10 Feb 2006
I’m vaguely hunting for a laptop. Well, okay, a little more than vaguely–but as they’re reputedly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that service as a purchasing vehicle is less than certain.
Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:
Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.
(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)
And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:
Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.
Sigh.
(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)
08 Feb 2006
Stumbled across this picture of more surveillance cameras than that bar should realistically be able to hold on Flickr today whilst building an RSS integration thingy (so, yeah, work related!)
Scary, huh?
07 Feb 2006
It works surprisingly well. I moved a site off a crappy server (so crappy, in fact, that core dumps were winding up in my public_html directory! Lame-o.) that wouldn’t let me have SSH access this evening to one that did, and tried for a while to get my head around *nix ftp‘s recursive get… then gave up, because whatever’s documented out there obviously wasn’t working for me.
Then I remembered wget (which I use all the time for grabbing big files, because I can just background the process and not think about it til I wonder “Hey, where’d this several-GB file on my desktop come from?”) had FTP capabilities and could spider websites. Recursive get shouldn’t be a problem!
And it wasn’t.
Just use wget -r ftp://login:password@example.org/public_html/ (or similar) and the server you’re on will happily leech from an older one! Good stuff.
07 Feb 2006
Okay what is the point of this? Seriously. It could work well, if it didn’t refuse to turn off as per my user settings. Grr. I need a “This Technology Sucks” category for posts on this blog, methinks.
07 Feb 2006
In my response-requested post of last evening, it was perhaps a little unclear what I was proposing as a state-of-the-web hypothesis.
To clarify:
- I believe there may exist a commonality of service usage within particular peer groups.
- This commonality may or may not be bound by any particular brand
- There is (entirely speaking from my personal experience here — hence the request for wider comment) minimal overlap between services (see 1.) within peer groups
- As a part of this, the chief motivator in electing a network is not the network itself or particular functionality, but rather the other ‘peers’ the network provides access to (n.b. chief exception to this is niche services, Skype being a good example. It’s great for voice, horrible for chat, and mediocre for video. Hence, even I know a few people who have Skype accounts, they/I rarely use it/sign in unless required.)
Of these points, the most oft-acknowledged in the past is the last (See Metcalfe’s law, and subsequently Reed’s law). But both of these “laws” fail to evaluate the potential value of a network that will, in all probability, never be realised due to competition/service fragmentation.
I’m not asserting service fragmentation is a BadThing, but I do believe that big service providers’ federation initiatives/common standardised platforms are the only way forward– short of us all waiting for a monopoly to emerge… unlikely in the present climate, and improbable in the extreme in the way that Steve desires (a universal service provider environment).