But that's the fallacy. Not all sellers - maybe not even a majority - want to "act like stores". I just want to sell the occasional piece of technology that I don't need any more to someone who does - at a fair price. I didn't mind paying Ebay 5-8% of the take for being the conduit that made that possible.
Even though I've been registered with Ebay for 12+ years, and have 250+ feedback (all positive, btw), I'm going to be using them a whole lot less (and Craigslist a whole lot more) because of these feedback changes and their new, much higher fees.
Ebay wants to be a strip mall with big sellers all hawking the same boring junk that you can already get on Amazon - with free shipping and better customer service to boot. What's the point?
Most folks are missing the vital distinction here between commercially _selling_ something (with an image being a prominent portion of the value of that sale), and merely owning - or reporting on - or privately sharing - that same image.
Look, I'm not defending Ford here - I think they've got their collective heads inserted into their nether orifices, and they're going down the RIAA's lemming cliff to be putting the hammer to their best customers - but let me give you an example of why it's not always so simple.
Here in Seattle, there's a famous, almost iconic piece of public art. It's free for anyone to visit, view, play on, and take pictures of. News organizations can report from events and show it in the background, or the foreground - no problem.
But that doesn't mean anyone can do anything with it they want, just because it's out in the open air - as a large shuttle-van company found out when they featured it prominently in their TV ads without asking nicely first. The original artist retained copyrights to the art, and the fact that it's visible in public didn't allow others to profit from that image without getting his approval first. Now, if people contact him in advance, he'll usually say yes at the cost of a case of beer (no kidding). Somehow I don't think the shuttle company got off so lightly, after the fact.
So: public art: news, yes; blatant commercial exploitation, no. Where something like having the same art in a commercial movie in the background of a scene would fall, I don't know (IANAL). But I do know that - like it or not - copyright questions aren't always ammenable to simple black-and-white answers.
I frequent that site. I actually find most of Wayan Vota's postings about the OLPC to be neutral or positive (with other contributors all over the map).
Jeesh, go visit right now. The lead article's titled "10,000 Give One Get One XO Laptops Going to OLPC Mongolia". Hardly the stuff of astroturfing.
You really want _negative_? Go visit their forums (same site) and read the posts from the hundreds of "Give One Get One" donors who've been out $423.95 for over two months now and still have no XO laptops to show for it, due to OLPC's incompetency and inability to manage the program. _That's_ negative stuff.
Full disclosure: I'm one of those unfortunate donors.
There are programmatic ways to mitigate the clock-skew problem. To give just one example off the top of my head, if the remote user attempts to connect to the port just "behind" (in time+crypto sequence) or just "ahead" of the current "correct" port, they could get a waiver - not a full connection, but not an autoblacklist, either. That wouldn't necessarily solve the problem completely, but would allow other opportunities/methods of authenticated assuming that both ends can recognize at that point that there's a clock-skew issue. (details left to the reader and implementer on that)
I believe that SecureID and other systems that require a token produced by a crypto device implement something like this, where there's a "greylist" to allow semi-synced remote users another shot at authenticating.
I presume this is a larger, bolder version of the City of Hollywood (California) successfully copyrighting and restricting use of the image of the iconic "HOLLYWOOD" sign on the hills above the city. But I also think it's going to be just a mite harder to enforce...
I have some experience here. My strong advice for now:
Wait. Don't contact them. Don't make any waves.
Often - very often - a domain farmer picks up the domain for just a week or so (no matter how long the WHOIS says it's really registered for) - and waits to see if the pay-per-click ads generate enough revenue to make it worth keeping. So often the best thing you can do is...nothing. Don't visit the site (generates traffic), don't contact them (tells them they have a chance of milking you for $), don't do anything - just sit and wait. Often the name will get dropped and another farmer will pick it up immediately - but if you're patient and check back in with the WHOIS, you should eventually see it free again for long enough to grab it.
This may sound ridiculous, but it's how the domain name economy is currently working, courtesy of weak ICAAN rules. Make it work in your favor - you want that one name, but they want 100,000 that generate enough revenue to make up the low ($3.50/year? can't remember) ICAAN fees necessary to hold on to it. (They know WIPO arbitration is going to cost you $1500+legal fees, so in that route the numbers are on their side.)
