Ebuyer have decent prices, but their customer service from my experience ranks as abysmal. The only way to communicate with them is via their 'e-notes' system, and they have a reputation for taking ridiculously long to respond to e-notes which they don't like, and to use cut/paste responses even then.
I bought a toner cartridge from them (like a fool I didn't bother to open the plastic bag it cames sealed in on arrival to check it), which turned out to be cracked, and they refused to accept it back, since they claim to only allow such returns within 7 days of delivery.
Also a friend of mine ordered a wireless AP, and they managed to send him the wrong product, make a fuss about accepting the return, tried to charge him a restocking fee on it, and then to top it off sent him the exact same wrong product again. This wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't take about a month for this to take place, due to Ebuyers terrible communication process.
They offer some good deals, but I won't be using them again, so as always it's buyer-beware.
You shouldn't have told me that... you can bet I'm going to sit outside your school sniffing wireless traffic now, so I can find out your date of birth and SSN. I hope you have plenty of car parking for the hacker influx!
Or perhaps not. In the grand scheme of things, this is a very minor issue, the details aren't that significant, the time taken to procure them would be excessive, and I doubt that a large proportion of students even use the wireless network. You should perhaps consider yourself lucky to have access to such a network at all, not kick up such a fuss posting articles on Slashdot full of hyperbole just because the login form uses HTTP instead of HTTPS, and certainly not advocate sniffing the network yourself and violating other's privacy.
Lets face it, your school computer account is unlikely to be of interest to most of the world. If you really feel the need to raise the issue (personally I don't think it's even worth the effort), speak to the person in charge of the school network, and if they don't do anything and you still consider it to be a significant issue, schedule a meeting to raise the issue with the principal. Certainly do not direct threats at anyone.
Oh, for the curious who can't be bothered to read the link, you want to be connecting to AIM usernames infocombot, infocombot2 or infocombot3. Don't expect a quick response though (ICQ works for this as well as AIM, or your favourite multiple network messaging client).
Judging by the fact that Slashdot probably has the highest concentration of MS advertising on the web (except for possibly MSN), doesn't that suggest that Microsoft's advertising makes people start using Linux? Perhaps a new, popular, Microsoft search engine could start an open source revolution!
No installation process which I've yet come across has yet been able to successfully autodetect and install on my Highpoint RAID (HPT374) controller, and allow me to select which connected logical drive I'd like to install to without problems (I've tried pretty recent versions of Redhat and Gentoo, not that I expected Gentoo to automatically configure support). This isn't a criticism of just Linux distros either, the Microsoft Windows 2k/XP installers each required me to produce a floppy disk containing drivers (no, apparently a CD/network copy was not good enough), which was something of a challenge, considering my machine has no floppy disk drive.
This is the kind of problem that could really put off an average user if they encountered it (although maybe RAID isn't a feature you'll find used in many average machines), since most distributions tend to refuse to install in the best case, and in the worst cases will sometimes contain stupid default settings which will trash data on my drives if I allow them to continue. Does anyone know a distribution that copes better with issues like this than those I have tried? Is this new version of Debian likely contain this feature (although I've heard bad things about the usability of the Debian installer), since I'd love to give it a try if it doesn't mean huge amounts of effort on my part. If anyone could recommend a distro that might be easier to install than those I have tested, I'd love to try it out, since I've grown bored of the wait of several hours to install packages on my current Gentoo setup (although it was interesting to play with for a while).
For any geeks who didn't get the 'snaaaaaaaake' dept. reference, you'll be wanting this link (flash required). You may also enjoy the Lord of the Rings version.
'Wicked Cool' shell scripts, a sure way to impress the ladies! Could anything be cooler than a script to calculate loan payments? I seriously doubt it!
Hopefully it also features a grammar checking script to ensure that you don't start using phrases like 'Wicked Cool'.
A friend told me that there might be some interesting documentation on the IE4 integration with the shell in/private/shell/docs, including a cheesy Powerpoint presentation. Who'd have thought Microsoft actually used that Powerpoint crap?
I've always been pretty amazed that companies marketing such blatantly fake products actually manage to sell anything, especially things like penis-enlargement pills. These are typically advertised through email with poor spelling, worse grammar, and appear written by someone who manages to produce documents using poorer English than a bad Babelfish translation.
