I also have a Yahoo! mail and GMail account. I currently use GMail, but only because of it's threading capability. Since my ISP gives my Yahoo! mail account 5 GB of storage,, GMail really has no benefit on that front either.
It will be interesting to see Yahoo!'s new AJAX mail client. I may switch to them then - especially since they have great calendering as well.
Teoma still has only text-based ads, and has some innovative features and accurate results.
MSN Search has only text ads. Sure, it is MS, but the new engine is actually pretty accurate and has useful features like encarta integration.
Yahoo! search also has no image-based ads. Funny how people are constantly bashing Yahoo!, and now Google is going to have image ads on it's search, where Yahoo! removed them a long time ago.
It's called a free market, we wil see how it plays out. If Google alienates their customers, they will migrate elsewhere.
The link is already Coralized...
on
Hacking Santa
·
· Score: 1
"What's the point, 1080p isn't so common" because I don't want to see another fucking interlaced display in my lifetime ever again! There is no reason we should have to put up with visual garbage such as interlacing.
You can't just make blanket statements like that. 1080i is superior to 720p if your subject is relatively low-motion. 720p is superior if your subject is relativly high motion.
If you watch a lot of sports or play video games, 720p is better. If you watch a lot of dramas and non-action cinema, 1080p is far better.
Personally for me, I don't give two shits about sports, and prefer 1080i in 95% of the situations. Only if I am watching an action flick do I like to have a 720p source.
It also depends a lot on the native resolution of your display.
None of this is falsifiable. For one thing, you could never train a group of people to recognize a persons emotions from a photograph, because it is by nature entirely subjective. There is absolutely no way this would work.
Even if it did, there would be no way to know that the emotions that the subjects *said* they were feeling when the photo was taken was actually the emotion they were feeling. Like, you can't base it off of saying "look happy!" then taking a photo - you have to take the photo when the person *is* happy, not when they are prentending to be happy. Constructing such a study across the whole range of emotions would be an act of futility.
All the trade rags are the exact same. Car + Driver, Computer Shopper, etc etc. Why should video game magazines be any different?
Any magazine that reviews a product that features a single ad for a product it reviews is tainted.
This is why I never trust any reviews from any magazine but Consumer Reports (who buys the products they review through normal channels via secret shoppers, and who do ntot accept any advertisement swhatsoever in their maagainze, and who do not allow their reviews ot be used in advertisements).
The only web reviews I trust are blogs or reivew sites where I know the reviewer purchased the items themselves.
There is no other way to ensure journalistic integrity.
I can't speak as to the laws in your state, but I know most states and other countries have laws specificlly surrounding credit card purchases, whereby any transaction used to perpetuate fraud is required *by law* to be null and void, and thus incur 0 liability on the owner.
That's why credit card companie that advertise based on 0 liability are usually bunk - every card has 0 liability. Its the law.
But as I said maybe your state has different laws. I would call your local better business bearu if you are curious, I am sure they would know the fraud laws in your area.
And why are the odds of the card being stolen higher overseas than in the US? Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America and more identity theft happens there per capita than anywhere else in the world, and the perpetrators are rarely caught and even more rarely is the money recovered. If you don't believe me Google it up.
You're not protecting yourself much by resticting yourself to domestic trade.
You should have called your credit card company and cancelled the payment *to paypal* citing the fraud.
Paypal has a horrible history for this (see http://www.paypalwarning.com). *Never* use your bank account to fund your paypal transactions, no matter *what* they say abot their so called "coverage". Your credit card company's coverage is much better (read: 0 liability), because it is required by law to be so. Paypal operates in a weird void between a bank and a credit card company, and as such, they weasel their way out of being covered by many laws.
I use paypal all the time, but I never ever fund it from my bank account (I have one registered with them, but it is a special paypal-only account I opened at my bank and I keep a $0 balence in it, and only use it for withdrawls from paypal).
Surely you don't think that *nothing* is *ever* lost during transit?
