I was surprised to see how many networks allow connections on port 23 when, for example, all web browsing goes through a proxy. I think the reason is that Cisco routers use plain 'ol telnet for administration.
The existence of things like the Nitdroid project and Jolla/Sailfish, plus the fact that N9 matched or possibly outsold the Lumia crud despite the massive disparity in corporate support, shows how good the technology was. The last time I saw this was...ooh it hurts to type this name...the Amiga. Commodore went under, not due to poor demand for the Amiga, which was profitable to the very end, but due to massive losses in PC clones that led them to credit default with their suppliers. They couldn't get parts to build Amigas anymore.
I hope that the prevalence of open source these days gives the keepers of the Meego flame more success then the Amigans had.
I have always maintained that the existence of Target is a response to K-Mart trying to slug it out with Walmart on price, and losing, instead of building brand-equity and following their demographic upmarket into higher margin retailing (like Sears, who bought them, or Radio Shack, or JC Penney, etc.).
I like to describe it like this: First-past-the-post forces coalition building into the political parties, whereas proportional elections have coalition-building in the legislature. Gerrymandering is like coding theory: The party in control of the districts can trade margin of victory (bit error rate) for number of seats (data rate), but if you design for a large number of seats (high data rate) a small decline in popular support (signal-to-noise ratio) will cause a large number of seats to flip (catastrophic rise in bit error rate).
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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I would make a stronger point about the removal of the floppy: Apple has an indifferent attitude toward removable media generally. The iPod, as hardware, would make a perfectly serviceable external hard drive, but software support for this was thin, and we also have the absence of SD slots. The organizing principle seems to be to have iTunes managing data instead of a file manager. iTunes knows more about the (meta-)data and can handle it with more aplomb than a general purpose file manager. That comes at the cost of limiting its scope (taking things out again) to AV media and rinky-dink apps, and keeping removable media at arm's length (copy and import rather than open up and look inside); using iTunes to manage CAD files or source code would be ridiculous.
On Gnome, I don't have much complaint. With Ubuntu and a fast connection, it is very easy to add in stuff as you need it, "Golly, I need XYZ...sudo apt-get install XYZ". My bigger beef is with KDE, which seems to be built by people who have spent too much time looking at Macs in the Apple store and not enough time trying to use Macs to do actual work. More broadly, I find that everyone in the industry apes Apple too much; Apple has their niche, and serves it well, and profitably, but it can never be more than a minority of the market. Workhorse products serving the bulk of the market will be made by others.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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That is sort of the crux though. Steve Jobs takes things out: the SD slot, the keyboard, the command prompt, the floppy drive. Taking stuff out makes it possible to simplfy the user interface. If anyone else did this, the product would fail in the market for being feature-poor, but he could get away with it because he was trusted (by some, not all) to do it well. Granted, some of the stuff Jobs took out should have been left in, the lack of fan on the early Macs comes to mind. That is the charisma, the RDF, or maybe just street cred for having introduced the Mac. Whatever it is, it accrued to him personally, not to Apple as an organization which went adrift whae he was gone.
That also explains the stupid holy wars that surround Apple:
Look at Apple's new product! It is so innovative and easy to use! (Because he took stuff out and simplified)
It is not innovative! Everything there was already done by others. (True, but that is not what makes it easy to use)
Apple's stuff is merely a toy! (It is lacking certain features, but that is the price of simplicity. You are not the intended market.)
Apple is an industry leader! Everyone copies them! (Now everyone else can take those things out without being accused of being feature-poor.)
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
I would say the walled garden metaphor misses the point, or at least it gets taken too far. A better way to think about it is delegation and trust. With Linux, you can, in principle, trust no one and collect all the cource code yourself and compile it. The next step is to delegate the job of compiling code to a distro, trusting them (or for Slackware, Pat) to use only open source software in keeping with the distro's community values. Various other relationships can go from there: you presumably trust your employer-provided laptop not to spy on you, and they trust you not to improperly divulge company information on it.
I would say that Steve Job's real innovation was to be cognizant of this delegation of trust, and he was good at getting people to buy in: Call it Charisma or the RDF. Apple products are offered as a package deal, take it or leave it. If you want the nice ease of use and aesthetic package, you have to play by Apple's rules. No modding, no tinkering, no exceptions, no whining. I never cared for the deal and always walked away, but I would admit that it is appropriate for some (most notably the very old and very young).
