It's not like the networks are doing a very good job of getting much of anything decent on the air as it is. And yet there are no ramifications. They just put out the same crap again, with more layers of ads on top to try to make up for how poorly they did before, which only serves to reduce the audience further. So perhaps a show that is tied to the fate of a company that really will feel it if it is horrible will actually be better. Maybe they will stick it out through initial low ratings to try to build an audience to avoid the embarrassment of canceling their show. Maybe it's just late and I am not thinking straight.
Lately it seems like the advertisers are doing a better job promoting new music than the music industry itself, so maybe they'll do better with tv as well.
I didn't see one - everyone's claiming that there were 10% less items for sale, but for what I was looking at, the numbers seemed normal. I expected things to run a little short near the end, but it didn't happen, other than the nominal "cheap listing day" crap they pull every so often that spams all my searches with a billion identical items.
It's hard to tell. The numbers did seem to climb after the boycott. There was just too much going on between the listing day, the new fees, and the boycott to make any determination.
Then again, I use eBay for finding hard to find stuff. Stuff you can buy in a store, is usually less of a hassle buying it from the store (B&M or online) - rather than eBay. eBay's for all those items one either can't find in stores (sold out/not made anymore/rare items), and the ones complaining are those who sell what everyone else can find at an online store. It's not like eBay even has many deals, so bargain hunting isn't an option.
But all of the changes are to favor the high volume sellers. Cheaper insertion fees favors spamming listings. 5-15% off FVF for powersellers with high ratings. Best match search results. One crazy buyer can do much more damage to a small seller than a volume seller, now that there is no checks and balances in the feedback system. And the new CEO has outright said he wants to get rid of the garage sale look of ebay. He has his eyes on Amazon. So, while many small sellers are going to stick around simply because ebay is where the buyers are, it's in spite of the changes. I've moved to etsy, though I may throw up the odd listing on ebay just for advertising. Nothing compared to what I had planned for this year.
As for the reasoning behind the changes, well, consider "feedback hostage" is rampant on eBay. The seller won't post feedback until you (the buyer) do. If you post negative feedback (say, item was fraudulent), the seller will do the same to you, even though you fulfilled your obligations (i.e., paid seller in a timely fashion, tried to resolve issues with seller, etc). Most good sellers will leave feedback immediately since the buyer's fulfilled their contractual duty to pay.
Bull. Have you ever even sold on ebay? Because there's only two kinds of people that think the seller should leave feedback first. People who don't sell on ebay, and people who sell but haven't gotten burned yet. The transaction is not over yet when the buyer pays, there is plenty that can go wrong after that. By the same logic the buyer should leave feedback immediately, because you thought it was good enough to buy in the first place so therefore it must be good, right? I would leave feedback as a seller when either I was sure the buyer was satisfied, by either leaving me feedback or sending me an email saying everything was ok, or if a couple weeks went by without me hearing anything. I guess that makes me a bad seller.
(Part of the changes also involve the buyer not being able to give feedback for 3 days or so, to prevent the buyer from the lesser idiocy of "I paid seller within hour, item didn't arrive 5 minutes later" crap, or the more common "item did not arrive" when buyer hasn't even paid for it!).
The 3 day waiting period is a joke. On what planet does that give time for the item to get there when often the seller doesn't even have a cleared payment until after that? If it was a week it would make some sort of sense, but 3 days just tells me those making the changes have no concept of what actually happens selling on their site. And it sure doesn't stop the buyer from leaving feedback without paying. And all the buyer has to do to keep their feedback from getting removed is respond to the dispute. They don't have to win, they can just type in some gibberish and their feedback sticks. How does that make any sense?
There's no real good solution to this - you could do feedback escrow (buyer and seller can't see feedback until both have submitted it), bu
1) First seat all the attractive women, evenly spaced with the most attractive furthest back.
2) Allow males to find their own seats.
3) Fill in the gaps with the old and ugly.
4) Store any children in the baggage h.. errr... Special Fun House.