It appears to me that people who are stupid (and insecure, but mainly just stupid) enough to buy these products seem for some reason unable to resist the persuasive tactics of modern marketing. Surely logically, the demographic spending money on such obviously fake products must waste vast amount of money on anything which appears in a slick television commercial, created by intelligent advertising execs who can speak English.
I suspect that even if penis enlargement pills and suchlike are taken off the market, those that will buy such products will simply spend their money on something else that they neither really want nor need (diet pills, viagra, naked teens in their email etc.) Although the advertisers are clearly doing wrong in this case, and suing them is a good course of action, this may not really help matter in the long term. There have always been products on the market whose effectiveness is dubious at best, and are often even harmful, yet some people clearly continue to purchase them. Perhaps the answer could be stricter controls over what products are allowed to be advertised at all. The crazy extreme alternative of course, is to take money away from the stupid people, but with adverts for personal loans and debt consolidation every five minutes during our mind-numbing daytime TV schedules, it seems unlikely that this will happen any time soon.
It's pretty clear that this virus wasn't written by an open source zealot. None of the copies I've received have come with a copy of the GPL included, and the author didn't include his address so that I can write and request a copy of the source code either.
Everyone lies about what they're doing on the Internet. I lock myself in my room, and try to convince everyone I'm looking at porn, and then read Slashdot. I'm not sure I can handle the shame any longer.
Enough of this tedium, lets discuss confectionary instead. I'm currently eating sherbert lemons, and I'm dubious that anyone currently browsing Slashdot has better sweets... let the challenge commence!
(I realise this will get modded offtopic within about 3 seconds, and I fully agree it has nothing to do with Python code and iPaqs, but I implore moderators to have some respect, if not for me, then for the sweets)
"Sorry, your search under the categories 'independant artists' and 'mp3s' yielded no results... Did you mean you want to purchase Britney Spears WMAs?"
Please, support personal homepages. For just $2 a month, you can supply one personal homepage with seven or more annoying midi files to use as background music.
Step up to the next level with a $5 donation, and a personal homepage can hire a web designer skilled enough to use the blink tag.
$10 can buy scripts capable of giving your mouse 'cool' trails, scrolling the window title text, and disabling the right mouse button.
And for $20 a month, you can 'adopt' your own personal homepage, allowing it the funds to be moved away from the popup hell of Geocities hosting!
Please guys, there are personal homepages out there that can't even afford to use animated gifts... we need your donations TODAY!
I think the logo is very poorly designed, it doesn't look much like I remember the Game Of Life being. I mean, I guess the circles are supposed to represent the spinners, but I don't any Life Tiles, career cards, or money featured. It used to be a lot more colourful too.
I'm not entirely sure there was a hacker career either, although it's a while since I've played it. There's possibly an updated version which features the FBI cybercrime squad, instead of the police officer player.
This means one of two things: -
1) People who started playing SW:G are getting bored/annoyed by the bugs already, and are selling their accounts.
2) People started playing the game with the intention of investing a large amount of time to farm cash/items, and sell them.
In either case, this is interesting, it means either SW:G sucks, or there are some people who really need to go out and get jobs (I find it hard to believe that the cash that can be made from playing online games is a reasonable substitute for a paying job).
I've never really understood the people who buy items for use in an online game, surely if they don't have the time to invest to actually earn cash and items themselves, with the accompanying sense of achievement, it's not worth playing the game at all? As an ex-player of Ultima Online though, I can sympathise with some of the sellers. For example, I sold my account when I quit, which was easily enough to recoup the subscription fees I'd payed for playing. There seem to be no reasons why people would be selling accounts this early in the game though, except for those I described above, both of which are a little worrying.
These comments come on the heels of the release of a new version of Kazaa (2.5), incorporating some features that I think sound rather interesting, and are skimmed rather briefly in the linked articles, for example: - Kazaa's intention to distribute licensed content via its users rather than via a central server Kazaa intends to reward users with 'points' which they can spend on more content or prizes, for distributing this content for them
What remains to be seen though, is whether users will be willing to pay for the kind of content that they are used to downloading for free, and could probably obtain for free elsewhere. Given that Kazaa's users are already used to this convinience, it seems unlikely that they will start queueing up to get their copyrighted files in legal form. This is especially true since the download of these new licensed files from other P2P users will likely be no faster or more reliable than other files of more dubious legality. Also by allowing users to handle the distribution, the door is opened for cracks that allow people to start handing out their already purchased content for free. I'm unsure how Kazaa intends to stop this from happening, and with the files already stored on a user's machine, any method they select should be fairly simple to overcome.
