Seriously, the only people who seem to get very upset about these types of restrictions are us techno/computer geeks/fanatics.
I've tried bringing these issues up to "average people", pointing out all the limitatons that have been involuntarily placed on the DVD player sitting on their entertainment center, etc.
Usually, they come back with a big "who cares?", because they think other issues are much more important. As long as they can go to the store and buy a movie for $19.95 or whatever and it plays for them, they're happy.
The true change will only come about when the MPAA and others like them keep pushing and pushing, until *something* does directly affect the average Joe and Jane. I have no doubt it will... and soon, at the rate we're going.
The recent announcement that the proposed encryption of HDTV broadcasts will render all units made before Jan. 2002 obsolete is a start. Only thing is, most "average people" didn't buy one yet.... So once again, they mainly pissed off the geeks who were "early adopters".
So are you trying to make a point that "we, the people" own the telco's wires - because they used to be granted a protected monopoly status by the federal govt.?
If so, I still disagree. It may be unfortunate that govt. believed the phone company really deserved treatment as a regulated monopoly, but it's pretty clear that those days are now over.
Nonetheless, I don't think the proper way to "fix" things is to try forcing them to share their equipment and infrastructure with anyone else who wants to try profiting from it. You have to treat the telcos like any other private business from here on out.
With a truly level playing field (AKA. no more restrictions on *any* aspects of telecommunications, such as requirements that the FTC approve a rate hike, or limitations on what types of traffic a given company is allowed to carry on their backbone), the telcos will quickly find that their spaghetti of copper wire isn't so teriffic after all.
Forward-thinking competitors will prefer to "one-up" the telco, not just resell their same (usually inferior) technologies.
I don't want to belabor the point, so I'll make this my last reply on this subject...
But I still tend to disagree with you, to an extent. (Where I do see your point is where you talked about the ridiculous "red-tape" in place, that prevents you from giving away the donated PCs to students or even throwing them out.) Honestly, I think that type of legislation was put in place with good intentions, but they didn't forsee this type of thing happening.
If the right legislators were written, explaining the problem, I'd bet these laws could be changed. It probably wouldn't hurt to call up the local TV stations either, and tell them how you're "not allowed to give away old PCs to students to further their learning and education at home" because of outdated laws preventing it.
I guarantee that it will, indeed, feel "adventurous and exciting" if a student's project is to get an old PC fully working and able to perform basic functions (get on the Internet to check email, write papers, etc.), and afterwards, said student gets to keep it!
If you feel DOS is "too arcane", then why not Linux or FreeBSD? It doesn't really matter what OS you choose, as long as it's something one of these old machines can run respectably well.
Even today, if you gave a kid a broken calculator, their level of excitement would have a lot to do with the quality of teaching that accompanied it. I bet someone who knew enough about the design and components in a calculator could manage to make a very good class out of that. (People have been asking kids to dissect frogs for years, and they're considerably less appealing to tear into than most electronics. I never had a calculator that smelled bad or got goop all over my hands.)
Nah... I disagree. What will ultimately "make or break" Linux is the overall quality of the apps. Short of Linus Torvalds and company suddenly deciding to churn out slop code, the core of Linux will remain quite solid and stable.
The OS itself isn't really the issue. It's already built on a solid foundation that other commercial OS's (MS, ahem...) are working quickly to emulate, due to their relatively poor initial choice for a foundation.
What really gives Linux a "bad name" is the slew of half-complete apps that are thrown onto distro CDs, all in an attempt to offer "bigger, better, more!".
Honestly, if you're a regular user of both Windows and Linux environments, count how many beta version of your Win apps you use, vs. beta versions of your Linux apps. I'm pretty confident you'll find at least 5x as many betas in use on Linux.
Being largely freeware, Linux has issues with lots of unstable/incomplete code floating around. (Often-times, code which has been abandoned - in the hopes that some other brave soul will pick up the source and continue the project.)
Distros like this one are sorely needed, because they weeded out most of the garbage, and only installed the apps that don't bomb too often and make the whole OS look bad.
Brian's point is still quite valid. I forsee the provider installing a box on the outside of the home or apartment complex that converts the incoming fiber cable to 100Base-T. The customer can then be responsible for everything up to that junction box. Sure, fiber can carry much more bandwidth than 100Base-T, but I think that's the least of the problems for the forseeable future.
Right now, nobody wants to fork out the type of bandwidth that would flood out a 100Base-T connection to any home user. If we ever reach that point, then the junction boxes can be yanked off the homes, and the fiber run on inside.
The main point here is, the fiber doesn't have to be run by a telco at all. This could (and probably should!) be an independent data network managed by a company with major financial backing and long-term planning skills to see it through to completion.