It happens all the freaking time, this is why shipping insurance exists. Nearly ever hand that touches your package on route from source to destination is making a below-average salary. Wouldn't you be tempted to swipe that laptop-sized box once in awhile? After all, you *know* it is insured, so it is a victimless crime, right?
Now, maybe you do know for sure you were scammed somehow, but if you don't, I wouldn't be so quick to blame the buyer.
As someone who does not live in the US, these three ignorant and mis-informed comments piss me off to no end when they affect me on ebay:
Don't ship abroad - at least not to 'certain countries' in Africa.
This is crap. If you are the seller, you have the advantage. You have every ability to ensure that the payment you recieve is genuine before you ship the item, so there is literally *nothing to lose* from shipping abroad. The only excuse you could have for not shipping abroad is laziness because you don't want to fill out the extra customs declaration.
Don't accept moneyorders, WU, MG or the like - card is king, and PayPal (while evil) is also decent.
Definitly don't accept a deal going like I'll send you a check on a higher amouth, you send me the item and the money left over. The check WILL be false.
See my above comment. There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques. Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item. Anyone who sent a legitimate payment will understand this, and it only takes 3-5 days.
If the transaction goes sour, there is no problem re-listing the item for free. It has happened to me a couple of times in the past (not fraudulent payment, just no payment at all), and eBay was very easy to deal with.
There is ample reason to be suspect of *buying* overseas, but rarely is there a good reason for not *selling8 overseas. All you are doing is needlessly constricting your customer base.
Nope, no dice. If they call, I inform them of my policy and send them on their way.
Anything else is doing nothing but re-enforcing the behaviour of cold calling. Until more people step up it will continune to get worse and worse.
Hint - I just drop off my stuff to the Salvation Army drop boxes instead. Never got a call from them.
And BTW my dad is even a diabetic.
I can't even begin to understand why VC's would think that a software company would need any more than $50K to start.
You gotta assume that anything halfway decent is going to take at least two or three people at least two or three months. 50k would not even pay the rent aorund here for two people for 6 months, not to mention food, etc. Plus you have capital requirements like a server and some desktops, and an office. Hell the office alone would be 10k for six months.
Unless you plan on doing development out of your mom's basement. That doesn't generally go over well with propspective clients.
You're forgetting something important
on
The Shadow of Kong
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
25% of the TV's sold in the US were hidef in 2004. Estimates for 2005 are roughly 50% of the TVs sold. And it is looking like sales of hidef TV's will reach critical mass in 2006.
Percent of sales of TVs means nothing, because people do not buy a new TV every year. Hell, most peopole buy a big TV maybe once every 15 years.
Every single person who came of age in the 90s and spent $500 or more on a 32+ inch TV is *not* going to rush out and replace it with an HDTV until absoltely necessary. Why? Theres a multitude of reasons. First of all, they're 40-some years old now with kids to feed, and don't have thousands of dollars of disposable income to drop on a luxury item. Second, they dont give a shit, to them their current TV is just fine.
Main point - the percent of TV sales in any given year is an infentessimal amount compared to the number of TVs in current use. Hell, I have two 14 inch TVs in my house from 1982-1984 with cable boxes, one on the porch and one downstairs. Why should I have go out and blow $800 bucks on two HDTV-compat. models of simmilar size? You think twice the res makes a huge difference on a 13" screen? You think I can fit a TV any larger on my porch? Think again.
One in every 3 customers will have a hidef tv in their house
I would like to know what this statistic is based on - but even if it is true, it still means that 66% of households will *not* have an HDTV. You think any government will piss off 66% of its voting base to push some technology they are not ready for down their throats? It would be political suicide.
And one more point - all those people in that 66 percent,the ones who wont have HDTVs when the Revolution comes out? All the ones with kids to feed, middle class, etc? Thats the Revolution's target market - cheaper console, lots of kids. Nintendo has never marketed to the 16-24 year old market like the Xbox, they target the 6-18 year old market. You still think it's such a bad move?
