Anybody have a young daughter or son that took a ball-point pen to your LCD screen?
Dell recommends a solution of 50% Isopropyl Alcohol and a Microfiber cloth such as those used to clean eyeglasses. Here are the details on how to clean your LCD screen
WordPress is becoming the most popular opensource blogging software.
It supports my favorites features: multiple posters, categories, and RSS feeds per category.
It also supports creating pages off the home page which makes it a very nice website CMS.
How to Snipe on eBay
EBBay Bidders Sold on Sniping
Why sniping isn’t necessary (read comment)
Why eBay charges to use their API
Beyond eBay, Yahoo & Amazon auctions compared
Third party eBay apps
eBay API and Open Source Great comment thread, including:
The problem with ‘sniping’ is (as I see it) largely caused by people
failing to understand the auction process. Many people seem to put in
the minimum bid required to make them the high bidder and wait to see
if they are outbid. If they used eBay ‘properly’ they would just put in
their maximum bid at the start and if someone snipes them with a higher
bid then they haven’t actually lost anything. If someone tries to snipe
them with a lower bid then they still win.
We understand that charging for API usage certainly discourages some developers from getting started with the program.
As
a result, we’re constantly reviewing data and listening to the
community to make sure our pricings and offerings hit that careful
balance spot between encouraging innovation and preventing runaway
costs.Some developers have tried "screen scraping" eBay.com;
however, most of them have found that’s a bad way to build a commercial
application. The site changes every two weeks. That’s means your
application can break on a regular basis, and you will need to devote
time to repairing it. Additionally, it is against our terms of service
to screen scrape, so you could be shut down at any time.In my
opinion, given the hourly rate most developers can charge for their
services, $500 a year is more than worth the time savings. However,
every developer must make that choice for themselves.Adam Trachtenberg
eBay Technical Evangelism
Scraping EBay, a bad idea?
Official Ebay User Agreement
7. Access and Interference.
The
Site contains robot exclusion headers. Much of the information on the
Site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed
to eBay by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not use
any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site
for any purpose without our express written permission. Additionally,
you agree that you will not: (i) take any action that imposes, or may
impose in our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately
large load on our infrastructure; (ii) copy, reproduce, modify, create
derivative works from, distribute or publicly display any content
(except for Your Information) from the Site without the prior expressed
written permission of eBay and the appropriate third party, as
applicable; (iii) interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper
working of the Site or any activities conducted on the Site; or (iv)
bypass our robot exclusion headers or other measures we may use to
prevent or restrict access to the Site.
What others think about sniping
Gartner Group’s Dataquest [2]
eBay Inc was successful in obtaining an interim injunction on the basis
of trespass which prevented Bidder’s Edge scraping eBay Inc’s internet
auction website. In the US, it is necessary to show a likelihood of
damage to succeed in an action for trespass. The court accepted that by
using over 100,000 automated searches per day, Bidder’s Edge Inc was
"draining" eBay Inc’s computer system resources away from legitimate
customers and that this had caused some harm to eBay Inc. The decision
has been criticised in the US on a number of fronts including on the
basis that the harm to eBay was not in fact sufficient.
Mark doesn’t buy the Podcasting hype. He’s not knocking podcasting per se, he just doesn’t believe people should plan to make money as podcasters. He equates it to streaming radio. I like this comment he made:
Repurposing industry
specific information from tradeshows, speeches, product presentations for employee or customer education or as sales
support. No brainer. These are just extensions of existing content into a new low cost medium.
That’s where my interest primarily lies. I hope NPR starts making their content avaliable via downloads. MSNBC has.
Mark comments on the impact of MGM winning this suit.
He posts:
This is from a contract for an investment that I was looking at. It was a very smart move to ask
for this protection and i have every intention of stealing it and using it in any digital asset acquisition I
undertake in the future.Digital Millennium
Copyright Act Compliance…
Blogger, TypePad and other services don’t support podcasting in terms of automatically generating the enclosure tag for your recorded podcast (MP3 file). But you can run your feed through feedburner to generate the enclosure tag and point people to this feed rather than the Blogger atom feed.
Here’s a step by step on the whole process of creating podcasts using Blogger
Social Networking is a term that describes people connecting on the Internet. How they connect takes various forms. Social Networking websites fall in two main categories, Social and Business related. There are numerous sites that simply bring people together for a common interest. Tribe.net, Yahoo Groups and Google Groups fall in this category. Their goals aren’t necessarily to enable networking (though that may very well happen), rather to create a forum for discussion of a common interest. Social sites such as Friendster, and Orkut have an explicit goal of connecting people socially. Orkut’s home page states:
We
are committed to providing an online meeting place where people can
socialize, make new acquaintances and find others who share their
interests.
The business networking sites advertise different agendas. LinkedIn’s website states:
With the help of the people you know and trust…As you activate your connections you will be able to reach hundreds of thousands in every industry profession and location…to help you, Hire, Find a Job, Close a Deal, Find New Clients.
The common thread is that the Social Networking sites/services promise to do what you could not do alone, meet people that can help further your personal or professional goals.
Social Networking as a business is meeting with mixed reviews. Certainly it can and has worked for many people. For others, not so much. This post links to two pessimistic reviews of Social Networking.
An insightful commenter offers this point on social networking:
I think the really successful web communities aren’t built for social networking
– they are created (and have evolved) for other purposes, and the social
networking is merely a byproduct, albeit an important one.
Of course you don’t need a special site to use the Internet to network. Blogs can serve that purpose and often do by the way they naturally work. People subscribe to other bloggers whose content they enjoy or benefit from. Comments on posts form a threaded discussion. Often the comments lead to new contacts. The feature of sharing your blog-roll is a subtle endorsement of what others have to say. Search services such as PubSub and Technorati with the ability to "subscribe" to various keywords is a very efficient method to connect to others over common topics of interest wherever the content and comments may be posted on the Internet.
Using FeedMap you can geo-code your blog, browse already
geo-coded blogs and search for blogs. Once geo-coded, you can get your
own BlogMap location using a simple url that allows you to network
with your local bloggers and much more!