Federal govt. gave competition the chance to mooch off of the voice telco monopoly, and it never accomplished much of anything beneficial for the consumer. All we get is a bunch of annoying ads and spam promising us "5 cents per minute long distance!", and fast Inet connections by someone who will go under a month after you get put online.
We need to come to grips with the idea that we don't need the telco's wiring to give people Internet access!
Yep - you're quite right, but there's a really *good* reason they're not on equal footing, and never *should* be!
The issue a number of people want to pretend doesn't exist is this: The telcos own the wires, period! Anyone coming along to resell DSL or other phone services amounts to a leech, trying to make cash off of the telco's cabling and infrastructure.
Covad and the others deserve to die. In fact, they should never have gotten started. Look, I like DSL as much as anyone - but it's a technology designed by and for the telcos. Anyone else trying to sell it is just trying to take advantage of ill-advised federal laws, written up because of paranoia about the Bell monopoly over voice communications.
There are a number of ways to move data around that don't require the use of Bell's cabling. The cable TV companies and satellite-based ISP's proved it, but they aren't necessarily the best alternatives. They're just the ones that sprung up first.
High speed Internet could be delivered along electrical power lines, by microwave relay towers, or even by innovative stringing of new fiber through existing mediums that already network homes and businesses together (how about fishing it throughout the sewer system?).
No matter how it's accomplished, it needs to be done by a company that does a lot of advance-planning, and gets the financial backing required for an undertaking of this size. Trying to short-cut the whole process by bumming off of the excellent infrstructure the telcos already put together over 100+ years isn't right. (Well, at least not if you claim to live under a governmnet that practices Capitalism.)
Yep! This is exactly the reception I got when we tried to donate our 486 and P-100 systems a couple years ago.
You know what's the most frustrating thing about it though? All those "rooms full of 8088's and 386's with no hard drives" would make excellent student projects. Instead of viewing it as "useless junk" because it won't run current Microsoft operating systems, use them to teach the history of computers, hands-on! Let students learn PC troubleshooting and upgrading in an electronics class with them! Teach them that just because something is old doesn't mean it's automatically no good; set up some of these systems to boot from floppies and run DOS-based testing software, math tutoring packages, etc.
Or are we all so hopelessly caught up in the "2 minute attention-span of kids" that we've convinced ourselves they can no longer learn from any software package that only displays text w/no multimedia?
No, not really.... My biggest complaint about spam mail is that it's totally unsolicited. Even when I get spam that might otherwise be of interest (EG. Buy one, get one free inkjet cartridges!), I trash it immediately because I don't want to contribute to a company that does business that way.
As another poster replying to you said, he has every right to do this.
People can scream about him being a , but the GPL'd version of Smoothwall that's already out there can always be used for free. All he can do is restrict future releases. If the free one does everything you need, what's to complain about? (Or do you just feel the world owes you some free labor because you're so special?)
If you want my take on the whole Smoothwall thing, I think it boils down to Richard Morrell originally having this idea that the free Smoothwall project would/should lead to a large number of donations to the charity of his choice. (He seems to be personal friends with a lady in England who runs this home for deaf children, and hoped to use Smoothie as a vehicle to get some funding directed her way.) When he found out that most people downloading and using Smoothie weren't willing to send a voluntary donation to said charity, he got irritated and started in with the name-calling and accusations of people expecting something for nothing.
People *do* want something for nothing. It's human nature. Is it "right"? I dunno... it just *is*. Richard probably should just start developing commercial software at this point. Perhaps it will put less stress in his life, and allow him to contribute directly to the charities he'd like to see money going towards.
Not to say that the seller of your monitor wasn't being a bit irresponsible in his packaging - but didn't you pay extra for insurance on the delivery?
I'm always surprised at how often someone bids on a product I'm selling, and then doesn't show any interest at all in paying extra for postal insurance. I guess people just assume the sellers will automatically ship everything insured? I'm sure not going to, with postage rates as high as they are nowdays!
If someone tries to ship an insured package through the post office and it's not packaged well-enough, most postal workers will refuse to ship it until the shipper does a better job of boxing it up. That, alone, might justify paying a few bucks extra and requesting insurance on your eBay packages.
You know, I find it interesting that people are so violently opposed to this practice.
If you don't want to deal with/don't trust someone who emails you outside the auction with an alternate offer, nobody's forcing you to accept.
It's in eBay's best interests to keep all sales inside eBay, so they can collect commission on the sales + the listing/re-listing fees. Therefore, it's only logical they want to scare you into believing that everyone who emails you outside the auction is a scammer.
In reality, some people are really just trying to do you a favor, and save themselves some money and effort too. I bid on a USB wireless ethernet adapter recently, for example. It turned out, my bid didn't meet the reserve price, and neither did a few other bids placed after mine.
