Without those two things you should never ship from PayPal, ever. It's not that hard, when shipping within the US, to have both of those.
I had a dude pay me with PayPal once, which included a confirmed shipping address. My terms specified that this was a requirement. He sent an email, however, saying that he would like the item shipped to his office - two states away. I ignored that request (as per my terms) and shipped to the confirmed address. Three weeks later, he emailed me saying he hadn't gotten the item. I replied with the delivery confirmation number that showed it had been delivered a week earlier to his confirmed address. I never heard anything else from him.
Was it someone else at the confirmed address? I'll probably never know - but the item was never returned and the charge never disputed. I have a feeling that had I not used the delivery confirmation to the confirmed address, however, that the guy was going to dispute it with paypal - just from the tone of his mail. Since I had, however, he had no grounds to stand on.
This is primarily the reason so many college radio stations play true "alternative", oldies, classical, or generally unheard of bands. The royalties are cheaper. Often they're covered by various grants, funds and such.
Yet another example of how the US "work ethic" has invaded our minds. Someone here claiming that 3 day weekends are a good thing. Sure, if we got one every week.
But we're made to feel guilty for ever being sick, for ever wanting a 3 day weekend (and you don't get these often unless you're top brass anyway), and Ford forbid that we actually take time away from the working world to spend some time for ourselves.
You realize that SBC/Yahoo *does* have a Yahoo branded browser, right? So the person could actually have been 100% correct. Though that probably wasn't the case.
Of course, it's just built using IE controls, so it's really a version of IE (but more than just a skin, as it does add some features, and remove some others), but the point remains...
Hey, the same applies for DSL. SBC DSL - you can max it out all day long and they don't complain either. And with the new packages out, the speeds are the same as cable at around the same price ($45 for 3.0 mbit, and arguably 6.0 mbit if you listen to the techs on dslreports).
Seriously, why people insist on sticking with cable when the providers are treating their users like this I don't know.
Looks like everyone's missing the point here. What Microsoft does with their own search engine is their own business.
However, they have been trying to pressure Google into selling. Then it becomes a concern because currently Google is the only decent search engine available. Do you honestly believe MS would buy google and keep it unchanged? They're more interested in simply eliminating competition and getting a couple of good patents than actually running the best search engine in the world.
If they were just interested in running a decent search engine, they wouldn't have to buy Google. They could write one. The key is that they don't want a good search engine, they want a good marketing device.
When they leverage their backbone to try to muscle out the competition, that is when it becomes a problem for everyone.
For the casual word-processor user, geek, and perhaps undergrad student, KWord or OpenOffice is sufficient, and to pay US$69 for it doesn't seem an viable option.
However, if it truly delivers fast, reliable, feature filled, word processing to linux/freebsd, then *SERIOUS* word processors should be interested. Some of us have to do more than just a letter to grandma.
For instance (and I don't know if it supports these) as a student in upper level History, and soon to be in grad school (next Fall), I know I need a word processor that handles the following all correctly:
* Headers & Footers.
* Supressing first page on Headers & Footers
*.RTF format in/out
*.DOC format in/out (mostly in, maybe out)
* Footnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Endnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Indexing
And that's off the top of my head. You'd be surprised how rare some of those features are. And when they do exist, they don't always work correctly.
Beyond that, you want good spell check, grammar check (neither do you depend on though), and versioning capability. That's just off the top of my head.
A word processor that handles all of that and:
* Doesn't crash frequently
* Can load up in a matter of seconds (single-digits here folks)
* Doesn't output strangely formatted text (1) is probably worth US $69 to me.
(1) Strangely formatted text: I recently printed out a coverpage that had some large lettering on the front in Open Office. It looked fine on the screen, but when printed, the letters were bunched up too closely - the spacing didn't match the size of the font. UNFORGIVABLE. A real word processing user cares about the appearance of printed output.