Yahoo, well, can't say I have an opinion of what it is like now, haven't used it since 2004. Does it still exist?
A few months ago, I did an analysis of the list of parents' email addresses from the school drama club. Yahoo was the most common provider with about a third of them. After that was the local DSL or cable ISP. Third place was people using work email addresses. GMail was fourth at about 15%. Then Hotmail/Live. Only about 1%, myself and one other person, were using a paid 3rd party service. For the record, I use usermail.com and am very happy with them, and seldom use my Gmail account.
What conclusions can be drawn from that? I would say Yahoo-email's first-mover advantage is much more durable than Friendster's or Myspace's was. Or perhaps Facebook's is. I would think that a survey of younger people would have fewer yahoosiers and more GMailers
Apparently, they need publicity to fleece some investors, to get the money they need to hire lawyers, to then execute their business plan of robbing everyone else. Multiple layers of corruption! Who here thinks the investors will get any return after the management insiders extract their bonuses?
Not as old as SMTP, but older than ICQ, is the text-based talk program, which goes back to at least 4.2 BSD. And IRC and similar BBS type programs, as well as the VAX/VMS phone program, go back to the 80's at least. I know VMS phone had notification; can't remember if it had presence though.
Re:a philosophical primer on money for bitcoin mor
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Bitcoin Price Crashes
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But what does it mean to be "backed by something real"? Very few currencies are redeemable for specie anymore. And being backed by a commodity isn't enough: Confederate bonds backed by cotton circulated in Europe until WW1, but their value tracked the prospect of redemption more than the value of cotton. Government currencies are backed by courts, who pronounce judgments and settle debt in terms of fiat currency: For a stark example, US account holders on e-gold.com quite emphatically cannot claim their gold, but only a court's judgment of its dollar value. And having courts enforce the value of a currency is not always enough either. The Zimbabwean dollar lost its status as money despite draconian efforts of the government to enforce it and ban alternatives.
But government courts are not the only institutions that can enforce the value of a currency. Rai stone coins on the island of Yap don't have much intrinsic value, and the one that sank to the bottom of the ocean has none but circulates as money just like the rest of them. They are not backed by anything other than tradition and social norms. If social norms are enough to turn a hunk of limestone into money, it could happen to bitcoins, too.
Re:a philosophical primer on money for bitcoin mor
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Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
Your larger point that money is a social phenomenon is valid. I like to describe money as "a claim on the labor of others", so money doesn't make sense in isolation.
Even so, that leaves unanswered how we keep score. A physical token of a well known luxury material? A book entry in a government-chartered bank? Or a cryptographically-verified transaction history of proof-of-work hash values? When confidence in banks rose, fiat money replaced gold coinage. The real bitcoin experiment is whether confidence in crypto systems is enough to sustain the bitcoin economy without the help of government courts. If the bitcoin economy matures from the mostly speculative transactions we have seen so far to a more stable role as an abstract claim on others' labor in a diversified economy, then it has as much claim to the title of "money" as anything else. I am not ready to place better then 50-50 odds that will happen, but it could.
That concurs with my experience when I have to dial-up around the Great Firewall (which is blocking news from Egypt these days...don't want to give the natives any restless ideas...). I typically have to fall back to 9600 or 2400 bps, which is good enough to make an independent check on SSH key MD5 sums, at least. Modems signals are pretty standard down to 2400 bps, but the slower 1200 and 300bps standards are different between Europe and North America. Russia used North American standards, because the Soviets of the 80's were more accustomed to stealing American technology.
And I wish dial-up were more obvious to the Ubuntu packagers. Recent versions of Network Manager won't recognize Gnome PPP as a network connection and Evolution refuses to fetch mail, thinking it is offline. Arrrgh!
The Great Firewall now has DNS poisoning. To go to Facebook with a SOCKS proxy you have to run DNS requests through the proxy, by either setting it in the about:config or using FoxyProxy. Another way is to have a UMA-capable phone use Wi-Fi to serve up GPRS on Bluetooth. The GPRS is tunneled inside the UMA and your Western cell carrier is efffectively proxying the connection. Straight-up GPRS roaming (as with an iPhone for example) is blocked.