The seller contacted me afterwards, offering to sell it to me for the price I bid - and I'm quite sure he was honestly just wanting to avoid getting burned twice on paying eBay fees. (If you list a "reserve" auction and the item doesn't sell, you have to pay a listing fee based on a percentage of the *reserve* price you asked - not the minimum starting bid.)
Do your other credit processing companies let you keep your funds in an account with them (providing you with a debit card to access said funds, in fact), and let you earn interest on the funds?
I see your point, but you know - people do trust banks every day, and yet I think they do screw much more than just 1% of them out of some of their money.
1. Say someone writes you a bad check. Not only do they have to pay a fee for bouncing the check, but so do *you*!
2. Banks do make mistakes. I, of course, can't give you statistics on this - but I have certainly had it happen with my own checking account at least once. If you ask around, I bet you can find quite a few people with at least one story of how a bank made a math error that caused them to bounce a check or two and pay a bunch of fees.
3. Unnecessary misc. fees for services rendered. For example, my last bank started charging people 50 cents for a deposit slip when they went in to deposit money. (You could use a slip from the back of your checkbook, but how often do people have those handy when they want to deposit some cash or a check in their bank?)
There are more examples, I'm sure, but these are just 3 off the top of my head. People are generally willing to put up with a certain level of inconvenience and expense before saying "Enough!" I think PayPal, like the banks, realizes this and therefore isn't going to be TOO concerned about 1% of their users complaining.
Your friend is right, IMHO. I do a lot of eBay business, too, and that's the only reason I keep a PayPal account around.
The ability for someone to click and pay, and be done with the transaction, is a great incentive to buy.
If I post a product for sale, identical to another one up for sale at the same price, I'll usually get mine sold first if I take PayPal and the other person doesn't.
As I keep telling people, just don't leave too much money sitting in your PayPal account. Immediately transfer most or all of it to another account, where it's FDIC insured and where you don't have to worry about your money being frozen by PayPal staff.
I've had several situations come up in the past where I made large purchases on my PayPal debit card, and then they sat in their system marked "pending" for as long as a week before they cleared. Many merchants don't really report the true amount of the transaction to services like PayPal during this "pending" time window (still don't get why this is... poor quality transaction software I suppose?). Every time I buy gas at Mobil, for example, the transaction shows up as $1.00 until it clears.
Because of this, you can actually have a situation where PayPal shows you have quite a bit of money available in your account, when really - it's already been spent.
Seems like someone wanting to screw over PayPal could take advantage of this situation and buy much more than they really had in the account, and then close it out.
Maybe I'm just having exceptionally poor experiences - but why is it I see so many people claiming they set up a Linux box with KDE and it works so well? I've been using Linux for years, on multiple systems, and several different distros - and still, I feel almost lucky if I can use KDE for a complete session without having at least one ugly glitch or problem.
Most often, I run into lingering processes when I leave X. (I know I'm not the only one, because I just read a complaint on the LTSP project mailing list where a sysadmin complained that he can't serve up KDE to his users on their production LTSP server anymore. He says the processes that get stuck and don't die when users exit/log-out keep piling up over time until they eventually make the server unstable.)
My other common headache is with the browsers. Whether I choose Netscape, Galleon, Mozilla or Konqueror, it doesn't seem to really matter. Eventually, any of them is guaranteed to blow up or freeze up something. I realize this isn't directly KDE's fault, but can't it at least offer a little more ability to kill a problem app without wreaking havoc on the rest of my session?
When you combine all of this with what I'd simply describe as "look and feel" issues (tendencies for.WAV sound files to start playing with a "click" or "pop" for example, or just the way X handles color palettes when you aren't in high-color mode), the environment still feels "rough around the edges" to most people.
And don't you think there's a pretty hefty level of this "accountability" in I.T. too?
Oh, sure - you're not cutting somebody open, but you are responsible for pretty much all of the company's important documents. (A sysadmin can pretty much access anyone's email and personal documents at will, after all, and controls security to who sees what on the systems.) If your server goes down, productivity at most businesses comes to a screeching halt. Therefore, the I.T. people maintaining it are ensuring all the other workers can keep doing their jobs.
I think it will be a sad day when this is overlooked or forgotten, just because some management-types and business owners decide that "computers are now a commodity".
My wife decided she wanted to go back to school, and got suckered in to attending ITT for their 2-year EE degree. What a scam!
After her first semester, they changed their curriculum, eliminating the old track to their EE degree and replacing it with some sort of "computers and electrical engineering" degree. Of course, they said those students who already started out on the old EE program could finish it up - but here's the kicker! If you missed too many days, you had to re-take that semester later, and in this case, you had to start over with the new degree program.
