Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm not a big fan of the whole escrow idea. I don't like the idea of another "middle man" getting involved in my sale or purchase. For starters, how often have you been improperly billed by a large company? I bet more than once! I'm just as afraid of the escrow company messing something up as I am of being ripped off by the person I'm trying to directly do business with.
Also, it's one more fee that cuts into your profits from a sale (and one more thing that can raise the price you pay for items). I've done hundreds of successful transactions on both eBay and Amazon.com auctions - and never used escrow. The money I've saved by skipping it all this time probably more than pays for the one time, someday, I'll get ripped off on something.
There are lots of safeguards in place to help you get your money back when you're a fraud victim. As people already said, use postal money orders or credit cards to pay for things. You'll get your transactions done more quickly and with less hassle, save a little money, and be better off, IMHO.
Yeah, whatever.... If I received a post-dated check from someone, I'd hold off on shipping their product until after that time had passed plus however long it took to clear my bank once I deposited it.
I've been burnt too many times by people giving me post-dated checks because they don't really have the money in the bank at all, and wrongly assumed they'd have some in there in a couple more weeks.
The board itself is pretty cool, but that case looks like it was inspired by external DLT tape backup drives! I mean, geesh - I'd almost accidently try to shove a DLT IV cartridge in one of the drive bays, if I wasn't paying attention.
I've both bought and sold a LOT of stuff on eBay over the years, and I've generally been very pleased with the outcome.
However, I've had a few problems with buyers of my products which resulted from them not reading the details before bidding (or ignoring them).
If an item does not state anyplace in the auction that it's "functional" or "in working order", you can assume it to be broken/malfunctioning. If you're not really sure, email the person and *ASK* before bidding!
I've occasionally sold some items that were known to be in not-so-great condition, but I've always stated "as-is" clearly in my auctions when they were like this. I also started the bids at a very low dollar amount. Still, I've had winning bidders of these things get all bent out of shape and threaten legal action before when the product wasn't shiny new and working perfectly after they got it.
The fact is, there are good reasons why people might actually want to buy broken products! Maybe they want to gut it for repair parts, or they want to take on the challenge of fixing it themselves?
Also, if you're buying a smaller-cost item ($100 or less), keep in mind that UPS will typically insure it for up to that amount at no additional cost over normal ground delivery. Therefore, there's no excuse for someone to ship you an item via UPS and have it completely uninsured. (I use the UPS "Worldship" shipping software all the time, and even though it defaults to entering a 0 amount for insurance, it doesn't add anything to the price if you bump that up to 100.00.)
I used to play one of the strategy games against my wife as pretty much a nightly ritual before bedtime. We played the original AOE, Starcraft, Warcraft I and II (quickly scrapped Warcraft due to poor quality graphics by today's standards), and finally settled on AOE2 as our favorite. It has everything right: good pace (a full game usually runs about an hour to no more than an hour and 45 mins.), great graphics, and most importantly for her - lots of little people to control.
For whatever reason, her biggest facination is seeing little people on the screen actually doing things.
She used to like all the "Sim" games, but got burnt out on them since they don't really have objectives, other than "build the biggest/nicest thing you can make".
Personally, I loved Civ and Civ II, but the "game board pieces" feel of the games turned my wife off to them after she played them a few times.
She occasionally plays the FPS shooters with me, but doesn't enjoy them much since she's not very good at them.
Right now, we're both waiting, anxiously, for Age of Myths and possibly Empire Earth from Sierra.
I'm pretty certain I heard a news bite a couple years ago about Dave Matthews going after several street-side dealers for selling bootlegs of his music. He got them completely shut down with crippling fines.
For a long time after that happened, I didn't want to buy any more of his music, even though I really liked it. I guess the guy has a philosophy that "it's ok to copy it for free, but don't make money off it unless you go through my official record company".
You know though, I find it interesting that everyone's so quick to condemn IBM drives over this one particular model, when all the other major manufacturers have made similar mistakes multiple times. The Western Digital "Caviar" 1.6 gig. IDE had a defect causing it to make a loud clicking sound at power-up. They ended up recalling them, and had a notice on their web site for quite a while. Seagate has had a number of "problem drives" over the years, including the first 7200 RPM SCSI Barracudas that had regular bearing failures from too much heat. We have several of the 30 gig. versions of these IBM EIDE hard drives and they've been not only fast and reliable, but among the quietest drives we've got. No complaints....
I'd say to avoid this one drive model, but in general, not other IBM hard drives. They've made many quality ones.
I'm not so upset that they don't send me back personal replies to letters. What *does* bother me is that they apparently don't make any effort to get a consensus on what the people are writing in favor of or against. There's no excuse for not having an aide submit at least a weekly summary of what the constituents said in their letters.
Yeah, I agree with you on the future of the PS2.