This cooler is on the northbridge, not the CPU. One would assume the northbridge to have more stable loading conditions. However it's a heckuva lot better to use a larger passive cooler whenever possible, not add more moving parts in addition to the fan. Those dinky motherboard fans are usually the first to die.
1) Announce reduction in insertion fees. And a 15% reduction in FVF (for powersellers only, and only if they have an impossible to reach rating of 4.8)
2) Announce change to feedback that will get people all worked up.
3) Announce increase in final value fees and other changes that are going to put a lot of people out of business.
4) Profit.
The whole thing is designed to make it look like they are dealing with bad sellers, when in reality the big not so good sellers can survive this but the smaller sellers cannot. eBay cannot get rid of these guys, they need them like the US needs Saudi Arabia. They cannot get rid of the bad buyers either, they need them too. So you get these insane changes that won't do what eBay says they will, but will screw a lot of people. You have eBay telling buyers that a rating of 4 is good but sellers that anything under 4.5 is bad. Yeah that's not going to cause any problems.
How sophisticated do you have to be to drag an anchor back and forth until you hit something? The media tells you when you are successful. One can probably get enough information to get close enough to a cable to do this fairly easily.
The above post is likely only visible as a single pixel from your vantage point, but it should be enough for you to determine what I think of this article
Okay so this has everyone up in a lather.. They didn't alter the content of the page, I don't think they identified a certain page and then made substitutions. If the user signs on and the first page that gets loaded gets a message added at the top regarding their account that they can opt out of.. what is the problem? Yes they COULD do all sorts of naughty stuff also, but they ALREADY could do that before. Seems like a fairly decent way to get important account messages in a way that can't get lost or missed.
Okay so they want to put power in your car at night and then take it out at various times during the day. One rather large problem with that... at night your car is at home in your garage. During the day your car is in a parking lot at your place of work. So unless everyone has their own personal parking spot with an electric hookup you've got this huge battery reservoir at night that drops to probably 1/4 the capacity during the day.
From a purely practical standpoint, you've already got to armor the thing to keep it from getting blown up, so removing the human from the tank doesn't get you as much compared to an aircraft. There are other means of getting eyes on something or blowing things up in situations where you wouldn't risk something with people in it. It's not like these things are going to be "expendable" with their no doubt ridiculous price tags. Plus, I'm pretty sure we still have human loaders instead of auto loaders because well trained humans can do it more reliably in less space inside the tank than an autoloader.
If part of the station is losing 3 lbs per day but the whole system appears to be stable, then the real question is 3 lbs per day of what are the aliens injecting into the station?
Being a leader means never having to take responsibility for anything until someone further up than you tosses you to the lions to cover their own ass.
How bout instead of flying all those people to a 4 star hotel party, fly them to the FREAKING LAUNCH. I don't care how much money you throw at your party, you aint gonna top the launch. And then it becomes rather more difficult for people to bitch about it.
You demand that all kids pay their lunch money to play your game.
Billy starts his own game.
You tell the teacher Billy stole your ball, while you are still holding your ball in your hand
The teacher starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the superintendent to try to get a new school policy that all games belong to you.
The superintendent starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the ball manufacturers and demand they install a remote device in all balls allowing you to deflate them at will
The ball manufacturers start playing Billy's game too.
Actually the real solution is their "Border Slingshot" scaled up. Simply winch back your own slingshot and you are gently whisked off to your destination. In a few years we'll look back at how silly we were with this whole airplane thing.
That's because NASA is flying around with so many known issues that their engineers and safety boards told them to fix but ignored so when something goes wrong they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. Right now the shuttle is sitting on the pad with the coating on several panels on the leading edges of the wings degraded. Rather than just fix the problem when they found out about it they went ahead and now while they debate the issue some more stopping to fix it will mean a huge delay.
Saturn is harboring water? Oh great, when did Bush declare war on water? I guess he figures the terrorists are 60% water, and then Katrina... So now NASA has a new mission to seek out and destroy all extra-terrestrial water?
