It turns out that Gawker has a "Chief Technology Officer". However, if you read this article from Forbes, it makes you wonder what this guy actually did, other than show up and collect a paycheck.
Asking the bank if the check cleared yields an answer which doesn't mean shit. If none of that means anything, what question must one ask the bank to require them to not reverse the answer?
That's the real issue here. Yes, the guy is an idiot for falling for an obvious scam. But this whole check clearing process is bullshit. A check is either good or it isn't. It either clears or it doesn't. There should be no in-between. There should be none of this bullshit of "well... it has provisionally cleared... sort of.... maybe..... we don't really know and even if we did know we won't tell you for a month or two".
It shouldn't take months. Or weeks. It shouldn't take more than a couple of days.
The bank sends the check off to the ACH who in turn electronically contacts the bank where the check is drawn.. "Hello. We have a check number ____ Account Number _____ In the amount of ______ Is this check OK?"
And within a reasonable amount of time, they have to tell you "yes it is good" or "no it's not any good" And that's the final answer. Period. If someone didn't do their homework, tough shit.
Why exactly did Yahoo buy Delicious in the first place? I see this a lot -- Company A buys Company B, usually for a lot of money, and then a short time later shuts down Company B or sells it for far less than they paid. And yet there never seems to be any consequences for the executives of Company A for wasting a few hundred million (or billion) dollars.
Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...
Recently, someone analyzed Oracle's latest financial reports and discovered something interesting. Although Oracle appears to be very profitable, it all comes from maintenance contracts. Take away the maintenance revenue and they lost money. This means that Oracle probably doesn't give a rat's ass about Java or who they alienate, as long as they can continue to milk the cash cow of maintenance revenue.
To have such frank dispatches suddenly outed within the lifetime of the Prime Minister's ministry could create enormous rifts between two key allies. The kind of language used in these dispatches is extremely frank. What good would it do the citizens of either nation to have these observations broadcast for the world to see?
Although this is possible, there are other bigger issues. For example, with regard to Turkey, there is fear that it will be revealed that both the U.S. and Turkey are secretly doing things that they publicly say they are not -- Turkey helping Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and the United States helping Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey. Which is exactly why these things need to be exposed.
He is a Republican who actually BELIEVES in smaller government, who has consistently acted on those grounds, and campaigns for it.
Really? Then why didn't he introduce a bill forbidding the molestation of passengers and exposure to harmful and ineffective scans? Or better yet, if he really believes in smaller governement he would introduce a bill eliminating the TSA all together since they are a wasteful ineffective agency that has done nothing to make anyone safer.
Instead he proposes a bill which says, in effect, "if you don't like how you are treated by the TSA you can spend a few hundred thousand dollars trying to sue the Federal Government. This is nothing more than political grandstanding and pretending to be "against big government".
But the real problem with Dell is their entire business model. They manufacture nothing. They buy components (motherboards, etc) from the lowest bidding Chinese OEM, who manufactured those components using parts from the lowest bidding Chinese OEMs. The bad capacitors aren't Dells, fault. They aren't even the motherboard manufacturers fault. The bad capacitors are the fault of the company that made them. And unfortunately, you can't tell they are bad until they fuck up.
So Dell is fucked. Dell can spend a ton of money fixing everyone's computer and then try to go back to the motherboard manufacturer and say "you sold me shitty motherboards". Lots of luck getting a Chinese sweatshop to give a shit about quality or customer service..
"In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter on a state-by-state basis. PayPal is not classified as a bank in the United States, though the company is subject to some of the rules and regulations governing the financial industry including Regulation E consumer protections and the USA PATRIOT Act."
Either I "preview" said film via torrent, maybe, or I don't see it at all. Now, please tell me where is the loss of sale?
Which cuts directly to the real bullshit of the RIAA/MPAA's arguments. They are convinced that if they could just get tougher laws, more DRM and punishments straight out of the middle ages, then all their troubles would go away and they would make even more money than they do now.
