There are netboot images, but primarily for Sparc and Mips... I have done a complete remote install on a sparc using serial console, when the physical server was several thousand miles away.
Well, they have very fast local connections over there... So you're more likely to put the files locally, than upload them to a server. This would be common for something like a wedding video, or local events etc... It's not a single 30gb video, but rather 30 downloads of a 1gb video perhaps.
People can teach themselves. There will always be a percentage of people who have a desire to learn and will use their free time to experiment. What do you think happened when computers were first introduced in america?
These people will then go on to teach others, and use what they know to benefit themselves and others.
They need to invest in education and contraception...
Despite widespread poverty and starvation in africa, the population is still increasing, its not uncommon for a single couple to have 10+ kids, and if some die they just have more to replace them...
Contraception will reduce the number of mouths to feed as well as the instances of aids.
If you cant feed the kids you already have, it's absolutely ridiculous to have more.
Yes, if they were truly interested in helping the suffering they would publish the medical research so that others could assist the process and everyone could benefit.
Instead they are actually researching medical treatments for the benefit of drugs companies. If the research became public, profits would be much lower due to competition, but the benefit to the sufferers would undoubtedly be much higher.
Consider this...
A drug that cures HIV/AIDS with a 1 month course would be highly profitable in the short term, but individual sufferers would only need a month supply, and eventually HIV would be all but eradicated and the market would dry up.
A drug (or set of drugs) that keeps HIV at bay, prolonging the life of the patient while they continue to take the drugs would be far more profitable... A sufferer would need to continue buying the drugs for as long as he lived, which would be considerably longer thanks to the drugs.. And there would still be the possibility he could infect others, thus creating more potential customers.
Yes, he is a business genius, his goal is to make money and he's very good at doing so. He spends 10% of the profits on helping the poor, which is a good way to buy good publicity.
It's not just about money going to the poor... It's also the fact that the all of the poor could easily "afford" free software without needing handouts. As for hardware to run it on, old computers are thrown in landfill by the thousands every day, they could be donated to the poor and function better than they did when they were new thanks to free software.
So what you're saying is that people's quality of life would be higher if they didn't pay for software? That sounds like a very good deal, especially in these financial times when quality of life is actually going down as prices go up.
Paying money to train your population is a lot better than paying the money to a foreign corporation... Governments already spend a lot of money training their population (schools) because having an educated population is beneficial to the country as a whole.
Also paying your government staff a bonus isn't so much a negative as giving it to a foreign corporation... The employee will be taxed on his bonus, and is likely to spend most of it locally (and incurring further taxes).
Not only that, but as a seller receiving payment in cash, cheque, bank transfer or such you receive the actual amount the auction was for... If you use paypal, they take a cut so you dont get the full amount... Add to that the ebay fees, and you take a quite significant hit on the sale.
Actually it is very easy to rip someone off using loopholes in paypal's system.
I can place an auction for an item which i claim to be in the US, and when you win it i can ship it from the US and make you submit payment to an email address via paypal, where the account is actually registered in australia (tho you obviously cant see this based purely on the email address). Then i send you a brick or some other heavy junk from somewhere in the US... You receive it, get real angry and file a paypal claim...
I can then try all the tricks in the book, i can say there's been an error and we shipped the wrong item, and if you cancel the claim we can proceed to send you the right one (if you cancel the claim you can never open it again)... Before you file a claim i can delay you with talk of slow shipping and false promises that the item will be with you soon etc, you only have 45 days to file a claim, if i delay you that long there's nothing you can do.
If you do file a claim, and paypal finds in your favor they will ask you to send the item back to me using a shipping service with online tracking... This is where the "heavy junk" comes in, it will cost you a lot to send the heavy junk to Australia with tracking, especially since you need to use a fairly fast shipping method to avoid the paypal claim expiring... You are expected to pay for this yourself, and paypal wont refund what it cost you to send the item back. And yes, despite the fact the item originally came from the US you will be forced to send it to australia because that's where the paypal account is registered. Also if you already sent the item back (ie during the negotiation phase i promised to deal with it if you returned it) you wont be able to send it with tracking and will thus have the claim rejected by paypal.
And throughout this process, paypal will help the unscrupulous seller.
See http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/category/fastmemorymanscam/ for details of how someone scammed me and many others using this method, and google for fastmemoryman - my site is the first hit nowadays, a LOT of people have been screwed by him.