This has worked with the.com versions of two different domain names held by non-profit clients of mine just this year. Good luck.
Ever hear of "two countries divided by a common language"?
one quick reference here There are various accepted abbreviations for the word mathematics, and one is as good as any other. In Germany, the abbreviation is "Mathe," in Britain and Canada, it is "maths," and in the USA, it is "math."
Those of us born before the Nixon administration will remember this used to be a particular specialty of IBM. They insisted - even in their advertising - on referring to "hard files", when the entire rest of the industry knew these simply as "disks" or "disk drives". This continued well into the personal computer era - I remember PC Week ads well into the mid-1980s, before they sank into the mire and reinvented themselves as a somewhat more open entity.
For IBM, I believe it was more a case of too many years of being "the environment" rather than "one of many competitors in the same environment" - in other words, more a symptom of corporate isolation and insulation than of Microsoft-style mendacious embrace/extend/extinguish treatment of industry standards. Though if Ballmer had been an IBM exec instead, who knows...
Could someone with more Microsoft Kool-Aid in their veins stick their fork in the acronym salad that is this article? ACL (Access Control Lists - which technically are a firewall), DoS (denial of service attacks) and IPS (intrusion protection services) I all know, but WTF are:
I've had this account since 2004 or so and I don't see the IMAP option yet. I expect the rollout of Google software across thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Gmail servers is not a trivial task.
I seem to recall statistics (noted on Slashdot, where else...) that came out of the Department of Energy a week or so ago that the energy required to operate the internet, computing, and communications infrastructure in the US was something on the order of 10% of the total power output.
Even if that's wrong by a factor of 2, it's still significant - especially as it's by far the fastest-growing segment of power consumption in this country (and, presumably, in most others).
...are set at $10M SEK (Swedish Kroner) - about $1.5M USD or $1.1M Euros, split between the winners equally. Not sure how this compares to previous years.
So in the end, each scientist nets about $750K USD, unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere.
/tsg/
Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it.
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I did use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (and/or the similarly intentioned Eudora Rescue) at several points in the conversion attempt. They're good, and allowed moving more of Eudora's quirky statuses and settings to Tbird - but they didn't (and really, couldn't) help to get around the bugs in the importer. Just a few of those for drill (and I'm sure I've forgotten some of them for my own sanity):
Tbird import silently drops any file from consideration for importing if it doesn't have an _exact_ file type of 'TEXT' - even though it also checks, seemingly, to make sure the first four bytes of the file are _exactly_ the string 'From'. Why the need for this belt-and-braces set of tests for what is, after all, and importer function - something that should be as expansive and forgiving as possible? Why no consideration that files coming from another platform might have a blank type field, no way for the user to specify looser checking (such as "if it ends in.mbx or.mbox it's likely safe to consider it a mailbox") - and no warning to the user that something's been skipped. If no valid files are found to import because of the type code problem, the importer hangs forever. my quick fix: write a Perl script that uses the SetFile() function and call it from a 'find' run at the command line.
Line-ending characters. Parts of the importer seem happy with DOS line endings - but other parts choke if they find a DOS line-end (x0D0A) or Unix (x0D only) end. How hard is it to have a "get next line" routine that handles this correctly? After all, we're dealing with an import function here, something that should be able to deal with data that's not exactly perfect.my quick fix: use "find" and "flip" to convert all mailbox files to Mac-style line-endings.
High-order characters. If the importer _does_ finally find what it thinks is a mailbox, and gets past the line ending problem, but encounters (seemingly) ANY high-order characters in the mail file, it stops importing the message and skips to the next one, silently truncating it. Unfortunately, characters like x93/x94 (beginning and ending curly quote marks) are really, really popular in HTML-ized mail. So you end up with Swiss cheese for an imported mail store if you've got anything other than old vanilla plain-text email to import. my quick fix: use the (excellent) OS X hex editor 0xED to look at the raw files and test various solutions, then use "find" and "tr" from a bash script to substitute low-order characters for the ones Tbird didn't like in each mailbox in turn.
As I said, there may have been other steps in this process that I've forgotten.
