Most of these sellers are one man "shops", not real companies. Perhaps implying that they are people is a little too good for they, but they are entities, not large organizations.
First, as I said, read the experiences at Reseller Ratings.
But, for those who simply will not, you might get what you order, but you very likely will not. The thieves at Alibaba know that they can send you just about anything, and with American postal rates you can't afford to send it back. Alibaba will apparently always side with their thieves, even if the thief doesn't dispute what you say.
In my case I ordered a 2000 lumen flashlight. I received a flashlight, but it was a cheaper 1200 lumen flashlight that it turns out the seller also sells. The seller's only response was "If you don't like my product, send it back", which would have cost more than I was already out. Aliexpress claims to hold payment in escrow, but they have a history of always siding with their thieves. In my case they had me spend hours making a video that showed the brightness (I had other high power flashlights that I could compare it to) but still said "we can't tell so we are paying the seller". I expect the seller really only has the cheaper lower power flashlight and on;y ships those, they assume that the stupid Americans they misrepresent the brightness to will not know better and, if they do, there is nothing they can do about it anyway.
There are plenty of complaints on Reseller Ratings of Alibaba deleting or changing feedback so that the sell looks more honest than they really are. Again, don't trust me, and don't trust the above shill. Certainly don't trust any filtered feedback you find on the Aliexpress site. Get your information for a less biased third party.
Alibaba is well named, although it leads a group of far more than just forty thieves. Anyone tempted to deal with Aliexpress (you only learn the Alibaba joke after you make the mistake) should take the time to search for them on Reseller Ratings.
OLPC should be working with the Raspberry Pi people to create a rugged cheap complete solution. Change the flimsy GPIO Pins to a standard Parallel connector and enclose it with a decent LCD screen with keyboard and USB mouse and you'd have a far more useful and productive device.
You seem very confused. The Rasberry Pi people made something that people actually wanted. That's how they achieved success. But that is the evil capitalistic way of doing things.
The OLPC gang took a philosophically different approach. They went for "Think of the Children" and talked about building a $100 laptop that starving kids in third world countries could hold while they starved. They got corporate sponsors to buy into the "Think of the Children" philosophy. They convinced some chumps to think of the children and buy two laptops (that never met the promised $100 price, although they have plenty of excuses for that) so that one could be given to the starving children. They may have even delivered some of the paid for units to corrupt dictators of third world countries with starving children, although they likely never reached the children. They convinced other governments to "think of the children" and made shady deals with big corporations that seemed to many to be in direct conflict with the stated goals. The OLPC approach is completely opposite of that of the Pi people.
I kind of suspect that the OLPC gang has some knowledge of the existence of the Raspberry PI and that they knew about it even before you made your suggestion. So might General Motors. But neither organization see the Pi has having anything to do with what their business does.
Actually, the Pi wouldn't be cost effective to build on for your stated project. It includes an HDMI interface and there is a hefty HDMI "tax" to be paid for any device with an HDMI interface. No point in including that if the goal is to keep costs low and it isn't needed. But the approaches taken by the Rasberry Pi people are openly documented. OLPC could take them as a starting point if their goad was to build something that people actually wanted and would actually be useful. But having watched OLPC since it's inception, I have no reason to think they would have any real intention to do that.
Down to $50...but how many run an old version of android? And this is off the shelf at a big box retail outfit.
Yea, there are plenty of tablets available with pretty dated versions of Android. And it really bugs me when I see big name players like Samsung and Lenovo not update their Android software. But there are a lot of Android makers and many who offer Android Jellybean 4.2.x., many well under the $100 mark. That others still sell older stuff hardly justifies the supposed non-profit OLPC gang in selling pretty lame $150 units and claiming the value is in the software.
... there are many Android tablets for sale for less than $150, Giulia points out that the OLPC tablets contain up to $300 worth of software...
Is anyone buying this? I doubt very much that there is any of that supposed $300 worth of software that there isn't as good or better free alternatives for. And this was supposed to be an organization that was based on free and open software. As the summary points out, there are many Android tablets available at far less than $150. And those are produced by "for profit" companies, not supposed non-profits (although I expect some pay their chief executives less that the OLPC executives skim off the top).
I see this as just another OLPC fail, at least as long as your not one of the ones cashing those OLPC paychecks.
