What happens when two companiesvie for the same name?
This bothers me because then the 'big boys' woulds decide with copyright holder is entitled to teh domain. Case in point, Nissan.com run by Nissan Computer services, but Nissan Motors wants it, too.
Under the old system, Nissan Computers got it becuase he was there first, and because he has a legal right to the name. Under the new system, I guarantee that Nissan.com ( dot-whatever) would go to Nissan Motors without any sort of consideration. This a a Bad Thing.
But then again, why Is Nissan Motors entitled to that name anyway? 'Nissan' is not their name, it's Nissan Motors (or something to that effect).
.
They *started* out being similar, because Justin needed a framework to work off of, but it hasn't been line this since WinAmp moved to 2.x -- true, it may still supports 1.x plugins, but..
And at the same time, XMMS (x11amp) has been evolving, too, and extending itself and it's API.
Maybe it's worth someomes' time to design a uniform IPC API for media players? That would be a very interesting propsition.
.
But, OTOH, this means that you then have to play Mr. SysAdmin, and that is usually no fun. I'm doing this now to offset the cost of a number of projects I'm running, and playing the System Adminstrator cuts quite a lot onto my code time. Not a HUGE amount, but enough to make me cranky in the morning.
The easy of being a sysadmin in a case like this varies inversely with the kind of people you're going to sublet your service to -- if they're techincal people who can handle things on they own, okay, but if they're newbies who just want to sell Furbies on-line, watch out.
.
I know of your site, and I used it just a few days ago to download a FreeBSD ISO. It's a great idea, and I think that yoi deserve some help.
However, I'm not sure you will be able to do it in the bounds that you have set for yourself. I realise that you want to 'give something back' to the community, and you do, but if you're doing it at an exteme loss, it's not worth it.
Saddly, I think you need to go a *bit* more commercial, and my idea for that is a 'pay-for-bandwidth' scheme. Take for example the Distro releases we've had these last few weeks -- Every site was (and probably still is) completely satturated... and if you can connect to a site, you'll only be able to get 3-4 kb a second. Now, in such a case, I would gladly pay you 5 bucks if you could give me a high-speed connection at times like those...
You could have the free stuff there, still, but you could also offer the option of users being able to download over a faster, members only connection for a small fee. Most people would jsut sign up for one month at a time or so, but still..
I'm assuming that your co-loc fees are a few hundred a month.. chances are, you would normally only make 20-30 bucks a month, but when A major distro revision is released, you could easily get a few hundred, which would offset the losses incurred in the other months.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned PDAs or HPCs Yet -- Depending on the capabilitied you want, you could pick up a greyscale WinCE Clamshell for under 50 bucks and hack it up a bit to make a 640x240 touch panel using a Web browerser over ethernet, or if you demand more capabilities, you could go with a few ePods (colour, fast, etc) for a few hundred USD each.
Running Pocket Internet Exploiter and conneted to ethernet or even serial/ppp, you could do it quite well.
.
But all the promises about new designs don't mean dick unless you're shipping the product NOW.
I've been floowing Yopy since it was released, and I'm becomming steadily disapointed. The Spec sheet, when it was first announced in '99, was very impressive -- TFT colour, fast CPU, built in Mpeg decoder and FM/TV tuner... but the features dwindled and eve those it retained started looking less stellar every time they pushed back the relase date.
I want to like the Yopy, I really do, but G-Mate is going to hve to impove it's track record before I'mm but my weight behind it again. Sorry.
Free- and Non-Free Software getting along?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 5
Hiya Bob!
The venerable Richard Stallman has a habit of saying that all software should be free -- he is therefor not interested in making Free Software too interoperable with Commercial, Closed-Source software.
On the other had, the also venerable Linus Torvalds has an opposite view; that free software has it's place and that non-free software also has place, and that all efforts should be made to make them co-exist.
Since you have on foot in each world, as it were, what are your feelings on this? Should Free and Open source software be expected to "play nice" with software from various Evil Empires? Or should it concentrate only on relation with other like software projects, and require the commercial world adapt to cooperating with Free software?
I realise that this is terribly off topic, but as an aside, many hard drive *can* be made WORM, though they have a higher cost per Meg then, say, a CD.