All this is far beyond your typical Chinese netzien.
I don't rememember this being the case as recently as a year ago; it was just those stinkin' reset packets..
>The inability to make a backup of the PP directly into its SD card
It can if you cough up $10. Such is the nature of the Palm OS universe. Spport from Palm isn't so hot, but the open (and, well, elderly) nature of the platform permits wide-ranging aftermarket.
And as long as we are comparing to iPhone, it doesn't even have an SD slot.
My idea isn't really all that original. The Sears Roebuck catalog didn't have credit cards or even the Federal Reserve System to clear personal checks. People paid C.O.D., and the post office acted as an intermediary. How was it paid for? C.O.D. charges, duh. We still see vestiges of this in the post office with postal money orders & strict laws on mail fraud. A modern version might have people opening the package in the presence of the shipper, who snaps a digital photo for the record.
The process would be opt-in (like, well, certified mail), and wouldn't really require Ebay's co-operation. FedEx, UPS, Western Union, or even the flippin' Post Office could just start offering the service. Buyers & sellers in high risk markets could start using it right away.
The human problems of trust introduced by the internet are basically the same as the trust problems introduced by the railroads 150 years ago (or by long distance Phoenician shipping 3000 years ago), and the solutions are similar. High-flying Silicon Valley companies have no sense of history, and are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
The Concorde didn't have trans-pacific endurance. Boeing dropped its SST project when they found they couldn't get enough endurance for its most promising market. Boeing clearly made the right move since the Concorde had no hope of recovering its multi-billion dollar development cost, though it did turn an operating profit on trans-Atlantic routes. (The institutional memory of this is a big reason why Boeing hasn't made an A380-sized plane, probably a good move again, since the 787 is undoubtedly more profitable than the A380 is.) There were plans for an extended range Concorde "B", but that was too controversial after a government bail out.
The upshot? This thing may very well be built, and we may have hypersonic flight for $8,000 one way, but the investors will probably either get sunk or bailed out by a government.
I think the best Palm device for this application is the TX, along with a Bluetooth keyboard. It just doesn't get any smaller, or more battery-friendly, than that. If you can find an infrared modem (I have a Psion model) you will have both Wi-Fi and dial-up. (I am not aware of an ethernet interface for a TX.) I don't know a way to edit a photo on one of these things, but it has an SD slot to take them in and the mail client can send them out.
But by the time you trick your TX out with all these accessories, it will cost more than an EEE PC. It may, however, be worth carrying a TX instead of a second, backup, EEE PC.
Palm cancelled the Foleo right before the EEE PC took off like a rocket. What a missed opportunity!
Your approach is similar to mine. The points or percentage scores are too easy to game and therefore are useless. I read the actual comments with a critical eye. The credibility of the feedback comments vary by a factor of 1000 to 1, so focus on the credible comments, and follow the links to see if the buyer is a whiner or not. This points up the reform Ebay should be making: Increase the permissible length of feedback comments. 80 characters is so 1996.
The gun auction sites have a built-in resistance to many of Ebay's problems. You can ship a gun only to a federally licensed dealer, so that automatically puts an identifiable escrow agent into the transaction as a witness. Legally, he is there to see the ID, but also he obviously sees the gun actually delivered to the buyer's possession. EBay might take a lesson from this and open a counter at every Kinko's where you show can show a claim code and get the stuff. Or see the benefit of real meatspace ID's and offer a type of account verified by a notary.
Maybe someone can come up with a web-of-trust scheme to rate buyers & sellers more effectively. I doubt Ebay ever will. The most likely result is Ebay will continue to flounder about, the alternatives will never gain traction, and the world will revert to how it was before Ebay came about. Only now classifieds are free on Craig's list and middlemen are easy to find on Google.