My wife has problems with getting sick quite often (she has an immune system deficiency, called IDD), and so she was very concerned she might need to take off a semester before her EE was finished. Therefore, she thought it safest to just start over on the new degree track from the get-go.
Here's where all the B.S. really begins. They made her take several classes over which she'd already taken (same textbook even), but said her other credits didn't count for the new degree program, because the courses she was taking over were called slightly different things.
I told her to bail out of ITT and cut her losses, but they refunded her grant money to the state as soon as she quit, and are now trying to bill us for the amount of the whole 2nd. semester, in full. No way we can afford to pay that, nor do I think we really owe that much anyway. (She was only a couple weeks into her 2nd. semester when she quit. Why isn't it pro-rated?)
I think you put too much faith in companies, all in all. I'd love to believe they understand this fact - but I think only a minority of them really do.
What happens, more often, is the actual manager of the programming dept. and his/her staff grasp this idea, but the other people doing the interviewing (H.R., etc.) don't. They're trained to serve as a "screen", filtering out the undesirables before they waste anyone else's interviewing time. Lack of a college degree is a prime reason to get "filtered out" after the initial interview.
Believe me, I know. I don't code for a living, but I do system administration and PC support - and I fought for a *long* time before finding a (small) company that cared about what I could do instead of what credentials I walked in with.
I've still not been able to break into employement with a large company, and I really believe the lack of a degree is the primary reason.
Nonetheless, I refuse to put myself thousands in debt and expend all the time/effort to get that piece of paper, just to satisfy those who aren't enlightened.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack is really blowing a prime opportunity for their stores to excel.
Why? Because they're small stores, with only one or two salespeople working there at a given time. This makes them prime candidates for keeping only the most knowledgeable people, and impressing customers with that knowledge.
Instead, Tandy Corp. seems to believe that they're better off economically to hire at a very low pay-rate and encourage sales with "spiffs" and commissions. Commissioned sales and "spiffs" don't at all motivate a true electronics geek. They only motivate a true "salesman", who wants to sell as much of anything as possible, and cares very little what it is he/she is selling.
A long time ago, I bought *loads* of items at my local Radio Shack. For starters, this was back before IBM became dominant, and so I did a lot of my Tandy computer purchasing there... but the other *big* reason I kept coming back was one particular salesperson. This guy was a big ham radio and electronics buff, with seemingly endless knowledge. He'd suggest parts I could buy to build circuits/projects to accomplish a task, and kept me motivated by asking how the projects were working out when I came back later.
He didn't care if what I needed was a 5 cent resistor -- it got the same level of attention as a big product, and that wasn't lost on me.
I quit buying at RS not long after he left (got hired at Chrysler as an electrical engineer, last I remember). The other sales drones I ran into at RS drove me away with their lack of knowledge and flat out wrong information.
Yeah, I wasn't aware they did that in Canada already, but that's the first thing that came to my mind when I read this story.
I wish they'd get going on a similar project to eliminate some of the mosquitoes here in the U.S.
Where I live, in the midwest, we've had a big problem with mosquitoes ever since we had some bad flooding in the early 1990's. I guess they've done a lot of pesticide-spraying in the swampy areas that became prime breeding-grounds - but more could and should be done.
I don't know of a single positive thing that can be said about mosquitoes, really. They don't produce anything we can use (unlike honey from bees, for example), and they don't seem to contribute to the ecosystem in any way I'm aware of. Meanwhile, they carry and spread diseases, and cause discomfort to millions of people every year.
But see, the counter-argument to your point is that "nothing is new, under the sun".
A person who "creates content" didn't really do it completely on his/her own. He/she had to learn the skills and tools from knowledge passed down by others - meaning it's never truly 100% an individual effort. As much as humans like to say we're "independent" creature, we're much more "interdependent".
Like most things in life, the truth is someplace in the middle. I think this goes for content creation, too. An author of content/intellectual properly deserves to be rewarded for his/her work. Nonetheless, giving him/her "absolute power" over it doesn't benefit anyone in the long run. It's too extreme of a solution -- and runs counter to the truth I mentioned above, about all of us being interdependent beings.
Even Civil Libertarians should note that Thomas Jefferson himself believed in limitations on terms of copyright; he feared that doing otherwise would stiffle innovation and become counter-productive to humanity.
Eh... I never had a submission used here before either. No big deal. I just assume they have plenty enough submissions to post, so they don't need any more help.
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Seriously, the only people who seem to get very upset about these types of restrictions are us techno/computer geeks/fanatics.
I've tried bringing these issues up to "average people", pointing out all the limitatons that have been involuntarily placed on the DVD player sitting on their entertainment center, etc.
