I know it really depends on the area what kind of service you get, but it might not hurt to just, you know, call them and ask them to send a tech to check the line. My wife and I bought a house last year and we had to downgrade from FIOS (tell me again why you won't upgrade?) back to DSL. When we first moved in we had some issues with the service dropping fairly frequently. After a couple service calls they eventually sent out an actual line tech who looked at the line and found there was a minor fault, which he fixed. Since then everything's been flawless. Maybe it really is just a coincidence, and if you can get someone to come take a look at your line you might get somewhere. Or, you could just post bitchy complaints on Slashdot and hope the CmdrTaco Fairy will come fix your line. Either way, can't hurt to try, right?
I'd say keep looking, eventually you'll find someone reasonable. My wedding photographer sold us a DVD with all of our wedding pictures on it, in addition to the prints, etc. The DVD was all untouched stuff - if we wanted the pretty, touched up version we had to order a print through him - but he sold it to us exactly with the understanding that we would want to play with it ourselves in photoshop, etc. We even got a letter from him stating that we could have prints made from the photos on the DVD. That said, it did cost us an addition $500 or so (I think, I'm too lazy to look up the bill), but considering his price for shooting the wedding was $5k, it seemed reasonable. And yes, he was worth it. Between himself and his assistant, they took over 1,000 shots and then culled that down to about 100 really good ones, which they touched up for the album (which was included in the cost, and was custom printed in book form). This guy is a consummate professional, and much more of an artist than most wedding photographers. If he was willing to sell the photo rights, I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find someone in your area who'll do it.
Think of me what you may... but I resell some tickets on e-bay. Not a lot... but I'll make a couple hundred a month. I would totally lose out due to the timing. If I list my tickets close to the actual event time I may not be able to resell the tickets as the date has passed.
Fair enough. I'll admit that this change may cause problems for sellers of time sensitive items like event tickets. However, those items are just a very small portion of the sales on eBay. Does it make sense to have a feedback system that is useful for maybe 5% or 10% (probably less) of the sales, but useless or even harmful otherwise?
I sold full time on eBay for about two years - I quit because I moved on to a better job, but my father still sells on eBay part time. From my perspective this is a good change. There is no way to leave "honest" negative feedback because of fear of retaliation, so one way or another the system had to change. Buyers need to be able to see negative feedback far more than sellers do - sellers have all the power, not buyers. The buyer sends the money, then the seller sends the goods. There is no point where the seller has neither money nor goods - but during the entire shipping process, the buyer is without his money and without his goods. So, unless you're a complete idiot seller, there's simply no way to get scammed on eBay. It's very easy, on the other hand, for buyers to get scammed. The worst thing that can happen to you as a seller is to have the buyer just not pay - but if that happens, you can file a non-paying bidder report to eBay and they will refund your final value fees, so even there you really don't lose out (they don't refund the listing fees, but considering they just lowered listing fees, this is even less of an issue now than it used to be - and you're also allowed to offer the item to the underbidder if the first bidder didn't work out, or relist the item). The other difficulty you may have as a seller is that if your buyer pays with PayPal or a credit card, he or she may file a fraudulent chargeback against you. This may be something you can use feedback to protect yourself against, but it's really an imperfect system. It's always been difficult to censor buyers based on feedback anyway - what are you going to do if the buyer bids at the very last minute, and you don't have time to cancel their bid and block them? eBay did allow you to set conditions for buyers and back out of the sale if the buyer didn't meat them, but it was always a difficult thing to enforce, anyway. As a seller you simply have to realize that there are a few small risks that come with retail (such as chargebacks, returns, and the occasional cranky buyer).
Brick and mortar retailers are just as exposed (or even more exposed) to these problems. If eBay sellers want to be taken seriously, they just need to accept the there will occasionally be issues. The mantra of all successful retail businesses is that "the customer is always right". Whatever losses you take from the occasional return or other problem are more than made up for by the boost to your reputation you get by having customers view you as a fair and flexible retailer. If you want to be in retail, you've just got to have thick skin. I'm sure eBay has made the decision that if sellers can't accept selling by the terms of the normal retail environment, then they really don't need to be selling on eBay. All they will do is lower buyer's confidence and hurt the site's reputation
Here's an idea - use a TIVO and compare it to the SHIT you've been shoveled by DISH
The DishDVR is actually quite good. I've used a TiVo and I've got DishDVR now, and I'd say they're about on par. DishDVR has some features TiVo doesn't (or at least doesn't out of the box - I understand you can hack the TiVo remote to enable 30 second commercial skips, but with DishDVR it's standard), and TiVo has a few that Dish doesn't. Overall I'd probably prefer a TiVo, but the DishDVR is not bad at all - it's far better than the boxes that most cable companies provide, and most reviews I read said it was heads and tails about DirecTV's DVR as well.