I get the creeps from Putin every time he is in the news, and recycling of backup tapes and even here seems innocuous. The backup regimes I have seen typically have daily incremental backups, monthly full backups, etc, and each sort of backup has a retention policy. Daily backups might be retained for six months, monthly backups for 10 years, and every sixth month forever. Even if the media is unspeakably cheap, it still is a hassle purchase, handle, & store securely. If you have stacks of redundant copies, you have more chances that someone will (even accidentally) walk off with something that should be kept confidential, even worse with leakers who will grab a copy of everything and leak only the parts most amenable to their own position to a credulous reporter. So when you do a daily backup, you just re-write the six-month-old daily backup media.
It's hard to see how a policy like this can be used to advantage by some bigwig. How can anyone keep track of what is on the long-retention backup vs the nightlies? And besides that, anything made that day and deleted before the nightly backup is lost anyway. Retaining only the monthly backup is only a matter of degree in the granularity.
Of course it does. Firefox runs on Windows. From those browser stats I can conclude that among those developing for Windows web servers, few run Mac or Linux (no kidding) but Firefox and Vista are increasing. No surprises there. But I can't conclude anything about popularity trends for non-Windows OSes outside the cloistered demographic served by W3 Schools.
A broader measure is Google's stats, since just about everybody uses Google. But even there, not everybody uses Google equally often. I would guess that Google overstates IE's usage since power users, who are more likely to use Firefox, search more efficiently, while inexperienced & casual users are more likely to use IE, with Google almost acting as an address bar.
I've thought about this, and can think of two possible solutions. First is a standardized battery geometry that bolts in from underneath. To change the battery you drive over a pit, like for an oil change. Battery units would be leased on a subscription basis, so the risk of poor battery condition is spread out. I don't think the soda-pop bottle deposit model, nor the propane cylinder exchange model would work very well since the batteries are very expensive compared to their content of energy; the supplier would be hit by Gresham's Law. The second approach is to rent a battery trailer (or gas-powered generator) that plugged into a standard connector on the rear bumper. Recharge stations wouldn't require special equipment, and any ol' gas station can get in the business, but it is more cumbersome for the consumer. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, an electric vehicle can be set up for both.
That website seems a bit Windows-centric. They offer dotnet and ASP certs, and to them PHP is an alternative to ASP that "can be used with Microsoft's IIS on Windows". Not a representative place to track trends. Would you think website statistics on amiga.org are representative?
Arrgh, everyone in this thread is missing the point. It's return on investment, guys. As a managers of a public corporation, MS bigwigs are duty-bound to direct company resources to to maximize return on stockholder equity. Given that they have high margins and monopolistic market share with Windows & Office, there is no potential for growth there; no one is going to pay $800 anymore for an office suite no matter how good it is, ribbon or no ribbon. The optimum fiscal strategy is to invest the minimum required to protect the cash cow. At the same time, Linux/OO.o gradually cuts away at the ability to charge fat profit margins. In this way, Microsoft can maintain 90% marketshare forever and still lose.
The experience of GE small appliances is instructive. Despite the fact that GE toasters & irons had strong market share, GE's strong brand couldn't command a premium price. You care much less about the quality of, innovative new features of, & aftermarket service for, a $20 blender, compared to a $600 washer/dryer set, so Jack Welch sold the former business and invested in the latter.
My broader theory is that properly-managed technology companies, as their core technical competence becomes obsolete, metamorph.
Into an investment bank, which is essentially what GE & GM are now, or similarly
a conglomerate (United Technologies, Tyco)
a break-up, (AT&T, Motorola)
or a completely different company in a different business (IBM, Apple)
Military contractors seem to go through (2) and (3) on 30-year cycle. Companies that cannot adapt can only merge together to reduce costs, the process of dinosaurs mating, as happened to all the mainframe makers except IBM, or just shrivel away (Kodak, Zenith). But that is not necessarily failure; sometimes the sound business decision is to close up shop, like Dairy Queen does every November. If the company crashes and explodes (Commodore), that is failure.
So what is Microsoft's fate? They seem to be attempting (2) with XBox and MSN/Windows live or whatever it is, but doing rather poorly. Even with healthy growth from here forward, the money invested in XBox would have returned better yields in treasury bonds. MS-branded Linux would seem to be an example of (4), so that seems unlikely to me. Either MS will get better at (2) (by mastering such conglomerate basics as buying medium-sized companies that are already good at what they do) or at some point a chainsaw-wielding exec will take over, lay everybody off, chop the company apart, and walk home with a jillion dollars in stock bonuses. The mind boggles at the prospect of a leveraged buyout of Microsoft, but we have been surprised before. The world needs a new Neutron Jack!