My point isn't that these solutions, in my case, were that hard. But figuring out what was wrong, and implementing them, took huge amounts of time and patience. An ordinary user would never have these means (knowledge of command-line Unix utilities, and insight into what might be failing) at his/her disposal. And they surely wouldn't have gone to these lengths to diagnose and correct the problems. (Although, to be honest, an ordinary user wouldn't have 10-15 years of email saved up that they wanted to convert to a new platform).
And - more importantly, and some of the reason for this rant - I think that import/conversion function, especially in FOSS software, have a greater need to be as friendly and bulletproof as possible, because the user's still quite possibly in the "I'm going to try it out and see if I want to use it instead of my old [proprietary] application if it doesn't work'. But in Tbird, seemingly, Import's it's at most an afterthought, and extremely fragile even AFTER you've used third-party apps like Eudora Rescue or Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to try and get around the known issues, limitations, and deficiencies in the code. That isn't the way it should be in an app that's trying to compete for mind and market share with some pretty damn good commercial or closed-source apps.
Thanks for the link. I'd heard of it but it's still apparently in alpha (according to the users, even though officially it's in beta).
What's irksome in trolling through the buglist is that some fo the bugs are being blamed on the Penelope port, even though I'm encountering them in the plain vanilla TB/Mac. Something's not right there.
Well, it kind of shows in the code...
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm in the midst of attempting a conversion from my PC-based mail client (Eudora) to Thunderbird on a Mac. It's been a horror show from day one - the Thunderbird import function turns out to be more buggy than a New York City apartment in the summer. If I didn't have lots of GNU command-line tools and a hex editor to fix the many things that choke Tbird, I'd have abandoned the effort and switched to some proprietary client a long time ago.
Let's hope as a separate entity they can do better.
My day gig is a network and database admin, supporting Win2k/XP desktops and W2K3/Linux servers. (At home I have an OpenBSD firewall and a Fedora web/mail server, in addition to an XP desktop). Note that I've been working with PCs since the time they didn't even have hard disks.
My non-computer-literate neighbor bought a brand-spanking-new Dell a few weeks back. With Vista. I said I'd help her get it connected to my wireless AP so she could do email. Result: 4-6+ hours of banging my head against Vista and its idiotic "security" dialogues, and nearly zero progress to actually getting the job done. (This even though the Linksys USB Wifi adapter was "Vista certified".) But I finally got it working and left...even though it was gawd-awful slow compared to her old XP setup. (And by that I mean pure data throughput speed in IE alone...it was like being on a dial-up modem or worse. On a 3ghz Pentium with a gig of ram.)
Then I get a call from her about five minutes later. She'd moved the WiFi adapter from the _front_ USB port where I had it for the install to the _back_ USB port of the machine...and it completely stopped working. Even putting it back in the front port didn't restore it. I went back over and tried to get it up again, and completely failed - Vista kept insisting the adapter was already installed, but then wouldn't let me uninstall it to start over, either. I gave up for the night, suggesting she might want to start from scratch with the Dell system restore disks, if only to avoid all the Dell-sanctioned crapware that was on her Vista install.
So, the next day she takes her PC with her to work (a big university) where the tech had a spare copy of XP SP2 that convinced her to let him load - which he did. She took the XP system home, plugged in the linksys, installed and configered the driver and TCP/IP settings *herself* (including typing in WEP encryption keys and static IP addresses that I'd left on a sheet of paper). I get a call around 7PM that she not only was on the Net, but it was wicked fast - even with only 2-3 bars of signal.
Do the math: Vista + network admin/computer pro + 6+ hours of work == Unusable system XP + computer illiterate single mom + 15 minutes of configuring == Net.connected and happy
At work there's corporate edict (from much higher up than me) that Vista's not allowed in the front door. Funny, no one seems to have any complaints about _that_ particular IT policy.../tsg/
It's like nails on a chalkboard to me, too. But a quick half-dozen references derived from Googling "orient orientate" lead to the surprising conclusion that yes, both are acceptable - and "orientate" is apparently even preferred in parts of the Commonwealth. "Two peoples divided by a common language", indeed....