I just recently broke down and bought a complete PS2 setup (S-video adapter, Mad Catz controller with the ability to program macros in it, several game titles, etc.) It sure does add up. I think I blew over $600 on all the stuff by the time I was done... but anyway, it's the first time I've *ever* laid out $'s for a new game console.
I even passed back in the heyday of the Atari 2600 and Colecovision, favoring spending money on my home computer instead.
Gran Turismo 3 totally sold me on PS2, though. One good look at that game really opens your eyes to what's possible with the unit, even though most other current titles don't come close to that quality right now.
I was really pondering grabbing a Dreamcast since every Best Buy store around here has them on sale... and you can rent titles for cheap at Blockbuster. But in the end, I splurged and did the PS2 thing, because I'm a believer in the future potential. Long after it's impossible to find broadband adapters for Dreamcast and new releases die out, the PS2 will be going strong with lots of interactive net action.
Argh! Seagate is your second favorite drive?
I was going along with you until you said that!
I've given Segate chance after chance over a span of 12 years or more, and each time I buy one, I get burned on it. Ever since the days of the ST238R RLL drive (I think it was a 30 meg.), I had several of them die off or develop loads of bad sectors.
When I started working for a local PC builder/repair shop in 1993 and 94, we sold a lot of IDE drives in the 120 to 540 meg. range, and I saw the Seagates come back as bad almost every time. (I personally know a few people *still* running Maxtor 245 meg. IDE drives we sold them back in '93 - and they haven't worn out yet!)
Then I got a job doing I.T. support and systems administration, and they bought all Dell systems. Dell used a mix of drives, ranging from Western Digital to Maxtor to Quantum to Seagate - and guess which ones always ended up failing on us? Yep, Seagate again. Oh, granted, they did have a bad batch of 1.6 gig. Western Digitals at one point in time. I think Dell ended up replacing each and every one of those we had in their Optiplex GS systems. But that was an exception to the rule.
Meanwhile, I bought a high-end SCSI LVD drive for a PC at home and went with Seagate because of the price and performance specs. I figured "Ok, maybe they finally got things right on these high end SCSI drives." Guess what? It had a bearing failure and self-destructed! My Quantum Viking and Atlas replacements are still ticking along with no problems at all....
I'm a long-time PayPal user. I thought it was a teriffic concept, but I have several complaints with their service.
1. They got rid of the Palm-Pilot support. That really sucks, because the ability to "beam" a payment directly from a Palm device to a merchant (or of course, to your buddy's Palm device) held a lot of promise. Until they discontinued this feature, a few of my co-workers started regularly paying each other back for lunches, etc. in this manner. (EG. 3 of you go to lunch. One guy puts the whole thing on his credit card to simplify things, and the other 2 beam him their portion of the bill, to be credited to his acct. when he hotsyncs his Pilot later in the day.)
2. PayPal became a lot less attractive when all the restrictions kicked in. That "Premiere" account they practically force regular PayPal users to "upgrade" to starts costing you a chunk of every payment you receive. I'd be ok with it if it was only on credit card payments, but PayPal wants a percentage even when it's on payments direct from PayPal users with funds in their PayPal account.
3. They've screwed up my account several times. For starters, they had/have a bug in the Quicken.QIF files they generate for you. If someone pays you but the payment is declined, it still shows up as debited in the.QIF - making your total balance show incorrectly low. Then last weekend, it showed every payment I made as being entered twice, making my account negative. All weekend long, I couldn't use my PayPal debit card for anything - and it was a time when I really needed access to the funds.
I gave up on them as a reasonable/viable company when they started whining about MS-DOS and attempted that lame lawsuit against MS over it.
What happened to Caldera's "OpenDOS" since then? Well, it's neither free nor open, and apparently they don't even support the thing anymore.
I've been doing some research on alternatives to MS-DOS in the last week or two, because I'm trying to build a bare-bones system that boots from a small hard drive into a Citrix client. Sure, this could be done with Linux - but you still have to boot into X and deal with configuring systems differently depending on their video card. A DOS boot makes the most sense for this task. I finally discovered the FreeDOS project (http://www.freedos.org). Their latest beta is still pretty rough around the edges, but the thing works well enough to boot my ICA client - so I'm happy.
Honestly, this could turn out to be worthwhile, *if* they provide stations that play a wide enough variety of music, and remain well-organized by music category. Having all music and no commercials/talk is a big plus. The big problem is that $10 monthly fee for the privilege of listening to a pre-determined playlist that you have no control over.
With the era of MP3 music upon us, I think many people will prefer to spend that $10 a month on blank media, and buy an in-car MP3 player (for roughly the same price as these satellite radios), and control what they listen to and when it's heard.
