Ebay is sending this to anyone selling WoW accounts or items:
**PLEASE READ THIS IMPORTANT EMAIL REGARDING YOUR LISTING(S)**
We would like to let you know that we removed your listing:
XXX
because the intellectual property rights owner notified us, under penalty of perjury, that your listing or the item itself infringes their copyright, trademark, or other rights.
We have credited any associated fees to your account. We have also notified the bidders that the listing(s) was removed, and that they are not obligated to complete the transaction.
If you relist this or any other similar items on eBay, your account likely will be suspended.
If you believe your listing was ended in error, or have questions regarding the removal of this listing, please contact the intellectual property rights owner directly at:
ESA - Entertainment Software Association dmca@theESA.com
eBay is available to answer questions, but since it is the rights owner that requested the removal of your listing(s), we encourage you to contact them first.
For more information on eBay's cooperation with rights owners through the VeRO Program, and a list of rights owners that have created About Me pages, please visit:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/vero-remov ed -listing.html http://pages.ebay.com/help/communit y/vero-aboutme. html
Thank you for your cooperation.
Regards,
Customer Support (Trust and Safety Department) eBay Inc
"As I get older, I dont game as much or as often. I expect there's a lot more like me in the same boat..."
It's the same for me. I've gotten sick of dealing with drivers, and Direct X versions on the PC and with what I saw as a general drop in quality of Japanese console games.
I have improved my gaming experience by restricting my PC gaming to games by Blizzard, because Blizzard has never done less than comepletely exceed my expectations. On the console side I've swapped my PS2 for an XBox so I can play my Bioware games on the couch and use XBox live for those rare fighting games where the programmers didn't get sloppy like Capcom and SNK seem to be doing now. I don't buy anything that I haven't already played or read reviews of, period. Sure I play a lot fewer games now, but I also waste a lot less time and money on the sitty ones.
As if it isn't bad enough that people are expected to try and comprehend messages written by people with no grasp of spelling or grammar the problem is compounded by the fact that most companies don't want anyone correcting other people! I have been yelled at, chewed out, and disciplined at previous work for replies to poorly-written emails that explained the problems and the correct use of language. The general opinion of managers on this topic is that as long as someone can get the point across anything short of prurient obscenity is acceptable, and correcting people is bad because it makes people feel bad.
If you haven't noticed, cheap people and poor people are NOT part of Apple's target demographic. Apple sells to people with money to burn and no time to spend on cheap stuff, not to people who have time to research lesser-known brands and snipe ebay to get a bargain price.
" It struck me as being a program designed by people who have never actually had to use that sort of software."
You're right on the money. Gimp is really great if you're a programmer and need to toss together some images for a web site, but for anything else the interface and featureset pretty much blows.
"...but it's sort of irritating that you answer every single computer related question with the stock answer, "why not switch to mac?"
It isn't half as irritating as being a Linux user is. I switched from Linux to OS X because I eventually realized that desktop Linux distributions generally create far more problems than they ever solve. The reason Mac users always suggest switching to a Mac is that for a lot of desktop problems, Macs are the answer.
Linux was really neat in 1999, and back then switching to Linux was a great way to get away from a long list of horrible problems with Windows and Mac OS. But Linux isn't growing up nearly as quickly as OS X and Windows have in the same time span, so expect to see a lot more of people suggesting that the solution to a lot of Linux problems is to stop using Linux.
I've done a lot of tech work involving crazy hours, long shifts and intense stress. It led to a near-mental breakdown and screwed my brain up so much that I developed an abnormal brain wave problem that actually lead to a seizure.
And the scary part is, I'm a lucky one. I've known guys who worked like that for years on end and have gone damned near insane. It's scary, and unless you want to end up a nervous wreck don't do it.
This is a common scam tech companies and recruiting firms (Particularly recruiting firms!) pull to try and either get out of paying benefits during probationary periods or bring extra money to the recruiting firm. The easiest way to get them to drop the contract BS is to get an offer and then accept it contingent on real employment. Simply refuse to go contract. They WILL cave. Usually within fifteen minutes, sometimes it might take a day or two, but if they want you, they'll give up on the scam and cave in.