After so many studies lately that talk about the benefits of drinking at least two cups of coffee a day, it's nice to see a study come out that not only seems to refute this but assaults common sense. Drink a lot of coffee? Then you're more likely to die in an industrial accident. Then you're more likely to die in a shooting. Then you're more likely to did in an airplane crash! Drink a lot of coffee and your odor will apparently provoke more deadly shark attacks. Drink a lot of coffee and you're more likely to die in your sleep. Drink a lot of coffee and you're more likely to die of old age. Of course you should believe it, this was a study done by professionals and you know how honest and reputable such research always is.
They gave $5000 to Twitter account merchants. It doesn't seem to me that was the smartest thing to do with the money if you actually want to discourage this kind of activity.
Yea, my thought exactly. Us amateurs have to wait until November for them. But I'm really not sure if they got the name wrong, or if this is just very dated and "this year's" refers to something that happened last year. Sloppy reporting either way, makes me not trust anything else that it might say.
"... while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence..."
Apparently Linus does not know the meaning of the word coincidence. If he had hit the target date deliberately and with advanced planning, it would not have been legitimately called a coincidence.
You say that you suspect that they work. But there is no data to support that. In fact, most 12 steppers fail, and the success rate for 12 steppers is as low as the success rate for people just deciding to quit without using the 12 step program. Penn and Teller did an episode of their show "Bullshit" that talked about 12 step programs and gave some interesting data on its success. I'll suggest that you may want to see it before telling more people why you think 12 step programs work. They do not. You can usually find copyright infringing episodes of this show on You Tube. This supposed report is just more Bullshit.
No, it isn't important because it can't be used to spy on Americans. If it could, then it's budget would be secret. Instead we have this cut by short sighted budget concerns.
If I use this then presumably every website that I sign in to would have my real private Gmail address. As it is now, I use a free forwarding service (Spamgourmet) to create a unique address for everyone I sign up with. That way, if and when the spam starts, I can disable just that one address rather than having to go through the tassel of abandoning my prime email address. And I have been spammed at some of those addresses that I created, both by the people that I signed up with and sometimes even by Chinese malware sent to addresses that only one company had and that should have been keeping their data very secure. So, no thank you, I'll go through the extra hassle of keeping separate names and passwords for all of the sites that I want to sign in to, and be a little less concerned that I opened myself to endless spamming and attacks.
And before anyone questions it, yes, I have had to abandon some email addresses before I started using a forwarding service. In one case that I particularly remember I logged in one day and there was so much duplicate spam in my inbox that it used the mailbox's full quota and was effectively a denial of service attack. The attack lasted longer than the account did.
have been available on the Internet for quite a while,
If you are going to make a statement like this, shouldn't it link to the information it claims is available? After all, the all powerful Brits didn't order you not to release the information, did they?
I had heard of them before. I had even bought things from them. Sad to see another potential supplier drop out, but to be honest I had not bought from then in years and had lost interest. While I had not even looked lately, the good deals and interesting items were getting fewer and fewer when I stopped shopping there. And they seemed to use shipping as a profit center, not just to cover shipping costs but to make a bit extra there. So you had to factor that in when you saw what at first looked like good deals.
As to not having heard of them before, I have to say that it is absurd the way that we are being tracked and marketed to by the likes of Google. There are other sellers on the web that I had never heard of before, until after I did a web search for a particular item and happened upon them myself. However, once I started browsing their website and buying from them, it seems that I can hardly visit any website without seeing ads for the company. Worse, those ads are custom tailored to show me the exact items that I already looked at from that vendor (in some cases, items I had already bought). They sell tens of thousands of items and I'm only shown the items that they or Google know that I'm already aware of!
They would be far better to maximize their advertising dollar by telling Google not to keep barraging a loyal customer with ads for things he already know they sell. Either show him something new or, better yet, spend finite advertising money to put those ads up for others on the Internet who may be visiting and shopping with their competitors and don't even know they exist.
If Geeks was spending advertising money with Google (and I don't know if they were or not) then they likely were only keeping their face in front of people who already knew about them and had visited their site recently. Not the best way to get the word out and find new customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these sellers are one man "shops", not real companies. Perhaps implying that they are people is a little too good for they, but they are entities, not large organizations.
First, as I said, read the experiences at Reseller Ratings.