Yes, this one has bugged the hell out of me. Mozilla is definitely not a graphics viewer. At the risk of sounding redundant, I want to reiterate that it's association of jpg and gif images with itself is a very annoying behaviour. That would apply to any filetype that is best handled by the application designed to handle it.
Mozilla browser should *only* handle web-based file types. html and the like. Leave the images and multimedia to the image and multimedia viewers.
As an end-user, you might never worry about kernel contamination of license, but it is very important to know.
For instance, if you install the Nvidia kernel driver module, it may give you a warning about contaminating the kernel in Linux with a commercial license.
FreeBSD has to worry about GPL contamination for a very important reason. The BSD license allows you to lift the code, package it as your own, and sell it at a profit without providing source code.
If you're a developer/publisher, and you do that, but you inadvertantly include a section of GPL'd code, you're now inviolation of the GPL that applies to that code. So if you're going to keep your BSD Licensed product close-source, you have to make sure there's no GPL'd code in it. Thus, the warning.
In related news, the "Dave Barry Effect", strangely similar to the "SlashDot Effect" has also stricken the ATA's home webpage, which refuses to load for many people who have it tagged to reload every few seconds. It wasn't even mentioned in the slashdot summary of the article, so apparently this was done by Barry's reader, or a few slashdot readers broke the rules and RTFA to get the addresss, which is:
Yes, that does mean that we don't need the middle letters at all.
I t___k t__t t__s is a s_______g d_______y!
Actually, the middle letters help, but as you see, I (and others) can figure out what you said even without them.
This is good, but don't count on XP 64-Bit
on
AMD64 Preview
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If the AMD64 version of Windows XP 64-Bit is as stripped down as the current Intel version... then don't bother considering what performance would be like there anyway... check here for a list of things *NOT* included in XP 64-bit:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defaul t. asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prka_ fea_tfiu.asp
But I guess we can do without features like Media Player, POSIX Compliance, Power Management, Windows Installer, and more... I guess..... just to have a 64-bit OS...
AC Said: > You no longer need that crap software. > Just upgrade to SBC Yahoo DSL [same service, new name]
*BZZ* Wrong. I have SBC Yahoo DSL. Connection manager software (SBC Connection Manager/EnterNet 300) is used in 2000 and previous. You have to install your own PPPoE client to get around it. The SBC Yahoo software is utter junk. Thus, I use XP since it gives me no hassle getting on my DSL.
Actually, WFP is not protection from yourself. By no means. In fact, WFP is probably the #1 feature of 2k/XP that has almost completely halted the old phenomenon of Windows "OS Decay", where an install of windows would degrade in quality over time.
Why is WFP good and how does it do that? Well... If you are like most users and install/uninstall apps, there's a good chance in the older OS's that this would degrade your system. Various versions of VisualBASIC installers, as well as other badly designed installers would overwrite existing DLL's regardless of version.
Such changes could result in Windows ME running with DLL's (the most common IIRC was ctl3d.dll or something like that) which dated back to Windows 3.1! I have *seen* it. Often, it won't complain right away as basic function calls are the same. But some apps will fail if they use newer function calls, and incompatibilities can result in "unexplained" lockups, etc..
For example, take your typical Win98SE install. A new feature back then was System File Checker. Why was it necessary? Because the System Files would get corrupted or replaced as I explained above. Take a 98SE machine that's been in operation for a year or so, and had programs installed/uninstalled. Run SFC tool. See exactly how many out of date DLL's were put on top of more current ones.
So... don't just assume because a feature is an annoyance, that it doesn't help protect the system. That's the kind of logic that makes Linux users login as root to surf the net.
Of that list, the only feature I find myself in requirement of is the Integrated PPPoE client. This because in 2000, using SBC's silly connection manager and EnterNet 300 combo is so slow and unreliable in comparison, and I never could get 3rd-party clients working reliably either...
As far as the theme... No, I don't like or use the default XP theme either... But StyleXP allows much cleaner skinning than any option available in 2000 due to better support in the OS... So I can make it look like it is KDE and feel at home:)
Personally, I'd like to see Longhorn delayed indefinitely. Force MS to provide patches for XP and 2000 for even longer to keep these OS's alive, before we're totally sold upriver in Longhorn.