They'll have to shell out for licensing. If they lose the DVR option, they're going to lose half their customers. I'm with Dish now, but the minute the DVR is disabled I'll be calling up to cancel (God help them if they try to hold me to my contract, since they'll clearly be breaking it by not providing the service they promised) and calling up DirecTV to see what they have on special that week...
you're forced to use their router and you have to pay for each computer connected to the internet.
Umm, no. I've had Verizon DSL and FiOS, with multiple computers connected in both cases, and never had to pay anything. They do require you to use their modem for FiOS and for DSL (and the modem generally has router capabilities, but you can easily hook your own router up to the modem and disable its router provisions. As far as cutting service and changing prices - sure they can do that, but so can cable companies. In my experience, they do it no more often than cable co.s, and they're far less likely than cable co.s to try to filter your service (like Comcast is doing with bittorrent).
I had FiOS for a few months (granted, it was their 5mb/2mb package) and ran BT more or less 24/7 and never ran into any problems. Verizon has a whole host of other issues (their billing department, especially, is a joke), but as far as using your bandwidth goes they really don't seem to care if you max it out. They also don't make any serious attempt to block P2P, although they do block some of the common web services ports (i.e. you can't run an http server on port 80, ftp server on 21, etc).
I've used Tivo, a Verizon FiOSTV provided Motorolla DVR, and now I've got a Dish Network DVR. Of the three, the Tivo was probably the best (and the Motorolla clearly the worst), but the Dish DVR is cheap (monthly fee was waived due to signing up under a package deal), supports two televisions, and has a nice, large capacity (not sure if it does HD, however, as I only have SD). Overall, I'm very happy with it, and I can't see spending however much up front and then another $10 a month just for the few extra perks that a Tivo gives.
Starting selling on eBay is just like starting any other small retail business. It requires a lot of hard work and effort, but it's certainly possible. The bonus of selling on eBay is that the world is your market - the downside is that you have a ton of competition. I do about $54,000 a year gross sales on eBay (net profit is, of course, much less than that). It's enough to keep me going while I take some time off between undergrad and grad school, but I wouldn't want to be doing this my whole life. There are, however, plenty of people out there who are making a lot of money on eBay. The keys are:
1. Find a reliable supplier where you can get items at wholesale
1a. Find about 20 items that sell well from that supplier and list them over and over again! Nothing sucks more than having to write new listings every week.
2. Spend a lot of time initititally working out your shipping system to minimize cost and time effort.
Macs are good for "new to computers" people. If I was buying my grandmother a computer to browse the web and use e-mail, an eMac would be a good choice. Yeah it's more expensive, but very few viruses target MacOS, OSX is easy to use, and a lack of moving parts on the computer makes it hard to mess with (which is bad for a geek, but good for a newbie). A cheap Dell for half the cost would get the job done too, but then 3 months later you'd be cleaning off spyware, explaining how to use a virus scanner, etc, etc.
Actually I live pretty far out in the woods (hence dial-up, I can't get DSL or Cable) - the closest used music stores are more like a half hour away, and they don't exactly have a great selection. My other option is FYE (which is also 1/2 hour away), but their markup is rather excessive - the CD I bought for $9.99 on iTunes would probably have been $16.99 or more there (plus tax). The closest reasonably priced music store (other than Wal-mart - yuck!) is at least an hour away.
Oops, downloaded it on Saturday. For some reason I have it stuck in my head that today is Friday, and I knew I downloaded it 2 days ago, so in my muddled head the math came out Wednesday...
I downloaded iTunes on Wednesday and used it to buy an album that night. Even though I'm on 56k dial-up, it downloaded flawlessly (although it did take about 4 hours, as I expected). I have to say that I'm pretty impressed - for a free jukebox program, it's really high quality. It still has some issues and bugs that could be polished out of it, but overall it's a well designed and easy to use program that I have no major complaints about. It's heads and tails above Windows Media Player 9, and a better jukebox than Winamp (although I think Winamp is still a better standalone player). If Jobs can play his cards right, this could be big.
As a seller, I can tell you that a lot of the reason shipping charges have gone up recently is that the USPS raised their rates. Up until this year, it cost about $3.50 to send a less than 2lb package anywhere in the country. Now it's $3.85 for a one pound package, and a two pound package going from coast to coast is about $6.30. I'm not saying that there aren't people who are ripping people off over shipping, but it's not as cut and dry as it might seem either.