Yeah, but this is such a poor excuse on govt.'s part. In reality, the paper cash system provides them no better control than what's proposed for these types of smart-cards. They're just trying to gain more control of money than they've ever had in the past. I hope the public can see through this and demands anonymous smart-cards without artifically imposed limits placed on them.
If we had such a thing, there would effectively be limits put on the $ amounts anyway; If you're a merchant and Joe Schmoe walks off the street and wants to buy $50,000 in new furniture on his smart-card, I'm sure you'll do some background checks first. Nobody wants to be the merchant who ends up losing a bunch of merchandise due to fraud.
Good points, but there's another reason using cash costs you. If you're smart about managing your credit cards, you can earn cash-back, free airline miles, and other such things by charging your purchases and paying the card off on-time each month. As long as you don't incur interest charges, you'll benefit more from using the card than from using cash all the time.
I got nearly $100 back from Discover last year, because I used it for all my travel expenses for my work -- and that's not even my primary credit card.
Oh, it gets worse. I have one of those horrible "all in one" ATM debit cards. Now, my bank (Firstar) tells me in order to get overdraft protection on the checking account it's attached to, I'm required to sign up for their credit card. Apparently, the only way they handle overdraft protection is by charging the portion over your limit to the credit card (plus additional service fee, of course). Since I've been burned a few times with bounced check charges - I reluctantly agreed to their terms and now have two cards of theirs to deal with. Ick!
A very interesting take on Copyright reform, but just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment -- what makes you so sure that just because some content "is the most needed in the public doamin" automatically means it should be turned over at no cost?
I think this is the main reason you have a large number of people shooting for a less radical goal of limiting copyrights to only a few years or so (depending on the type of content, perhaps). I think most people can agree that new concepts generate the most revenue for developers during the first year or two they're on the market. A big part of Capitalism is allowing people to benefit from their hard work and development of new concepts/ideas. As much as all of us might prefer that all those great new ideas immediately get handed over to us at no charge, that will tear down the structure we have in place to reward people for their research/work.
If copyright on software, for example, was limited to no more than 2 years - companies like MS could realistically make 99% of the profit they do today. (They release new operating systems and applications on practically a yearly basis as it is.) Non-profits, schools, students, and anyone else who can't afford the latest and greatest could still use software that cost hundreds of dollars per copy less than 3 years ago - and do just fine.
Hmm... I never heard of the Clark Networks package so I just took a look at their web site. I can't say that I recommend it at all. Among other bad ideas, it makes your firewall a file storage area for common, shared files. Why on earth would you want to store your data on the firewall PC?? If hackers do get into it, your information is right at their fingertips.
A firewall should be just that, a dedicated, secure box that shields the systems behind it. Since Point Clark networks also built on top of a *default* RedHat 7.1 installation, that's another bad idea. They need to strip it down to the bare essentials before modifying it. There are too many potential security holes in a full blown installation to qualify as a secure firewall.
I can understand your reasoning for going with the dedicated hub/router/firewall box -- but please don't tell everyone else to "give it up" if they're considering using a PC for the job.
Granted, it does take up a little more space and makes a little noise - but there are a *lot* of benefits, too. For example, you can run web proxy caching on a PC with a hard drive. Saves on bandwidth usage. Usually provides much better logging features, too. I can monitor hack attempts and generate usage graphs/stats. I also have a DSL connection with PPPoE, and so I get a dynamic IP address. I want to host a web site though, so I use the dyndns.org service. I can't find a hardware router that auto-updates dynamic IPs with them, but my Linux-based Smoothwall firewall does.
It all comes down to choosing what's best for your individual needs... but there's no right or wrong way to do this stuff.
I've played with several recently.
Personally, I think the best idea is to sell the Linksys router (and possibly even the hub, depending on total # of ports you need) and buy the all-in-one Linksys wireless router/hub. Best Buy has them on sale for $199.95 (US) right now, and they're nice because they have removeable antennas. (Lets you upgrade to a bigger/better one if you so choose.) The model I'm thinking of provides 4 hub ports - but I believe they also make one with 8 ports on it.
http://www.smoothwall.com should get you to the main product page. It's a freeware GPL firewall running Linux, but designed for ease of installation and administration via a web browser afterwards. The new version 0.99 is due for release any day now, and the beta of 0.99 works quite well for me.
Since most people have an old 486 or Pentium lying around, the cost to set this up is next to nothing - and it has features the hardware firewall/router boxes don't include. (EG. Ability to auto-update your dynamic IP with the dyndns.org service and "snort" to log hack attempts with details on what was attempted.)
Granted, the FBI has bungled a whole slew of things in recent years, and the ATF is just as much to blame.
Still, I fail to see how those issues directly equate with this one. Of course they didn't attack Canada. Canada has chosen to remain basically neutral in regards to the Middle-East political situation. (For similar reasons, you don't see lots of terrorist actions against Switzerland or Sweden.) Does neutrality automatically equate with doing "the right thing"? Is it better to sit back and watch people die than to try to intervene, and take a side?