Usually, they come back with a big "who cares?", because they think other issues are much more important. As long as they can go to the store and buy a movie for $19.95 or whatever and it plays for them, they're happy.
The true change will only come about when the MPAA and others like them keep pushing and pushing, until *something* does directly affect the average Joe and Jane. I have no doubt it will... and soon, at the rate we're going.
The recent announcement that the proposed encryption of HDTV broadcasts will render all units made before Jan. 2002 obsolete is a start. Only thing is, most "average people" didn't buy one yet.... So once again, they mainly pissed off the geeks who were "early adopters".
....a Beowulf cluster of lawyers!
Errr.... uh.... nevermind.
Sorry.
So are you trying to make a point that "we, the people" own the telco's wires - because they used to be granted a protected monopoly status by the federal govt.?
If so, I still disagree. It may be unfortunate that govt. believed the phone company really deserved treatment as a regulated monopoly, but it's pretty clear that those days are now over.
Nonetheless, I don't think the proper way to "fix" things is to try forcing them to share their equipment and infrastructure with anyone else who wants to try profiting from it. You have to treat the telcos like any other private business from here on out.
With a truly level playing field (AKA. no more restrictions on *any* aspects of telecommunications, such as requirements that the FTC approve a rate hike, or limitations on what types of traffic a given company is allowed to carry on their backbone), the telcos will quickly find that their spaghetti of copper wire isn't so teriffic after all.
Forward-thinking competitors will prefer to "one-up" the telco, not just resell their same (usually inferior) technologies.
I don't want to belabor the point, so I'll make this my last reply on this subject...
But I still tend to disagree with you, to an extent. (Where I do see your point is where you talked about the ridiculous "red-tape" in place, that prevents you from giving away the donated PCs to students or even throwing them out.) Honestly, I think that type of legislation was put in place with good intentions, but they didn't forsee this type of thing happening.
If the right legislators were written, explaining the problem, I'd bet these laws could be changed. It probably wouldn't hurt to call up the local TV stations either, and tell them how you're "not allowed to give away old PCs to students to further their learning and education at home" because of outdated laws preventing it.
I guarantee that it will, indeed, feel "adventurous and exciting" if a student's project is to get an old PC fully working and able to perform basic functions (get on the Internet to check email, write papers, etc.), and afterwards, said student gets to keep it!
If you feel DOS is "too arcane", then why not Linux or FreeBSD? It doesn't really matter what OS you choose, as long as it's something one of these old machines can run respectably well.
Even today, if you gave a kid a broken calculator, their level of excitement would have a lot to do with the quality of teaching that accompanied it. I bet someone who knew enough about the design and components in a calculator could manage to make a very good class out of that. (People have been asking kids to dissect frogs for years, and they're considerably less appealing to tear into than most electronics. I never had a calculator that smelled bad or got goop all over my hands.)
Nah... I disagree. What will ultimately "make or break" Linux is the overall quality of the apps. Short of Linus Torvalds and company suddenly deciding to churn out slop code, the core of Linux will remain quite solid and stable.
The OS itself isn't really the issue. It's already built on a solid foundation that other commercial OS's (MS, ahem...) are working quickly to emulate, due to their relatively poor initial choice for a foundation.
What really gives Linux a "bad name" is the slew of half-complete apps that are thrown onto distro CDs, all in an attempt to offer "bigger, better, more!".
Honestly, if you're a regular user of both Windows and Linux environments, count how many beta version of your Win apps you use, vs. beta versions of your Linux apps. I'm pretty confident you'll find at least 5x as many betas in use on Linux.
Being largely freeware, Linux has issues with lots of unstable/incomplete code floating around. (Often-times, code which has been abandoned - in the hopes that some other brave soul will pick up the source and continue the project.)
Distros like this one are sorely needed, because they weeded out most of the garbage, and only installed the apps that don't bomb too often and make the whole OS look bad.
Brian's point is still quite valid. I forsee the provider installing a box on the outside of the home or apartment complex that converts the incoming fiber cable to 100Base-T. The customer can then be responsible for everything up to that junction box. Sure, fiber can carry much more bandwidth than 100Base-T, but I think that's the least of the problems for the forseeable future.
Right now, nobody wants to fork out the type of bandwidth that would flood out a 100Base-T connection to any home user. If we ever reach that point, then the junction boxes can be yanked off the homes, and the fiber run on inside.
The main point here is, the fiber doesn't have to be run by a telco at all. This could (and probably should!) be an independent data network managed by a company with major financial backing and long-term planning skills to see it through to completion.