And the results - for the same file, at 910 kbps, indistinguishable quality, both had minor artifacting, etc, but looked pretty good full screen, and looked great at default res. The big difference was time to encode - divx took 6 1/2 minutes to encode the clip I selected, VP3 took 11, and size - divx was 20.7 mb, vp3 was 29 mb. All other things were equal, I used Virtual Dub for both, same video clip, and the default encoding parameters for both (Medium for speed/quality in DivX 4.0, Fast Encode for VP3). My computer's a Celeron 566, 256mb RAM, running Windows 2000 SP2.
They didn't offer to turn him over, they offered to try him in Afghanistan under Islamic law... how likely do you think it is he'd be convicted under those circumstances??? They're just blowing hot air to try to save their asses, they have no intention of turning him over.
This is the law though - it's extremely difficult to get on dissability, contrary to what most people believe. My father has post polio disorder - he's in constant physical pain (which only hard narcotics can dull, so he doesn't take anything), can hardly walk, can't type, can't sit for long periods of time, has trouble doing analytical thinking (a symptom of polio, believe it or not), and looks like hell - but he had to go through three appeals to get on disability, because according to the initial board of review he could still work. Not that I'm complaining, I think dissability should be as difficult to get on as possible, to stop freeloaders... I don't think the article gives enough details for me to make a judgement on this case, but considering the standards they set, I'm not too surprised.
That's one way of looking at things, or you could take the opposite approach - ferinstance, quite a bit of computer tech was developed specifically for NASA's moon push in the 60's - would we be talking today if not for space exploration? As to world hunger, it might not end it in the short term, but in the long term, who's to say it won't? If cheap space transport and effect terraforming can be developed (who knows if they can, but who really thought computers were possible a relatively short 150 years ago?) we've got two planets pretty close by, Mars & Venus, that would make great big-ass farms.
Mining other planets and asteroids has the potential to provide plenty of precious metals, and on the war front - a few extra planets to expand to could stop war quite easily - or make it 10 times as worse, but war isn't something that's going to be solved by us staying on planet either, and if anything I think the population constraints that living on just one planet provides are much more likely to cause war than anything. And of course there's species survival to think about... as a whole humans are more likely to survive indefinitely if we're on many different planets, cuz right now if we blow up this one, well, that's it. I'm sure any sci-fi hack can flesh this out better than I have, but since I'm up...
Slashdot Mirror
I know it really depends on the area what kind of service you get, but it might not hurt to just, you know, call them and ask them to send a tech to check the line. My wife and I bought a house last year and we had to downgrade from FIOS (tell me again why you won't upgrade?) back to DSL. When we first moved in we had some issues with the service dropping fairly frequently. After a couple service calls they eventually sent out an actual line tech who looked at the line and found there was a minor fault, which he fixed. Since then everything's been flawless. Maybe it really is just a coincidence, and if you can get someone to come take a look at your line you might get somewhere. Or, you could just post bitchy complaints on Slashdot and hope the CmdrTaco Fairy will come fix your line. Either way, can't hurt to try, right?
I'd say keep looking, eventually you'll find someone reasonable. My wedding photographer sold us a DVD with all of our wedding pictures on it, in addition to the prints, etc. The DVD was all untouched stuff - if we wanted the pretty, touched up version we had to order a print through him - but he sold it to us exactly with the understanding that we would want to play with it ourselves in photoshop, etc. We even got a letter from him stating that we could have prints made from the photos on the DVD. That said, it did cost us an addition $500 or so (I think, I'm too lazy to look up the bill), but considering his price for shooting the wedding was $5k, it seemed reasonable. And yes, he was worth it. Between himself and his assistant, they took over 1,000 shots and then culled that down to about 100 really good ones, which they touched up for the album (which was included in the cost, and was custom printed in book form). This guy is a consummate professional, and much more of an artist than most wedding photographers. If he was willing to sell the photo rights, I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find someone in your area who'll do it.
Think of me what you may... but I resell some tickets on e-bay. Not a lot... but I'll make a couple hundred a month. I would totally lose out due to the timing. If I list my tickets close to the actual event time I may not be able to resell the tickets as the date has passed.
Fair enough. I'll admit that this change may cause problems for sellers of time sensitive items like event tickets. However, those items are just a very small portion of the sales on eBay. Does it make sense to have a feedback system that is useful for maybe 5% or 10% (probably less) of the sales, but useless or even harmful otherwise?