I have a few IBM drives at home (some old, some new) that have WARM capabilities built in -- the first is a write protect jumper -- no biggie, if you want to change the data, just change the jumper.
The other is the most amusing -- it is another jumper flanked by a big red caution label. If you bridge this circuit, it actually blows some of the PROM, namely the part that allows data to be written to the disk.
One option, albeit and expensive one, is to have the machines, expect for your highest-load servers, to be notebooks and laptops. Compared to a desptop PCs, they sip power due to low power CPUs and integral LCDs. The problem here is that they'll be more expenisive, more difficult to upgrade and more expensive to repair if something goes wrong.
One of the easiest ways, though, would be to insist that the green features of all the desktop PCs be turned on -- example is my home machine with goes into 'hibernate/suspend to disk' after 20 minutes of inactivity -- the machine powers down, the monitor turns off, though the system is brought back with a keypress in a few seconds.
And, of course, is the discussiona bout LCD monitors, but I'm sure you've already covered that.
One other stab in the dark could be one of cooling -- if you get PCs that do no require active cooling, there is no need for a fan ( don't know how much juice a fan uses), and perhaps they won't heat the lab up as much, which means the HVAC system won't run as much?
If this is a real concern to you, you might want to look into a few other options.
One, is that many LCD brands, if they use flourescent Backlighting (like most Laptops do), often times the flourescent tube can be replaced -- sometimes with ease, sometime with difficulty. Examples of ease are the Mac PowerBook 1xx series, where a new tube is only a few bucks and can be replace in a a a few minutes. Examples of difficultly are my Fujitsu Lifebook, where the entire LCD panel itself had to be taken apart.
The other option you have is, depending on how old you machine is and how much time and money you want to put into it, is to just replace the screen when it becomes a problem. If it's an 'older' (i.e. 1 year old) machine, you can pick up a new-from-factory LCD for 300 USD, or your can watch eBay for a model like yours with a dead logic board or something.
Anyway, if it's your main machine, then I have a feeling that other parts of the box will go before the backlight does -- especially the battery and the hinge.
The reason that freeBSD isn't as accepted as a desktop OS is not one of technical merit at all, just one of Promoton:
It's a desktop OS because the industry promotes it as such. The industry promotes it as such because it has industry support. It has industry support because of it's interesting history, and it's history is interesting because it was first spawned by a college student in Finland, not a large corporation.
FreeBSD, OTOH, is just a really a Port for some corporate code, and doesn't have the 'human intrest' value that Linux does. This doesn't mean one is technically superior to the other, just one catches the imagination of the public more than the other.
I still vote on your nodes, D, and there is a pattern there that you don't seem to want to admit:
You'll notice that any writeups you made that simply stated your opinion are + rep, while the ones you made that were simply attacks (on other noders, usually) are in the - rep dolldrums. Weird, no? Funny how people don't like flames.
Another funny thing is that EVERYONE in E2 tried to accomodate you, to the point where you were given and EDITORSHIP. You have no right to say that you are 'picked on'. '[Dem bones|bones] bent over backwards to help you -- you know it and I know it.
I followed your entire career D... I still think you have fantansic ability, but, well, you take everything too personally.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. You're labouring under the idea that [XP] Matters.
XP only matters if you want it to, and if you write nodes JUST to get Reputations, well ladee, you're there for the wrong reason.
And while we're all whining about Reputation, let me say again that EVERY [noder] gets ONE vote. One Vote, One Noder. Did you know that these '[Elite]' E2'ers you talk about comprises less than one percent of all noders in the system?
There are a few things you need to remember: One, we like depth. Two, we like humour and three, we respect honesty. If you follow those tenents, you'll do fine, [I guarantee it].
People on E2 take everything so personally. You need to have a thich skin if you're going to play the game. They write fine nodes, and when they don't get [C!]'ed in the first 5 minutes they start complaining about the conspiracy. THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY.
....okay, there is the [Dai-un] conspiracy, but that's on hold until he trims the fur between his toes.
How they purr? I had it explained to me (from a PBS Special, IIRC), that the 'purring' noise is the result of bones/cartalige ridges (sp) vibrating togther in the larnyx.