This is completely true. I've emailed Bill Gates many times asking him to fix the bugs in the copy of Windows 3.11 that I'm using, and he doesn't seem to have got around to making an updated version freely available yet!
Viewing Natalie Portman on a 3.8" screen makes you go blind!
Seriously, this sounds like a pretty cool gadget, but I'd like to see what kind of battery life this thing has, and it doesn't look to me like it'll stand up to being bashed around particularly well. The linked review didn't seem at all comprehensive however.
I've always found Kazaa slightly disturbing, so I invented the following conspiracy theories about it, using the tried and tested research method of wild conjecture: -
1) Most of the files on Kazaa aren't really transfered peer to peer - there's a huge central repository somewhere of horrible 128kbps quality mp3s full of noise. The noise makes these files sufficiently different from the original songs that Sharman doesn't have to license them. This is why any poor quality songs start downloading instantly, whereas you have to wait approximately forever to find any good quality material.
2) Sharman also regularly publishes versions of it's other popular software package 'Kazaa Lite'. This contains just as much Spyware as standard Kazaa, but it's special 'stealth' Spyware custom written by Sharman. It also crashes randomly.
3) Sharman also publishes 'Diet Kazaa'. This contains twice as much Spyware as either 'Kazaa' or 'Kazaa Lite', and crashes twice as often. However, as a reward, you get a special button that looks like Britney Spears.
4) Any version of Kazaa uses your idle bandwidth and processor power to research dangerous biological toxins and military hardware for the US Department of Defense. Coming soon - the Sharman Tank.
5) Sharman logs all copyrighted files shared over their network, and the users sharing them, so that if they are ever short on money, they can sell the list to the **AA.
6) Sharman is run by a group of aliens, from their spaceship. This is how the company is able to move so swiftly between countries each time legal action threatens.
I bought an Xblox the other day, and I wish I hadn't. I guess the poor sales number should have warned me (since they only sold 3000 EggsBlockses in Europe, and 12 in Japan). I don't know what Bill Gates was thinking when he designed the controller, but it really hurts my hands. It's way too big!
I was playing a game with it once, and it started vibrating, jumped right out of my hands, and severely wounded a small child. Also, it's strained my fingers so much, I'm starting to have problems 'viewing' my Natalie Portman image collection! I'm going to sue Bill Gates!
Sure, some of the games may have nice graphics, but the gameplay is absolutely shocking. I tried to play Halo, but it's nothing but a tech demo! You may not believe this, but it's actually impossible to shoot! I played for five minutes, and couldn't kill anything at all, so I took the game back to the shop. It has nothing on Goldeneye. I'm going to wait for the PC version, which should be much better.
Also, my son really wanted me to buy a console, so that he could play GTA3, so imagine my surprise when I found out it was not yet released on the Xbox! He had to undergo therapy for several weeks - but I'll get the money back from Bill Gates when I sue him.
I'm going to sell my XSocks on Ebay now. It'll probably cost me a lot in shipping, because it's really heavy. Bill Gates designed it that way, because he likes to hit immigrants over the head with his. I'll never buy another M$ product!
Why use existing software when you could have all the fun of writing your own. You can then release it under the GPL, and add to the huge pool of substandard software that already exist. That's the open source way!
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a toner cartridge from them (like a fool I didn't bother to open the plastic bag it cames sealed in on arrival to check it), which turned out to be cracked, and they refused to accept it back, since they claim to only allow such returns within 7 days of delivery.
Also a friend of mine ordered a wireless AP, and they managed to send him the wrong product, make a fuss about accepting the return, tried to charge him a restocking fee on it, and then to top it off sent him the exact same wrong product again. This wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't take about a month for this to take place, due to Ebuyers terrible communication process.
They offer some good deals, but I won't be using them again, so as always it's buyer-beware.
Or perhaps not. In the grand scheme of things, this is a very minor issue, the details aren't that significant, the time taken to procure them would be excessive, and I doubt that a large proportion of students even use the wireless network. You should perhaps consider yourself lucky to have access to such a network at all, not kick up such a fuss posting articles on Slashdot full of hyperbole just because the login form uses HTTP instead of HTTPS, and certainly not advocate sniffing the network yourself and violating other's privacy.