We can only see a tiny bit of it so it's hard to draw any conclusions. But I imagine a straight vertical drop at the top would give you faster acceleration while keeping the cost down. You might stay closer to the rocket during the initial few seconds, but for the type of emergency this system is designed for that shouldn't make too much difference. If the fire is in the capsule then getting down is just as good as getting horizontally away, and if the fire is in the rocket itself you're dead before you can get in it either way.
Is the world that much a better place with career writers, musicians, and politicians? I'm a believer that all of these tasks are done better when they aren't the primary source of income for the person. Notice how at least one of these writers doesn't even make it one sentence into his response before promoting his book? Get out there and get your hands dirty. If you are truly passionate about it you'll still manage to do it.
Contacting your elected representative is covered under patent. Please acquire the appropriate licenses before attempting this. Furthermore, usage of Microsoft software to write a letter to a government address is expressly forbidden somewhere in those 80 pages of crap you said "I agree" to. If you get any ideas about using paper and pen, the lawyers from Bic would like to have a word with you, as well as Greenpeace for wasting a piece of paper on a non-environmental issue. In short, please quietly go back to watching tv and forget you heard anything about this before anything bad happens to you. Oh, but be sure to close the blinds and mute it or we'll take your house. Thank you.
No wonder my dog barks so much at the UPS truck, that thing must be a TARDIS to get all that in there. That also explains why they aren't interested in our quaint little rockets and space shuttles.
From the article: "Gone are the days of Pole Position, when all it took to draw motorheads in was a steering wheel and something vaguely shaped like a car." Then they go on about how they measured sports cars recording their every nuance to reproduce it exactly.
That's nice. Give me "arcade mode" any day where I can have fun. The only thing that really needed improvement of the good older racing games was how they handled the opponent cars when they weren't on screen. Doesn't matter how well you were doing they'd still be sitting a few seconds behind you waiting for that one screw up. But if the handling of the car is good and the tracks are well done it makes no difference what the graphics are like. There are lots of flash racing games and some of them are fun, but mostly they come up short in those two important aspects.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like the networks are doing a very good job of getting much of anything decent on the air as it is. And yet there are no ramifications. They just put out the same crap again, with more layers of ads on top to try to make up for how poorly they did before, which only serves to reduce the audience further. So perhaps a show that is tied to the fate of a company that really will feel it if it is horrible will actually be better. Maybe they will stick it out through initial low ratings to try to build an audience to avoid the embarrassment of canceling their show. Maybe it's just late and I am not thinking straight. Lately it seems like the advertisers are doing a better job promoting new music than the music industry itself, so maybe they'll do better with tv as well.
would be filtered out completely by this, but I welcome our new humor overlords anyway.
I didn't see one - everyone's claiming that there were 10% less items for sale, but for what I was looking at, the numbers seemed normal. I expected things to run a little short near the end, but it didn't happen, other than the nominal "cheap listing day" crap they pull every so often that spams all my searches with a billion identical items.
It's hard to tell. The numbers did seem to climb after the boycott. There was just too much going on between the listing day, the new fees, and the boycott to make any determination.
Then again, I use eBay for finding hard to find stuff. Stuff you can buy in a store, is usually less of a hassle buying it from the store (B&M or online) - rather than eBay. eBay's for all those items one either can't find in stores (sold out/not made anymore/rare items), and the ones complaining are those who sell what everyone else can find at an online store. It's not like eBay even has many deals, so bargain hunting isn't an option.
But all of the changes are to favor the high volume sellers. Cheaper insertion fees favors spamming listings. 5-15% off FVF for powersellers with high ratings. Best match search results. One crazy buyer can do much more damage to a small seller than a volume seller, now that there is no checks and balances in the feedback system. And the new CEO has outright said he wants to get rid of the garage sale look of ebay. He has his eyes on Amazon. So, while many small sellers are going to stick around simply because ebay is where the buyers are, it's in spite of the changes. I've moved to etsy, though I may throw up the odd listing on ebay just for advertising. Nothing compared to what I had planned for this year.