They went on to say that 'big cats' (tigers, lions, etc) CAN'T purr, because these bones/whatever in the throat have in fact evolved into the mechanisms responsible for roaring. House cats, as well, can't roar, but can (obviously) purr.
This reminds me a lot of the two hand transplants that have recently been performed. I recall reading from somewhere that the 'stiffs' the hands where taken from had been heart-dead for 6 hours on one and 9 on the other.
The both the Hand transplant and the above Reuters stories didn't specifically address this, but I wonder how they dealt with the coagulation of the blood -- does the chilling of the cadaver prevent this?
Actually, let's not blame the 160x160 dependency on bad developers.
Actually, thats what I meant to say, it just didn't come out right. The OS will handle it fine, but sometimes it's just easier for a developer to say screen.height = 160...
There are a few problems I can see already with this. It's nice, don't get me wrong, but there are some potential issues (bear in mind that I am a WinCE user, so take all my words with some Sodium-Chloride).
it can play back full consumer range (20Hz-20KHz) audio, takes normal and copyright protected memory sticks, has ATRAC-3 compatibility, 132Kbps audio recording...
First issue - the 33mHz VZ *is* fast, about as fast as a 66 mHz SuperH-3, but even that is nowhere near fast enough to decode that they're saying -- this means there must be another ASIC in the mix for decoding the audio. This is a blessing and a curse -- you'd get decoded audio with no system load, but it would suck you batteries dry in only a couple of hours.
...sports a new extra high resolution 320x320 dot display...
Another potential trouble spot -- many, very many, PalmOS apps are (thanks to bad design) dependant on the fact that PalmOS device screen is 160x160, and it it's bigger than that, some things can freak out; we saw this is the 'Newton' world, when the screen resolution changed from 200x336 to 200x320 -- many of your favourite Apps for their butts cut off, and some wouldn't run at all.
And, my finaly gripe is ablout the Graffiti area -- Why, when there is all this screen space and processor power, is the HWR area still *screen printed* on the glass? We can't they make it software?
I don't want to beat up on the (damn good looking) Clie, and I'm not saying this is a bad unit by any means, but I would ask that these specs be taken with a bit of realism. Remember, the first 'Griffin' class WinCE devices made similar claims, and few could deliver them all.
Perhaps it would be better to simply accept the user info, item number, and quanity instead - letting any price calculation be done on the server side - and submit THAT to the gateway.
Stop Yourself. You're right, a *good* shopping cart would do that -- but there are two small problems.
One) Few shopping carts, in my experience, meet the criteria of "good".
Two) Many Payment gateways offer a way to have secure transactions without the shop having to maintain a secure server of their own. Goes like this:
The buyer presses submit on a form that contains all their info (name, address, shopping cart contents, etc), except for their credit card number. This for posts, in fact, to the CCPG's secure server, where the card number is then entered and then the buyers posts that and is sent back to the merchant's cart.
I'm sure you can see that, using this scenario, you can't rely on the server to do the computation you describe. It's not the best way, granted, but it's a lot easier on the merchant. I'm sure you can see why that would be a problem, and why you should check the amount actually debited.
And yes, I realise that the article didn't specifically adress this scenario, but I feel that it should still be of intrest.
My day job is at a Credit Card Authorization Gateway -- we handle the debiting of the customers credit card -- so I feel I know a thingor two about how this system functions.
The process happens generally like: the the 'buy' button is pressed by the shopper, the shopping cart passes a few things to the transaction gateway (among them the price), the gateway debits the card in question, and returns a status code to the shopping cart saying either that the transacttion was sucessful, or that is wasn't (AVS fail, Insufficient funds, etc).
The problem here is that people are editing pages so that the wrong value is being passed to the payment gateway -- the gateway doesn't know dick about the product in question, all it knows to debit the amount of money it was asked to debit. So even if it's the wrong amount, all the gateway knows is if the debiting succeeded or failed, and doesn't know how much the item costs.
The thing here is that any payment gateway worth it's salt (Like Authorize.net or iTransact.com) will return, along with a status code about the transaction, a field containing the amount the buyers card was debited for, so they can then compare it to their records and see of the correct price was paid.