What's amusing, is when you file a claim for the supposed compensation that ebay offer...
Sometimes they will respond very slowly, claiming they have a backlog... It took them several months to respond to me when i tried, but all the mails they send to you have a short deadline for your response.
They demand that you fax a large amount of information about the transaction to them, they provide a premium rate phone number for this... They won't let you send it in the post or scan it in and email. Not everyone has a fax machine, or scanner / faxmodem combination.
They won't acknowledge receipt of your documents, you fax them off and have no idea wether or not they have been received... If you contact them to request confirmation you get no reply. This is what happened to me, i filed a claim, faxed the information they requested more than once and then heard absolutely nothing despite repeated contact attempts. A few months later the claim is dropped because i "didnt send the required information". Had they told me they hadn't received anything on any of the multiple times when i queried it, i could have sent it again, assuming they weren't simply lying about not receiving it.
Some of the mails from their trust + safety department come from strange sources, different addresses to the normal ebay mails (ie they look like scams) and ask you to send lots of personal information via fax to a phone number in the mail... If you query ebay as to the legitimacy of these mails you get no reply, ebay always tells you to be careful of scams, and im sure intentionally make the compensation claim mails look suspicious so you will hesitate and let the claim expire.
If you have something to sell, and you want to get the best price for it, you need to use a site with a lot of users... Leaving you with little choice.
Similarly if you want to buy something, you need to go where there is most likely to be what you want for sale.
They have got large enough that they can shaft their customers with little impact to their bottom line.
I forgot another thing, keep an open forum where the site owners talk to the users, not just minimum wage call center staff with no power to do anything.
And keep the decision making process publicly documented.
Well, why don't a group of us get together and make something better...
Making a better site is the easy part tho, letting people know about it is the really hard part. An auction site without many listings won't attract buyers, and one without many buyers won't attract sellers.
Things i'd change tho...
Any payment method - let buyers and sellers negotiate how they want to pay, with filtering options on the search (ebay has this but to a fairly limited degree)
Escrow service for all transactions - the site should offer a low cost escrow service, or the use of a vetted third party, and it should be mandatory to support it if one party demands (ebay let you use escrow sites, but buyer/seller both have to agree), obviously with restrictions - ie you cant make someone use an escrow service on the other side of the world. If your worried about a seller, use escrow, once you've dealt with someone once and trust them you don't need to.
Encourage face to face sales, its easy to find goods local to you but ebay don't really encourage it.
Better dispute resolution service, there must be some way to make this process less abusable but i'm not sure on the best way right now...
Allow sellers to recover costs of expensive payment methods (ie paypal)
Fairer feedback system, require sellers to leave feedback as soon as they receive payment (by which point the buyer has fulfilled their end)
Have actual live support staff, not just respond to everything with a cut+paste form letter.
A less cluttered site, google style, make everything like complaint forms easy to find.
Actively report any fraud complaints to the appropriate police, and pursue the case...
Support variable auction end times, ie if someone places a bid the end time is extended by an hour - to prevent sniping.
I know this, i was replying to someone.. Pointing out other issues (ie the fake user agent) and describing another company that sends unwelcome hits to sites i run.
Google, as other search engines, not only obey robots.txt but also quite clearly identify themselves a GoogleBot and connect from an IP address registered to Google.
Another company that's particularly bad is Cyveillance, they also regularly spider sites very aggressively (redownloading the same content repeatedly even tho it hasn't changed), and they try to spoof their user agent. If you mail them to complain, they will claim to remove your sites from their spider if you give them the IPs, but they lie... They will continue spidering your sites, but from a different IP range which is still traceable to them.
They spoof as IE, because seeing an IE user agent, especially a non current one, signifies to the malware server that the user is not likely to be very security conscious and therefore are a good target for malware attacks... A user agent saying firefox on linux is much less likely to be an attractive target for a malware spreader.
Why should people who have already spent $100 or so on an OS then be expected to spend a further $60 "hidden costs" before it's safe to use it to access files from third parties?
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There are netboot images, but primarily for Sparc and Mips... I have done a complete remote install on a sparc using serial console, when the physical server was several thousand miles away.
Not so hard when your connection is 1GB...
But think infected machines running DDOS nodes!
Well, they have very fast local connections over there...