Federal govt. gave competition the chance to mooch off of the voice telco monopoly, and it never accomplished much of anything beneficial for the consumer. All we get is a bunch of annoying ads and spam promising us "5 cents per minute long distance!", and fast Inet connections by someone who will go under a month after you get put online.
We need to come to grips with the idea that we don't need the telco's wiring to give people Internet access!
Yep - you're quite right, but there's a really *good* reason they're not on equal footing, and never *should* be!
The issue a number of people want to pretend doesn't exist is this: The telcos own the wires, period! Anyone coming along to resell DSL or other phone services amounts to a leech, trying to make cash off of the telco's cabling and infrastructure.
Covad and the others deserve to die. In fact, they should never have gotten started. Look, I like DSL as much as anyone - but it's a technology designed by and for the telcos. Anyone else trying to sell it is just trying to take advantage of ill-advised federal laws, written up because of paranoia about the Bell monopoly over voice communications.
There are a number of ways to move data around that don't require the use of Bell's cabling. The cable TV companies and satellite-based ISP's proved it, but they aren't necessarily the best alternatives. They're just the ones that sprung up first.
High speed Internet could be delivered along electrical power lines, by microwave relay towers, or even by innovative stringing of new fiber through existing mediums that already network homes and businesses together (how about fishing it throughout the sewer system?).
No matter how it's accomplished, it needs to be done by a company that does a lot of advance-planning, and gets the financial backing required for an undertaking of this size. Trying to short-cut the whole process by bumming off of the excellent infrstructure the telcos already put together over 100+ years isn't right. (Well, at least not if you claim to live under a governmnet that practices Capitalism.)
Yep! This is exactly the reception I got when we tried to donate our 486 and P-100 systems a couple years ago.
You know what's the most frustrating thing about it though? All those "rooms full of 8088's and 386's with no hard drives" would make excellent student projects. Instead of viewing it as "useless junk" because it won't run current Microsoft operating systems, use them to teach the history of computers, hands-on! Let students learn PC troubleshooting and upgrading in an electronics class with them! Teach them that just because something is old doesn't mean it's automatically no good; set up some of these systems to boot from floppies and run DOS-based testing software, math tutoring packages, etc.
Or are we all so hopelessly caught up in the "2 minute attention-span of kids" that we've convinced ourselves they can no longer learn from any software package that only displays text w/no multimedia?
No, not really.... My biggest complaint about spam mail is that it's totally unsolicited. Even when I get spam that might otherwise be of interest (EG. Buy one, get one free inkjet cartridges!), I trash it immediately because I don't want to contribute to a company that does business that way.
Umm, unless I'm mistaken - isn't OpenOffice missing an Access database clone? I recall a database being included in StarOffice.
That, alone, might make it worthwhile for some people to pay for StarOffice.
As another poster replying to you said, he has every right to do this.
People can scream about him being a , but the GPL'd version of Smoothwall that's already out there can always be used for free. All he can do is restrict future releases. If the free one does everything you need, what's to complain about? (Or do you just feel the world owes you some free labor because you're so special?)
If you want my take on the whole Smoothwall thing, I think it boils down to Richard Morrell originally having this idea that the free Smoothwall project would/should lead to a large number of donations to the charity of his choice. (He seems to be personal friends with a lady in England who runs this home for deaf children, and hoped to use Smoothie as a vehicle to get some funding directed her way.) When he found out that most people downloading and using Smoothie weren't willing to send a voluntary donation to said charity, he got irritated and started in with the name-calling and accusations of people expecting something for nothing.
People *do* want something for nothing. It's human nature. Is it "right"? I dunno... it just *is*. Richard probably should just start developing commercial software at this point. Perhaps it will put less stress in his life, and allow him to contribute directly to the charities he'd like to see money going towards.
Not to say that the seller of your monitor wasn't being a bit irresponsible in his packaging - but didn't you pay extra for insurance on the delivery?
I'm always surprised at how often someone bids on a product I'm selling, and then doesn't show any interest at all in paying extra for postal insurance. I guess people just assume the sellers will automatically ship everything insured? I'm sure not going to, with postage rates as high as they are nowdays!
If someone tries to ship an insured package through the post office and it's not packaged well-enough, most postal workers will refuse to ship it until the shipper does a better job of boxing it up. That, alone, might justify paying a few bucks extra and requesting insurance on your eBay packages.
You know, I find it interesting that people are so violently opposed to this practice.
If you don't want to deal with/don't trust someone who emails you outside the auction with an alternate offer, nobody's forcing you to accept.
It's in eBay's best interests to keep all sales inside eBay, so they can collect commission on the sales + the listing/re-listing fees. Therefore, it's only logical they want to scare you into believing that everyone who emails you outside the auction is a scammer.