Slashdot Mirror
I was surprised to see how many networks allow connections on port 23 when, for example, all web browsing goes through a proxy. I think the reason is that Cisco routers use plain 'ol telnet for administration.
The existence of things like the Nitdroid project and Jolla/Sailfish, plus the fact that N9 matched or possibly outsold the Lumia crud despite the massive disparity in corporate support, shows how good the technology was. The last time I saw this was...ooh it hurts to type this name...the Amiga. Commodore went under, not due to poor demand for the Amiga, which was profitable to the very end, but due to massive losses in PC clones that led them to credit default with their suppliers. They couldn't get parts to build Amigas anymore.
I hope that the prevalence of open source these days gives the keepers of the Meego flame more success then the Amigans had.
I have always maintained that the existence of Target is a response to K-Mart trying to slug it out with Walmart on price, and losing, instead of building brand-equity and following their demographic upmarket into higher margin retailing (like Sears, who bought them, or Radio Shack, or JC Penney, etc.).
I like to describe it like this: First-past-the-post forces coalition building into the political parties, whereas proportional elections have coalition-building in the legislature. Gerrymandering is like coding theory: The party in control of the districts can trade margin of victory (bit error rate) for number of seats (data rate), but if you design for a large number of seats (high data rate) a small decline in popular support (signal-to-noise ratio) will cause a large number of seats to flip (catastrophic rise in bit error rate).
I would make a stronger point about the removal of the floppy: Apple has an indifferent attitude toward removable media generally. The iPod, as hardware, would make a perfectly serviceable external hard drive, but software support for this was thin, and we also have the absence of SD slots. The organizing principle seems to be to have iTunes managing data instead of a file manager. iTunes knows more about the (meta-)data and can handle it with more aplomb than a general purpose file manager. That comes at the cost of limiting its scope (taking things out again) to AV media and rinky-dink apps, and keeping removable media at arm's length (copy and import rather than open up and look inside); using iTunes to manage CAD files or source code would be ridiculous.
On Gnome, I don't have much complaint. With Ubuntu and a fast connection, it is very easy to add in stuff as you need it, "Golly, I need XYZ...sudo apt-get install XYZ". My bigger beef is with KDE, which seems to be built by people who have spent too much time looking at Macs in the Apple store and not enough time trying to use Macs to do actual work. More broadly, I find that everyone in the industry apes Apple too much; Apple has their niche, and serves it well, and profitably, but it can never be more than a minority of the market. Workhorse products serving the bulk of the market will be made by others.
That is sort of the crux though. Steve Jobs takes things out: the SD slot, the keyboard, the command prompt, the floppy drive. Taking stuff out makes it possible to simplfy the user interface. If anyone else did this, the product would fail in the market for being feature-poor, but he could get away with it because he was trusted (by some, not all) to do it well. Granted, some of the stuff Jobs took out should have been left in, the lack of fan on the early Macs comes to mind. That is the charisma, the RDF, or maybe just street cred for having introduced the Mac. Whatever it is, it accrued to him personally, not to Apple as an organization which went adrift whae he was gone.
That also explains the stupid holy wars that surround Apple:
I would say the walled garden metaphor misses the point, or at least it gets taken too far. A better way to think about it is delegation and trust. With Linux, you can, in principle, trust no one and collect all the cource code yourself and compile it. The next step is to delegate the job of compiling code to a distro, trusting them (or for Slackware, Pat) to use only open source software in keeping with the distro's community values. Various other relationships can go from there: you presumably trust your employer-provided laptop not to spy on you, and they trust you not to improperly divulge company information on it.
I would say that Steve Job's real innovation was to be cognizant of this delegation of trust, and he was good at getting people to buy in: Call it Charisma or the RDF. Apple products are offered as a package deal, take it or leave it. If you want the nice ease of use and aesthetic package, you have to play by Apple's rules. No modding, no tinkering, no exceptions, no whining. I never cared for the deal and always walked away, but I would admit that it is appropriate for some (most notably the very old and very young).
