programming tricks that people will need a college degree to do it reliably, then today's engineers have failed miserably.
The whole point of computer 'science' is to make operating, programming, and using computers productively be easy and transparent. It is not to create layers and layers of code, interfaces, and protocols that add massive plateaus of complexity to what is already a discipline wroght with artificial and useless complexity.
This is a key point that no one in the Linux/Unix community seems to understand.
(Oh boy, there go all my mod karma points again)
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work.
The giant media corporations have destroyed the idea of copyright themselves by bribing legislators in the USA to change the copyright time period from limited to indefinite. Since they refuse to release copyrighted material into public domain (by permanently extending the copyright period), the consumers refuse to acknowledge their ownership of the copyright by using new digital technology to make extensive and widespread copies.
Corporations don't understand the idea of 'social compact' and never will. In the long run, they will dissolve themselves due to inability to control digital copyright, but they will send many random people to prison to set examples and will destroy many works by encrypting them and refusing to release the decryption keys or allowing the sale of the product.
A local Portland Oregon folk artist, Lew Jones, released a new album several years ago with most of his older work included on the CD in MP3 form.
This was a mixed-mode CD where the audio came first and then the data. Placing the CD in an audio player gives the sound, so there is no blast of noise when the data is placed on the CD first.
Also there were a few selections of other artists from the same small label on the CD in MP3 form.
This is pretty neat and is an example of the RIAA companies should be doing to address this issue. It's too bad that these companies are all run by bozos who have let all the cocaine, limos, bimbos, and rock-star celebrity cloud their business sense.
Another idea would be is to have the original mix tracks on the CD in MP3 form along with a program that allows the buyers to remix to songs differently. Remove that irritating guitar solo, add more reverb on the bass, things like this.
You know your a 'dirty old man' the first time that you make love to a woman who doesn't know what a typewriter is.
I realize for the first time that I might *not* live to see mankind on mars.
This is no real big deal. It will be on television and it will look exactly like the Hollywood movies from a few years ago have shown it.
There is nothing on Mars. It's a cold as hell, there are no resources, no water, no liveable environment, nothing at all there worth spending all the money to go there.
There is no life there. If scientists spent billions of dollars to find as many microbes on the whole planet that is found here in a spoonful of tap water, it still wouldn't mean anything at all except to a few religious zealots.
The europeans should spend a little more time making love with each other considering their birthrate is far below the sustainability. By the time that they got to mars, there will only be half as many of them as there are now.
Space exploration is just a way to avoid dealing with difficult problems here on Earth.
This reminds me of the old game of 'middle east war' played on a simple calculator.
You do all sorts of number and word tricks until the display "71077345".
Then you ask who wins the war. To get the answer, turn the calculator display upside down.
The preacher looks a the blonde in Sunday School.
"What is the name of God?," asked the preacher.
The blonde thought for a minute and then said, "Andy!".
"Andy?," asked the astounded preacher, "How do you that?"
"Well, the song goes...Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me..."
I only have two questions:
WHY are there so many different screw types on a PC?
How does an average person or technician learn what screws go where and what their precise technical names are? (so we know what we are talking about)
I've alway maintained that the real difference between the professional electronic tech and the amateur is that the pro doesn't lose the screws or drops it on a powered circuit board. Sort of like doctors taking extra care not to leave a small spounge inside a person after an operation.
An assault weapon shoots salt.
Wow. I hope all the lines at the beginning of the message about the empty parking lots at Fry's were irony.
You're right about Fry's branching into retail electronics from groceries. My point is that the modern electronics business is different enough from groceries so that it would be in their best interest not to run their computer store exactly like a grocerie store.
Fry's electronics is fantastic and fantasticly frustrating at the same time. One opened ten miles away about five years ago in the shell of a giant Radio Shack that went bust. I enjoy going there, but I don't buy as much stuff there as I used to.
Fry's is at their peak now and stuck. They can't grow and their 'grocery store' formula is too successful to fail. My suggestions are methods that they could use to get out of their present dilemma and onto the next level of success.
Research in the 19th century was done by wealthy aristocrats and their eccentric friends. It was considered cool to spend your time investigating areas that had no possible application in the real world. 99.9% of that energy and research was wasted and today we remember only a few of these people like George Boole and Countess Ada Lovelace.
Research today is a huge taxpayer funded collecton of unrelated projects primarily designed to give employment to people who got college degrees with little or no commercial potential (not even enough to pay for the expense of their education) like astrophysics and Mars exploration. If people want this stuff, let them pay for it with their own money, not taxpayer's funds.
One out every ten women get breast cancer. I would like to see every dollar spent on NASA go instead to breast cancer research. Because, frankly, I love women more than I love NASA space engineer geeks. The number of jobs for scientists and technicians would be the same and the benefit to ourselves, our families, and the world would be much better.
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
It's a new century and it's time to move away from this idiot mentality that says that it's OK to be at permanent war and that anything that one does to fight the enemy is cool.
The USA arranged for the USSR to buy defective computer chips that caused a major disaster in a nuclear facility. A disaster that could have caused unpresidented and irreversible environment damage, cost thousands of lives, and cause hundreds of thousands of cases of Cancer.
And this is an example of 'the spooks getting it right'?
This is insane. Americans need to start realizing that their obsession with 'permanent war is good for the economy' is a mental disease that threatens not only them but everyone else in the world. No wonder their entire electronic industry is outsourceing to third world. No one can trust them because they allow themselves to be ruled by people and institutions that are clearly insane.