But, for those who simply will not, you might get what you order, but you very likely will not. The thieves at Alibaba know that they can send you just about anything, and with American postal rates you can't afford to send it back. Alibaba will apparently always side with their thieves, even if the thief doesn't dispute what you say.
In my case I ordered a 2000 lumen flashlight. I received a flashlight, but it was a cheaper 1200 lumen flashlight that it turns out the seller also sells. The seller's only response was "If you don't like my product, send it back", which would have cost more than I was already out. Aliexpress claims to hold payment in escrow, but they have a history of always siding with their thieves. In my case they had me spend hours making a video that showed the brightness (I had other high power flashlights that I could compare it to) but still said "we can't tell so we are paying the seller". I expect the seller really only has the cheaper lower power flashlight and on;y ships those, they assume that the stupid Americans they misrepresent the brightness to will not know better and, if they do, there is nothing they can do about it anyway.
There are plenty of complaints on Reseller Ratings of Alibaba deleting or changing feedback so that the sell looks more honest than they really are. Again, don't trust me, and don't trust the above shill. Certainly don't trust any filtered feedback you find on the Aliexpress site. Get your information for a less biased third party.
Alibaba is well named, although it leads a group of far more than just forty thieves. Anyone tempted to deal with Aliexpress (you only learn the Alibaba joke after you make the mistake) should take the time to search for them on Reseller Ratings.
Pay it no attention. Next thing you know the Ruskies will claim that America spies on its own citizens.
OLPC should be working with the Raspberry Pi people to create a rugged cheap complete solution. Change the flimsy GPIO Pins to a standard Parallel connector and enclose it with a decent LCD screen with keyboard and USB mouse and you'd have a far more useful and productive device.
You seem very confused. The Rasberry Pi people made something that people actually wanted. That's how they achieved success. But that is the evil capitalistic way of doing things.
The OLPC gang took a philosophically different approach. They went for "Think of the Children" and talked about building a $100 laptop that starving kids in third world countries could hold while they starved. They got corporate sponsors to buy into the "Think of the Children" philosophy. They convinced some chumps to think of the children and buy two laptops (that never met the promised $100 price, although they have plenty of excuses for that) so that one could be given to the starving children. They may have even delivered some of the paid for units to corrupt dictators of third world countries with starving children, although they likely never reached the children. They convinced other governments to "think of the children" and made shady deals with big corporations that seemed to many to be in direct conflict with the stated goals. The OLPC approach is completely opposite of that of the Pi people.
I kind of suspect that the OLPC gang has some knowledge of the existence of the Raspberry PI and that they knew about it even before you made your suggestion. So might General Motors. But neither organization see the Pi has having anything to do with what their business does.
Actually, the Pi wouldn't be cost effective to build on for your stated project. It includes an HDMI interface and there is a hefty HDMI "tax" to be paid for any device with an HDMI interface. No point in including that if the goal is to keep costs low and it isn't needed. But the approaches taken by the Rasberry Pi people are openly documented. OLPC could take them as a starting point if their goad was to build something that people actually wanted and would actually be useful. But having watched OLPC since it's inception, I have no reason to think they would have any real intention to do that.
Down to $50...but how many run an old version of android? And this is off the shelf at a big box retail outfit.
Yea, there are plenty of tablets available with pretty dated versions of Android. And it really bugs me when I see big name players like Samsung and Lenovo not update their Android software. But there are a lot of Android makers and many who offer Android Jellybean 4.2.x., many well under the $100 mark. That others still sell older stuff hardly justifies the supposed non-profit OLPC gang in selling pretty lame $150 units and claiming the value is in the software.
Is anyone buying this? I doubt very much that there is any of that supposed $300 worth of software that there isn't as good or better free alternatives for. And this was supposed to be an organization that was based on free and open software. As the summary points out, there are many Android tablets available at far less than $150. And those are produced by "for profit" companies, not supposed non-profits (although I expect some pay their chief executives less that the OLPC executives skim off the top).
I see this as just another OLPC fail, at least as long as your not one of the ones cashing those OLPC paychecks.
Seems right. After all, I know that thinking about religion makes me want to do evil and go out and kill people.
After so many studies lately that talk about the benefits of drinking at least two cups of coffee a day, it's nice to see a study come out that not only seems to refute this but assaults common sense. Drink a lot of coffee? Then you're more likely to die in an industrial accident. Then you're more likely to die in a shooting. Then you're more likely to did in an airplane crash! Drink a lot of coffee and your odor will apparently provoke more deadly shark attacks. Drink a lot of coffee and you're more likely to die in your sleep. Drink a lot of coffee and you're more likely to die of old age. Of course you should believe it, this was a study done by professionals and you know how honest and reputable such research always is.
