gdee

Joined 18 years ago

Karma

309

Submissions

144

Member since

Jul 23

geppa.dee at that mail system owned by google

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Recent submissions

Comment · 16 years ago

Anybody from Spain knows of a better address to send letters to the new Spanish "Minister of External Affairs and Cooperation", Trinidad Jiménez, than [email protected] (which itself is rather well hidden on the ministry's website) ?

Comment · 16 years ago

That project is about 5-6 years old. I remember being exited when I first saw that page. It still is exiting. But not news :)

Comment · 16 years ago

  >  PayPal doesn't need to freeze your account, they can
  > just as easily prevent you from withdrawing money to 
  > your bank account, which sucks but it probably won't 
  > kill your business. At least your customers can still 
  > pay you.

I can't believe I'm writing in PayPal's defense but facts are facts.

They did this to me last week. They sent a message Friday night that they would need some extra documentation. I acted upon that on the spot. They then proceeded to restrict my account next Monday because they didn't bother to process my response to their request from Friday. That sucked, but they only locked withdrawals. My customers didn't see a thing, and they finally suspended restrictions Thursday. Took a few phone calls to make sure they hurry (to a number that is not free and not on the front page, but definitely not "10 pages deep": from your account > contact (footer) > call us).

Like anticipated, I feel dirty for speaking to their defense.

Comment · 16 years ago

Thanks for the advice. Will look into it.

Comment · 16 years ago

  >   But I'm no longer accepting paypal payments myself 
  > and I would advise everybody to keep their account 
  > balances as low as possible.

Sound advice. In my new private project, I redraw from paypal every 200 euros. Thankfully, that's a lot of redraws (for certain definitions of a lot) and I'm a bit behind redraws but I learned the lesson from the losses the company I work with endures every month. Details in this same thread. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679288)

Comment · 16 years ago

  >   I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style 
  > asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand 
  > to benefit financially, personally and directly.

You'd lose that bet. They refund the money to the original payer. For better or worse. My company loses a few hundred euros each month to this. They keep asking for proof of delivery. Yet we sell internet access. No proof in that unless I'm willing to break the law (and my client's trust) and tcpdump my clients. No way I'm doing that so I swallow the losses. No client ever filled a complain in the first place and no client ever complained about returned funds for consumed services either. :P

Comment · 16 years ago

  > ssh prod-db 
  > mysqldump what-i-need > file.sql
  > exit
  > scp prod-db:file.sql .

You can definitely do better than that with ssh:

  ssh prod-db "mysqldump what-i-need" > file.sql

If the dump is large and the network is the bottleneck, you can also do it like this:

  ssh prod-db "mysqldump what-i-need | p7zip" | p7zip -d > file.sql

Edit: Noste gave the right oneliner, sorry I didn't notice it at first. Consider mine only as an expansion of his second point.

Comment · 16 years ago

Here's a nice book about, among other things, a similar country: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Comment · 16 years ago

Beware. That resolution might mean that the screen was produced for landscape viewing. If that's true, it will be quite horrible to use in portrait. It will show slightly different colors to each of your eyes which will make the screen seem slightly semitransparent and silvery. I have this problem with a Sandisk Sansa mp3 player I have.

Comment · 16 years ago

I don't know about Netherlands, but in Spain you can contest any customs tax. They send you a printed form to fill if you want to contest it in the same envelope where they send you the invoice for the tax. Things can't be very different there.

Comment · 16 years ago

direct link to video interview

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4177270/wozniak-on-mass-ipad-...

Comment · 16 years ago

I didn't use to be. Then I had a problem and my bank took 2 months and almost 10 phone calls to fix it. Then I became a little paranoid.

Comment · 16 years ago

Have them not touch the CC#. Leave that last part of the funnel to some certified external. You'd also make them a big service. I simply abandon most carts if the CC entry stage is still on the merchant site and not on someone's big and recognized like PayPal, and I hate PayPal. I just don't trust the little, unknown, guys with CC# & details.

Comment · 16 years ago

>> It just doesn't want them on the app store.

Where else exactly could they go?

>> Forcing Apple to repeal 3.3.1 doesn't allow offending software to be built and sold (as it already can be), it forces Apple to stock its shelves with it

Those two things are the same, by Apple's design.

Comment · 16 years ago

>> Prior to the iPhone, there was virtually no real development allowed on phones that achieved any levels of success (carriers had the platform locked down hard).

cough The development for mobile phones partially sucked (and still does, partially; it's in the nature of the beast I suppose, for now) before the iPhone, but I don't know about it being not allowed. You have to draw a distinction between so called feature-phones and smart-phones here. Feature-phone dev was and still is largely restricted (not to mention uninteresting from most POVs) but the same cannot be said about smart-phones. Seeing how the iPhone is supposed the be a smart-phone, we should compare it to those I think. And to that end, I seem to remember writing mobile apps for Windows Mobile and Symbian long before the iPhone existed. Some of that writing didn't even suck that much and I definitely didn't have to ask nobody's permission to distribute the apps. Python for S60 [1] appeared before the iPhone not to mention the c/c++ based toolchains from MS and others. Even the appstore concept is not really Apple's invention, Handango predates it by quite some margin for example.

>> In many ways, the iPhone has been the founding of "open" phone development

I don't know in how many were those ways. I would say it made it's (phone development) products cool (albeit not yet mainstream) for the masses, and that is very nice and respectable, but "founding" and "inventing" and "reinventing" are just hyperbole filled, marketing words that Apple touts around.

>> Post iPhone, we've seen actual competition in this space - the entirely open Android strategy (though their App Store also has restrictions, they just apply them post-release rather than pre-release); the semi-closed iPhone and Nokia Ovi models, the web app model of all the platforms.

A few lines up, you were talking about "phone development" and I assumed you were referring to application development because you mentioned carriers platform locks. Now you refer to appstores. Not the same thing. And even there, there was competition [2].

>> People claiming that Apple has created a locked-down environment have very short memories

I would argue that it's somebody else exhibiting short memory here but I have already.

>> even the closed nature of the App Store via 3.3.1 would have been considered insanely open only 5 years ago. No... it would not have been. Again, please see [2].

The thing is, we had "open for development" smart phones before the iPhone. The platforms were less cool. Some of today's platforms, that are still more "open for development" are more cool in at least some ways that the iPhone.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_distribution_pl...