As information is offered for sale, negotiation
by telephone can seal such transactions

ROM ZDNet comes as item that speaks of yet another odd item ‘on sale’. The article states: “An online auction of a “brand new vulnerability” in Microsoft Excel had reached about $60 when eBay pulled the item late Thursday. A seller using the name “fearwall” started the auction Wednesday evening at 1 cent. It was up to $56 on Thursday afternoon with 21 bids placed, and eBay quashed the auction soon after that.”

Other strange items which I can recall eBay boasting: chewing gums that have been sput out by celebrities, fake love letters, and potato chips.

Opting for ‘old school’ TV, even on a modern set

HILE many of us are afraid of change, some of us refuse to accept change. At some of the worst scenarios, without any awareness, we can miss out on tremendous benefits. Examples from the hardware domain:

• Half of all HDTV owners never use the high definition capabilities of their set.
• Many people still use a single-head display even though they have dual-head graphics card and some old monitor(s) lying around in the house. It is poor use of the available hardware, which few people seem to mind.

As for more examples pertaining to software:

• People browse with Firefox/Opera/Mozilla/Netscape and make no use of tabs.
• Use of heavy and sluggish, Web-based E-mail services, notably MSN/Hotmail. Some vendors/hosts make the exception nonetheless.

ntel are starting to feel the greatest of heats from their competition, most notably AMD. That heat cannot be circumvented by more fans or underclocking either. As explained in a ZDNet blog:

The news keeps getting worse for Intel when it comes to arch nemesis AMD.

[...]

But if that news isn’t bad enough for Intel (and good for AMD), now comes this: AMD’s 7-round clean sweep technical knockout in ZDNet’s comparative review that benchmarked the two companies’ dual-core offerings against each other.

Another comprehensive review provides even more AMD versus Intel CPU benchmarks. Yesterday I heard about profit warnings in Intel, which led to the dive of their stock.

Intel on Thursday slightly narrowed its outlook for fourth-quarter sales, a sign that seems to be making some investors queasy.

As if that was not enough, Intel call the $100 laptop, which runs Open Source software and is intended to serve developing nations, an “undesired gadget”. This sounds like resistance and mockery of a good cause. Need it be mentioned that those laptops use AMD chips? Intel’s chips cost around $40 to manufacture, yet they can never be sold for a price that makes them viable for such low-end, inexpensive laptops.

Previous critiques of Intel:

• Farewell Intel, Welcome AMD
• Intel Sidles Closer to Microsoft

My deceased del.icio.us bookmark

OT so long after their Flickr takeover, Yahoo take control of del.icio.us (also covered in Associated Press via Yahoo! News).

I am now reluctant to add anything to my del.icio.us bookmarks. I use my Firefox bookmarks instead. Firefox settings are available to me from anywhere, but I used to like the idea of social bookmarking, so long as it was not commercially-orchestrated. I somehow perceived del.icio.us as a Wikipedia ‘sister’, wherein the community helped organise Web addresses (links) as oppose to human knowledge.

Wikipedia has its problems too. Earlier today ZDNet argued that its Open Source label is a conundrum. More recently it began to impose restrictions and it appears to have commercially-motivated mirrors.

Another major takeover: Adobe Buy Macromedia

Also to note: Prodigy now up for sale (external)

Addendum:

• Yahoo can refine their search results using popularity figures in del.icio.us, which are good reflectants on inbound links and high-quality content.
• Wikipedia is now sold in paper form and as DVD‘s

ECOMING your own Web host and E-mail administrator is troublesome. It’s a challenge, but a very unproductive one, which can lead to entanglement and nervousness.

Try to imagine hosting your site the DIY way. Think of managing E-mail on your own workstation or a personal Web server; not a dedicated Web server, but one which is owned and run by yourself. Such server would reside in a not-so-secure environment, which is bound to lose power at times while no generator is available. Data on the server begs for regular backups that are time consuming. Moreover, the server may lose its Internet connection or suffer from bandwidth spikes, making stability and resilience prone to great risk. On top of it all, the server will require software updates on occasion, which are easier for a professional host to take care of. The professional uses time more effectively because all is done in ‘batch mode’ — hundreds of sites affected by an upgrade in one fell swoop. Experience plays a role too.

Lastly, on a less technical and more personal level, I reckon that ‘self-sysadmining’ would be too emotional. Although I have the knowledge required for doing it, as well as 3 boxes at my disposal for the purpose, I believe this could lead to a resource hog to begin with. Without peers involved and in the lack of diverse experience, the step would be a daunting one too. By running code that is questionable the Web server, which is never to be considered a computational server, everything is put at risk, even the mail daemon. Mechanical faults are another issue as there are no alternative hardware to divert that traffic ‘aqueduct’ onto.

Related items:

• Remote Data
• Leave the Hard Stuff to Someone Else (external)

Manchester’s notoriously busy transport system

There are some big plans for the transport system in Manchester. Buses might become similar to trams, but will involve no driver or rails. Alas, after scraping of the long-anticipated tram extension, we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

It may sound like science fiction, but Stagecoach, which runs most of the buses in south Manchester’s, says the new service could be in place years before any Metrolink connections are built. The computer-guided buses would be manned by a driver but new ‘optical guidance’ technology means the bus would steer itself along a prescribed route and pull up flush to raised platforms.

This is particularly interesting to me because it happens at the very centre of where I live and work. Moreover, it is related to my research, which is focused on computer vision.

Old stories:

• Autonomous Vehicle in Rough Terrain
• Autonomous Vehicle from Stanford and Volkswagen

Related news: Google launch service offering public transport schedules

Also see: Assorted Manchester photography

Tabs corresponding to separate E-mail messages in Thunderbird

ABBED views in E-mail applications (also referred to as “mail clients”) are a brand new idea as far as I can gather. Thunderbird developers are now said to be going down this unprecedented route. From the recent article:

A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.

Tabs corresponding to separate RSS feeds in Owl

I have seen tabs in feed readers before, namely in RSSOwl (shown above). Nonetheless, I believe that incorporation of tabs into E-mail/newsreaders would be uncalled for. Much-familiar applications like Thunderbird would prove confusing to many users unless tabs are shrewdly hidden, thereby protecting users from their freedom.

Tabs make the controls finer, maybe unnecessarily so. E-mail, as oppose to feed readers, is used by merely everybody (assuming Webmail is put aside for the sake of the argument). Not everyone who uses Outlook (Express) can handle higher levels of complexity, let alone those who are new to E-mail altogether. Overall, tabs can make the entry barrier even higher. In firefox, tabs do not appear by default until/unless a second one appears. This makes tabbed browsing a function which is easy to enable if/when the user feels confident. Yet, owing to smart UI design, it never contributes to unnecessary clutter.

Thunderbird and RSSOwl are of course Open Source projects that are not bound to desires of large companies. According to Wozniak (AKA Woz), who is co-founder of Apple, the worst applications come from the large companies, Apple included. To quote Woz, “Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise”.

A shrunk-down screenshot of Thunderbird
‘dressed’ with the CrossOver theme