Personally, I don't see how the U.S. factors in at all to the behavior of Israel vs. Palestine. They've been fighting for a LONG time now, and I don't see the supposed "Nazi tactics against the Palestinians" as ending just because the U.S. decides not to arm or fund Israel any more. The Palestinians will continue to see the United States as evil and against their religious beliefs, whether we take a stand or cower in neutrality, off to the side.
Uncle Sam isn't putting a "spin" on this at all by blaming the individuals responsible for the attacks. Or do you suppose it's a big conspiracy, and our political leaders were up in those planes, crashing them into our buildings?
Hmm... interesting points. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the mainframe/dumb-terminal vs. power-user PCs on all desktops models lately.
I work in I.T. for a business (7 locations around the U.S.) that is in the process of centralizing our servers and storage right now. We started out with VT-100 dumb terminals and DEC VAX servers originally, and as the PC revolution progressed, moved to a much more distributed model. (We had 2 file/print servers installed on-site at each of our locations, and tape backups were done independently at each location.)
Now, we've invested heavily in Citrix Metaframe and a storage area network solution, and power is becoming centralized again.
I think the primary reason people moved away from a centralized computing model was the rise of the GUI interface. Microsoft and Apple brought the GUI to the forefront, and millions of individuals became comfortable using it. Despite all of its problems, it made it possible for a whole generation of workers to learn the basics of using a computer at home. Instead of training someone in exactly what menu selections to choose in a custom-written app on a dumb terminal at one particular business, you could train them in general PC usage concepts instead. The knowledge carried over to anything you put in front of them.
Now, the GUI has been fully integrated to the point where it's feasible to make a dumb-terminal (now renamed "thin client") that works just like the full-power desktop PC. For reasons of security and ease of administration, I.T. has always wanted to centralize the PC environment. Until now, though, the benefits of using GUI desktops outweighed that desire.
The challenge, now, is convincing users to let go of some of the control we gave them in the 90's. Where I work, our more knowledgeable users feel punished when you take that Pentium III off their desk and replace it with a thin client. You can overcome some of that by upgrading their monitor. (Everyone likes a bigger, brighter screen.) Still, they resist when they discover they can't install those 30-day free trial programs anymore, or they can't load a driver for that custom 6-button cordless mouse they bought without I.T. knowing about it.
I think the final solution will really be a mix of high-end PCs and thin clients. The high-end PCs will be able to enter and exit the Citrix Metaframe environment at will, while everyone else "lives" in the Citrix environment all day long. People who can give legitimate reasons to keep a PC will do so. Otherwise, they're getting the thin client.
In summary, we might have come full circle, but today, users have been on both sides of the fence. You'll see more of them wanting a mix - rather than one model or the other.
I'd agree, except I guess the only problem is the people who aren't really aware of what they're getting into until after they buy a copy of XP and install it.
Despite all the marketing information and even a few screen shots I looked at online, I had no idea what the XP overall "feel" would be until I installed a release-candidate 30-day trial for myself. The average user doesn't wipe their hard drive and install 30-day trials of operating systems, just to decide if they should buy it or not.
(For the record, I wiped XP off my drive after giving it about 5 days. My wife refused to use it, saying it looked too "cartoon-like" and was noticeably slower launching several programs she commonly uses. I could deal with the new appearance of things, but I really disliked all the attempts to coerce me into using MS products for everything. It installed MSN messenger by default, and each "mouse-over" to the shortcut in the system tray reminded me to click to sign up and activate it. Then, they kept bugging me to go to their web site and sign up for a Passport account, to use their.net functionality. Uh, no thanks.)
I'm a SW Bell DSL subscriber, and while I was initially disappointed to hear that they're getting rid of many of the alt.binaries newsgroups - I also am currently just thankful that I can get a decent speed connection for around $40 a month. AT&T provided cable TV service in my area, and *still* hasn't made any effort to roll out cable Internet in this part of town, over 2 years after they started deploying it in a few test markets.
I think the majority of those who really complain about not getting alt.binaries are the porn collectors, running automated programs or scripts that download every file in particular groups overnight. They come back the next day and cull through all the stuff, keeping anything they like and deleting the rest. That's really a pretty inefficient use of bandwidth - and I can see the side of ISP's like PacBell/Prodigy, who are trying to find ways to discourage and eliminate that sort of thing.
Imagine if people started trying to ftp down entire sites all the time instead of bothering to read the directory contents and 00index.txt files first - and just deleted all the stuff they didn't end up liking afterwards? Before long, you'd have some unhappy ftp site operators!