So, simply, the problem here is lazy merchants and (sadly) lazy programmers. With only a few lines of code this problem could be COMPLETELY aliviated(sp).
Nope, it isn't. The '1337 speak' we know today evolved from conventions of long, long, long ago, before large online services where around -- we're talking early 80's here. And, back then, we -- err 'they' didn't "leetify" every word, just a few, like "thanx" "kule" etc.
It was a sign that one was 'at home' when in the BBS world.. now it's just irritating.
My girlf's parents smoke -- not a lot, but enought to impact her PC. She usually has to replace the fans in her case (only two, though), because they get clogged with sticky dust, and i works it's way into the motor or causes the bearings to impact or any number of things. I can't attest to the yellowed plastic, but the blackend dust is terrible.
In a attepts to remedy this, we put cheesecloth filters over the sites of heavy air intake -- it helps immensly, and I would suggest you try it if you need to. Alternatly, many 'server' cases have washable filters that snap over the air intake ports, but those cases are in the 100+ USD range.
I don't mean to beat up on any smokers, but thats just the way it is. One way to compare is to compare the dust inside a PC in a smoke-filled house with one that isn't -- the one sans smoke will still be covvered with dust, eys, but in this case it will be fine white dust which is, interestingly enough, skin cells. The key here is that it doesn't have the adhesive properties that tar-laden dust does.
Okay, I know I really am not allowed to gripe, because I didn't submit any questions of my own to be asked, but I'm started to see how one-dimensional the questions were. Granted, they were *good*, but they were almost all (6 out of 10, if I count correctly) about Paters' involvment with the noble Slashdot.
I'm sure he loves/. and all, but I was hopping for more of a glimpse about CowboyNeal the person, not only CBN the Slashdot Admin.
At the very least, he should have been given a question about scratching;)
Well, actually, there might be a simple way. You probably want to be able to hear sound from all your PCs simultainiously(sp).. but if you don't, and just want to lsiten to one source at a time, there are several boxes that might help.
I don't know exactly what they're called, but I think Target (a department store) carries one made by Recton, going for about $15 USD (IIRC). It's not a mixer, just a push-button switch box -- 4 inputs, one output... just push the button for the source you want to listen to. Made for home entertainment systems, obviously, but it might work for your uses.
Gee, did you ever consider the fact that I *wasn't* talking about the anomoly? I was talking about other aspects of the lake. If you couldn't grasp that, well...
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when two companiesvie for the same name?
This bothers me because then the 'big boys' woulds decide with copyright holder is entitled to teh domain. Case in point, Nissan.com run by Nissan Computer services, but Nissan Motors wants it, too.
Under the old system, Nissan Computers got it becuase he was there first, and because he has a legal right to the name. Under the new system, I guarantee that Nissan.com ( dot-whatever) would go to Nissan Motors without any sort of consideration. This a a Bad Thing.
But then again, why Is Nissan Motors entitled to that name anyway? 'Nissan' is not their name, it's Nissan Motors (or something to that effect).
.
Uhm. No.
They *started* out being similar, because Justin needed a framework to work off of, but it hasn't been line this since WinAmp moved to 2.x -- true, it may still supports 1.x plugins, but..
And at the same time, XMMS (x11amp) has been evolving, too, and extending itself and it's API.
Maybe it's worth someomes' time to design a uniform IPC API for media players? That would be a very interesting propsition.
.
But, OTOH, this means that you then have to play Mr. SysAdmin, and that is usually no fun. I'm doing this now to offset the cost of a number of projects I'm running, and playing the System Adminstrator cuts quite a lot onto my code time. Not a HUGE amount, but enough to make me cranky in the morning.
The easy of being a sysadmin in a case like this varies inversely with the kind of people you're going to sublet your service to -- if they're techincal people who can handle things on they own, okay, but if they're newbies who just want to sell Furbies on-line, watch out.
.
I know of your site, and I used it just a few days ago to download a FreeBSD ISO. It's a great idea, and I think that yoi deserve some help.
However, I'm not sure you will be able to do it in the bounds that you have set for yourself. I realise that you want to 'give something back' to the community, and you do, but if you're doing it at an exteme loss, it's not worth it.