Lets face it, your school computer account is unlikely to be of interest to most of the world. If you really feel the need to raise the issue (personally I don't think it's even worth the effort), speak to the person in charge of the school network, and if they don't do anything and you still consider it to be a significant issue, schedule a meeting to raise the issue with the principal. Certainly do not direct threats at anyone.
Oh, for the curious who can't be bothered to read the link, you want to be connecting to AIM usernames infocombot, infocombot2 or infocombot3. Don't expect a quick response though (ICQ works for this as well as AIM, or your favourite multiple network messaging client).
So, is this the first AIM bot we've slashdotted? It's taking forever to let me play Hitchhiker's guide... where's the Google mirror?
Judging by the fact that Slashdot probably has the highest concentration of MS advertising on the web (except for possibly MSN), doesn't that suggest that Microsoft's advertising makes people start using Linux? Perhaps a new, popular, Microsoft search engine could start an open source revolution!
This is the kind of problem that could really put off an average user if they encountered it (although maybe RAID isn't a feature you'll find used in many average machines), since most distributions tend to refuse to install in the best case, and in the worst cases will sometimes contain stupid default settings which will trash data on my drives if I allow them to continue. Does anyone know a distribution that copes better with issues like this than those I have tried? Is this new version of Debian likely contain this feature (although I've heard bad things about the usability of the Debian installer), since I'd love to give it a try if it doesn't mean huge amounts of effort on my part. If anyone could recommend a distro that might be easier to install than those I have tested, I'd love to try it out, since I've grown bored of the wait of several hours to install packages on my current Gentoo setup (although it was interesting to play with for a while).
For any geeks who didn't get the 'snaaaaaaaake' dept. reference, you'll be wanting this link (flash required). You may also enjoy the Lord of the Rings version.
Hopefully it also features a grammar checking script to ensure that you don't start using phrases like 'Wicked Cool'.
Because nobody on Slashdot can decide whether that ought to be a + mod or a - mod.
It appears to me that people who are stupid (and insecure, but mainly just stupid) enough to buy these products seem for some reason unable to resist the persuasive tactics of modern marketing. Surely logically, the demographic spending money on such obviously fake products must waste vast amount of money on anything which appears in a slick television commercial, created by intelligent advertising execs who can speak English.
I suspect that even if penis enlargement pills and suchlike are taken off the market, those that will buy such products will simply spend their money on something else that they neither really want nor need (diet pills, viagra, naked teens in their email etc.) Although the advertisers are clearly doing wrong in this case, and suing them is a good course of action, this may not really help matter in the long term. There have always been products on the market whose effectiveness is dubious at best, and are often even harmful, yet some people clearly continue to purchase them. Perhaps the answer could be stricter controls over what products are allowed to be advertised at all. The crazy extreme alternative of course, is to take money away from the stupid people, but with adverts for personal loans and debt consolidation every five minutes during our mind-numbing daytime TV schedules, it seems unlikely that this will happen any time soon.
Food for thought, in any case.
The BBC clearly needs to check its facts.
Does anyone know of a support group?
(I realise this will get modded offtopic within about 3 seconds, and I fully agree it has nothing to do with Python code and iPaqs, but I implore moderators to have some respect, if not for me, then for the sweets)
"Sorry, your search under the categories 'independant artists' and 'mp3s' yielded no results... Did you mean you want to purchase Britney Spears WMAs?"
Step up to the next level with a $5 donation, and a personal homepage can hire a web designer skilled enough to use the blink tag.
$10 can buy scripts capable of giving your mouse 'cool' trails, scrolling the window title text, and disabling the right mouse button.
And for $20 a month, you can 'adopt' your own personal homepage, allowing it the funds to be moved away from the popup hell of Geocities hosting!
Please guys, there are personal homepages out there that can't even afford to use animated gifts... we need your donations TODAY!
I'm not entirely sure there was a hacker career either, although it's a while since I've played it. There's possibly an updated version which features the FBI cybercrime squad, instead of the police officer player.
1) People who started playing SW:G are getting bored/annoyed by the bugs already, and are selling their accounts.
2) People started playing the game with the intention of investing a large amount of time to farm cash/items, and sell them.