Perosnally, I donate $30 a month to Amnesty International, because I believe strongly in the work that they do, and they don't try to play politics or endorse a religious dogma while doing so.
The only thing I have ever recieved from them in the mail is a quarterly newsletter thing detailing what they are doing (which I like - nice to know what I am helping). I have never recieved any cold calls asking me to up my pledge, never recieved any letters asking the same either. And as far as I am aware they haven't given my number to anyone.
My point is, you gotta be careful about what charity you support. I find that the worst ones are the "foundation" type charities for a particular disorder. If you give any money to these guys they will be back at and at you again for more. I find that if you eve rplan to do a one-time donation, or a christmas donation, your best bet is to do so anonymously, or give a fake phone number / address when you mail it in (making it the address of the charity itself is a good way to send a point and have them not waste money sending the stuff out).
Personally, I will *never* give money to a charity that cold calls me, no matter *what* the cause, and I tell them as such if they call (that, although i regularly donate to charities, I will not donate to theirs, because of this call). I refuse to endorse the practice of cold-calling people and asking for money. It is just plain rude IMO. Charities may be allowed to do it by law, but that does not mean that they should.
If the SSL ceritifcate does not match the IP address of the host you are connecting to, it should raise big red flags in your head.
Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for this (such as a bank moving servers and not having time to get a new cert), but they are usually very temporary, so to be safe you can just not do any banking during that period.
Sure, you can still bypass this via a man in the middle attack using ARP poisioning - but in order to do that the hacker has to be on your local subnet if you have a home router, or else working at your ISP if you are directly connected.
Either case is highly unlikely, and **any** way you look at it, even if your original DNS thing was an actual issue, online banking is much more secure thank banking at an ATM or via debit payment, and I bet you do that every day.
All I need to steal your money at an ATM is to install a hidden swipe reader inside the ATM/debit machine and a hidden camera to capture your PIN number. This happens *all the time*, far more than publicized. It is very easy to do, and a smart crook who just leaves the setup installed for a few hours then takes it down is rarely caught either
Even easier is to just capture the cazd swipe, us eit to make a fake identical copy of your own card, and going into the bank and convince the teller to let you change the PIN on the card cause "you forgot it". Also simple to do. Much simpler than hacking itno the DNS servers of your ISP, that's for sure.
And when said customers see their fees increse because of their bank's lack security, they will switch banks to one who has lower fees (because they have good security and don't have to pay said fines).
Any way you cut it, with this legislation the bank is the one who loses if they don't get their act together when it comes to security.
*Every* industry should have this type of legislation. It should not be the customers responsibility to research the security policies of their prospective banks/stores/whatever. Hell there is no way you could realisticly do that, since theres no way for you to know their internal policies.
This is what consumer protection should be. Too bad around here all the politicians are bought and paid for by the corperations that this should be protecting us from.
Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.
Personally, if I can read the damned text, I dont give a flying monkey butt what the "history" or "character" of a font is (who in God's name WOULD????)
Let me pick my own fonts thank you very much. I am subjected to enough Flash in my daily life to not have to go through this nonsense just because some "gods-gift-to-web-design" flunkie wants to shove his view of the world down my throat.
Maybe now I can add some of the mor euseful widgets at My Yahoo! to the Google homepage... lik a stock ticker that does more than just US exchange, or a TV listings mondule for more than just US listings.
My Yahoo! has been way ahead of Google on this for some time, hopefully this will allow Google to catch up quicker by leveraging third-party developers.
Not to mention you won't get taxed on the iPod right away.
Sure, you are *ahem* supported to file the value of it as income when you do your taxes, but even if you actually do, its still way better than getting a huge chunk of your bonus removed right away.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see Yahoo!'s new AJAX mail client. I may switch to them then - especially since they have great calendering as well.
Not only is A9's search powered by Google, but it's ads are as well.