Well, I've had a Speakeasy DSL line for over seven years, about as long as anyone could be. Through most of that time, their support's been great. As have been their policies on static IPs, port blocking, running servers, line sharing, and "alternative" OSs - most of the things I care about in an ISP.
But the company's also changed over the past few years (the "Bruce Chatterly" era, way past the time when Mike, Tyler, and a bunch of Burners ran the show). They've become much more money-hungry and prone to corporate foot-shooting at the top levels. The real sleazy move last year was that they timed a stealth fee increase (doubling the bogus "regulatory recovery fee") to kick in exactly at the same time that the Federal USF fee expired. Users who didn't watch carefully saw their monthly charge go down slightly (under a buck) and thought life was good - when in fact it should have dropped $2-3 or more. When some of the customers who were awake complained, we only got marketroid doublespeak and obfuscation.
I'm prepared to wait this latest change of scenery out for now - but my skepticism quotient just got shifted one bit to the left. We'll see.//tsg//
Speakeasy customers who resent this blatant (and sneaky, underhanded, unannounced) fee "land grab" should email the Speakeasy management team directly: mailto:exec@speakeasy.net> and let them know exactly how they feel about this crap.
I've been a Speakeasy DSL customer since early 2000, but I've started to check into Qwest and other DSL providers in my area as a result of this. They're certainly not the same "do no evil" company that I signed up with back then, and my loyalty to them has basically evaporated.
I'll miss my grandfathered SDSL line, but FWIW a much faster RADSL line from other providers looks to be $10-20/month cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for what ails ya.
'nuff said.
But that's the fallacy. Not all sellers - maybe not even a majority - want to "act like stores". I just want to sell the occasional piece of technology that I don't need any more to someone who does - at a fair price. I didn't mind paying Ebay 5-8% of the take for being the conduit that made that possible.
Even though I've been registered with Ebay for 12+ years, and have 250+ feedback (all positive, btw), I'm going to be using them a whole lot less (and Craigslist a whole lot more) because of these feedback changes and their new, much higher fees.
Ebay wants to be a strip mall with big sellers all hawking the same boring junk that you can already get on Amazon - with free shipping and better customer service to boot. What's the point?
Will it work even if I'm wearing my tinfoil hat?
> "...networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."
/TSG/
Well, we're on Slashdot, so there's no possibility of us meeting the flesh of more attractive people.
We'll just have to settle for what he describes.
Look, I'm not defending Ford here - I think they've got their collective heads inserted into their nether orifices, and they're going down the RIAA's lemming cliff to be putting the hammer to their best customers - but let me give you an example of why it's not always so simple.
Here in Seattle, there's a famous, almost iconic piece of public art. It's free for anyone to visit, view, play on, and take pictures of. News organizations can report from events and show it in the background, or the foreground - no problem.
But that doesn't mean anyone can do anything with it they want, just because it's out in the open air - as a large shuttle-van company found out when they featured it prominently in their TV ads without asking nicely first. The original artist retained copyrights to the art, and the fact that it's visible in public didn't allow others to profit from that image without getting his approval first. Now, if people contact him in advance, he'll usually say yes at the cost of a case of beer (no kidding). Somehow I don't think the shuttle company got off so lightly, after the fact.
So: public art: news, yes; blatant commercial exploitation, no. Where something like having the same art in a commercial movie in the background of a scene would fall, I don't know (IANAL). But I do know that - like it or not - copyright questions aren't always ammenable to simple black-and-white answers.
Jeesh, go visit right now. The lead article's titled "10,000 Give One Get One XO Laptops Going to OLPC Mongolia". Hardly the stuff of astroturfing.
You really want _negative_? Go visit their forums (same site) and read the posts from the hundreds of "Give One Get One" donors who've been out $423.95 for over two months now and still have no XO laptops to show for it, due to OLPC's incompetency and inability to manage the program. _That's_ negative stuff.
Full disclosure: I'm one of those unfortunate donors.
There are programmatic ways to mitigate the clock-skew problem. To give just one example off the top of my head, if the remote user attempts to connect to the port just "behind" (in time+crypto sequence) or just "ahead" of the current "correct" port, they could get a waiver - not a full connection, but not an autoblacklist, either. That wouldn't necessarily solve the problem completely, but would allow other opportunities/methods of authenticated assuming that both ends can recognize at that point that there's a clock-skew issue. (details left to the reader and implementer on that)
I believe that SecureID and other systems that require a token produced by a crypto device implement something like this, where there's a "greylist" to allow semi-synced remote users another shot at authenticating.