It depends on the quality of service one wants. I don't mind paying it because, given the experiences I had during the beta, Blizzard's servers work much better than games in the $9-$13 range. I quit playing EQ because I got sick of paying for servers that crashed regularly and were unavailable during peak times. My experience with the WoW beta suggests that Blizzard was tooling things to make sure that those things don't happen, and assuming that it stays that way I'm cool with it.
"'Keeping up with the Joneses' isn't a reason inof itself."
It is when those who do not keep up risk economic obscurity. At the time of the original space race, very few people realized what an economic boon it would be for the USA -- and would have been to the Soviets, had they not been socialists working toward communism -- however now people realize the value of competing in a space race. With China, the EU, and India fighting to become economic superpowers and the USA fighting to remain an economic superpower, any nation not joining in risks falling too far behind to ever catch up. That's a damned compelling reason to get to work in space.
Because India going to space would start a space race in Asia. China would speed up its own space program to try and prove that they can beat the Indians. Pakistan would start a space program out of contempt for India. All three nations will gain advanced rocket engine technology that will be used by their militaries to enhance nuclear weapon delivery.
Doing all of this will provide these nations with plenty of cool technology and a lot of capable engineers. At that point the US Government would have no choice but to join in the space race or risk losing what little edge it has left over Asia in that area. This will spur EU nations to start pushing their space programs so that they can at least stay in the game.
At this point the worlds economic powerhouses would all be engaged in cool space missions. With people of very different cultures approaching the problems related in getting people to space and back alive, there will be all sorts of different solutions produced.But without a cold war in the way this time, many of the technologies and personnel produced can be shared, allowing everyone involved to do it better and faster. And with everyone working together, maybe nations would be less likely to drop out.
A new space race would be a huge step forward in the scientific evolution of mankind and I can't wait!
It all depends on what job you're trying to fill or get. Some areas of tech are flooded with competent people, such as java programming and web development, so you don't have much luck looking for those jobs. DBAs, on the other hand, are very hard to come by at any skill level and anyone who can get Oracle certifications is guaranteed a high-paying job in just about any civilzed nation on earth.
Experience is also a big issue in many areas. Companies are still loathe to hire inexperienced or even mid-level sysadmins, but if you have real senior enterprise sysadmin experience you'll do well in just about any area with a few big shops. Just about any sort of senior programmer is also in demand, but if you have fewer than five years of real experience most employers don't give a damn.
So it really just depends on what you can do and how long you've been doing it.
Keep in mind that this card was just released yesterday, and is in short supply. Give it a month and it will be right where the PCI-E cards are price wise, which is about $135 on Pricewatch.
"Christ, if he's going to get screwed by some stupid HMO if he doesn't play their little game or something, I'll toss a couple bucks into a donation fund for the medical bills if someone sets one up."
I second the motion... anyone know if he's accepting paypal donations or anything like that?
Sun has been pushing smart-card signon systems for years -- along with plenty of little security vendors -- not to mention smart rings, smart money clips, hell, smart anything that can take on a key. Has anyone in the mainstream picked it up? No.
Of course, MSFT has a hell of a lot more clout than Sun, but I just don't see this as being technology that anyone other than a nerd who gets off on RFID actually wanting to bother with.
Stories of fire-breathing dragons are also common among almost all of the world's cultures. That doesn't make it any less likely that they are all handed down from one great experience.
Look at it this way -- there have been thousands of human cultures, each with thousands of items in their individual mythologies. Statistically, there's a pretty good chance that out of all those items, at least one or two will match up.
Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to figure this out, so idiots keep wasting money investing in schemes to find the Atlantis and Noah's ark.
