08.20.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:39 pm by blog
Aparrently the Skype service went down this week, and stayed down for 2 days leaving users unable to use it…
Now Skype uses it’s own proprietary protocol, it’s not based on any kind of standard like SIP or H.323, so you have to use the Skype client and connect it to the Skype service.
But when the service is not available, your screwed, and if you want to communicate with people you have to use something else.
If you had used a standard protocol such as SIP, then you can easily have a backup provider which your client can switch to automatically. You may not even notice that your primary service provider went down at all.
Similarly, because they can be replaced so easily, standards compliant service providers have to compete for your custom. There are hundreds of SIP providers out there, your free to shop around for the best value provider rather than being stuck with a single supplier.
So if you use a standard protocol you get choice, the choice of where to get your service from, and the choice to use another service if one fails you (eg: an outage) and even to use multiple services at once, automatically switching to another if the primary fails.
If you use proprietary protocols like Skype, you are at the mercy of a single provider. You have to pay whatever prices they decide to charge, and simply put up with whatever outages they have.
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07.09.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:53 am by blog
Today i had a listing cancelled on ebay, for:
“Circumvention of eBay Fees (=LS &12362 JM119848267)”
However, your listing was in breach of eBay’s Circumvention of eBay Fees policy and has been removed from eBay. All fees related to this listing have been credited to
your account. We also notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has
been canceled.
We would like to take this opportunity to let you know what part of your listing is not permitted.
Your listing(s) contains the following information:
Payment by paypal will incur a 5 additional charge to cover fees
You may not manipulate eBay’s system in order to avoid paying certain eBay fees. This includes practices such as adding previously unspecified fees after the end of the
auction, or charging excessive postage and packaging in order to recoup your listing and Final Value Fees. Fee avoidance provides a poor buying experience and gives you
an unfair advantage over other eBay sellers.
Payment surcharges are a form of fee circumvention. eBay prohibits surcharging by sellers. Surcharging occurs when sellers pass the charges they incur for using eBay or
third party services such as payment services onto buyers.
eBay has adopted this surcharging policy to ensure that all buyers receive clear and accurate pricing information when trading on eBay.co.uk. This surcharge policy
applies only to items listed on eBay.co.uk.
For more information on Circumvention of eBay Fees copy this link into a new browser window:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/listing-surcharges.html
What this basically boils down to is. I as a seller cannot make the buyer pay to cover the charges imposed by paypal… Thus, if a buyer pays for the item with cash, a cheque or some other method I receive all the money. If they pay using paypal, I lose a percentage of it. I don’t consider this at all unreasonable, if a buyer wants to use a method of payment that will cost more, they should foot the bill, not the seller. Ebay are doing this because making buyers pay the paypal charges discourages people from using it, so they screw the sellers instead.
Also let’s not forget that paypal take a cut from the money intended for shipping costs, so sellers have no choice but to inflate shipping costs to cover it.
So as a consequence, i will stop using paypal.
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07.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:06 am by blog
A followup to my earlier posting on http://www.ev4.org/wordpress/2007/03/03/keziefoodscouk-are-cheeky-bastards/ regarding the way their registration page uses javascript to fake you signing up for their newsletter, even when you explicitely unchecked the “subscribe to newsletter” box.
As i stated in my earlier post, i wrote them an email complaining about this horrendous behaviour. A few days later, i got a reply:
From: "Wendy Biggins" (wendy@kezie.com)
To:(MY ADDRESS)
Subject: RE: March Offer
Can you deal with this one!!!!!!
-----Original Message-----
From: MY_ADDRESS [mailto:MY_ADDRESS]=20
Sent: 03 March 2007 10:04
To: wendy@kezie.com
Subject: Re: March Offer
How dare you send me this unsolicited mail.
Your registration form uses javascript to recheck the “subscribe to
newsletter” tickbox, even if it’s explicitely been left unchecked.
I was planning to make a purchase from your company, and i went through
the registration form while intentionally leaving the newsletter option
unticked as i don’t like to receive floods of junk mail. When i clicked
submit, the newsletter box got automatically ticked by javascript within
the page. This is an illegal and incredibly insulting act, and caused me
to immediately stop placing an order and go elsewhere.
I want my details removed from your system IMMEDIATELY, or else i will
be
forced to report you for sending of unsolicited commercial email.