Yahoo, well, can't say I have an opinion of what it is like now, haven't used it since 2004. Does it still exist?
A few months ago, I did an analysis of the list of parents' email addresses from the school drama club. Yahoo was the most common provider with about a third of them. After that was the local DSL or cable ISP. Third place was people using work email addresses. GMail was fourth at about 15%. Then Hotmail/Live. Only about 1%, myself and one other person, were using a paid 3rd party service. For the record, I use usermail.com and am very happy with them, and seldom use my Gmail account.
What conclusions can be drawn from that? I would say Yahoo-email's first-mover advantage is much more durable than Friendster's or Myspace's was. Or perhaps Facebook's is. I would think that a survey of younger people would have fewer yahoosiers and more GMailers
Apparently, they need publicity to fleece some investors, to get the money they need to hire lawyers, to then execute their business plan of robbing everyone else. Multiple layers of corruption! Who here thinks the investors will get any return after the management insiders extract their bonuses?
Not as old as SMTP, but older than ICQ, is the text-based talk program, which goes back to at least 4.2 BSD. And IRC and similar BBS type programs, as well as the VAX/VMS phone program, go back to the 80's at least. I know VMS phone had notification; can't remember if it had presence though.
But what does it mean to be "backed by something real"? Very few currencies are redeemable for specie anymore. And being backed by a commodity isn't enough: Confederate bonds backed by cotton circulated in Europe until WW1, but their value tracked the prospect of redemption more than the value of cotton. Government currencies are backed by courts, who pronounce judgments and settle debt in terms of fiat currency: For a stark example, US account holders on e-gold.com quite emphatically cannot claim their gold, but only a court's judgment of its dollar value. And having courts enforce the value of a currency is not always enough either. The Zimbabwean dollar lost its status as money despite draconian efforts of the government to enforce it and ban alternatives.
But government courts are not the only institutions that can enforce the value of a currency. Rai stone coins on the island of Yap don't have much intrinsic value, and the one that sank to the bottom of the ocean has none but circulates as money just like the rest of them. They are not backed by anything other than tradition and social norms. If social norms are enough to turn a hunk of limestone into money, it could happen to bitcoins, too.
Your larger point that money is a social phenomenon is valid. I like to describe money as "a claim on the labor of others", so money doesn't make sense in isolation.
Even so, that leaves unanswered how we keep score. A physical token of a well known luxury material? A book entry in a government-chartered bank? Or a cryptographically-verified transaction history of proof-of-work hash values? When confidence in banks rose, fiat money replaced gold coinage. The real bitcoin experiment is whether confidence in crypto systems is enough to sustain the bitcoin economy without the help of government courts. If the bitcoin economy matures from the mostly speculative transactions we have seen so far to a more stable role as an abstract claim on others' labor in a diversified economy, then it has as much claim to the title of "money" as anything else. I am not ready to place better then 50-50 odds that will happen, but it could.
That concurs with my experience when I have to dial-up around the Great Firewall (which is blocking news from Egypt these days...don't want to give the natives any restless ideas...). I typically have to fall back to 9600 or 2400 bps, which is good enough to make an independent check on SSH key MD5 sums, at least. Modems signals are pretty standard down to 2400 bps, but the slower 1200 and 300bps standards are different between Europe and North America. Russia used North American standards, because the Soviets of the 80's were more accustomed to stealing American technology.
And I wish dial-up were more obvious to the Ubuntu packagers. Recent versions of Network Manager won't recognize Gnome PPP as a network connection and Evolution refuses to fetch mail, thinking it is offline. Arrrgh!
The Great Firewall now has DNS poisoning. To go to Facebook with a SOCKS proxy you have to run DNS requests through the proxy, by either setting it in the about:config or using FoxyProxy. Another way is to have a UMA-capable phone use Wi-Fi to serve up GPRS on Bluetooth. The GPRS is tunneled inside the UMA and your Western cell carrier is efffectively proxying the connection. Straight-up GPRS roaming (as with an iPhone for example) is blocked.
All this is far beyond your typical Chinese netzien.
I don't rememember this being the case as recently as a year ago; it was just those stinkin' reset packets..