I think a load of people here are completely missing the point.
1) The issue isn't necessarily just getting noobs to start using Linux instead of Windows.
2) Making Linux more desirable to more people benefits Linux by encouraging hardware vendors to support Linux, which can never be a bad thing. (Guess I should check again to see if my 160gig UDMA 133 drive is recognized on a newer distro...)
3) Making Linux more desirable does not require making Linux less customisable or eliminating any choice.
4) The problem for many is what I call the "Hassle factor".
I'm no technical neophyte - I've used Linux in various flavors at various times since 1994. I'm in the camp with a lot of people though - I use Windows most of the time for daily use. Why? Hassle factor. It has nothing to do with a "standard GUI" or "choice" or "lack of choice". But fixing those things will reduce the Hassle factor.
Say a user follows good advice and uses a distro like RedHat or Suse (Suse 8.2 is my current favourite). They then install a KDE desktop.
It looks pretty, sure. Does some nice things. They're past the point of desktop choice, but the hassle factor is over.
What are the things the user is going to have a problem with? These are the things that need the most attention.
In my experience, helping neophyte friends get into Linux as well as my own experience:
1) Getting connected to the internet. PPP utilities still suck. They work sometimes, sometimes they don't. They aren't easy to find, as Linux still often assumes you're on a LAN. Many distros include more than one. Cut it to one, and put the shortcut in plain view on the starting desktop!! Or set it up during install, and put the startup link on the desktop!.. I will credit SUSE on one point - it configured my DSL connection via DHCP with very little effort. But I still had to login to the administrator mode on Yast to get it to do it. Why? Hassle...
2) Menus, menus, and more menus. *THIS* IMHO is where we need standardization. All WM's should share a central repository for basic "start" menu lists. Most WM's give such a menu - but apps on one won't find their way onto the other. I've seen mumblings about such ideas, but it never actually seems to work. When I install an RPM of an app, I don't care if the app is written in QT and my WM is Gnome, vice versa, or even if it's an old Motif-style app - I want the app to register itself on my menu. I don't want to have to hunt down the executable, which could be in one of twenty different places, and add it manually to the menu. Hassle.
3) Better desktop and menu shortcut creation. This has improved MUCH in the last few years. But I still discovered when using KDE that I can't just go to a folder, find an executable, and drag it onto the desktop or the menu. Sure, I can make a link to the desktop. But it's not an "application" link, it's a link to a file. So I can't set the same properties as if it were an application link. And customizing the menu isn't drag-n-drop simple like in Windows. Sure, I know how to do it. I create a new application link, and browse to the executable... set a bunch of values by hand, then I have a proper application icon. But why? Hassle.
4) Source archives. Yes, I know how to./configure, make all, make install, etc. Many people don't. Even if they're able to read the README.install or whatever, it's a big hassle. I understand source archives - you can target much more varied versions of Linux with them, which is necessary since there's so much variation. Okay.... How about a good - and standard - system for installing these source archives? It should be as easy as installing any RPM package. No reason why those stops (configure, make, etc) can't be automated. In fact, Redhat does this with source RPM's to some extent. But first, it's not a standard that's adhered to much, and it's not flexible. Why not simply take the standard tarball, and add an installer script that can be detected and launched by
Slashdot Mirror
This is of course, why as a seller you NEVER ship without two things:
1. Confirmed shipping address
2. Delivery Confirmation
Without those two things you should never ship from PayPal, ever. It's not that hard, when shipping within the US, to have both of those.
I had a dude pay me with PayPal once, which included a confirmed shipping address. My terms specified that this was a requirement. He sent an email, however, saying that he would like the item shipped to his office - two states away. I ignored that request (as per my terms) and shipped to the confirmed address. Three weeks later, he emailed me saying he hadn't gotten the item. I replied with the delivery confirmation number that showed it had been delivered a week earlier to his confirmed address. I never heard anything else from him.