I sold full time on eBay for about two years - I quit because I moved on to a better job, but my father still sells on eBay part time. From my perspective this is a good change. There is no way to leave "honest" negative feedback because of fear of retaliation, so one way or another the system had to change. Buyers need to be able to see negative feedback far more than sellers do - sellers have all the power, not buyers. The buyer sends the money, then the seller sends the goods. There is no point where the seller has neither money nor goods - but during the entire shipping process, the buyer is without his money and without his goods. So, unless you're a complete idiot seller, there's simply no way to get scammed on eBay. It's very easy, on the other hand, for buyers to get scammed. The worst thing that can happen to you as a seller is to have the buyer just not pay - but if that happens, you can file a non-paying bidder report to eBay and they will refund your final value fees, so even there you really don't lose out (they don't refund the listing fees, but considering they just lowered listing fees, this is even less of an issue now than it used to be - and you're also allowed to offer the item to the underbidder if the first bidder didn't work out, or relist the item). The other difficulty you may have as a seller is that if your buyer pays with PayPal or a credit card, he or she may file a fraudulent chargeback against you. This may be something you can use feedback to protect yourself against, but it's really an imperfect system. It's always been difficult to censor buyers based on feedback anyway - what are you going to do if the buyer bids at the very last minute, and you don't have time to cancel their bid and block them? eBay did allow you to set conditions for buyers and back out of the sale if the buyer didn't meat them, but it was always a difficult thing to enforce, anyway. As a seller you simply have to realize that there are a few small risks that come with retail (such as chargebacks, returns, and the occasional cranky buyer).
Brick and mortar retailers are just as exposed (or even more exposed) to these problems. If eBay sellers want to be taken seriously, they just need to accept the there will occasionally be issues. The mantra of all successful retail businesses is that "the customer is always right". Whatever losses you take from the occasional return or other problem are more than made up for by the boost to your reputation you get by having customers view you as a fair and flexible retailer. If you want to be in retail, you've just got to have thick skin. I'm sure eBay has made the decision that if sellers can't accept selling by the terms of the normal retail environment, then they really don't need to be selling on eBay. All they will do is lower buyer's confidence and hurt the site's reputation
Here's an idea - use a TIVO and compare it to the SHIT you've been shoveled by DISH
The DishDVR is actually quite good. I've used a TiVo and I've got DishDVR now, and I'd say they're about on par. DishDVR has some features TiVo doesn't (or at least doesn't out of the box - I understand you can hack the TiVo remote to enable 30 second commercial skips, but with DishDVR it's standard), and TiVo has a few that Dish doesn't. Overall I'd probably prefer a TiVo, but the DishDVR is not bad at all - it's far better than the boxes that most cable companies provide, and most reviews I read said it was heads and tails about DirecTV's DVR as well.
They'll have to shell out for licensing. If they lose the DVR option, they're going to lose half their customers. I'm with Dish now, but the minute the DVR is disabled I'll be calling up to cancel (God help them if they try to hold me to my contract, since they'll clearly be breaking it by not providing the service they promised) and calling up DirecTV to see what they have on special that week...
you're forced to use their router and you have to pay for each computer connected to the internet.
Umm, no. I've had Verizon DSL and FiOS, with multiple computers connected in both cases, and never had to pay anything. They do require you to use their modem for FiOS and for DSL (and the modem generally has router capabilities, but you can easily hook your own router up to the modem and disable its router provisions. As far as cutting service and changing prices - sure they can do that, but so can cable companies. In my experience, they do it no more often than cable co.s, and they're far less likely than cable co.s to try to filter your service (like Comcast is doing with bittorrent).
I had FiOS for a few months (granted, it was their 5mb/2mb package) and ran BT more or less 24/7 and never ran into any problems. Verizon has a whole host of other issues (their billing department, especially, is a joke), but as far as using your bandwidth goes they really don't seem to care if you max it out. They also don't make any serious attempt to block P2P, although they do block some of the common web services ports (i.e. you can't run an http server on port 80, ftp server on 21, etc).
I've used Tivo, a Verizon FiOSTV provided Motorolla DVR, and now I've got a Dish Network DVR. Of the three, the Tivo was probably the best (and the Motorolla clearly the worst), but the Dish DVR is cheap (monthly fee was waived due to signing up under a package deal), supports two televisions, and has a nice, large capacity (not sure if it does HD, however, as I only have SD). Overall, I'm very happy with it, and I can't see spending however much up front and then another $10 a month just for the few extra perks that a Tivo gives.
Starting selling on eBay is just like starting any other small retail business. It requires a lot of hard work and effort, but it's certainly possible. The bonus of selling on eBay is that the world is your market - the downside is that you have a ton of competition. I do about $54,000 a year gross sales on eBay (net profit is, of course, much less than that). It's enough to keep me going while I take some time off between undergrad and grad school, but I wouldn't want to be doing this my whole life. There are, however, plenty of people out there who are making a lot of money on eBay. The keys are:
1. Find a reliable supplier where you can get items at wholesale
1a. Find about 20 items that sell well from that supplier and list them over and over again! Nothing sucks more than having to write new listings every week.