As for the reasoning behind the changes, well, consider "feedback hostage" is rampant on eBay. The seller won't post feedback until you (the buyer) do. If you post negative feedback (say, item was fraudulent), the seller will do the same to you, even though you fulfilled your obligations (i.e., paid seller in a timely fashion, tried to resolve issues with seller, etc). Most good sellers will leave feedback immediately since the buyer's fulfilled their contractual duty to pay.
Bull. Have you ever even sold on ebay? Because there's only two kinds of people that think the seller should leave feedback first. People who don't sell on ebay, and people who sell but haven't gotten burned yet. The transaction is not over yet when the buyer pays, there is plenty that can go wrong after that. By the same logic the buyer should leave feedback immediately, because you thought it was good enough to buy in the first place so therefore it must be good, right? I would leave feedback as a seller when either I was sure the buyer was satisfied, by either leaving me feedback or sending me an email saying everything was ok, or if a couple weeks went by without me hearing anything. I guess that makes me a bad seller.
(Part of the changes also involve the buyer not being able to give feedback for 3 days or so, to prevent the buyer from the lesser idiocy of "I paid seller within hour, item didn't arrive 5 minutes later" crap, or the more common "item did not arrive" when buyer hasn't even paid for it!).
The 3 day waiting period is a joke. On what planet does that give time for the item to get there when often the seller doesn't even have a cleared payment until after that? If it was a week it would make some sort of sense, but 3 days just tells me those making the changes have no concept of what actually happens selling on their site. And it sure doesn't stop the buyer from leaving feedback without paying. And all the buyer has to do to keep their feedback from getting removed is respond to the dispute. They don't have to win, they can just type in some gibberish and their feedback sticks. How does that make any sense?
There's no real good solution to this - you could do feedback escrow (buyer and seller can't see feedback until both have submitted it), bu
1) First seat all the attractive women, evenly spaced with the most attractive furthest back.
2) Allow males to find their own seats.
3) Fill in the gaps with the old and ugly.
4) Store any children in the baggage h.. errr... Special Fun House.
This cooler is on the northbridge, not the CPU. One would assume the northbridge to have more stable loading conditions. However it's a heckuva lot better to use a larger passive cooler whenever possible, not add more moving parts in addition to the fan. Those dinky motherboard fans are usually the first to die.
1) Announce reduction in insertion fees. And a 15% reduction in FVF (for powersellers only, and only if they have an impossible to reach rating of 4.8) 2) Announce change to feedback that will get people all worked up. 3) Announce increase in final value fees and other changes that are going to put a lot of people out of business. 4) Profit. The whole thing is designed to make it look like they are dealing with bad sellers, when in reality the big not so good sellers can survive this but the smaller sellers cannot. eBay cannot get rid of these guys, they need them like the US needs Saudi Arabia. They cannot get rid of the bad buyers either, they need them too. So you get these insane changes that won't do what eBay says they will, but will screw a lot of people. You have eBay telling buyers that a rating of 4 is good but sellers that anything under 4.5 is bad. Yeah that's not going to cause any problems.
How sophisticated do you have to be to drag an anchor back and forth until you hit something? The media tells you when you are successful. One can probably get enough information to get close enough to a cable to do this fairly easily.
.
The above post is likely only visible as a single pixel from your vantage point, but it should be enough for you to determine what I think of this article
Okay so this has everyone up in a lather.. They didn't alter the content of the page, I don't think they identified a certain page and then made substitutions. If the user signs on and the first page that gets loaded gets a message added at the top regarding their account that they can opt out of.. what is the problem? Yes they COULD do all sorts of naughty stuff also, but they ALREADY could do that before. Seems like a fairly decent way to get important account messages in a way that can't get lost or missed.
Okay so they want to put power in your car at night and then take it out at various times during the day. One rather large problem with that... at night your car is at home in your garage. During the day your car is in a parking lot at your place of work. So unless everyone has their own personal parking spot with an electric hookup you've got this huge battery reservoir at night that drops to probably 1/4 the capacity during the day.
If it were actually economical to do this, then why wouldn't the utilities just buy the batteries themselves rather than pay you to use yours?