I presume this is a larger, bolder version of the City of Hollywood (California) successfully copyrighting and restricting use of the image of the iconic "HOLLYWOOD" sign on the hills above the city. But I also think it's going to be just a mite harder to enforce...
Wait. Don't contact them. Don't make any waves.
Often - very often - a domain farmer picks up the domain for just a week or so (no matter how long the WHOIS says it's really registered for) - and waits to see if the pay-per-click ads generate enough revenue to make it worth keeping. So often the best thing you can do is...nothing. Don't visit the site (generates traffic), don't contact them (tells them they have a chance of milking you for $), don't do anything - just sit and wait. Often the name will get dropped and another farmer will pick it up immediately - but if you're patient and check back in with the WHOIS, you should eventually see it free again for long enough to grab it.
This may sound ridiculous, but it's how the domain name economy is currently working, courtesy of weak ICAAN rules. Make it work in your favor - you want that one name, but they want 100,000 that generate enough revenue to make up the low ($3.50/year? can't remember) ICAAN fees necessary to hold on to it. (They know WIPO arbitration is going to cost you $1500+legal fees, so in that route the numbers are on their side.)
This has worked with the .com versions of two different domain names held by non-profit clients of mine just this year. Good luck.
one quick reference here
There are various accepted abbreviations for the word mathematics, and one is as good as any other. In Germany, the abbreviation is "Mathe," in Britain and Canada, it is "maths," and in the USA, it is "math."
For IBM, I believe it was more a case of too many years of being "the environment" rather than "one of many competitors in the same environment" - in other words, more a symptom of corporate isolation and insulation than of Microsoft-style mendacious embrace/extend/extinguish treatment of industry standards. Though if Ballmer had been an IBM exec instead, who knows...
HBI?
GFS (is the G for "Ghost")?
NBI?
NLB?
ACE?
TIA
Clearly, I'm writing grants for the wrong kind of research. This would be one hell of a lot more fun than playing with infectious diseases.
I've had this account since 2004 or so and I don't see the IMAP option yet. I expect the rollout of Google software across thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Gmail servers is not a trivial task.
So it'll include nothing except DRM?
Even if that's wrong by a factor of 2, it's still significant - especially as it's by far the fastest-growing segment of power consumption in this country (and, presumably, in most others).
So in the end, each scientist nets about $750K USD, unless I dropped a decimal point somewhere.
As I said, there may have been other steps in this process that I've forgotten.
My point isn't that these solutions, in my case, were that hard. But figuring out what was wrong, and implementing them, took huge amounts of time and patience. An ordinary user would never have these means (knowledge of command-line Unix utilities, and insight into what might be failing) at his/her disposal. And they surely wouldn't have gone to these lengths to diagnose and correct the problems. (Although, to be honest, an ordinary user wouldn't have 10-15 years of email saved up that they wanted to convert to a new platform).
And - more importantly, and some of the reason for this rant - I think that import/conversion function, especially in FOSS software, have a greater need to be as friendly and bulletproof as possible, because the user's still quite possibly in the "I'm going to try it out and see if I want to use it instead of my old [proprietary] application if it doesn't work'. But in Tbird, seemingly, Import's it's at most an afterthought, and extremely fragile even AFTER you've used third-party apps like Eudora Rescue or Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to try and get around the known issues, limitations, and deficiencies in the code. That isn't the way it should be in an app that's trying to compete for mind and market share with some pretty damn good commercial or closed-source apps.
Thanks for the link. I'd heard of it but it's still apparently in alpha (according to the users, even though officially it's in beta).
What's irksome in trolling through the buglist is that some fo the bugs are being blamed on the Penelope port, even though I'm encountering them in the plain vanilla TB/Mac. Something's not right there.
I'm in the midst of attempting a conversion from my PC-based mail client (Eudora) to Thunderbird on a Mac. It's been a horror show from day one - the Thunderbird import function turns out to be more buggy than a
New York City apartment in the summer. If I didn't have lots of GNU command-line tools and a hex editor to fix the many things that choke Tbird, I'd have abandoned the effort and switched to some proprietary client a long time ago.