Unfortunately:
1. There is no content so amazingly wonderful that I absolutely have to have it. 2. There is a significant number of people who will never buy your product, at any price. If they can't get it for free, or really really cheap, then they will simply do without it (see point 1) 3. Someone "pirates" your movie -- you get no money. People are afraid of getting sued for downloading it so they say "fuck it" and move on to something else (see point 2) in which case -- you get no money.
Is this a poorly translated article that was originally in another language? None of it makes any sense. For example:
"As Android is an open platform, vendors of Android handsets have to pay royalty fees of at least US$10-15 per handset for licensed use of the patents concerned, the sources explained"
What does being an "open platform" have to do with paying patent royalties?
I know someone who works there, and he tells me that when it was bought out, that Tom guy was very resistant to making the sort of changes to the site that anybody could see were needed.
It wouldn't have mattered. My Space, Facebook and all the rest are fads. They come and go. Once your 15 minutes of fame are up, that's it, people have already moved on to the latest "new big thing".
I recently came across an old copy of Modern Recording magazine from early 1981. There is an article about how cassette decks are evil and home taping is hurting the record industry and the RIAA commissioned a study that that they hoped to take to congress as proof that new laws were need.
But a funny thing happened. The report was shelved when it revealed that people who owned home recording equipment spent 75% more money buying music than people who didn't own an evil cassette deck.
hey still can make good software, which they proceed to sell for very large quantities of cash. What I don't really understand is why they ever updated PDF beyond being a simple document format - it introduced all of these vulnerabilities, and gave them a lot more work to do on their free reader software, for little real value. What was wrong with just keeping it as a simple extension of postscript?
Like any product, they have to keep producing new versions with new "features" so that existing users will want to upgrade. Otherwise everyone would still be using version 1.0 and Adobe wouldn't make any money. Unfortunately this creates the existing cycle of constantly introducing new exploitable bugs which must be patched.
The advent of HTML 5 within the next couple years is expected to solve many of these problems, because that specification finally standardizes how HTML code should be parsed by Web browsers, rather than leaving it up to individual platform vendors to develop their own interpretations of how the code should be parsed.
Note the use of the phrase "should be". I see this a lot when reading about HTML 5. Are people really that stupid and/or naive that they think all browsers will follow the HTML 5 spec exactly? (yes Microsoft I'm looking at you)
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that Gawker has a "Chief Technology Officer". However, if you read this article from Forbes, it makes you wonder what this guy actually did, other than show up and collect a paycheck.
Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
That's the real issue here. Yes, the guy is an idiot for falling for an obvious scam. But this whole check clearing process is bullshit. A check is either good or it isn't. It either clears or it doesn't. There should be no in-between. There should be none of this bullshit of "well ... it has provisionally cleared ... sort of .... maybe ..... we don't really know and even if we did know we won't tell you for a month or two".
It shouldn't take months. Or weeks. It shouldn't take more than a couple of days.
The bank sends the check off to the ACH who in turn electronically contacts the bank where the check is drawn..
"Hello. We have a check number ____ Account Number _____ In the amount of ______ Is this check OK?"
And within a reasonable amount of time, they have to tell you "yes it is good" or "no it's not any good" And that's the final answer. Period. If someone didn't do their homework, tough shit.
What would make even more sense would be not to waste a few billion dollars buying up companies that have no real value.
Why exactly did Yahoo buy Delicious in the first place? I see this a lot -- Company A buys Company B, usually for a lot of money, and then a short time later shuts down Company B or sells it for far less than they paid. And yet there never seems to be any consequences for the executives of Company A for wasting a few hundred million (or billion) dollars.
An "independent" test that was "funded by Microsoft". WTF? How is that independent?
You mean eliminating 800 of the 1000 data centers they didn't know they had?
Recently, someone analyzed Oracle's latest financial reports and discovered something interesting. Although Oracle appears to be very profitable, it all comes from maintenance contracts. Take away the maintenance revenue and they lost money. This means that Oracle probably doesn't give a rat's ass about Java or who they alienate, as long as they can continue to milk the cash cow of maintenance revenue.