Was it someone else at the confirmed address? I'll probably never know - but the item was never returned and the charge never disputed. I have a feeling that had I not used the delivery confirmation to the confirmed address, however, that the guy was going to dispute it with paypal - just from the tone of his mail. Since I had, however, he had no grounds to stand on.
This is primarily the reason so many college radio stations play true "alternative", oldies, classical, or generally unheard of bands. The royalties are cheaper. Often they're covered by various grants, funds and such.
Yet another example of how the US "work ethic" has invaded our minds. Someone here claiming that 3 day weekends are a good thing. Sure, if we got one every week.
But we're made to feel guilty for ever being sick, for ever wanting a 3 day weekend (and you don't get these often unless you're top brass anyway), and Ford forbid that we actually take time away from the working world to spend some time for ourselves.
Life is all about work, didn't you know that?
You realize that SBC/Yahoo *does* have a Yahoo branded browser, right? So the person could actually have been 100% correct. Though that probably wasn't the case.
Of course, it's just built using IE controls, so it's really a version of IE (but more than just a skin, as it does add some features, and remove some others), but the point remains...
Oh, so they get the New York office, while the rest of us get Inida. Great :)
Hey, the same applies for DSL. SBC DSL - you can max it out all day long and they don't complain either. And with the new packages out, the speeds are the same as cable at around the same price ($45 for 3.0 mbit, and arguably 6.0 mbit if you listen to the techs on dslreports).
Seriously, why people insist on sticking with cable when the providers are treating their users like this I don't know.
Looks like everyone's missing the point here. What Microsoft does with their own search engine is their own business.
However, they have been trying to pressure Google into selling. Then it becomes a concern because currently Google is the only decent search engine available. Do you honestly believe MS would buy google and keep it unchanged? They're more interested in simply eliminating competition and getting a couple of good patents than actually running the best search engine in the world.
If they were just interested in running a decent search engine, they wouldn't have to buy Google. They could write one. The key is that they don't want a good search engine, they want a good marketing device.
When they leverage their backbone to try to muscle out the competition, that is when it becomes a problem for everyone.
The internet just saves them time rummaging around in your sock drawer looking for that Playboy you had hidden. It's safe now.
Wow, someone finally posts a curl link here that works.... This should be modded up!
For the casual word-processor user, geek, and perhaps undergrad student, KWord or OpenOffice is sufficient, and to pay US$69 for it doesn't seem an viable option.
.RTF format in/out .DOC format in/out (mostly in, maybe out)
However, if it truly delivers fast, reliable, feature filled, word processing to linux/freebsd, then *SERIOUS* word processors should be interested. Some of us have to do more than just a letter to grandma.
For instance (and I don't know if it supports these) as a student in upper level History, and soon to be in grad school (next Fall), I know I need a word processor that handles the following all correctly:
* Headers & Footers.
* Supressing first page on Headers & Footers
*
*
* Footnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Endnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Indexing
And that's off the top of my head. You'd be surprised how rare some of those features are. And when they do exist, they don't always work correctly.
Beyond that, you want good spell check, grammar check (neither do you depend on though), and versioning capability. That's just off the top of my head.
A word processor that handles all of that and:
* Doesn't crash frequently
* Can load up in a matter of seconds (single-digits here folks)
* Doesn't output strangely formatted text (1)
is probably worth US $69 to me.
(1) Strangely formatted text: I recently printed out a coverpage that had some large lettering on the front in Open Office. It looked fine on the screen, but when printed, the letters were bunched up too closely - the spacing didn't match the size of the font. UNFORGIVABLE. A real word processing user cares about the appearance of printed output.
One of the benefits of Mozilla to me that is really useful is:
X : Wheel-Click to load a link in the background without ever having to leave the current window/page.