Saddly, I think you need to go a *bit* more commercial, and my idea for that is a 'pay-for-bandwidth' scheme. Take for example the Distro releases we've had these last few weeks -- Every site was (and probably still is) completely satturated... and if you can connect to a site, you'll only be able to get 3-4 kb a second. Now, in such a case, I would gladly pay you 5 bucks if you could give me a high-speed connection at times like those...
You could have the free stuff there, still, but you could also offer the option of users being able to download over a faster, members only connection for a small fee. Most people would jsut sign up for one month at a time or so, but still..
I'm assuming that your co-loc fees are a few hundred a month.. chances are, you would normally only make 20-30 bucks a month, but when A major distro revision is released, you could easily get a few hundred, which would offset the losses incurred in the other months.
Just a thought
.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned PDAs or HPCs Yet -- Depending on the capabilitied you want, you could pick up a greyscale WinCE Clamshell for under 50 bucks and hack it up a bit to make a 640x240 touch panel using a Web browerser over ethernet, or if you demand more capabilities, you could go with a few ePods (colour, fast, etc) for a few hundred USD each.
Running Pocket Internet Exploiter and conneted to ethernet or even serial/ppp, you could do it quite well.
.
But all the promises about new designs don't mean dick unless you're shipping the product NOW.
I've been floowing Yopy since it was released, and I'm becomming steadily disapointed. The Spec sheet, when it was first announced in '99, was very impressive -- TFT colour, fast CPU, built in Mpeg decoder and FM/TV tuner... but the features dwindled and eve those it retained started looking less stellar every time they pushed back the relase date.
I want to like the Yopy, I really do, but G-Mate is going to hve to impove it's track record before I'mm but my weight behind it again. Sorry.
Hiya Bob!
The venerable Richard Stallman has a habit of saying that all software should be free -- he is therefor not interested in making Free Software too interoperable with Commercial, Closed-Source software.
On the other had, the also venerable Linus Torvalds has an opposite view; that free software has it's place and that non-free software also has place, and that all efforts should be made to make them co-exist.
Since you have on foot in each world, as it were, what are your feelings on this? Should Free and Open source software be expected to "play nice" with software from various Evil Empires? Or should it concentrate only on relation with other like software projects, and require the commercial world adapt to cooperating with Free software?
I realise that this is terribly off topic, but as an aside, many hard drive *can* be made WORM, though they have a higher cost per Meg then, say, a CD.
I have a few IBM drives at home (some old, some new) that have WARM capabilities built in -- the first is a write protect jumper -- no biggie, if you want to change the data, just change the jumper.
The other is the most amusing -- it is another jumper flanked by a big red caution label. If you bridge this circuit, it actually blows some of the PROM, namely the part that allows data to be written to the disk.
This has been another useless fact.
One option, albeit and expensive one, is to have the machines, expect for your highest-load servers, to be notebooks and laptops. Compared to a desptop PCs, they sip power due to low power CPUs and integral LCDs. The problem here is that they'll be more expenisive, more difficult to upgrade and more expensive to repair if something goes wrong.
One of the easiest ways, though, would be to insist that the green features of all the desktop PCs be turned on -- example is my home machine with goes into 'hibernate/suspend to disk' after 20 minutes of inactivity -- the machine powers down, the monitor turns off, though the system is brought back with a keypress in a few seconds.
And, of course, is the discussiona bout LCD monitors, but I'm sure you've already covered that.
One other stab in the dark could be one of cooling -- if you get PCs that do no require active cooling, there is no need for a fan ( don't know how much juice a fan uses), and perhaps they won't heat the lab up as much, which means the HVAC system won't run as much?
If this is a real concern to you, you might want to look into a few other options.
One, is that many LCD brands, if they use flourescent Backlighting (like most Laptops do), often times the flourescent tube can be replaced -- sometimes with ease, sometime with difficulty. Examples of ease are the Mac PowerBook 1xx series, where a new tube is only a few bucks and can be replace in a a a few minutes. Examples of difficultly are my Fujitsu Lifebook, where the entire LCD panel itself had to be taken apart.
The other option you have is, depending on how old you machine is and how much time and money you want to put into it, is to just replace the screen when it becomes a problem. If it's an 'older' (i.e. 1 year old) machine, you can pick up a new-from-factory LCD for 300 USD, or your can watch eBay for a model like yours with a dead logic board or something.