Let's hope as a separate entity they can do better.
My day gig is a network and database admin, supporting Win2k/XP desktops and W2K3/Linux servers. (At home I have an OpenBSD firewall and a Fedora web/mail server, in addition to an XP desktop). Note that I've been working with PCs since the time they didn't even have hard disks.
/tsg/
My non-computer-literate neighbor bought a brand-spanking-new Dell a few weeks back. With Vista. I said I'd help her get it connected to my wireless AP so she could do email. Result: 4-6+ hours of banging my head against Vista and its idiotic "security" dialogues, and nearly zero progress to actually getting the job done. (This even though the Linksys USB Wifi adapter was "Vista certified".) But I finally got it working and left...even though it was gawd-awful slow compared to her old XP setup. (And by that I mean pure data throughput speed in IE alone...it was like being on a dial-up modem or worse. On a 3ghz Pentium with a gig of ram.)
Then I get a call from her about five minutes later. She'd moved the WiFi adapter from the _front_ USB port where I had it for the install to the _back_ USB port of the machine...and it completely stopped working. Even putting it back in the front port didn't restore it. I went back over and tried to get it up again, and completely failed - Vista kept insisting the adapter was already installed, but then wouldn't let me uninstall it to start over, either. I gave up for the night, suggesting she might want to start from scratch with the Dell system restore disks, if only to avoid all the Dell-sanctioned crapware that was on her Vista install.
So, the next day she takes her PC with her to work (a big university) where the tech had a spare copy of XP SP2 that convinced her to let him load - which he did. She took the XP system home, plugged in the linksys, installed and configered the driver and TCP/IP settings *herself* (including typing in WEP encryption keys and static IP addresses that I'd left on a sheet of paper). I get a call around 7PM that she not only was on the Net, but it was wicked fast - even with only 2-3 bars of signal.
Do the math:
Vista + network admin/computer pro + 6+ hours of work == Unusable system
XP + computer illiterate single mom + 15 minutes of configuring == Net.connected and happy
At work there's corporate edict (from much higher up than me) that Vista's not allowed in the front door. Funny, no one seems to have any complaints about _that_ particular IT policy...
It's like nails on a chalkboard to me, too. But a quick half-dozen references derived from Googling "orient orientate" lead to the surprising conclusion that yes, both are acceptable - and "orientate" is apparently even preferred in parts of the Commonwealth. "Two peoples divided by a common language", indeed....
Well, I've had a Speakeasy DSL line for over seven years, about as long as anyone could be. Through most of that time, their support's been great. As have been their policies on static IPs, port blocking, running servers, line sharing, and "alternative" OSs - most of the things I care about in an ISP.
//tsg//
But the company's also changed over the past few years (the "Bruce Chatterly" era, way past the time when Mike, Tyler, and a bunch of Burners ran the show). They've become much more money-hungry and prone to corporate foot-shooting at the top levels. The real sleazy move last year was that they timed a stealth fee increase (doubling the bogus "regulatory recovery fee") to kick in exactly at the same time that the Federal USF fee expired. Users who didn't watch carefully saw their monthly charge go down slightly (under a buck) and thought life was good - when in fact it should have dropped $2-3 or more. When some of the customers who were awake complained, we only got marketroid doublespeak and obfuscation.
I'm prepared to wait this latest change of scenery out for now - but my skepticism quotient just got shifted one bit to the left. We'll see.
Speakeasy customers who resent this blatant (and sneaky, underhanded, unannounced) fee "land grab" should email the Speakeasy management team directly: mailto:exec@speakeasy.net> and let them know exactly how they feel about this crap.
I've been a Speakeasy DSL customer since early 2000, but I've started to check into Qwest and other DSL providers in my area as a result of this. They're certainly not the same "do no evil" company that I signed up with back then, and my loyalty to them has basically evaporated.
I'll miss my grandfathered SDSL line, but FWIW a much faster RADSL line from other providers looks to be $10-20/month cheaper.
I bet they've got a website...and its backend uses SOAP.