So it is unknown how this deal will effect them. You may see graphics in A9's results as well.
MSN Search has only text ads. Sure, it is MS, but the new engine is actually pretty accurate and has useful features like encarta integration.
Yahoo! search also has no image-based ads. Funny how people are constantly bashing Yahoo!, and now Google is going to have image ads on it's search, where Yahoo! removed them a long time ago.
It's called a free market, we wil see how it plays out. If Google alienates their customers, they will migrate elsewhere.
... highly unlikely that this will go down.
http://kopete.kde.org
"What's the point, 1080p isn't so common" because I don't want to see another fucking interlaced display in my lifetime ever again! There is no reason we should have to put up with visual garbage such as interlacing.
You can't just make blanket statements like that. 1080i is superior to 720p if your subject is relatively low-motion. 720p is superior if your subject is relativly high motion.
If you watch a lot of sports or play video games, 720p is better. If you watch a lot of dramas and non-action cinema, 1080p is far better.
Personally for me, I don't give two shits about sports, and prefer 1080i in 95% of the situations. Only if I am watching an action flick do I like to have a 720p source.
It also depends a lot on the native resolution of your display.
If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular...
It's called war.
And it seems to be extremely popular nowadays.
None of this is falsifiable. For one thing, you could never train a group of people to recognize a persons emotions from a photograph, because it is by nature entirely subjective. There is absolutely no way this would work.
Even if it did, there would be no way to know that the emotions that the subjects *said* they were feeling when the photo was taken was actually the emotion they were feeling. Like, you can't base it off of saying "look happy!" then taking a photo - you have to take the photo when the person *is* happy, not when they are prentending to be happy. Constructing such a study across the whole range of emotions would be an act of futility.
All the trade rags are the exact same. Car + Driver, Computer Shopper, etc etc. Why should video game magazines be any different?
Any magazine that reviews a product that features a single ad for a product it reviews is tainted.
This is why I never trust any reviews from any magazine but Consumer Reports (who buys the products they review through normal channels via secret shoppers, and who do ntot accept any advertisement swhatsoever in their maagainze, and who do not allow their reviews ot be used in advertisements).
The only web reviews I trust are blogs or reivew sites where I know the reviewer purchased the items themselves.
There is no other way to ensure journalistic integrity.
I can't speak as to the laws in your state, but I know most states and other countries have laws specificlly surrounding credit card purchases, whereby any transaction used to perpetuate fraud is required *by law* to be null and void, and thus incur 0 liability on the owner.
That's why credit card companie that advertise based on 0 liability are usually bunk - every card has 0 liability. Its the law.
But as I said maybe your state has different laws. I would call your local better business bearu if you are curious, I am sure they would know the fraud laws in your area.
And why are the odds of the card being stolen higher overseas than in the US? Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in America and more identity theft happens there per capita than anywhere else in the world, and the perpetrators are rarely caught and even more rarely is the money recovered. If you don't believe me Google it up.
You're not protecting yourself much by resticting yourself to domestic trade.
You should have called your credit card company and cancelled the payment *to paypal* citing the fraud. Paypal has a horrible history for this (see http://www.paypalwarning.com). *Never* use your bank account to fund your paypal transactions, no matter *what* they say abot their so called "coverage". Your credit card company's coverage is much better (read: 0 liability), because it is required by law to be so. Paypal operates in a weird void between a bank and a credit card company, and as such, they weasel their way out of being covered by many laws. I use paypal all the time, but I never ever fund it from my bank account (I have one registered with them, but it is a special paypal-only account I opened at my bank and I keep a $0 balence in it, and only use it for withdrawls from paypal).
... that it was a scam?
Surely you don't think that *nothing* is *ever* lost during transit?
It happens all the freaking time, this is why shipping insurance exists. Nearly ever hand that touches your package on route from source to destination is making a below-average salary. Wouldn't you be tempted to swipe that laptop-sized box once in awhile? After all, you *know* it is insured, so it is a victimless crime, right?