Yes, this one has bugged the hell out of me. Mozilla is definitely not a graphics viewer. At the risk of sounding redundant, I want to reiterate that it's association of jpg and gif images with itself is a very annoying behaviour. That would apply to any filetype that is best handled by the application designed to handle it.
Mozilla browser should *only* handle web-based file types. html and the like. Leave the images and multimedia to the image and multimedia viewers.
As an end-user, you might never worry about kernel contamination of license, but it is very important to know.
For instance, if you install the Nvidia kernel driver module, it may give you a warning about contaminating the kernel in Linux with a commercial license.
FreeBSD has to worry about GPL contamination for a very important reason. The BSD license allows you to lift the code, package it as your own, and sell it at a profit without providing source code.
If you're a developer/publisher, and you do that, but you inadvertantly include a section of GPL'd code, you're now inviolation of the GPL that applies to that code. So if you're going to keep your BSD Licensed product close-source, you have to make sure there's no GPL'd code in it. Thus, the warning.
Kopete from version 0.72 works fine with MSN (KDE/Linux). By far my favorite, if only for the fact it'll dock in the KDE bar.
If you use the Yahoo plugin, you'll need 0.73, since it is broken in 0.72.
Hey thanks, now I don't have to boot into windows :) (much).
In related news, the "Dave Barry Effect", strangely similar to the "SlashDot Effect" has also stricken the ATA's home webpage, which refuses to load for many people who have it tagged to reload every few seconds. It wasn't even mentioned in the slashdot summary of the article, so apparently this was done by Barry's reader, or a few slashdot readers broke the rules and RTFA to get the addresss, which is:
http://www.ataconnect.org/
Yeah.... 72 virgins.... well thats enough for a few days maybe, but after that you're virgin-less... is that part of this program's scheme?
We're forgetting CP/M aren't we?
It's a fee charged for collecting a fee.... Absolutely perfect. Why didn't anybody think of it before?
Yes, that does mean that we don't need the middle letters at all.
I t___k t__t t__s is a s_______g d_______y!
Actually, the middle letters help, but as you see, I (and others) can figure out what you said even without them.
If the AMD64 version of Windows XP 64-Bit is as stripped down as the current Intel version... then don't bother considering what performance would be like there anyway... check here for a list of things *NOT* included in XP 64-bit:
l t. asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prka_ fea_tfiu.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defau
But I guess we can do without features like Media Player, POSIX Compliance, Power Management, Windows Installer, and more... I guess..... just to have a 64-bit OS...
AC Said:
> You no longer need that crap software.
> Just upgrade to SBC Yahoo DSL [same service, new name]
*BZZ* Wrong. I have SBC Yahoo DSL. Connection manager software (SBC Connection Manager/EnterNet 300) is used in 2000 and previous. You have to install your own PPPoE client to get around it. The SBC Yahoo software is utter junk. Thus, I use XP since it gives me no hassle getting on my DSL.
Actually, WFP is not protection from yourself. By no means. In fact, WFP is probably the #1 feature of 2k/XP that has almost completely halted the old phenomenon of Windows "OS Decay", where an install of windows would degrade in quality over time.
Why is WFP good and how does it do that? Well... If you are like most users and install/uninstall apps, there's a good chance in the older OS's that this would degrade your system. Various versions of VisualBASIC installers, as well as other badly designed installers would overwrite existing DLL's regardless of version.
Such changes could result in Windows ME running with DLL's (the most common IIRC was ctl3d.dll or something like that) which dated back to Windows 3.1! I have *seen* it. Often, it won't complain right away as basic function calls are the same. But some apps will fail if they use newer function calls, and incompatibilities can result in "unexplained" lockups, etc..
For example, take your typical Win98SE install. A new feature back then was System File Checker. Why was it necessary? Because the System Files would get corrupted or replaced as I explained above. Take a 98SE machine that's been in operation for a year or so, and had programs installed/uninstalled. Run SFC tool. See exactly how many out of date DLL's were put on top of more current ones.