Large Hardon Collider
Although this is possible, there are other bigger issues. For example, with regard to Turkey, there is fear that it will be revealed that both the U.S. and Turkey are secretly doing things that they publicly say they are not -- Turkey helping Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and the United States helping Iraq-based Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey. Which is exactly why these things need to be exposed.
Einstein is responsible for those crappy Bose speakers?
Really? Then why didn't he introduce a bill forbidding the molestation of passengers and exposure to harmful and ineffective scans? Or better yet, if he really believes in smaller governement he would introduce a bill eliminating the TSA all together since they are a wasteful ineffective agency that has done nothing to make anyone safer.
Instead he proposes a bill which says, in effect, "if you don't like how you are treated by the TSA you can spend a few hundred thousand dollars trying to sue the Federal Government. This is nothing more than political grandstanding and pretending to be "against big government".
So I won't, because they really suck.
But the real problem with Dell is their entire business model. They manufacture nothing. They buy components (motherboards, etc) from the lowest bidding Chinese OEM, who manufactured those components using parts from the lowest bidding Chinese OEMs. The bad capacitors aren't Dells, fault. They aren't even the motherboard manufacturers fault. The bad capacitors are the fault of the company that made them. And unfortunately, you can't tell they are bad until they fuck up.
So Dell is fucked. Dell can spend a ton of money fixing everyone's computer and then try to go back to the motherboard manufacturer and say "you sold me shitty motherboards". Lots of luck getting a Chinese sweatshop to give a shit about quality or customer service..
Unique users.
It's funny how everyone talks about Facebook competing with Google, when Hotmail has almost twice as many users and Yahoo has almost 3 times as many.
Here's an interesting graphic that surprised me. U.S. Internet traffic to Web-based email clients
#1 Yahoo - 72.8 million
#2 Hotmail - 48.5 million
#3 GMail - 25.1 million
"In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter on a state-by-state basis. PayPal is not classified as a bank in the United States, though the company is subject to some of the rules and regulations governing the financial industry including Regulation E consumer protections and the USA PATRIOT Act."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal
Which cuts directly to the real bullshit of the RIAA/MPAA's arguments. They are convinced that if they could just get tougher laws, more DRM and punishments straight out of the middle ages, then all their troubles would go away and they would make even more money than they do now.
Unfortunately:
1. There is no content so amazingly wonderful that I absolutely have to have it.
2. There is a significant number of people who will never buy your product, at any price. If they can't get it for free, or really really cheap, then they will simply do without it (see point 1)
3. Someone "pirates" your movie -- you get no money. People are afraid of getting sued for downloading it so they say "fuck it" and move on to something else (see point 2) in which case -- you get no money.
Is this a poorly translated article that was originally in another language? None of it makes any sense. For example:
"As Android is an open platform, vendors of Android handsets have to pay royalty fees of at least US$10-15 per handset for licensed use of the patents concerned, the sources explained"
What does being an "open platform" have to do with paying patent royalties?
It wouldn't have mattered. My Space, Facebook and all the rest are fads. They come and go. Once your 15 minutes of fame are up, that's it, people have already moved on to the latest "new big thing".
Microsoft has (had) their own JVM but Sun always made their own Windows version. But Sun couldn't be bothered to made a Mac version?
I recently came across an old copy of Modern Recording magazine from early 1981. There is an article about how cassette decks are evil and home taping is hurting the record industry and the RIAA commissioned a study that that they hoped to take to congress as proof that new laws were need.
But a funny thing happened. The report was shelved when it revealed that people who owned home recording equipment spent 75% more money buying music than people who didn't own an evil cassette deck.
Note the use of the phrase "should be". I see this a lot when reading about HTML 5. Are people really that stupid and/or naive that they think all browsers will follow the HTML 5 spec exactly? (yes Microsoft I'm looking at you)
Posting anything on Facebook or Twitter is proof of bad judgement.
Finally!! Something worthwhile on Twitter.