Now, maybe you do know for sure you were scammed somehow, but if you don't, I wouldn't be so quick to blame the buyer.
Don't ship abroad - at least not to 'certain countries' in Africa.
This is crap. If you are the seller, you have the advantage. You have every ability to ensure that the payment you recieve is genuine before you ship the item, so there is literally *nothing to lose* from shipping abroad. The only excuse you could have for not shipping abroad is laziness because you don't want to fill out the extra customs declaration.
Don't accept moneyorders, WU, MG or the like - card is king, and PayPal (while evil) is also decent.
Definitly don't accept a deal going like I'll send you a check on a higher amouth, you send me the item and the money left over. The check WILL be false.
See my above comment. There is nothing wrong with accepting money orders or cheques. Just make sure you wait until they clear at your bank before you ship the item. Anyone who sent a legitimate payment will understand this, and it only takes 3-5 days.
If the transaction goes sour, there is no problem re-listing the item for free. It has happened to me a couple of times in the past (not fraudulent payment, just no payment at all), and eBay was very easy to deal with.
There is ample reason to be suspect of *buying* overseas, but rarely is there a good reason for not *selling8 overseas. All you are doing is needlessly constricting your customer base.
Nope, no dice. If they call, I inform them of my policy and send them on their way. Anything else is doing nothing but re-enforcing the behaviour of cold calling. Until more people step up it will continune to get worse and worse. Hint - I just drop off my stuff to the Salvation Army drop boxes instead. Never got a call from them. And BTW my dad is even a diabetic.
... considering they are currently paying $1 to everyone you can get to download firefox.
You can be if they bought Opera, that deal would end pretty quick. (Hey, here is a dollar to get someone to download a competing browser!)
I can't even begin to understand why VC's would think that a software company would need any more than $50K to start.
You gotta assume that anything halfway decent is going to take at least two or three people at least two or three months. 50k would not even pay the rent aorund here for two people for 6 months, not to mention food, etc. Plus you have capital requirements like a server and some desktops, and an office. Hell the office alone would be 10k for six months.
Unless you plan on doing development out of your mom's basement. That doesn't generally go over well with propspective clients.
25% of the TV's sold in the US were hidef in 2004. Estimates for 2005 are roughly 50% of the TVs sold. And it is looking like sales of hidef TV's will reach critical mass in 2006.
Percent of sales of TVs means nothing, because people do not buy a new TV every year. Hell, most peopole buy a big TV maybe once every 15 years.
Every single person who came of age in the 90s and spent $500 or more on a 32+ inch TV is *not* going to rush out and replace it with an HDTV until absoltely necessary. Why? Theres a multitude of reasons. First of all, they're 40-some years old now with kids to feed, and don't have thousands of dollars of disposable income to drop on a luxury item. Second, they dont give a shit, to them their current TV is just fine.
Main point - the percent of TV sales in any given year is an infentessimal amount compared to the number of TVs in current use. Hell, I have two 14 inch TVs in my house from 1982-1984 with cable boxes, one on the porch and one downstairs. Why should I have go out and blow $800 bucks on two HDTV-compat. models of simmilar size? You think twice the res makes a huge difference on a 13" screen? You think I can fit a TV any larger on my porch? Think again.
One in every 3 customers will have a hidef tv in their house
I would like to know what this statistic is based on - but even if it is true, it still means that 66% of households will *not* have an HDTV. You think any government will piss off 66% of its voting base to push some technology they are not ready for down their throats? It would be political suicide.
And one more point - all those people in that 66 percent,the ones who wont have HDTVs when the Revolution comes out? All the ones with kids to feed, middle class, etc? Thats the Revolution's target market - cheaper console, lots of kids. Nintendo has never marketed to the 16-24 year old market like the Xbox, they target the 6-18 year old market. You still think it's such a bad move?