In reality, some people are really just trying to do you a favor, and save themselves some money and effort too. I bid on a USB wireless ethernet adapter recently, for example. It turned out, my bid didn't meet the reserve price, and neither did a few other bids placed after mine.
The seller contacted me afterwards, offering to sell it to me for the price I bid - and I'm quite sure he was honestly just wanting to avoid getting burned twice on paying eBay fees. (If you list a "reserve" auction and the item doesn't sell, you have to pay a listing fee based on a percentage of the *reserve* price you asked - not the minimum starting bid.)
Do your other credit processing companies let you keep your funds in an account with them (providing you with a debit card to access said funds, in fact), and let you earn interest on the funds?
Hmm... I think not.
I see your point, but you know - people do trust banks every day, and yet I think they do screw much more than just 1% of them out of some of their money.
1. Say someone writes you a bad check. Not only do they have to pay a fee for bouncing the check, but so do *you*!
2. Banks do make mistakes. I, of course, can't give you statistics on this - but I have certainly had it happen with my own checking account at least once. If you ask around, I bet you can find quite a few people with at least one story of how a bank made a math error that caused them to bounce a check or two and pay a bunch of fees.
3. Unnecessary misc. fees for services rendered. For example, my last bank started charging people 50 cents for a deposit slip when they went in to deposit money. (You could use a slip from the back of your checkbook, but how often do people have those handy when they want to deposit some cash or a check in their bank?)
There are more examples, I'm sure, but these are just 3 off the top of my head. People are generally willing to put up with a certain level of inconvenience and expense before saying "Enough!" I think PayPal, like the banks, realizes this and therefore isn't going to be TOO concerned about 1% of their users complaining.
Your friend is right, IMHO.
I do a lot of eBay business, too, and that's the only reason I keep a PayPal account around.
The ability for someone to click and pay, and be done with the transaction, is a great incentive to buy.
If I post a product for sale, identical to another one up for sale at the same price, I'll usually get mine sold first if I take PayPal and the other person doesn't.
As I keep telling people, just don't leave too much money sitting in your PayPal account. Immediately transfer most or all of it to another account, where it's FDIC insured and where you don't have to worry about your money being frozen by PayPal staff.
I've had several situations come up in the past where I made large purchases on my PayPal debit card, and then they sat in their system marked "pending" for as long as a week before they cleared. Many merchants don't really report the true amount of the transaction to services like PayPal during this "pending" time window (still don't get why this is... poor quality transaction software I suppose?). Every time I buy gas at Mobil, for example, the transaction shows up as $1.00 until it clears.
Because of this, you can actually have a situation where PayPal shows you have quite a bit of money available in your account, when really - it's already been spent.
Seems like someone wanting to screw over PayPal could take advantage of this situation and buy much more than they really had in the account, and then close it out.
Maybe I'm just having exceptionally poor experiences - but why is it I see so many people claiming they set up a Linux box with KDE and it works so well? I've been using Linux for years, on multiple systems, and several different distros - and still, I feel almost lucky if I can use KDE for a complete session without having at least one ugly glitch or problem.
.WAV sound files to start playing with a "click" or "pop" for example, or just the way X handles color palettes when you aren't in high-color mode), the environment still feels "rough around the edges" to most people.
Most often, I run into lingering processes when I leave X. (I know I'm not the only one, because I just read a complaint on the LTSP project mailing list where a sysadmin complained that he can't serve up KDE to his users on their production LTSP server anymore. He says the processes that get stuck and don't die when users exit/log-out keep piling up over time until they eventually make the server unstable.)
My other common headache is with the browsers. Whether I choose Netscape, Galleon, Mozilla or Konqueror, it doesn't seem to really matter. Eventually, any of them is guaranteed to blow up or freeze up something. I realize this isn't directly KDE's fault, but can't it at least offer a little more ability to kill a problem app without wreaking havoc on the rest of my session?
When you combine all of this with what I'd simply describe as "look and feel" issues (tendencies for
And don't you think there's a pretty hefty level of this "accountability" in I.T. too?
Oh, sure - you're not cutting somebody open, but you are responsible for pretty much all of the company's important documents. (A sysadmin can pretty much access anyone's email and personal documents at will, after all, and controls security to who sees what on the systems.) If your server goes down, productivity at most businesses comes to a screeching halt. Therefore, the I.T. people maintaining it are ensuring all the other workers can keep doing their jobs.
I think it will be a sad day when this is overlooked or forgotten, just because some management-types and business owners decide that "computers are now a commodity".
How right you are!
My wife decided she wanted to go back to school, and got suckered in to attending ITT for their 2-year EE degree. What a scam!