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Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm not a big fan of the whole escrow idea. I don't like the idea of another "middle man" getting involved in my sale or purchase. For starters, how often have you been improperly billed by a large company? I bet more than once! I'm just as afraid of the escrow company messing something up as I am of being ripped off by the person I'm trying to directly do business with.
Also, it's one more fee that cuts into your profits from a sale (and one more thing that can raise the price you pay for items). I've done hundreds of successful transactions on both eBay and Amazon.com auctions - and never used escrow. The money I've saved by skipping it all this time probably more than pays for the one time, someday, I'll get ripped off on something.
There are lots of safeguards in place to help you get your money back when you're a fraud victim. As people already said, use postal money orders or credit cards to pay for things. You'll get your transactions done more quickly and with less hassle, save a little money, and be better off, IMHO.
Yeah, whatever.... If I received a post-dated check from someone, I'd hold off on shipping their product until after that time had passed plus however long it took to clear my bank once I deposited it.
I've been burnt too many times by people giving me post-dated checks because they don't really have the money in the bank at all, and wrongly assumed they'd have some in there in a couple more weeks.
The board itself is pretty cool, but that case looks like it was inspired by external DLT tape backup drives! I mean, geesh - I'd almost accidently try to shove a DLT IV cartridge in one of the drive bays, if I wasn't paying attention.
I've both bought and sold a LOT of stuff on eBay over the years, and I've generally been very pleased with the outcome.
However, I've had a few problems with buyers of my products which resulted from them not reading the details before bidding (or ignoring them).
If an item does not state anyplace in the auction that it's "functional" or "in working order", you can assume it to be broken/malfunctioning. If you're not really sure, email the person and *ASK* before bidding!
I've occasionally sold some items that were known to be in not-so-great condition, but I've always stated "as-is" clearly in my auctions when they were like this. I also started the bids at a very low dollar amount. Still, I've had winning bidders of these things get all bent out of shape and threaten legal action before when the product wasn't shiny new and working perfectly after they got it.
The fact is, there are good reasons why people might actually want to buy broken products! Maybe they want to gut it for repair parts, or they want to take on the challenge of fixing it themselves?
Also, if you're buying a smaller-cost item ($100 or less), keep in mind that UPS will typically insure it for up to that amount at no additional cost over normal ground delivery. Therefore, there's no excuse for someone to ship you an item via UPS and have it completely uninsured. (I use the UPS "Worldship" shipping software all the time, and even though it defaults to entering a 0 amount for insurance, it doesn't add anything to the price if you bump that up to 100.00.)
I used to play one of the strategy games against my wife as pretty much a nightly ritual before bedtime. We played the original AOE, Starcraft, Warcraft I and II (quickly scrapped Warcraft due to poor quality graphics by today's standards), and finally settled on AOE2 as our favorite. It has everything right: good pace (a full game usually runs about an hour to no more than an hour and 45 mins.), great graphics, and most importantly for her - lots of little people to control.
For whatever reason, her biggest facination is seeing little people on the screen actually doing things.
She used to like all the "Sim" games, but got burnt out on them since they don't really have objectives, other than "build the biggest/nicest thing you can make".
Personally, I loved Civ and Civ II, but the "game board pieces" feel of the games turned my wife off to them after she played them a few times.
She occasionally plays the FPS shooters with me, but doesn't enjoy them much since she's not very good at them.
Right now, we're both waiting, anxiously, for Age of Myths and possibly Empire Earth from Sierra.
I'm pretty certain I heard a news bite a couple years ago about Dave Matthews going after several street-side dealers for selling bootlegs of his music. He got them completely shut down with crippling fines.
For a long time after that happened, I didn't want to buy any more of his music, even though I really liked it. I guess the guy has a philosophy that "it's ok to copy it for free, but don't make money off it unless you go through my official record company".
You know though, I find it interesting that everyone's so quick to condemn IBM drives over this one particular model, when all the other major manufacturers have made similar mistakes multiple times. The Western Digital "Caviar" 1.6 gig. IDE had a defect causing it to make a loud clicking sound at power-up. They ended up recalling them, and had a notice on their web site for quite a while. Seagate has had a number of "problem drives" over the years, including the first 7200 RPM SCSI Barracudas that had regular bearing failures from too much heat. We have several of the 30 gig. versions of these IBM EIDE hard drives and they've been not only fast and reliable, but among the quietest drives we've got. No complaints....
I'd say to avoid this one drive model, but in general, not other IBM hard drives. They've made many quality ones.
I'm not so upset that they don't send me back personal replies to letters. What *does* bother me is that they apparently don't make any effort to get a consensus on what the people are writing in favor of or against. There's no excuse for not having an aide submit at least a weekly summary of what the constituents said in their letters.
Yeah, I agree with you on the future of the PS2.