The only thing I have ever recieved from them in the mail is a quarterly newsletter thing detailing what they are doing (which I like - nice to know what I am helping). I have never recieved any cold calls asking me to up my pledge, never recieved any letters asking the same either. And as far as I am aware they haven't given my number to anyone.
My point is, you gotta be careful about what charity you support. I find that the worst ones are the "foundation" type charities for a particular disorder. If you give any money to these guys they will be back at and at you again for more. I find that if you eve rplan to do a one-time donation, or a christmas donation, your best bet is to do so anonymously, or give a fake phone number / address when you mail it in (making it the address of the charity itself is a good way to send a point and have them not waste money sending the stuff out).
Personally, I will *never* give money to a charity that cold calls me, no matter *what* the cause, and I tell them as such if they call (that, although i regularly donate to charities, I will not donate to theirs, because of this call). I refuse to endorse the practice of cold-calling people and asking for money. It is just plain rude IMO. Charities may be allowed to do it by law, but that does not mean that they should.
I sue online banking exclusivly, and pay all my bills off it. I have some 15 or so registered.
Even so, if my bank started charging me a monthly service fee, I would jump ship with no hesitation.
I mean, it takes all of 5 minutes to reigster 10 or 15 accounts online. It is not rocket science.
The biggest pain would be swtiching the directd eposit at work, and only because it would take a few days to go through probably.
Not much of a deterrent IMO.
If the SSL ceritifcate does not match the IP address of the host you are connecting to, it should raise big red flags in your head.
Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for this (such as a bank moving servers and not having time to get a new cert), but they are usually very temporary, so to be safe you can just not do any banking during that period.
Sure, you can still bypass this via a man in the middle attack using ARP poisioning - but in order to do that the hacker has to be on your local subnet if you have a home router, or else working at your ISP if you are directly connected.
Either case is highly unlikely, and **any** way you look at it, even if your original DNS thing was an actual issue, online banking is much more secure thank banking at an ATM or via debit payment, and I bet you do that every day.
All I need to steal your money at an ATM is to install a hidden swipe reader inside the ATM/debit machine and a hidden camera to capture your PIN number. This happens *all the time*, far more than publicized. It is very easy to do, and a smart crook who just leaves the setup installed for a few hours then takes it down is rarely caught either
Even easier is to just capture the cazd swipe, us eit to make a fake identical copy of your own card, and going into the bank and convince the teller to let you change the PIN on the card cause "you forgot it". Also simple to do. Much simpler than hacking itno the DNS servers of your ISP, that's for sure.
And when said customers see their fees increse because of their bank's lack security, they will switch banks to one who has lower fees (because they have good security and don't have to pay said fines).
Any way you cut it, with this legislation the bank is the one who loses if they don't get their act together when it comes to security.
*Every* industry should have this type of legislation. It should not be the customers responsibility to research the security policies of their prospective banks/stores/whatever. Hell there is no way you could realisticly do that, since theres no way for you to know their internal policies.
This is what consumer protection should be. Too bad around here all the politicians are bought and paid for by the corperations that this should be protecting us from.
Arial's ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It's actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.
Personally, if I can read the damned text, I dont give a flying monkey butt what the "history" or "character" of a font is (who in God's name WOULD????)
Let me pick my own fonts thank you very much. I am subjected to enough Flash in my daily life to not have to go through this nonsense just because some "gods-gift-to-web-design" flunkie wants to shove his view of the world down my throat.
Maybe now I can add some of the mor euseful widgets at My Yahoo! to the Google homepage... lik a stock ticker that does more than just US exchange, or a TV listings mondule for more than just US listings.
My Yahoo! has been way ahead of Google on this for some time, hopefully this will allow Google to catch up quicker by leveraging third-party developers.
Not to mention you won't get taxed on the iPod right away.
Sure, you are *ahem* supported to file the value of it as income when you do your taxes, but even if you actually do, its still way better than getting a huge chunk of your bonus removed right away.