Sun's Linux roadmap is headed in the same place that all of Sun's plans lead - dwindling sales and bankruptcy. Until Sun's board grows some balls and fires Scott McNealy's arrogant ass, that company is just going to keep pushing one lame idea after another until nobody can remember what it is Sun does well enough to justify using Sun kit.
"Plus, the stores in rural places don't carry anything, so you have to do all your shopping by catalog."
City stores aren't much better. There's nothing like an extreme lack of space to hamper selection. I live in Washington DC, where we have one Best Buy and one Kmart. Just about every other store in town in some sort of specialty shoppe with a poor selection and high prices. The only notable exceptions are the usually clothing chains and a wealth of huge bookstores. I do the majority of my shopping via the web or trips to VA/MD because when I need specialty electronics, video games that aren't AAA titles, or clothes that don't cost way too much to beat up, I just can't get that stuff in the city.
Yeah, but what you aren't factoring in is the cost of lost customers due to shitty foreign tech support. When Dell moved tech support overseas customers were incensed at the horrible english of the foreign workers and Dell foresaw a huge impact on repeat business. So they moved the tech support back to the US, and people stopped complaining.
It's not only the lack of things to do that sucks, but there's also the lack of other jobs issue. One of my previous employers moved the majority of IT work to Indianapolis because Gartner told them that there would be almost no competition for IT jobs there, so they would be able to cut existing salaries, cut raises, and hire new workers at rock-bottom salaries. Of course, the plan backfired when 90% of the IT staff quit shortly after the plan was announced, but the execs went through with it all and have been paying for the decision ever since...
Companies that build in urban areas usually do so because there are a lot of customers in the city itself, and a lot of potential employees living in the city and surrounding suburbs. As business in the area grows, offices that do not deal directly with customers can be moved (or created) in the suburbs to allow for easy meetings between the two. Cities also tend to be very near important things like airports, which can come in handy when dealing with out-of-town clients.
Slashdot Mirror
Ebay is sending this to anyone selling WoW accounts or items:
v ed -listing.htmlt y/vero-aboutme. html
**PLEASE READ THIS IMPORTANT EMAIL REGARDING YOUR LISTING(S)**
We would like to let you know that we removed your listing:
XXX
because the intellectual property rights owner notified us, under penalty of perjury, that your listing or the item itself infringes their copyright, trademark, or other rights.
We have credited any associated fees to your account. We have also notified the bidders that the listing(s) was removed, and that they are not obligated to complete the transaction.
If you relist this or any other similar items on eBay, your account likely will be suspended.
If you believe your listing was ended in error, or have questions regarding the removal of this listing, please contact the intellectual property rights owner directly at:
ESA - Entertainment Software Association
dmca@theESA.com
eBay is available to answer questions, but since it is the rights owner that requested the removal of your listing(s), we encourage you to contact them first.
For more information on eBay's cooperation with rights owners through the VeRO Program, and a list of rights owners that have created About Me pages, please visit:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/vero-remo
http://pages.ebay.com/help/communi
Thank you for your cooperation.
Regards,
Customer Support (Trust and Safety Department)
eBay Inc
You mean like every PVP rpg that allows looting the other players after they die? It's been done, and the players hated it.
"As I get older, I dont game as much or as often. I expect there's a lot more like me in the same boat..."
It's the same for me. I've gotten sick of dealing with drivers, and Direct X versions on the PC and with what I saw as a general drop in quality of Japanese console games.
I have improved my gaming experience by restricting my PC gaming to games by Blizzard, because Blizzard has never done less than comepletely exceed my expectations. On the console side I've swapped my PS2 for an XBox so I can play my Bioware games on the couch and use XBox live for those rare fighting games where the programmers didn't get sloppy like Capcom and SNK seem to be doing now. I don't buy anything that I haven't already played or read reviews of, period. Sure I play a lot fewer games now, but I also waste a lot less time and money on the sitty ones.