I just recently broke down and bought a complete PS2 setup (S-video adapter, Mad Catz controller with the ability to program macros in it, several game titles, etc.) It sure does add up. I think I blew over $600 on all the stuff by the time I was done... but anyway, it's the first time I've *ever* laid out $'s for a new game console.
I even passed back in the heyday of the Atari 2600 and Colecovision, favoring spending money on my home computer instead.
Gran Turismo 3 totally sold me on PS2, though. One good look at that game really opens your eyes to what's possible with the unit, even though most other current titles don't come close to that quality right now.
I was really pondering grabbing a Dreamcast since every Best Buy store around here has them on sale... and you can rent titles for cheap at Blockbuster. But in the end, I splurged and did the PS2 thing, because I'm a believer in the future potential. Long after it's impossible to find broadband adapters for Dreamcast and new releases die out, the PS2 will be going strong with lots of interactive net action.
Argh! Seagate is your second favorite drive?
I was going along with you until you said that!
I've given Segate chance after chance over a span of 12 years or more, and each time I buy one, I get burned on it. Ever since the days of the ST238R RLL drive (I think it was a 30 meg.), I had several of them die off or develop loads of bad sectors.
When I started working for a local PC builder/repair shop in 1993 and 94, we sold a lot of IDE drives in the 120 to 540 meg. range, and I saw the Seagates come back as bad almost every time. (I personally know a few people *still* running Maxtor 245 meg. IDE drives we sold them back in '93 - and they haven't worn out yet!)
Then I got a job doing I.T. support and systems administration, and they bought all Dell systems. Dell used a mix of drives, ranging from Western Digital to Maxtor to Quantum to Seagate - and guess which ones always ended up failing on us? Yep, Seagate again. Oh, granted, they did have a bad batch of 1.6 gig. Western Digitals at one point in time. I think Dell ended up replacing each and every one of those we had in their Optiplex GS systems. But that was an exception to the rule.
Meanwhile, I bought a high-end SCSI LVD drive for a PC at home and went with Seagate because of the price and performance specs. I figured "Ok, maybe they finally got things right on these high end SCSI drives." Guess what? It had a bearing failure and self-destructed! My Quantum Viking and Atlas replacements are still ticking along with no problems at all....
Sorry Seagate, you're just junk in my book.
I'm a long-time PayPal user. I thought it was a teriffic concept, but I have several complaints with their service.
.QIF files they generate for you. If someone pays you but the payment is declined, it still shows up as debited in the .QIF - making your total balance show incorrectly low. Then last weekend, it showed every payment I made as being entered twice, making my account negative. All weekend long, I couldn't use my PayPal debit card for anything - and it was a time when I really needed access to the funds.
1. They got rid of the Palm-Pilot support. That really sucks, because the ability to "beam" a payment directly from a Palm device to a merchant (or of course, to your buddy's Palm device) held a lot of promise. Until they discontinued this feature, a few of my co-workers started regularly paying each other back for lunches, etc. in this manner. (EG. 3 of you go to lunch. One guy puts the whole thing on his credit card to simplify things, and the other 2 beam him their portion of the bill, to be credited to his acct. when he hotsyncs his Pilot later in the day.)
2. PayPal became a lot less attractive when all the restrictions kicked in. That "Premiere" account they practically force regular PayPal users to "upgrade" to starts costing you a chunk of every payment you receive. I'd be ok with it if it was only on credit card payments, but PayPal wants a percentage even when it's on payments direct from PayPal users with funds in their PayPal account.
3. They've screwed up my account several times. For starters, they had/have a bug in the Quicken
I gave up on them as a reasonable/viable company when they started whining about MS-DOS and attempted that lame lawsuit against MS over it.
What happened to Caldera's "OpenDOS" since then? Well, it's neither free nor open, and apparently they don't even support the thing anymore.
I've been doing some research on alternatives to MS-DOS in the last week or two, because I'm trying to build a bare-bones system that boots from a small hard drive into a Citrix client. Sure, this could be done with Linux - but you still have to boot into X and deal with configuring systems differently depending on their video card. A DOS boot makes the most sense for this task. I finally discovered the FreeDOS project (http://www.freedos.org). Their latest beta is still pretty rough around the edges, but the thing works well enough to boot my ICA client - so I'm happy.
Honestly, this could turn out to be worthwhile, *if* they provide stations that play a wide enough variety of music, and remain well-organized by music category. Having all music and no commercials/talk is a big plus. The big problem is that $10 monthly fee for the privilege of listening to a pre-determined playlist that you have no control over.
With the era of MP3 music upon us, I think many people will prefer to spend that $10 a month on blank media, and buy an in-car MP3 player (for roughly the same price as these satellite radios), and control what they listen to and when it's heard.