2. Spend a lot of time initititally working out your shipping system to minimize cost and time effort.
3. Profit!
Macs are good for "new to computers" people. If I was buying my grandmother a computer to browse the web and use e-mail, an eMac would be a good choice. Yeah it's more expensive, but very few viruses target MacOS, OSX is easy to use, and a lack of moving parts on the computer makes it hard to mess with (which is bad for a geek, but good for a newbie). A cheap Dell for half the cost would get the job done too, but then 3 months later you'd be cleaning off spyware, explaining how to use a virus scanner, etc, etc.
Actually I live pretty far out in the woods (hence dial-up, I can't get DSL or Cable) - the closest used music stores are more like a half hour away, and they don't exactly have a great selection. My other option is FYE (which is also 1/2 hour away), but their markup is rather excessive - the CD I bought for $9.99 on iTunes would probably have been $16.99 or more there (plus tax). The closest reasonably priced music store (other than Wal-mart - yuck!) is at least an hour away.
Oops, downloaded it on Saturday. For some reason I have it stuck in my head that today is Friday, and I knew I downloaded it 2 days ago, so in my muddled head the math came out Wednesday...
I downloaded iTunes on Wednesday and used it to buy an album that night. Even though I'm on 56k dial-up, it downloaded flawlessly (although it did take about 4 hours, as I expected). I have to say that I'm pretty impressed - for a free jukebox program, it's really high quality. It still has some issues and bugs that could be polished out of it, but overall it's a well designed and easy to use program that I have no major complaints about. It's heads and tails above Windows Media Player 9, and a better jukebox than Winamp (although I think Winamp is still a better standalone player). If Jobs can play his cards right, this could be big.
As a seller, I can tell you that a lot of the reason shipping charges have gone up recently is that the USPS raised their rates. Up until this year, it cost about $3.50 to send a less than 2lb package anywhere in the country. Now it's $3.85 for a one pound package, and a two pound package going from coast to coast is about $6.30. I'm not saying that there aren't people who are ripping people off over shipping, but it's not as cut and dry as it might seem either.
And the results - for the same file, at 910 kbps, indistinguishable quality, both had minor artifacting, etc, but looked pretty good full screen, and looked great at default res. The big difference was time to encode - divx took 6 1/2 minutes to encode the clip I selected, VP3 took 11, and size - divx was 20.7 mb, vp3 was 29 mb. All other things were equal, I used Virtual Dub for both, same video clip, and the default encoding parameters for both (Medium for speed/quality in DivX 4.0, Fast Encode for VP3). My computer's a Celeron 566, 256mb RAM, running Windows 2000 SP2.
Do people ever read the article?
They didn't offer to turn him over, they offered to try him in Afghanistan under Islamic law... how likely do you think it is he'd be convicted under those circumstances??? They're just blowing hot air to try to save their asses, they have no intention of turning him over.
This is the law though - it's extremely difficult to get on dissability, contrary to what most people believe. My father has post polio disorder - he's in constant physical pain (which only hard narcotics can dull, so he doesn't take anything), can hardly walk, can't type, can't sit for long periods of time, has trouble doing analytical thinking (a symptom of polio, believe it or not), and looks like hell - but he had to go through three appeals to get on disability, because according to the initial board of review he could still work. Not that I'm complaining, I think dissability should be as difficult to get on as possible, to stop freeloaders... I don't think the article gives enough details for me to make a judgement on this case, but considering the standards they set, I'm not too surprised.
That's one way of looking at things, or you could take the opposite approach - ferinstance, quite a bit of computer tech was developed specifically for NASA's moon push in the 60's - would we be talking today if not for space exploration? As to world hunger, it might not end it in the short term, but in the long term, who's to say it won't? If cheap space transport and effect terraforming can be developed (who knows if they can, but who really thought computers were possible a relatively short 150 years ago?) we've got two planets pretty close by, Mars & Venus, that would make great big-ass farms.
Mining other planets and asteroids has the potential to provide plenty of precious metals, and on the war front - a few extra planets to expand to could stop war quite easily - or make it 10 times as worse, but war isn't something that's going to be solved by us staying on planet either, and if anything I think the population constraints that living on just one planet provides are much more likely to cause war than anything. And of course there's species survival to think about... as a whole humans are more likely to survive indefinitely if we're on many different planets, cuz right now if we blow up this one, well, that's it. I'm sure any sci-fi hack can flesh this out better than I have, but since I'm up...