NASA does the impossible! It has made me sympathetic to the rich assholes who secretly transfer millions of dollars out of the USA to tax havens like Lichtenstein and Cayman Islands.
The Americans insist on pissing away hundreds of millions of dollars on this nonsense, even though they have many real and serious problems that need funds.
The entire space program is based on two principals:
one is creating super-weapons to blast the shit out of anyone with space-based lasers who dares challenge the right of global corporations to take their money.
The second is to provide fat government jobs to white people with science degrees who can't or won't find jobs that provide productive benefit to anyone.
If the rich decide that they don't want to pay for this horseshit anymore, well good luck to them! Let the rest of the people know how you get away with it so that they can do it too.
I for one salute our science community. Keep up the good work folks.
The most amazing thing about this whole business is the justifications that the scientists use to get all the money for this.
It costs millions, and has no possible direct benefits to the taxpayers who are paying for it. There is even no remote long term benefit from this activity. It's just welfare for white guys with science degrees.
Fry's has the potential of becoming one of the big four companies of the information age, along with Amazon, Google, and Yahoo. Deep down, most geeks love Fry's. They just have great difficulty dealing with the layers of stupidity that shroud the company like a great onion.
Becoming the most web-savay electonics retailer would go a lot way for Fry's. They would start to be taken seriously by their customers.
Demanding manuals for placement on the their website would be a logical first step for Fry's in their long journey to becoming the most important electronic retailer in the world. If they do nothing and simply stay the way that they are now, then someone else will figure this all out and leapfrog ahead of them.
The comment 'years for additional sales' means that people will be more willing to by Yamaha synthesizers over Roland or Kawai because they know that they can resell them used for more money because the manuals are available online.
Tone module synthesizers are big closed computers that are worth significantly less if the programming information is not available. If the paper manual gets lost, then the often the used equipment buyer is at a real disadvantage.
Yahama addressed that issue by scanning all the manuals for its products and putting them online.
The point of the article is that most gadgets these days are unusable, despite the documentation.
I see your point and I was concerned about this very issue when composing the message.
But I believe that having more documentation and deeper technological docs will allow the gadget to be used in productive ways that may be different from that primarily envisioned by the manufacturer.
Plus deep technical docs might show a way to disable the unwanted functionality.
It's like this: I can have a small to moderate manual converted to PDF in about an hour with a good scanner and an hour of a staff member's time. All told, maybe $20-$30 of the company's cash per manual. No biggie.
Or, I can pay someone to scan and OCR the manual, scan the images, place all the images in the proper places, and two days later have it all working and looking the way it should. All told, a couple hundred bucks per. Looking at that, most companies would say No, period.
Another alternative would be for the companies to ask users to scan the manuals that they don't have in digital format (for older products) and upload the scans (as GIF or PDF) to the companie's website. Then when each product's manual arrives from the field they could remove it from the list of manuals that they need, the list also being on the website.
This would require the company both being intelligent, interacting with their customer base, and often maintaining their website. Few companies would meet these difficult qualifications.
It's an example of what makes Amazon so different and wonderful.
http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/english/index.html
Manufacturers need to learn that in the information age (which is now!) they need to put more and more info on their websites.
Every product manual should be on the website in PDF!
Even the products that are ten to fifteen years old!
For an example of the best example of providing info, look at Yamaha. They have scanned every manual for every music synthesizer model and variation that they have made and have put these scans (in PDF format) on their web site for free download. Considering that this is refers to several hundred models each with manuals that have several hundred pages, this is incredible customer support!! I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Yamaha musical instrument new or used, for fear that I couldn't operate it.
Plus they did it knowing that it would take years to pay off in additional sales. Great company.
Now for the chumps! Fry's Electronics gets the price here. Every product , yes every product in the store should have a manual on-line on their website.
And,
Every product that they have ever sold in the past ten years should have the manual on their web site. Plus, there should be links to information that people always need to know when they buy stuff there. Like, what type of memory does this motherboard that is on sale this week use? And, 'Can I use this other type of memory for the motherboard that I bought at Fry's three years ago?'.
Usually at Fry's, nobody knows what the answer to your question is. So people buy the wrong product, can't figure out how to get it working, scoop up most of the parts, and bring it back for a refund. Then they put most of the parts back in the box, put shrinkwrap cellophane around it, and stick it back on the shelves at full price.
The only way to tell if the product at Fry's is a dud is by the ratio of returned units to the previously unsold ones. If half the boxes are user returns, don't buy it or you too will probably be back to return it. Like the saying goes: 'A trip to Fry's is two trips to Fry's'.
This monkeyshit mentality wouldn't be so bad if you're not driving fifteen miles each way.
And they could reduce this nonsense by demanding that each supplier provide a manual in PDF form and a list of FAQ that could be put on the Fry's website before the product goes on sale there.
But would they do it, no ef'in way. They just don't give a fuck!
So what't the point?
MORE DOCUMENTATION!
I'm finding that more and more websites only work with IE. For example, Ebay refuses to accept my password from Opera7 and works fine with IE.
I went to a site yesterday to research a sound box. (Applied Research Technology of Boston, MA) When I clicked on a list box, I was always sent to the Adobe Acrobat download site (the Acrobat icon was near the list box).
I wrote a message to the people who did the website and they wrote back that they couldn't repair the site for browsers that only had 2-3% of the market.
Huh? Why shouldn't a list box work correctly? Why should Ebay of all people not work with Opera 7?
There really is no excuse for this nonsense.
In still more news, Wackenhut and Correction Corporation of America have determined that locking up black kids in private prisons for possession of ten cents worth of marijuana is a positive influence on society.