After her first semester, they changed their curriculum, eliminating the old track to their EE degree and replacing it with some sort of "computers and electrical engineering" degree. Of course, they said those students who already started out on the old EE program could finish it up - but here's the kicker! If you missed too many days, you had to re-take that semester later, and in this case, you had to start over with the new degree program.
My wife has problems with getting sick quite often (she has an immune system deficiency, called IDD), and so she was very concerned she might need to take off a semester before her EE was finished. Therefore, she thought it safest to just start over on the new degree track from the get-go.
Here's where all the B.S. really begins. They made her take several classes over which she'd already taken (same textbook even), but said her other credits didn't count for the new degree program, because the courses she was taking over were called slightly different things.
I told her to bail out of ITT and cut her losses, but they refunded her grant money to the state as soon as she quit, and are now trying to bill us for the amount of the whole 2nd. semester, in full. No way we can afford to pay that, nor do I think we really owe that much anyway. (She was only a couple weeks into her 2nd. semester when she quit. Why isn't it pro-rated?)
I think you put too much faith in companies, all in all. I'd love to believe they understand this fact - but I think only a minority of them really do.
What happens, more often, is the actual manager of the programming dept. and his/her staff grasp this idea, but the other people doing the interviewing (H.R., etc.) don't. They're trained to serve as a "screen", filtering out the undesirables before they waste anyone else's interviewing time. Lack of a college degree is a prime reason to get "filtered out" after the initial interview.
Believe me, I know. I don't code for a living, but I do system administration and PC support - and I fought for a *long* time before finding a (small) company that cared about what I could do instead of what credentials I walked in with.
I've still not been able to break into employement with a large company, and I really believe the lack of a degree is the primary reason.
Nonetheless, I refuse to put myself thousands in debt and expend all the time/effort to get that piece of paper, just to satisfy those who aren't enlightened.
Unfortunately, Radio Shack is really blowing a prime opportunity for their stores to excel.
... but the other *big* reason I kept coming back was one particular salesperson. This guy was a big ham radio and electronics buff, with seemingly endless knowledge. He'd suggest parts I could buy to build circuits/projects to accomplish a task, and kept me motivated by asking how the projects were working out when I came back later.
Why? Because they're small stores, with only one or two salespeople working there at a given time. This makes them prime candidates for keeping only the most knowledgeable people, and impressing customers with that knowledge.
Instead, Tandy Corp. seems to believe that they're better off economically to hire at a very low pay-rate and encourage sales with "spiffs" and commissions. Commissioned sales and "spiffs" don't at all motivate a true electronics geek. They only motivate a true "salesman", who wants to sell as much of anything as possible, and cares very little what it is he/she is selling.
A long time ago, I bought *loads* of items at my local Radio Shack. For starters, this was back before IBM became dominant, and so I did a lot of my Tandy computer purchasing there
He didn't care if what I needed was a 5 cent resistor -- it got the same level of attention as a big product, and that wasn't lost on me.
I quit buying at RS not long after he left (got hired at Chrysler as an electrical engineer, last I remember). The other sales drones I ran into at RS drove me away with their lack of knowledge and flat out wrong information.
Yeah, I wasn't aware they did that in Canada already, but that's the first thing that came to my mind when I read this story.
I wish they'd get going on a similar project to eliminate some of the mosquitoes here in the U.S.
Where I live, in the midwest, we've had a big problem with mosquitoes ever since we had some bad flooding in the early 1990's. I guess they've done a lot of pesticide-spraying in the swampy areas that became prime breeding-grounds - but more could and should be done.
I don't know of a single positive thing that can be said about mosquitoes, really. They don't produce anything we can use (unlike honey from bees, for example), and they don't seem to contribute to the ecosystem in any way I'm aware of. Meanwhile, they carry and spread diseases, and cause discomfort to millions of people every year.
But see, the counter-argument to your point is that "nothing is new, under the sun".
A person who "creates content" didn't really do it completely on his/her own. He/she had to learn the skills and tools from knowledge passed down by others - meaning it's never truly 100% an individual effort. As much as humans like to say we're "independent" creature, we're much more "interdependent".
Like most things in life, the truth is someplace in the middle. I think this goes for content creation, too. An author of content/intellectual properly deserves to be rewarded for his/her work. Nonetheless, giving him/her "absolute power" over it doesn't benefit anyone in the long run. It's too extreme of a solution -- and runs counter to the truth I mentioned above, about all of us being interdependent beings.
Even Civil Libertarians should note that Thomas Jefferson himself believed in limitations on terms of copyright; he feared that doing otherwise would stiffle innovation and become counter-productive to humanity.
Eh... I never had a submission used here before either. No big deal. I just assume they have plenty enough submissions to post, so they don't need any more help.