So you're more likely to put the files locally, than upload them to a server. This would be common for something like a wedding video, or local events etc...
It's not a single 30gb video, but rather 30 downloads of a 1gb video perhaps.
People can teach themselves. There will always be a percentage of people who have a desire to learn and will use their free time to experiment. What do you think happened when computers were first introduced in america?
These people will then go on to teach others, and use what they know to benefit themselves and others.
They need to invest in education and contraception...
Despite widespread poverty and starvation in africa, the population is still increasing, its not uncommon for a single couple to have 10+ kids, and if some die they just have more to replace them...
Contraception will reduce the number of mouths to feed as well as the instances of aids.
If you cant feed the kids you already have, it's absolutely ridiculous to have more.
Yes, if they were truly interested in helping the suffering they would publish the medical research so that others could assist the process and everyone could benefit.
Instead they are actually researching medical treatments for the benefit of drugs companies. If the research became public, profits would be much lower due to competition, but the benefit to the sufferers would undoubtedly be much higher.
Consider this...
A drug that cures HIV/AIDS with a 1 month course would be highly profitable in the short term, but individual sufferers would only need a month supply, and eventually HIV would be all but eradicated and the market would dry up.
A drug (or set of drugs) that keeps HIV at bay, prolonging the life of the patient while they continue to take the drugs would be far more profitable... A sufferer would need to continue buying the drugs for as long as he lived, which would be considerably longer thanks to the drugs.. And there would still be the possibility he could infect others, thus creating more potential customers.
Yes, he is a business genius, his goal is to make money and he's very good at doing so. He spends 10% of the profits on helping the poor, which is a good way to buy good publicity.
It's not just about money going to the poor...
It's also the fact that the all of the poor could easily "afford" free software without needing handouts. As for hardware to run it on, old computers are thrown in landfill by the thousands every day, they could be donated to the poor and function better than they did when they were new thanks to free software.
So what you're saying is that people's quality of life would be higher if they didn't pay for software?
That sounds like a very good deal, especially in these financial times when quality of life is actually going down as prices go up.
Paying money to train your population is a lot better than paying the money to a foreign corporation...
Governments already spend a lot of money training their population (schools) because having an educated population is beneficial to the country as a whole.
Also paying your government staff a bonus isn't so much a negative as giving it to a foreign corporation... The employee will be taxed on his bonus, and is likely to spend most of it locally (and incurring further taxes).
Not only that, but as a seller receiving payment in cash, cheque, bank transfer or such you receive the actual amount the auction was for...
If you use paypal, they take a cut so you dont get the full amount...
Add to that the ebay fees, and you take a quite significant hit on the sale.
Actually it is very easy to rip someone off using loopholes in paypal's system.
I can place an auction for an item which i claim to be in the US, and when you win it i can ship it from the US and make you submit payment to an email address via paypal, where the account is actually registered in australia (tho you obviously cant see this based purely on the email address).
Then i send you a brick or some other heavy junk from somewhere in the US...
You receive it, get real angry and file a paypal claim...
I can then try all the tricks in the book, i can say there's been an error and we shipped the wrong item, and if you cancel the claim we can proceed to send you the right one (if you cancel the claim you can never open it again)...
Before you file a claim i can delay you with talk of slow shipping and false promises that the item will be with you soon etc, you only have 45 days to file a claim, if i delay you that long there's nothing you can do.
If you do file a claim, and paypal finds in your favor they will ask you to send the item back to me using a shipping service with online tracking... This is where the "heavy junk" comes in, it will cost you a lot to send the heavy junk to Australia with tracking, especially since you need to use a fairly fast shipping method to avoid the paypal claim expiring... You are expected to pay for this yourself, and paypal wont refund what it cost you to send the item back.
And yes, despite the fact the item originally came from the US you will be forced to send it to australia because that's where the paypal account is registered.
Also if you already sent the item back (ie during the negotiation phase i promised to deal with it if you returned it) you wont be able to send it with tracking and will thus have the claim rejected by paypal.
And throughout this process, paypal will help the unscrupulous seller.
See http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/category/fastmemorymanscam/ for details of how someone scammed me and many others using this method, and google for fastmemoryman - my site is the first hit nowadays, a LOT of people have been screwed by him.
What's amusing, is when you file a claim for the supposed compensation that ebay offer...