Yeah, but this is such a poor excuse on govt.'s part. In reality, the paper cash system provides them no better control than what's proposed for these types of smart-cards. They're just trying to gain more control of money than they've ever had in the past. I hope the public can see through this and demands anonymous smart-cards without artifically imposed limits placed on them.
If we had such a thing, there would effectively be limits put on the $ amounts anyway; If you're a merchant and Joe Schmoe walks off the street and wants to buy $50,000 in new furniture on his smart-card, I'm sure you'll do some background checks first. Nobody wants to be the merchant who ends up losing a bunch of merchandise due to fraud.
Good points, but there's another reason using cash costs you. If you're smart about managing your credit cards, you can earn cash-back, free airline miles, and other such things by charging your purchases and paying the card off on-time each month. As long as you don't incur interest charges, you'll benefit more from using the card than from using cash all the time.
I got nearly $100 back from Discover last year, because I used it for all my travel expenses for my work -- and that's not even my primary credit card.
Oh, it gets worse. I have one of those horrible "all in one" ATM debit cards. Now, my bank (Firstar) tells me in order to get overdraft protection on the checking account it's attached to, I'm required to sign up for their credit card. Apparently, the only way they handle overdraft protection is by charging the portion over your limit to the credit card (plus additional service fee, of course). Since I've been burned a few times with bounced check charges - I reluctantly agreed to their terms and now have two cards of theirs to deal with. Ick!
A very interesting take on Copyright reform, but just to play Devil's Advocate for a moment -- what makes you so sure that just because some content "is the most needed in the public doamin" automatically means it should be turned over at no cost?
I think this is the main reason you have a large number of people shooting for a less radical goal of limiting copyrights to only a few years or so (depending on the type of content, perhaps). I think most people can agree that new concepts generate the most revenue for developers during the first year or two they're on the market. A big part of Capitalism is allowing people to benefit from their hard work and development of new concepts/ideas. As much as all of us might prefer that all those great new ideas immediately get handed over to us at no charge, that will tear down the structure we have in place to reward people for their research/work.
If copyright on software, for example, was limited to no more than 2 years - companies like MS could realistically make 99% of the profit they do today. (They release new operating systems and applications on practically a yearly basis as it is.) Non-profits, schools, students, and anyone else who can't afford the latest and greatest could still use software that cost hundreds of dollars per copy less than 3 years ago - and do just fine.
Hmm... I never heard of the Clark Networks package so I just took a look at their web site. I can't say that I recommend it at all. Among other bad ideas, it makes your firewall a file storage area for common, shared files. Why on earth would you want to store your data on the firewall PC?? If hackers do get into it, your information is right at their fingertips.
A firewall should be just that, a dedicated, secure box that shields the systems behind it. Since Point Clark networks also built on top of a *default* RedHat 7.1 installation, that's another bad idea. They need to strip it down to the bare essentials before modifying it. There are too many potential security holes in a full blown installation to qualify as a secure firewall.
Smoothwall is *much* more security-oriented.
I can understand your reasoning for going with the dedicated hub/router/firewall box -- but please don't tell everyone else to "give it up" if they're considering using a PC for the job.
Granted, it does take up a little more space and makes a little noise - but there are a *lot* of benefits, too. For example, you can run web proxy caching on a PC with a hard drive. Saves on bandwidth usage. Usually provides much better logging features, too. I can monitor hack attempts and generate usage graphs/stats. I also have a DSL connection with PPPoE, and so I get a dynamic IP address. I want to host a web site though, so I use the dyndns.org service. I can't find a hardware router that auto-updates dynamic IPs with them, but my Linux-based Smoothwall firewall does.
It all comes down to choosing what's best for your individual needs... but there's no right or wrong way to do this stuff.
I've played with several recently.
Personally, I think the best idea is to sell the Linksys router (and possibly even the hub, depending on total # of ports you need) and buy the all-in-one Linksys wireless router/hub. Best Buy has them on sale for $199.95 (US) right now, and they're nice because they have removeable antennas. (Lets you upgrade to a bigger/better one if you so choose.) The model I'm thinking of provides 4 hub ports - but I believe they also make one with 8 ports on it.
http://www.smoothwall.com should get you to the main product page. It's a freeware GPL firewall running Linux, but designed for ease of installation and administration via a web browser afterwards. The new version 0.99 is due for release any day now, and the beta of 0.99 works quite well for me.
Since most people have an old 486 or Pentium lying around, the cost to set this up is next to nothing - and it has features the hardware firewall/router boxes don't include. (EG. Ability to auto-update your dynamic IP with the dyndns.org service and "snort" to log hack attempts with details on what was attempted.)
Granted, the FBI has bungled a whole slew of things in recent years, and the ATF is just as much to blame.