I also suggest that you modify the ridiculous policy of tricking people
into subscribing to your newsletter, as this highly offensive and
underhanded act will certainly cost you more customers than just me.
This looks like a pretty stupid screwup… It’s obvious she tried to forward this to one of her colleagues, but fucked up and hit reply instead of forward…
I did reply, to let her know of the mistake but have since not received anything back. How very rude of them.
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07.01.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:08 pm by blog
I doubt i’m alone in being frustrated with the ridiculous anti-piracy measures these days…
The requirement to have the original CD/DVD in the drive to play a game for instance. I have several games installed on my HD, and the idea of installing games in the first place, was to improve load times and AVOID THE HASSLE OF HAVING TO LOAD ORIGINAL MEDIA AND/OR DAMAGE IT.
I work away a lot, and carry a laptop with me at all times. I don’t want to carry a stack of CDs on the off chance i might want to play them. I dont want to keep transferring the media between my stack at home, and my laptop bag.
People with pirate copies are much better off, they dont have to worry about losing media, they dont have to worry about bringing it along with them. It is actually advantageous to the game player to download a pirate copy. This is in stark contrast to the old anti-piracy advertising associated with analogue video/audio, where pirated copies were noticeably inferior to the originals. The advent of digital media levelled the ground, but rather than do something to compensate for that, companies have gone the other way and taken steps to make the originals actually inferior to the pirate copies.
Having to enter license codes or serial numbers is equally irritating, most people simply aren’t organised enough to keep track of all these small scraps of paper with serial numbers on them, and most people don’t want that much paper laying about. And losing that small piece of paper results in them being completely unable to use software they may have paid a large amount of money for.
Also the old code wheels, and requirements to enter a word/letter from the manual. This was common years ago, on the amiga for instance, and was incredibly irritating. Some even required you to re-enter codes at random points throughout the game, and would punish you if you entered them wrong.
So, i won’t buy games where i have to keep the DVD in the drive to play, and i won’t buy software where i need to enter a code to use it. Why should legitimate customers be at a disadvantage relative to pirates? If this is the thanks we get for buying software, then i think i’l side with the pirates as they don’t shaft their own customers.
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06.25.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:00 pm by blog
Does anyone else see the problems with for-profit drug companies doing all the research into new medications?
For one, when a drug company develops a drug, they will patent it, giving them an artificial monopoly on that drug. They can then keep prices artificially high, because there’s no competing companies offering the same drugs. If you cant afford that price (and many people in poor countries cannot) your screwed.
But how about the hypocrisy of it all? Imagine for a minute that you run a for-profit drugs company… Will you:
a, develop a cure for AIDS, that sufferers will take for a brief time before being cured.
b, develop combination-therapy that, with continued use, will keep sufferers alive but infected with HIV for many years
For-profit companies will take the latter. Why? It’s obvious, why sell a quick effective cure when you can keep selling people a whole cocktail of drugs for many years? It’s in the drug companies interest to offer a less effective treatment that the sufferer will need to keep taking.
So what *should* be done?
1, Abolish patents on medications, and publish medication details in the public domain, use capitalism for what its good for, pushing down prices with competition as drugs companies are forced to produce the same drugs cheaper in order to compete.
2, Have all medical research be done by charities, or non profit organisations like the UN, with all the research openly published and collaborated, so as to avoid multiple organisations repeating the same work.
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06.13.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:39 am by blog
Most people with an email account nowadays, will get floods of email claiming to be from various banks, ebay, paypal etc. Usually it’s trying to get you to log in to confirm something, while providing a link to a malicious site.
Now, why dont these companies sign their outbound mails using PGP? That way, we can all verify the signature using their public key, and if it’s wrong we disregard the mail. Spam filters could do the same, so the fake mails never hit people’s inbox.
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04.25.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:46 pm by blog
So the Amiga was a great platform, technologically superior to anything anywhere close to it’s price range. Unfortunately, Commodore managed to screw it all up and go bust.
Nowadays, the Amiga OS is owned by a company called “Amiga International” who have contracted out development of the OS to another company called “Hyperion”. Now, AmigaOS version 4 is now available, and it promises to be a great OS.
However, in true Amiga style, the companies involved are screwing everything up.
Firstly, AmigaOS only runs on PowerPC. Now this in itself is not a bad thing, all the major games consoles run PowerPC chips, and used macs are plentiful and cheap on ebay, and AmigaOS itself is lightweight enough to run at a usable speed on an older mac that wouldn’t be capable of running the latest MacOS.