>didn't include a microphone
You can buy one that clips onto the athena connector.
>The inability to make a backup of the PP directly into its SD card
It can if you cough up $10. Such is the nature of the Palm OS universe. Spport from Palm isn't so hot, but the open (and, well, elderly) nature of the platform permits wide-ranging aftermarket.
And as long as we are comparing to iPhone, it doesn't even have an SD slot.
My idea isn't really all that original. The Sears Roebuck catalog didn't have credit cards or even the Federal Reserve System to clear personal checks. People paid C.O.D., and the post office acted as an intermediary. How was it paid for? C.O.D. charges, duh. We still see vestiges of this in the post office with postal money orders & strict laws on mail fraud. A modern version might have people opening the package in the presence of the shipper, who snaps a digital photo for the record.
The process would be opt-in (like, well, certified mail), and wouldn't really require Ebay's co-operation. FedEx, UPS, Western Union, or even the flippin' Post Office could just start offering the service. Buyers & sellers in high risk markets could start using it right away.
The human problems of trust introduced by the internet are basically the same as the trust problems introduced by the railroads 150 years ago (or by long distance Phoenician shipping 3000 years ago), and the solutions are similar. High-flying Silicon Valley companies have no sense of history, and are doomed to repeat its mistakes.
The Concorde didn't have trans-pacific endurance. Boeing dropped its SST project when they found they couldn't get enough endurance for its most promising market. Boeing clearly made the right move since the Concorde had no hope of recovering its multi-billion dollar development cost, though it did turn an operating profit on trans-Atlantic routes. (The institutional memory of this is a big reason why Boeing hasn't made an A380-sized plane, probably a good move again, since the 787 is undoubtedly more profitable than the A380 is.) There were plans for an extended range Concorde "B", but that was too controversial after a government bail out.
The upshot? This thing may very well be built, and we may have hypersonic flight for $8,000 one way, but the investors will probably either get sunk or bailed out by a government.
I think the best Palm device for this application is the TX, along with a Bluetooth keyboard. It just doesn't get any smaller, or more battery-friendly, than that. If you can find an infrared modem (I have a Psion model) you will have both Wi-Fi and dial-up. (I am not aware of an ethernet interface for a TX.) I don't know a way to edit a photo on one of these things, but it has an SD slot to take them in and the mail client can send them out.
But by the time you trick your TX out with all these accessories, it will cost more than an EEE PC. It may, however, be worth carrying a TX instead of a second, backup, EEE PC.
Palm cancelled the Foleo right before the EEE PC took off like a rocket. What a missed opportunity!
Your approach is similar to mine. The points or percentage scores are too easy to game and therefore are useless. I read the actual comments with a critical eye. The credibility of the feedback comments vary by a factor of 1000 to 1, so focus on the credible comments, and follow the links to see if the buyer is a whiner or not. This points up the reform Ebay should be making: Increase the permissible length of feedback comments. 80 characters is so 1996.
The gun auction sites have a built-in resistance to many of Ebay's problems. You can ship a gun only to a federally licensed dealer, so that automatically puts an identifiable escrow agent into the transaction as a witness. Legally, he is there to see the ID, but also he obviously sees the gun actually delivered to the buyer's possession. EBay might take a lesson from this and open a counter at every Kinko's where you show can show a claim code and get the stuff. Or see the benefit of real meatspace ID's and offer a type of account verified by a notary.
Maybe someone can come up with a web-of-trust scheme to rate buyers & sellers more effectively. I doubt Ebay ever will. The most likely result is Ebay will continue to flounder about, the alternatives will never gain traction, and the world will revert to how it was before Ebay came about. Only now classifieds are free on Craig's list and middlemen are easy to find on Google.
I get the creeps from Putin every time he is in the news, and recycling of backup tapes and even here seems innocuous. The backup regimes I have seen typically have daily incremental backups, monthly full backups, etc, and each sort of backup has a retention policy. Daily backups might be retained for six months, monthly backups for 10 years, and every sixth month forever. Even if the media is unspeakably cheap, it still is a hassle purchase, handle, & store securely. If you have stacks of redundant copies, you have more chances that someone will (even accidentally) walk off with something that should be kept confidential, even worse with leakers who will grab a copy of everything and leak only the parts most amenable to their own position to a credulous reporter. So when you do a daily backup, you just re-write the six-month-old daily backup media.