They gave $5000 to Twitter account merchants. It doesn't seem to me that was the smartest thing to do with the money if you actually want to discourage this kind of activity.
Yea, my thought exactly. Us amateurs have to wait until November for them. But I'm really not sure if they got the name wrong, or if this is just very dated and "this year's" refers to something that happened last year. Sloppy reporting either way, makes me not trust anything else that it might say.
"... while releasing the final 3.11 today would be a lovely coincidence ..."
Apparently Linus does not know the meaning of the word coincidence. If he had hit the target date deliberately and with advanced planning, it would not have been legitimately called a coincidence.
You say that you suspect that they work. But there is no data to support that. In fact, most 12 steppers fail, and the success rate for 12 steppers is as low as the success rate for people just deciding to quit without using the 12 step program. Penn and Teller did an episode of their show "Bullshit" that talked about 12 step programs and gave some interesting data on its success. I'll suggest that you may want to see it before telling more people why you think 12 step programs work. They do not. You can usually find copyright infringing episodes of this show on You Tube. This supposed report is just more Bullshit.
No, it isn't important because it can't be used to spy on Americans. If it could, then it's budget would be secret. Instead we have this cut by short sighted budget concerns.
Every once in a great while an AC makes sense.
And yet Lindsay Lohan is still free and endangering the public.
If I use this then presumably every website that I sign in to would have my real private Gmail address. As it is now, I use a free forwarding service (Spamgourmet) to create a unique address for everyone I sign up with. That way, if and when the spam starts, I can disable just that one address rather than having to go through the tassel of abandoning my prime email address. And I have been spammed at some of those addresses that I created, both by the people that I signed up with and sometimes even by Chinese malware sent to addresses that only one company had and that should have been keeping their data very secure. So, no thank you, I'll go through the extra hassle of keeping separate names and passwords for all of the sites that I want to sign in to, and be a little less concerned that I opened myself to endless spamming and attacks.
And before anyone questions it, yes, I have had to abandon some email addresses before I started using a forwarding service. In one case that I particularly remember I logged in one day and there was so much duplicate spam in my inbox that it used the mailbox's full quota and was effectively a denial of service attack. The attack lasted longer than the account did.
can peek all the passwords in clear text very easily with a couple of mouse clicks
it takes at least 3 clicks with Firefox.
My schooling was a long time ago, but as best I remember, a court order is issued by a court, and the courts are part of the government.
have been available on the Internet for quite a while,
If you are going to make a statement like this, shouldn't it link to the information it claims is available? After all, the all powerful Brits didn't order you not to release the information, did they?
someone got it
Are you a turtle?
Not only are they doing it just to be nice to you, but the N.S.A. is doing it anonymously so that you won't feel that you owe them any thanks.
Oh shit
I had heard of them before. I had even bought things from them. Sad to see another potential supplier drop out, but to be honest I had not bought from then in years and had lost interest. While I had not even looked lately, the good deals and interesting items were getting fewer and fewer when I stopped shopping there. And they seemed to use shipping as a profit center, not just to cover shipping costs but to make a bit extra there. So you had to factor that in when you saw what at first looked like good deals.
As to not having heard of them before, I have to say that it is absurd the way that we are being tracked and marketed to by the likes of Google. There are other sellers on the web that I had never heard of before, until after I did a web search for a particular item and happened upon them myself. However, once I started browsing their website and buying from them, it seems that I can hardly visit any website without seeing ads for the company. Worse, those ads are custom tailored to show me the exact items that I already looked at from that vendor (in some cases, items I had already bought). They sell tens of thousands of items and I'm only shown the items that they or Google know that I'm already aware of!
They would be far better to maximize their advertising dollar by telling Google not to keep barraging a loyal customer with ads for things he already know they sell. Either show him something new or, better yet, spend finite advertising money to put those ads up for others on the Internet who may be visiting and shopping with their competitors and don't even know they exist. If Geeks was spending advertising money with Google (and I don't know if they were or not) then they likely were only keeping their face in front of people who already knew about them and had visited their site recently. Not the best way to get the word out and find new customers.