Only, the companies behind AmigaOS have placed artificial restrictions in place. You can’t just install AmigaOS on any old PowerPC hardware, you have to buy custom built PowerPC hardware with proprietary firmware. Only, there is no such hardware currently on the market! Apparently some such hardware has recently been announced. There are no formal specs, nor are there any firm prices. In short, this hardware is vapourware and may never actually be sold.
These ridiculous restrictions are supposedly to stop piracy. But all it will really do, is ensure that AmigaOS never gains any new users. Only the few remaining die-hard Amiga users will buy custom hardware in order to try AmigaOS 4. People who might otherwise have tried it out on a spare mac, or under an emulator like PearPC simply won’t bother.
As for piracy, a small platform _NEEDS_ piracy. The original Amiga achieved much of it’s success because of how easy it was to pirate the games. Microsoft achieved their current market position largely through pirate installs hugely increasing their market share. Just think where Microsoft would be in countries like China or Russia where virtually all software is pirated. Very few people in these countries would buy windows if they couldn’t pirate it. They would be using one of the freely available alternatives like Linux or FreeBSD, or have developed their own local software.
With more users, whether those users have paid for, or pirated the OS, comes greater interest. A percentage of these users will develop additional software for the OS, and advocate or demonstrate the OS to their friends. Conversely, if the only people using AmigaOS 4 are the die hard Amiga users who have been advocating Amiga for years, what good will it do?
Many people would want to try out AmigaOS on hardware they already have, or can obtain cheaply. But very few people will be willing to buy a complete hardware/software package for an unproven OS that’s tied to overpriced outdated proprietary hardware, with few applications, and a small user base on blind faith alone (ie, having never used the OS themselves at a friends place etc).
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04.23.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:42 pm by blog
So in these days, everyone is jumping on the global warming bandwagon… Companies are producing more efficient cars, governments are trying to force people to emit less carbon through taxes, processor makers are moving towards more efficient less power hungry designs.
Microsoft however, have just brought out a new, more inefficient, more power hungry OS. Multiplied by all the millions of machines that will be running it, how much power is going to be wasted?
People are very big on managed/interpreted code nowadays, and very few people code hand optimized assembler any more… Multiplied among all the millions of computers running the world over, how much power is being wasted, and how much CO2 is being emitted by running sub optimal code?
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04.12.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:26 pm by blog
Just now i was presented with the following ad:http://www.ev4.org/img/lamead2.png (WARNING: BIG)It seemed able to work out that i was using a mac, but then tried to sell me windows software… Isn’t it a bit pointless to market your product to someone you’ve already established won’t want it?
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04.10.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:47 pm by blog
I get a lot of calls from companies wanting to sell me something, or offering their services… And here are a few of my biggest gripes:
Calling from witheld number - If you call from a witheld number, i won’t answer your call. I want to be able to recognise who is calling so I can decide if I want to answer it or not. If you don’t hide your number, you increase the chance of the call being answered and/or called back. So, why hide your number unless you have something to hide?
Leaving voicemail… If your leaving a voicemail, think first.
Voicemails like “Hi this is Joe from BlahCO”. Great, now what the hell is BlahCO? Unless your calling from a huge organisation that everyone will immediately recognise, or a company with whom i’m already doing business, you really must qualify what your organisation is. Otherwise, how am I to know? It’s incredibly arrogant to assume i will have already heard of your company.
Asking me to call you back on an 0845/0870/09 number. - This is a NO NO. I will not under any circumstances call you back on an 0845/0870 kickback number. Why should you make money from me calling you? Give me a regular 01/02 number, or a freephone 0800.
Giving vague information on voicemail “Hi this is Joe from BlahCO, i have an opportunity you might be interested in could you call me back”. An opportunity for what? Your not gonna give me any information? Why should i call you back only to find out that it’s of absoloutely no interest to me whatsoever? Even worse if you expect me to call a kickback number, and actually pay you for the privilege of hearing that you have nothing to interest me at all. If you want me to call you back, give some useful information as to why.
Only giving a phone number - I might not want to speak to you on the phone. I sometimes work weird hours, so i’m not available during your working hours. I also want to decide if and when i talk to you. I prefer time to consider things, not be put on the spot on the phone. Leaving me an email address through which i can communicate with you is much easier for me, and far more likely to get you a response.
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