As if it isn't bad enough that people are expected to try and comprehend messages written by people with no grasp of spelling or grammar the problem is compounded by the fact that most companies don't want anyone correcting other people! I have been yelled at, chewed out, and disciplined at previous work for replies to poorly-written emails that explained the problems and the correct use of language. The general opinion of managers on this topic is that as long as someone can get the point across anything short of prurient obscenity is acceptable, and correcting people is bad because it makes people feel bad.
If you haven't noticed, cheap people and poor people are NOT part of Apple's target demographic. Apple sells to people with money to burn and no time to spend on cheap stuff, not to people who have time to research lesser-known brands and snipe ebay to get a bargain price.
" It struck me as being a program designed by people who have never actually had to use that sort of software."
You're right on the money. Gimp is really great if you're a programmer and need to toss together some images for a web site, but for anything else the interface and featureset pretty much blows.
"...but it's sort of irritating that you answer every single computer related question with the stock answer, "why not switch to mac?"
It isn't half as irritating as being a Linux user is. I switched from Linux to OS X because I eventually realized that desktop Linux distributions generally create far more problems than they ever solve. The reason Mac users always suggest switching to a Mac is that for a lot of desktop problems, Macs are the answer.
Linux was really neat in 1999, and back then switching to Linux was a great way to get away from a long list of horrible problems with Windows and Mac OS. But Linux isn't growing up nearly as quickly as OS X and Windows have in the same time span, so expect to see a lot more of people suggesting that the solution to a lot of Linux problems is to stop using Linux.
I've done a lot of tech work involving crazy hours, long shifts and intense stress. It led to a near-mental breakdown and screwed my brain up so much that I developed an abnormal brain wave problem that actually lead to a seizure.
And the scary part is, I'm a lucky one. I've known guys who worked like that for years on end and have gone damned near insane. It's scary, and unless you want to end up a nervous wreck don't do it.
This is a common scam tech companies and recruiting firms (Particularly recruiting firms!) pull to try and either get out of paying benefits during probationary periods or bring extra money to the recruiting firm. The easiest way to get them to drop the contract BS is to get an offer and then accept it contingent on real employment. Simply refuse to go contract. They WILL cave. Usually within fifteen minutes, sometimes it might take a day or two, but if they want you, they'll give up on the scam and cave in.
It depends on the quality of service one wants. I don't mind paying it because, given the experiences I had during the beta, Blizzard's servers work much better than games in the $9-$13 range. I quit playing EQ because I got sick of paying for servers that crashed regularly and were unavailable during peak times. My experience with the WoW beta suggests that Blizzard was tooling things to make sure that those things don't happen, and assuming that it stays that way I'm cool with it.
I picked up a copy at the Best Buy here in DC, which had a pile of them heaped on a table.
"'Keeping up with the Joneses' isn't a reason inof itself."
It is when those who do not keep up risk economic obscurity. At the time of the original space race, very few people realized what an economic boon it would be for the USA -- and would have been to the Soviets, had they not been socialists working toward communism -- however now people realize the value of competing in a space race. With China, the EU, and India fighting to become economic superpowers and the USA fighting to remain an economic superpower, any nation not joining in risks falling too far behind to ever catch up. That's a damned compelling reason to get to work in space.
Because India going to space would start a space race in Asia. China would speed up its own space program to try and prove that they can beat the Indians. Pakistan would start a space program out of contempt for India. All three nations will gain advanced rocket engine technology that will be used by their militaries to enhance nuclear weapon delivery.
Doing all of this will provide these nations with plenty of cool technology and a lot of capable engineers. At that point the US Government would have no choice but to join in the space race or risk losing what little edge it has left over Asia in that area. This will spur EU nations to start pushing their space programs so that they can at least stay in the game.
At this point the worlds economic powerhouses would all be engaged in cool space missions. With people of very different cultures approaching the problems related in getting people to space and back alive, there will be all sorts of different solutions produced.But without a cold war in the way this time, many of the technologies and personnel produced can be shared, allowing everyone involved to do it better and faster. And with everyone working together, maybe nations would be less likely to drop out.
A new space race would be a huge step forward in the scientific evolution of mankind and I can't wait!