So... don't just assume because a feature is an annoyance, that it doesn't help protect the system. That's the kind of logic that makes Linux users login as root to surf the net.
Of that list, the only feature I find myself in requirement of is the Integrated PPPoE client. This because in 2000, using SBC's silly connection manager and EnterNet 300 combo is so slow and unreliable in comparison, and I never could get 3rd-party clients working reliably either...
:)
As far as the theme... No, I don't like or use the default XP theme either... But StyleXP allows much cleaner skinning than any option available in 2000 due to better support in the OS... So I can make it look like it is KDE and feel at home
Personally, I'd like to see Longhorn delayed indefinitely. Force MS to provide patches for XP and 2000 for even longer to keep these OS's alive, before we're totally sold upriver in Longhorn.
I think a load of people here are completely missing the point.
./configure, make all, make install, etc. Many people don't. Even if they're able to read the README.install or whatever, it's a big hassle. I understand source archives - you can target much more varied versions of Linux with them, which is necessary since there's so much variation. Okay.... How about a good - and standard - system for installing these source archives? It should be as easy as installing any RPM package. No reason why those stops (configure, make, etc) can't be automated. In fact, Redhat does this with source RPM's to some extent. But first, it's not a standard that's adhered to much, and it's not flexible. Why not simply take the standard tarball, and add an installer script that can be detected and launched by
1) The issue isn't necessarily just getting noobs to start using Linux instead of Windows.
2) Making Linux more desirable to more people benefits Linux by encouraging hardware vendors to support Linux, which can never be a bad thing. (Guess I should check again to see if my 160gig UDMA 133 drive is recognized on a newer distro...)
3) Making Linux more desirable does not require making Linux less customisable or eliminating any choice.
4) The problem for many is what I call the "Hassle factor".
I'm no technical neophyte - I've used Linux in various flavors at various times since 1994. I'm in the camp with a lot of people though - I use Windows most of the time for daily use. Why? Hassle factor. It has nothing to do with a "standard GUI" or "choice" or "lack of choice". But fixing those things will reduce the Hassle factor.
Say a user follows good advice and uses a distro like RedHat or Suse (Suse 8.2 is my current favourite). They then install a KDE desktop.
It looks pretty, sure. Does some nice things. They're past the point of desktop choice, but the hassle factor is over.
What are the things the user is going to have a problem with? These are the things that need the most attention.
In my experience, helping neophyte friends get into Linux as well as my own experience:
1) Getting connected to the internet. PPP utilities still suck. They work sometimes, sometimes they don't. They aren't easy to find, as Linux still often assumes you're on a LAN. Many distros include more than one. Cut it to one, and put the shortcut in plain view on the starting desktop!! Or set it up during install, and put the startup link on the desktop!.. I will credit SUSE on one point - it configured my DSL connection via DHCP with very little effort. But I still had to login to the administrator mode on Yast to get it to do it. Why? Hassle...
2) Menus, menus, and more menus. *THIS* IMHO is where we need standardization. All WM's should share a central repository for basic "start" menu lists. Most WM's give such a menu - but apps on one won't find their way onto the other. I've seen mumblings about such ideas, but it never actually seems to work. When I install an RPM of an app, I don't care if the app is written in QT and my WM is Gnome, vice versa, or even if it's an old Motif-style app - I want the app to register itself on my menu. I don't want to have to hunt down the executable, which could be in one of twenty different places, and add it manually to the menu. Hassle.
3) Better desktop and menu shortcut creation. This has improved MUCH in the last few years. But I still discovered when using KDE that I can't just go to a folder, find an executable, and drag it onto the desktop or the menu. Sure, I can make a link to the desktop. But it's not an "application" link, it's a link to a file. So I can't set the same properties as if it were an application link. And customizing the menu isn't drag-n-drop simple like in Windows. Sure, I know how to do it. I create a new application link, and browse to the executable... set a bunch of values by hand, then I have a proper application icon. But why? Hassle.
4) Source archives. Yes, I know how to