Still, I fail to see how those issues directly equate with this one. Of course they didn't attack Canada. Canada has chosen to remain basically neutral in regards to the Middle-East political situation. (For similar reasons, you don't see lots of terrorist actions against Switzerland or Sweden.) Does neutrality automatically equate with doing "the right thing"? Is it better to sit back and watch people die than to try to intervene, and take a side?
Personally, I don't see how the U.S. factors in at all to the behavior of Israel vs. Palestine. They've been fighting for a LONG time now, and I don't see the supposed "Nazi tactics against the Palestinians" as ending just because the U.S. decides not to arm or fund Israel any more. The Palestinians will continue to see the United States as evil and against their religious beliefs, whether we take a stand or cower in neutrality, off to the side.
Uncle Sam isn't putting a "spin" on this at all by blaming the individuals responsible for the attacks. Or do you suppose it's a big conspiracy, and our political leaders were up in those planes, crashing them into our buildings?
Hmm... interesting points. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the mainframe/dumb-terminal vs. power-user PCs on all desktops models lately.
I work in I.T. for a business (7 locations around the U.S.) that is in the process of centralizing our servers and storage right now. We started out with VT-100 dumb terminals and DEC VAX servers originally, and as the PC revolution progressed, moved to a much more distributed model. (We had 2 file/print servers installed on-site at each of our locations, and tape backups were done independently at each location.)
Now, we've invested heavily in Citrix Metaframe and a storage area network solution, and power is becoming centralized again.
I think the primary reason people moved away from a centralized computing model was the rise of the GUI interface. Microsoft and Apple brought the GUI to the forefront, and millions of individuals became comfortable using it. Despite all of its problems, it made it possible for a whole generation of workers to learn the basics of using a computer at home. Instead of training someone in exactly what menu selections to choose in a custom-written app on a dumb terminal at one particular business, you could train them in general PC usage concepts instead. The knowledge carried over to anything you put in front of them.
Now, the GUI has been fully integrated to the point where it's feasible to make a dumb-terminal (now renamed "thin client") that works just like the full-power desktop PC. For reasons of security and ease of administration, I.T. has always wanted to centralize the PC environment. Until now, though, the benefits of using GUI desktops outweighed that desire.
The challenge, now, is convincing users to let go of some of the control we gave them in the 90's. Where I work, our more knowledgeable users feel punished when you take that Pentium III off their desk and replace it with a thin client. You can overcome some of that by upgrading their monitor. (Everyone likes a bigger, brighter screen.) Still, they resist when they discover they can't install those 30-day free trial programs anymore, or they can't load a driver for that custom 6-button cordless mouse they bought without I.T. knowing about it.
I think the final solution will really be a mix of high-end PCs and thin clients. The high-end PCs will be able to enter and exit the Citrix Metaframe environment at will, while everyone else "lives" in the Citrix environment all day long. People who can give legitimate reasons to keep a PC will do so. Otherwise, they're getting the thin client.
In summary, we might have come full circle, but today, users have been on both sides of the fence. You'll see more of them wanting a mix - rather than one model or the other.
I'd agree, except I guess the only problem is the people who aren't really aware of what they're getting into until after they buy a copy of XP and install it.
.net functionality. Uh, no thanks.)
Despite all the marketing information and even a few screen shots I looked at online, I had no idea what the XP overall "feel" would be until I installed a release-candidate 30-day trial for myself. The average user doesn't wipe their hard drive and install 30-day trials of operating systems, just to decide if they should buy it or not.
(For the record, I wiped XP off my drive after giving it about 5 days. My wife refused to use it, saying it looked too "cartoon-like" and was noticeably slower launching several programs she commonly uses. I could deal with the new appearance of things, but I really disliked all the attempts to coerce me into using MS products for everything. It installed MSN messenger by default, and each "mouse-over" to the shortcut in the system tray reminded me to click to sign up and activate it. Then, they kept bugging me to go to their web site and sign up for a Passport account, to use their
I'm a SW Bell DSL subscriber, and while I was initially disappointed to hear that they're getting rid of many of the alt.binaries newsgroups - I also am currently just thankful that I can get a decent speed connection for around $40 a month. AT&T provided cable TV service in my area, and *still* hasn't made any effort to roll out cable Internet in this part of town, over 2 years after they started deploying it in a few test markets.
I think the majority of those who really complain about not getting alt.binaries are the porn collectors, running automated programs or scripts that download every file in particular groups overnight. They come back the next day and cull through all the stuff, keeping anything they like and deleting the rest. That's really a pretty inefficient use of bandwidth - and I can see the side of ISP's like PacBell/Prodigy, who are trying to find ways to discourage and eliminate that sort of thing.
Imagine if people started trying to ftp down entire sites all the time instead of bothering to read the directory contents and 00index.txt files first - and just deleted all the stuff they didn't end up liking afterwards? Before long, you'd have some unhappy ftp site operators!