Month: March 2004

online dispute resolution

SquareTrade | Building Trust in Transactions

I bought something from an eBay seller (a large liquidator) and have been having some trouble getting the goods delivered. After a couple of fruitless attempts to get any information from them, I decided to enlist a mediator. eBay offers free mediation (I suspect all they do is forward on your complaint to the other party under their name) as well as a low-cost option. A $1.00 item (transaction total: $6.24) doesn’t warrant spending $20 on a mediator: my hope is the more formal reminder of their obligation gets this taken care of.

it shouldn’t come to this

CNN.com:

Former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke today began his statements to the 9/11 commission with an apology to the loved ones of those killed in the attacks. “Your government failed you,” he said, “and I failed you.”

What we should be able to expect from an honorable public servant, even if it’s uncalled for . . . . .

It will be interesting to see how this gets spun: will the ideologues be brazen enough to say that Clarke is to blame? The guy they say was “out of the loop,” the one they claim was demoted and never had a plan to deal with Al Qaeda?

Contrast that with this: the exercise of simple good manners and professionalism in his resignation letter somehow undermines his criticism of the administration’s handling of the threat . . .

CNN.com – Clarke wrote warm letter to Bush in 2003 – Mar 24, 2004:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday that the warm tone of the letter “runs counter to what he is now asserting.”

“At this time period, when he was leaving, there was no mention of the grave concerns he claims to have had about the direction of the war on terrorism, or what we were doing to confront the threat posed by Iraq,” McClellan said.

I realize this is a spokesman talking — a professional prevaricator — but what planet are these people from?

URL rewriting solved

Two nuts to crack on this one:

* the syntax of the requested rewriting

* the location of the invocation of the rules

Turns out I need to put it in the Virtual Host catch-all stanza, for reasons I’m not clear on.

<VirtualHost *>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*)_\.html $1.html

CNN helped, even made money from, the fake Medicare news fiasco?

CJR Campaign Desk: Archives:

But some also expressed strong displeasure with CNN, which distributes pre-packaged stories to local stations around the country through its CNN Newsource service, acting as a sort of wire service for TV. Veazey said that when his station receives VNR footage from CNN, it’s clearly labeled in the slug at the top as VNR. But other news directors told us that’s not the case in their systems: You have to search through the footage to find the VNR I.D. Henderson, of WTVC-Chattanooga, told us his station “ran what appeared to be a reporter’s package, which aggravates the mistake.” And Lynn Brooks of WVUA-Tuscaloosa, confirmed in an email to a viewer, obtained by Campaign Desk, that when her station received the Medicare story, it “was designated as a ‘reporter package’, with nothing distinguishing it as a video news release.” CNN, she said, “dropped the ball.” Akins of KSEE-Fresno agreed: “I think CNN does a disservice to its affiliates” by including VNR packages in its stream of news footage. “They should create a separate VNR feed,” she said.

According to the news directors, CNN makes money on both ends of the process. Understandably, it charges the news stations a fee to subscribe to its satellite news feed service, just as the Associated Press charges the newspapers it serves. But Larry Moskowitz of Medialink (which Moskowitz told Campaign Desk is the world’s largest producer and distributor of VNRs) confirmed that CNN Newsource and other similar services also charge the VNR distributor, by leasing transmission time on the satellite news feed that then goes out to local stations.

Hmm, I worked with CNN Newsource quite a bit during my time at CNN.com: it’s unfortunate to read this. I hope it was just a mistake: I’m sure the feed data has changed since last I saw any of that stuff, assuming I could remember it. I think there’s a true video browsing system in place now, so my memories are obsolete, I’m sure.

Background: the project I worked on was a precursor of this, I think: an online feed parser/browser system that took feed data from the newsroom system, parsed it, and inserted it into mSQL. The resulting application allowed subscribing stations to see lists of what packages were available, with the dateline, reporter’s details, and some descriptive information (often the lead-in text).

Does anyone like TypeKey?

TeledyN: MT To Reinvent Drupal Authentication:

To mimick the proposed TypeKey selective-ban policies, any network member site would apply a JayAllen ban-pattern list to the full login name@server, but they might also now ban the specific authenticating server — if some server starts to pollute our network with bad IDs, like a lame nameserver, it gets itself excluded from the gene pool (but it could still be considered reliable and just in some other network); we may even improve on the JayAllen content-based filter by adding a facility to ban by point of entry into the network.

Gary reviews the various arguments for and against the new TypeKey authentication {proposal|meme}, and perhaps unintentionally makes a counter-proposal.

The whole thing is quite tiresome (don’t any of us have anything more important to talk/think about?), but one of the reasons webloggers even take up the filthy habit is a sense of “I know better” . . .

What seems to stick in everyone’s throat about this is the lack of transparency and openness about it: “just trust us, we know best” doesn’t get you far with this crowd.

I guess the only thing to do is wait for MT 3.0 to be released so the new APIs can be leveraged for something people will hate less.

this isn’t how monopolies think

Shot across Microsoft’s bow:

Cusumano said Microsoft should focus more on improving the Windows operating system itself than on adding extra programs. If Microsoft could fix Windows’ security problems and make it “the best in class — no questions asked,” the company would have people lining up to buy the operating system and upgrade to the improved version, he said.

Considering that Microsoft makes most of its money on Windows and loses money in many other areas, such a strategy makes even more sense, Cusumano said.

But do the risks of losing share loom large enough to make the investment? This is a case of the best being the enemy of the good: the cost of fixing it all, even if they can, may outweigh any new revenue, either from upgrades, new purchases, or switchers.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 21, 2004 – March 27, 2004 Archives:

[ . . . ] the pattern suggests two possible theories.

The first is that President Bush has the odd misfortune of repeatedly hiring Democratic party stooges for key counter-terrorism assignments who stab him in the back as soon as they leave his employ.

The second is that anyone the president hires in a key counter-terrorism role who is not either a hidebound ideologue or a Bush loyalist gets so disgusted with the mismanagement and/or dishonesty that they eventually quit and then devote themselves to driving the president from office.

Which sounds more likely?

You’d think someone with the leadership and management background one expects of the highest officeholder in the land would be immune to either possibility . . . .