Anyway, if it's your main machine, then I have a feeling that other parts of the box will go before the backlight does -- especially the battery and the hinge.
The reason that freeBSD isn't as accepted as a desktop OS is not one of technical merit at all, just one of Promoton:
It's a desktop OS because the industry promotes it as such. The industry promotes it as such because it has industry support. It has industry support because of it's interesting history, and it's history is interesting because it was first spawned by a college student in Finland, not a large corporation.
FreeBSD, OTOH, is just a really a Port for some corporate code, and doesn't have the 'human intrest' value that Linux does. This doesn't mean one is technically superior to the other, just one catches the imagination of the public more than the other.
Quwitcherbichin.
I still vote on your nodes, D, and there is a pattern there that you don't seem to want to admit:
You'll notice that any writeups you made that simply stated your opinion are + rep, while the ones you made that were simply attacks (on other noders, usually) are in the - rep dolldrums. Weird, no? Funny how people don't like flames.
Another funny thing is that EVERYONE in E2 tried to accomodate you, to the point where you were given and EDITORSHIP. You have no right to say that you are 'picked on'. '[Dem bones|bones] bent over backwards to help you -- you know it and I know it.
I followed your entire career D... I still think you have fantansic ability, but, well, you take everything too personally.
THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. You're labouring under the idea that [XP] Matters.
XP only matters if you want it to, and if you write nodes JUST to get Reputations, well ladee, you're there for the wrong reason.
And while we're all whining about Reputation, let me say again that EVERY [noder] gets ONE vote. One Vote, One Noder. Did you know that these '[Elite]' E2'ers you talk about comprises less than one percent of all noders in the system?
There are a few things you need to remember: One, we like depth. Two, we like humour and three, we respect honesty. If you follow those tenents, you'll do fine, [I guarantee it].
People on E2 take everything so personally. You need to have a thich skin if you're going to play the game. They write fine nodes, and when they don't get [C!]'ed in the first 5 minutes they start complaining about the conspiracy. THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY.
....okay, there is the [Dai-un] conspiracy, but that's on hold until he trims the fur between his toes.
How they purr? I had it explained to me (from a PBS Special, IIRC), that the 'purring' noise is the result of bones/cartalige ridges (sp) vibrating togther in the larnyx.
They went on to say that 'big cats' (tigers, lions, etc) CAN'T purr, because these bones/whatever in the throat have in fact evolved into the mechanisms responsible for roaring. House cats, as well, can't roar, but can (obviously) purr.
This reminds me a lot of the two hand transplants that have recently been performed. I recall reading from somewhere that the 'stiffs' the hands where taken from had been heart-dead for 6 hours on one and 9 on the other.
The both the Hand transplant and the above Reuters stories didn't specifically address this, but I wonder how they dealt with the coagulation of the blood -- does the chilling of the cadaver prevent this?
First issue - the 33mHz VZ *is* fast, about as fast as a 66 mHz SuperH-3, but even that is nowhere near fast enough to decode that they're saying -- this means there must be another ASIC in the mix for decoding the audio. This is a blessing and a curse -- you'd get decoded audio with no system load, but it would suck you batteries dry in only a couple of hours.
Another potential trouble spot -- many, very many, PalmOS apps are (thanks to bad design) dependant on the fact that PalmOS device screen is 160x160, and it it's bigger than that, some things can freak out; we saw this is the 'Newton' world, when the screen resolution changed from 200x336 to 200x320 -- many of your favourite Apps for their butts cut off, and some wouldn't run at all.
And, my finaly gripe is ablout the Graffiti area -- Why, when there is all this screen space and processor power, is the HWR area still *screen printed* on the glass? We can't they make it software?
I don't want to beat up on the (damn good looking) Clie, and I'm not saying this is a bad unit by any means, but I would ask that these specs be taken with a bit of realism. Remember, the first 'Griffin' class WinCE devices made similar claims, and few could deliver them all.
'Linux is only free if your Time has no value.'
I really don't need to say more.
And yes, I *am* running Linux right now.