It's hard to see how a policy like this can be used to advantage by some bigwig. How can anyone keep track of what is on the long-retention backup vs the nightlies? And besides that, anything made that day and deleted before the nightly backup is lost anyway. Retaining only the monthly backup is only a matter of degree in the granularity.
Of course it does. Firefox runs on Windows. From those browser stats I can conclude that among those developing for Windows web servers, few run Mac or Linux (no kidding) but Firefox and Vista are increasing. No surprises there. But I can't conclude anything about popularity trends for non-Windows OSes outside the cloistered demographic served by W3 Schools.
A broader measure is Google's stats, since just about everybody uses Google. But even there, not everybody uses Google equally often. I would guess that Google overstates IE's usage since power users, who are more likely to use Firefox, search more efficiently, while inexperienced & casual users are more likely to use IE, with Google almost acting as an address bar.
I've thought about this, and can think of two possible solutions. First is a standardized battery geometry that bolts in from underneath. To change the battery you drive over a pit, like for an oil change. Battery units would be leased on a subscription basis, so the risk of poor battery condition is spread out. I don't think the soda-pop bottle deposit model, nor the propane cylinder exchange model would work very well since the batteries are very expensive compared to their content of energy; the supplier would be hit by Gresham's Law. The second approach is to rent a battery trailer (or gas-powered generator) that plugged into a standard connector on the rear bumper. Recharge stations wouldn't require special equipment, and any ol' gas station can get in the business, but it is more cumbersome for the consumer. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, an electric vehicle can be set up for both.
That website seems a bit Windows-centric. They offer dotnet and ASP certs, and to them PHP is an alternative to ASP that "can be used with Microsoft's IIS on Windows". Not a representative place to track trends. Would you think website statistics on amiga.org are representative?
Arrgh, everyone in this thread is missing the point. It's return on investment, guys. As a managers of a public corporation, MS bigwigs are duty-bound to direct company resources to to maximize return on stockholder equity. Given that they have high margins and monopolistic market share with Windows & Office, there is no potential for growth there; no one is going to pay $800 anymore for an office suite no matter how good it is, ribbon or no ribbon. The optimum fiscal strategy is to invest the minimum required to protect the cash cow. At the same time, Linux/OO.o gradually cuts away at the ability to charge fat profit margins. In this way, Microsoft can maintain 90% marketshare forever and still lose.
The experience of GE small appliances is instructive. Despite the fact that GE toasters & irons had strong market share, GE's strong brand couldn't command a premium price. You care much less about the quality of, innovative new features of, & aftermarket service for, a $20 blender, compared to a $600 washer/dryer set, so Jack Welch sold the former business and invested in the latter.
My broader theory is that properly-managed technology companies, as their core technical competence becomes obsolete, metamorph.
- Into an investment bank, which is essentially what GE & GM are now, or similarly
- a conglomerate (United Technologies, Tyco)
- a break-up, (AT&T, Motorola)
- or a completely different company in a different business (IBM, Apple)
Military contractors seem to go through (2) and (3) on 30-year cycle. Companies that cannot adapt can only merge together to reduce costs, the process of dinosaurs mating, as happened to all the mainframe makers except IBM, or just shrivel away (Kodak, Zenith). But that is not necessarily failure; sometimes the sound business decision is to close up shop, like Dairy Queen does every November. If the company crashes and explodes (Commodore), that is failure.So what is Microsoft's fate? They seem to be attempting (2) with XBox and MSN/Windows live or whatever it is, but doing rather poorly. Even with healthy growth from here forward, the money invested in XBox would have returned better yields in treasury bonds. MS-branded Linux would seem to be an example of (4), so that seems unlikely to me. Either MS will get better at (2) (by mastering such conglomerate basics as buying medium-sized companies that are already good at what they do) or at some point a chainsaw-wielding exec will take over, lay everybody off, chop the company apart, and walk home with a jillion dollars in stock bonuses. The mind boggles at the prospect of a leveraged buyout of Microsoft, but we have been surprised before. The world needs a new Neutron Jack!