In either case, this is interesting, it means either SW:G sucks, or there are some people who really need to go out and get jobs (I find it hard to believe that the cash that can be made from playing online games is a reasonable substitute for a paying job).
I've never really understood the people who buy items for use in an online game, surely if they don't have the time to invest to actually earn cash and items themselves, with the accompanying sense of achievement, it's not worth playing the game at all? As an ex-player of Ultima Online though, I can sympathise with some of the sellers. For example, I sold my account when I quit, which was easily enough to recoup the subscription fees I'd payed for playing. There seem to be no reasons why people would be selling accounts this early in the game though, except for those I described above, both of which are a little worrying.
Kazaa's intention to distribute licensed content via its users rather than via a central server
Kazaa intends to reward users with 'points' which they can spend on more content or prizes, for distributing this content for them
What remains to be seen though, is whether users will be willing to pay for the kind of content that they are used to downloading for free, and could probably obtain for free elsewhere. Given that Kazaa's users are already used to this convinience, it seems unlikely that they will start queueing up to get their copyrighted files in legal form. This is especially true since the download of these new licensed files from other P2P users will likely be no faster or more reliable than other files of more dubious legality. Also by allowing users to handle the distribution, the door is opened for cracks that allow people to start handing out their already purchased content for free. I'm unsure how Kazaa intends to stop this from happening, and with the files already stored on a user's machine, any method they select should be fairly simple to overcome.
This is completely true. I've emailed Bill Gates many times asking him to fix the bugs in the copy of Windows 3.11 that I'm using, and he doesn't seem to have got around to making an updated version freely available yet!
Seriously, this sounds like a pretty cool gadget, but I'd like to see what kind of battery life this thing has, and it doesn't look to me like it'll stand up to being bashed around particularly well. The linked review didn't seem at all comprehensive however.
I've always found Kazaa slightly disturbing, so I invented the following conspiracy theories about it, using the tried and tested research method of wild conjecture: - 1) Most of the files on Kazaa aren't really transfered peer to peer - there's a huge central repository somewhere of horrible 128kbps quality mp3s full of noise. The noise makes these files sufficiently different from the original songs that Sharman doesn't have to license them. This is why any poor quality songs start downloading instantly, whereas you have to wait approximately forever to find any good quality material. 2) Sharman also regularly publishes versions of it's other popular software package 'Kazaa Lite'. This contains just as much Spyware as standard Kazaa, but it's special 'stealth' Spyware custom written by Sharman. It also crashes randomly. 3) Sharman also publishes 'Diet Kazaa'. This contains twice as much Spyware as either 'Kazaa' or 'Kazaa Lite', and crashes twice as often. However, as a reward, you get a special button that looks like Britney Spears. 4) Any version of Kazaa uses your idle bandwidth and processor power to research dangerous biological toxins and military hardware for the US Department of Defense. Coming soon - the Sharman Tank. 5) Sharman logs all copyrighted files shared over their network, and the users sharing them, so that if they are ever short on money, they can sell the list to the **AA. 6) Sharman is run by a group of aliens, from their spaceship. This is how the company is able to move so swiftly between countries each time legal action threatens.
I was playing a game with it once, and it started vibrating, jumped right out of my hands, and severely wounded a small child. Also, it's strained my fingers so much, I'm starting to have problems 'viewing' my Natalie Portman image collection! I'm going to sue Bill Gates!
Sure, some of the games may have nice graphics, but the gameplay is absolutely shocking. I tried to play Halo, but it's nothing but a tech demo! You may not believe this, but it's actually impossible to shoot! I played for five minutes, and couldn't kill anything at all, so I took the game back to the shop. It has nothing on Goldeneye. I'm going to wait for the PC version, which should be much better.
Also, my son really wanted me to buy a console, so that he could play GTA3, so imagine my surprise when I found out it was not yet released on the Xbox! He had to undergo therapy for several weeks - but I'll get the money back from Bill Gates when I sue him.
I'm going to sell my XSocks on Ebay now. It'll probably cost me a lot in shipping, because it's really heavy. Bill Gates designed it that way, because he likes to hit immigrants over the head with his. I'll never buy another M$ product!
ssssssss sssssssssss sss
Why use existing software when you could have all the fun of writing your own. You can then release it under the GPL, and add to the huge pool of substandard software that already exist. That's the open source way!