Stop Yourself. You're right, a *good* shopping cart would do that -- but there are two small problems.
One) Few shopping carts, in my experience, meet the criteria of "good".
Two) Many Payment gateways offer a way to have secure transactions without the shop having to maintain a secure server of their own. Goes like this:
The buyer presses submit on a form that contains all their info (name, address, shopping cart contents, etc), except for their credit card number. This for posts, in fact, to the CCPG's secure server, where the card number is then entered and then the buyers posts that and is sent back to the merchant's cart.
I'm sure you can see that, using this scenario, you can't rely on the server to do the computation you describe. It's not the best way, granted, but it's a lot easier on the merchant. I'm sure you can see why that would be a problem, and why you should check the amount actually debited.
And yes, I realise that the article didn't specifically adress this scenario, but I feel that it should still be of intrest.
Okay, I must speak out here.
My day job is at a Credit Card Authorization Gateway -- we handle the debiting of the customers credit card -- so I feel I know a thingor two about how this system functions.
The process happens generally like: the the 'buy' button is pressed by the shopper, the shopping cart passes a few things to the transaction gateway (among them the price), the gateway debits the card in question, and returns a status code to the shopping cart saying either that the transacttion was sucessful, or that is wasn't (AVS fail, Insufficient funds, etc).
The problem here is that people are editing pages so that the wrong value is being passed to the payment gateway -- the gateway doesn't know dick about the product in question, all it knows to debit the amount of money it was asked to debit. So even if it's the wrong amount, all the gateway knows is if the debiting succeeded or failed, and doesn't know how much the item costs.
The thing here is that any payment gateway worth it's salt (Like Authorize.net or iTransact.com) will return, along with a status code about the transaction, a field containing the amount the buyers card was debited for, so they can then compare it to their records and see of the correct price was paid.
So, simply, the problem here is lazy merchants and (sadly) lazy programmers. With only a few lines of code this problem could be COMPLETELY aliviated(sp).
Nope, it isn't. The '1337 speak' we know today evolved from conventions of long, long, long ago, before large online services where around -- we're talking early 80's here. And, back then, we -- err 'they' didn't "leetify" every word, just a few, like "thanx" "kule" etc.
It was a sign that one was 'at home' when in the BBS world.. now it's just irritating.
My girlf's parents smoke -- not a lot, but enought to impact her PC. She usually has to replace the fans in her case (only two, though), because they get clogged with sticky dust, and i works it's way into the motor or causes the bearings to impact or any number of things. I can't attest to the yellowed plastic, but the blackend dust is terrible.
In a attepts to remedy this, we put cheesecloth filters over the sites of heavy air intake -- it helps immensly, and I would suggest you try it if you need to. Alternatly, many 'server' cases have washable filters that snap over the air intake ports, but those cases are in the 100+ USD range.
I don't mean to beat up on any smokers, but thats just the way it is. One way to compare is to compare the dust inside a PC in a smoke-filled house with one that isn't -- the one sans smoke will still be covvered with dust, eys, but in this case it will be fine white dust which is, interestingly enough, skin cells. The key here is that it doesn't have the adhesive properties that tar-laden dust does.
Okay, I know I really am not allowed to gripe, because I didn't submit any questions of my own to be asked, but I'm started to see how one-dimensional the questions were. Granted, they were *good*, but they were almost all (6 out of 10, if I count correctly) about Paters' involvment with the noble Slashdot.
/. and all, but I was hopping for more of a glimpse about CowboyNeal the person, not only CBN the Slashdot Admin.
;)
I'm sure he loves
At the very least, he should have been given a question about scratching
Well, actually, there might be a simple way. You probably want to be able to hear sound from all your PCs simultainiously(sp).. but if you don't, and just want to lsiten to one source at a time, there are several boxes that might help.
I don't know exactly what they're called, but I think Target (a department store) carries one made by Recton, going for about $15 USD (IIRC). It's not a mixer, just a push-button switch box -- 4 inputs, one output... just push the button for the source you want to listen to. Made for home entertainment systems, obviously, but it might work for your uses.
Gee, did you ever consider the fact that I *wasn't* talking about the anomoly? I was talking about other aspects of the lake. If you couldn't grasp that, well...