From a purely practical standpoint, you've already got to armor the thing to keep it from getting blown up, so removing the human from the tank doesn't get you as much compared to an aircraft. There are other means of getting eyes on something or blowing things up in situations where you wouldn't risk something with people in it. It's not like these things are going to be "expendable" with their no doubt ridiculous price tags. Plus, I'm pretty sure we still have human loaders instead of auto loaders because well trained humans can do it more reliably in less space inside the tank than an autoloader.
If part of the station is losing 3 lbs per day but the whole system appears to be stable, then the real question is 3 lbs per day of what are the aliens injecting into the station?
Being a leader means never having to take responsibility for anything until someone further up than you tosses you to the lions to cover their own ass.
How bout instead of flying all those people to a 4 star hotel party, fly them to the FREAKING LAUNCH. I don't care how much money you throw at your party, you aint gonna top the launch. And then it becomes rather more difficult for people to bitch about it.
You demand that all kids pay their lunch money to play your game.
Billy starts his own game.
You tell the teacher Billy stole your ball, while you are still holding your ball in your hand
The teacher starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the superintendent to try to get a new school policy that all games belong to you.
The superintendent starts playing Billy's game too.
You go to the ball manufacturers and demand they install a remote device in all balls allowing you to deflate them at will
The ball manufacturers start playing Billy's game too.
You take your ball and go home
Actually the real solution is their "Border Slingshot" scaled up. Simply winch back your own slingshot and you are gently whisked off to your destination. In a few years we'll look back at how silly we were with this whole airplane thing.
That's because NASA is flying around with so many known issues that their engineers and safety boards told them to fix but ignored so when something goes wrong they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. Right now the shuttle is sitting on the pad with the coating on several panels on the leading edges of the wings degraded. Rather than just fix the problem when they found out about it they went ahead and now while they debate the issue some more stopping to fix it will mean a huge delay.
Saturn is harboring water? Oh great, when did Bush declare war on water? I guess he figures the terrorists are 60% water, and then Katrina... So now NASA has a new mission to seek out and destroy all extra-terrestrial water?
We can only see a tiny bit of it so it's hard to draw any conclusions. But I imagine a straight vertical drop at the top would give you faster acceleration while keeping the cost down. You might stay closer to the rocket during the initial few seconds, but for the type of emergency this system is designed for that shouldn't make too much difference. If the fire is in the capsule then getting down is just as good as getting horizontally away, and if the fire is in the rocket itself you're dead before you can get in it either way.
Is the world that much a better place with career writers, musicians, and politicians? I'm a believer that all of these tasks are done better when they aren't the primary source of income for the person. Notice how at least one of these writers doesn't even make it one sentence into his response before promoting his book? Get out there and get your hands dirty. If you are truly passionate about it you'll still manage to do it.
Contacting your elected representative is covered under patent. Please acquire the appropriate licenses before attempting this. Furthermore, usage of Microsoft software to write a letter to a government address is expressly forbidden somewhere in those 80 pages of crap you said "I agree" to. If you get any ideas about using paper and pen, the lawyers from Bic would like to have a word with you, as well as Greenpeace for wasting a piece of paper on a non-environmental issue. In short, please quietly go back to watching tv and forget you heard anything about this before anything bad happens to you. Oh, but be sure to close the blinds and mute it or we'll take your house. Thank you.
If AOL did this it would finally be possible to end your service over the net.
No wonder my dog barks so much at the UPS truck, that thing must be a TARDIS to get all that in there. That also explains why they aren't interested in our quaint little rockets and space shuttles.
From the article: "Gone are the days of Pole Position, when all it took to draw motorheads in was a steering wheel and something vaguely shaped like a car." Then they go on about how they measured sports cars recording their every nuance to reproduce it exactly.
That's nice. Give me "arcade mode" any day where I can have fun. The only thing that really needed improvement of the good older racing games was how they handled the opponent cars when they weren't on screen. Doesn't matter how well you were doing they'd still be sitting a few seconds behind you waiting for that one screw up. But if the handling of the car is good and the tracks are well done it makes no difference what the graphics are like. There are lots of flash racing games and some of them are fun, but mostly they come up short in those two important aspects.