It all depends on what job you're trying to fill or get. Some areas of tech are flooded with competent people, such as java programming and web development, so you don't have much luck looking for those jobs. DBAs, on the other hand, are very hard to come by at any skill level and anyone who can get Oracle certifications is guaranteed a high-paying job in just about any civilzed nation on earth.
Experience is also a big issue in many areas. Companies are still loathe to hire inexperienced or even mid-level sysadmins, but if you have real senior enterprise sysadmin experience you'll do well in just about any area with a few big shops. Just about any sort of senior programmer is also in demand, but if you have fewer than five years of real experience most employers don't give a damn.
So it really just depends on what you can do and how long you've been doing it.
Keep in mind that this card was just released yesterday, and is in short supply. Give it a month and it will be right where the PCI-E cards are price wise, which is about $135 on Pricewatch.
"Christ, if he's going to get screwed by some stupid HMO if he doesn't play their little game or something, I'll toss a couple bucks into a donation fund for the medical bills if someone sets one up."
I second the motion... anyone know if he's accepting paypal donations or anything like that?
Be proactive -- join NORML so that you'll have access to medical marijuana once you get glaucoma!
Sun has been pushing smart-card signon systems for years -- along with plenty of little security vendors -- not to mention smart rings, smart money clips, hell, smart anything that can take on a key. Has anyone in the mainstream picked it up? No.
Of course, MSFT has a hell of a lot more clout than Sun, but I just don't see this as being technology that anyone other than a nerd who gets off on RFID actually wanting to bother with.
Stories of fire-breathing dragons are also common among almost all of the world's cultures. That doesn't make it any less likely that they are all handed down from one great experience.
Look at it this way -- there have been thousands of human cultures, each with thousands of items in their individual mythologies. Statistically, there's a pretty good chance that out of all those items, at least one or two will match up.
Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to figure this out, so idiots keep wasting money investing in schemes to find the Atlantis and Noah's ark.
Sun's Linux roadmap is headed in the same place that all of Sun's plans lead - dwindling sales and bankruptcy. Until Sun's board grows some balls and fires Scott McNealy's arrogant ass, that company is just going to keep pushing one lame idea after another until nobody can remember what it is Sun does well enough to justify using Sun kit.
"Plus, the stores in rural places don't carry anything, so you have to do all your shopping by catalog."
City stores aren't much better. There's nothing like an extreme lack of space to hamper selection. I live in Washington DC, where we have one Best Buy and one Kmart. Just about every other store in town in some sort of specialty shoppe with a poor selection and high prices. The only notable exceptions are the usually clothing chains and a wealth of huge bookstores. I do the majority of my shopping via the web or trips to VA/MD because when I need specialty electronics, video games that aren't AAA titles, or clothes that don't cost way too much to beat up, I just can't get that stuff in the city.
Yeah, but what you aren't factoring in is the cost of lost customers due to shitty foreign tech support. When Dell moved tech support overseas customers were incensed at the horrible english of the foreign workers and Dell foresaw a huge impact on repeat business. So they moved the tech support back to the US, and people stopped complaining.
It's not only the lack of things to do that sucks, but there's also the lack of other jobs issue. One of my previous employers moved the majority of IT work to Indianapolis because Gartner told them that there would be almost no competition for IT jobs there, so they would be able to cut existing salaries, cut raises, and hire new workers at rock-bottom salaries. Of course, the plan backfired when 90% of the IT staff quit shortly after the plan was announced, but the execs went through with it all and have been paying for the decision ever since...
Companies that build in urban areas usually do so because there are a lot of customers in the city itself, and a lot of potential employees living in the city and surrounding suburbs. As business in the area grows, offices that do not deal directly with customers can be moved (or created) in the suburbs to allow for easy meetings between the two. Cities also tend to be very near important things like airports, which can come in handy when dealing with out-of-town clients.
That sound is AOL investors all over the world dumping the stock after finding out that the ISP division just released it's suicide note.