Sometimes they will respond very slowly, claiming they have a backlog... It took them several months to respond to me when i tried, but all the mails they send to you have a short deadline for your response.
They demand that you fax a large amount of information about the transaction to them, they provide a premium rate phone number for this... They won't let you send it in the post or scan it in and email. Not everyone has a fax machine, or scanner / faxmodem combination.
They won't acknowledge receipt of your documents, you fax them off and have no idea wether or not they have been received... If you contact them to request confirmation you get no reply. This is what happened to me, i filed a claim, faxed the information they requested more than once and then heard absolutely nothing despite repeated contact attempts. A few months later the claim is dropped because i "didnt send the required information". Had they told me they hadn't received anything on any of the multiple times when i queried it, i could have sent it again, assuming they weren't simply lying about not receiving it.
Some of the mails from their trust + safety department come from strange sources, different addresses to the normal ebay mails (ie they look like scams) and ask you to send lots of personal information via fax to a phone number in the mail... If you query ebay as to the legitimacy of these mails you get no reply, ebay always tells you to be careful of scams, and im sure intentionally make the compensation claim mails look suspicious so you will hesitate and let the claim expire.
Trouble is ebay have critical mass...
If you have something to sell, and you want to get the best price for it, you need to use a site with a lot of users... Leaving you with little choice.
Similarly if you want to buy something, you need to go where there is most likely to be what you want for sale.
They have got large enough that they can shaft their customers with little impact to their bottom line.
I forgot another thing, keep an open forum where the site owners talk to the users, not just minimum wage call center staff with no power to do anything.
And keep the decision making process publicly documented.
Well, why don't a group of us get together and make something better...
Making a better site is the easy part tho, letting people know about it is the really hard part. An auction site without many listings won't attract buyers, and one without many buyers won't attract sellers.
Things i'd change tho...
Any payment method - let buyers and sellers negotiate how they want to pay, with filtering options on the search (ebay has this but to a fairly limited degree)
Escrow service for all transactions - the site should offer a low cost escrow service, or the use of a vetted third party, and it should be mandatory to support it if one party demands (ebay let you use escrow sites, but buyer/seller both have to agree), obviously with restrictions - ie you cant make someone use an escrow service on the other side of the world. If your worried about a seller, use escrow, once you've dealt with someone once and trust them you don't need to.
Encourage face to face sales, its easy to find goods local to you but ebay don't really encourage it.
Better dispute resolution service, there must be some way to make this process less abusable but i'm not sure on the best way right now...
Allow sellers to recover costs of expensive payment methods (ie paypal)
Fairer feedback system, require sellers to leave feedback as soon as they receive payment (by which point the buyer has fulfilled their end)
Have actual live support staff, not just respond to everything with a cut+paste form letter.
A less cluttered site, google style, make everything like complaint forms easy to find.
Actively report any fraud complaints to the appropriate police, and pursue the case...
Support variable auction end times, ie if someone places a bid the end time is extended by an hour - to prevent sniping.
And some other stuff i can't think of right now..
Well, they sold the locked iphone in the carphone warehouse...
I know this, i was replying to someone.. Pointing out other issues (ie the fake user agent) and describing another company that sends unwelcome hits to sites i run.
Surely they have more important things to worry about, like people starving and dying of aids, iraq, afghanistan, robert mugabe, burma, etc...
Just shows they're only concerned with the agenda of big business.
Google, as other search engines, not only obey robots.txt but also quite clearly identify themselves a GoogleBot and connect from an IP address registered to Google.
Another company that's particularly bad is Cyveillance, they also regularly spider sites very aggressively (redownloading the same content repeatedly even tho it hasn't changed), and they try to spoof their user agent.
If you mail them to complain, they will claim to remove your sites from their spider if you give them the IPs, but they lie... They will continue spidering your sites, but from a different IP range which is still traceable to them.
They spoof as IE, because seeing an IE user agent, especially a non current one, signifies to the malware server that the user is not likely to be very security conscious and therefore are a good target for malware attacks...
A user agent saying firefox on linux is much less likely to be an attractive target for a malware spreader.
Why should people who have already spent $100 or so on an OS then be expected to spend a further $60 "hidden costs" before it's safe to use it to access files from third parties?
On access scanning, what a horrendous way to cripple performance.
Well, a resume created in word will always look crappy..
If you want it to look good, try latex.
Most business users only make use of a very tiny subset of features too.