Monday, Nov 16th, 2009 by
admin
Category:
Internet
As some of you may already know, Don Dodge was a former Microsoft “evangelist” who evidently had connections. The instant he announced being fired from Microsoft, it was featured as a prominent story on Techcrunch and other news venues. I for one would never have heard about him if he wasn’t fired.
Don Dodge
Amusingly, though probably not surprising, he wrote a blog post today highlighting four of Google’s offerings over Microsoft.
- Outlook vs Gmail
- Office Office [sic] 2007 vs Google Docs
- Windows Mobile 6.5 vs Google Android
- Internet Explorer vs Chrome
He says that it is the first time he has used these Google products now that he’s been hired by Google.
Apparently you can be a persuasive evangelist like Don Dodge knowing nothing about your competitor’s products; which is why you should ignore “evangelists”.
Having said that, I think people are being too hard on Don.
If you consider Don as a corporation himself, what makes this so different than if Dell switched to Linux because MS stopped subsidizing Windows, and Dell started extolling the virtues of Linux over Windows? None.
It is only because we are so ingrained into thinking that employees should be the thralls of their companies even after being fired while the company themselves have no qualms about treating their employees as a cost/benefit commodity. This is a double standard.
Don Dodge’s Marketing Blog Post
Saturday, Nov 7th, 2009 by
admin
Category:
Hacking,
Internet
It was recently “discovered” (or really just blogged about) by competing website bountii.com that Bing was using a hilariously insecure method for recording “Cashback” purchases.
The cashback program is simply where Microsoft pays you a percentage for searching and shopping through Bing.
The original article was taken down by legal threats probably due to the fact that the author actually exploited it for a couple thousand dollars. Given the nature of the “exploit”, I believe I can safely talk about it vaguely as it as obvious and insecure as a blank check.
Simply put, Bing cashback allows merchants to record cashback purchases with a “tracking pixel” where the url is something like:
http://www.not-a-real-bing-website.com/?bingaccount=43&ordernumber=123&money=499.99
Where you can apparently change the money value and guess the order number.
Original Articles
(Cached from Bountii.com from Bing and Google cache due to legal takedown)
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4879267570255838&w=a29cc607,9ea4ebc5
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:3hxOgSPu460J:bountii.com/blog/
Sunday, Oct 25th, 2009 by
admin
Category:
Internet Tags:
google
I just received 20 “invitations” for Google Wave. Anyone want one?
Update: Only 4 left. Priority will be given to frequent readers who ask for one.
Update2: No more invitations left for now.
Tuesday, Oct 6th, 2009 by
admin
Category:
Internet
If you are looking for a good deal on Ebay, how do you know how much you should pay?
Ebay’s “search completed listings” is fairly useless. It only lasts 15 days, and often comes up with no results. Looking at other active listings are also useless if no one is selling the same item. The current bid is also useless because everyone now bid snipes so you are probably only seeing a low figure until the last few seconds.
It turns out that Ebay actually records the average sale price for many standardized items. It is just somewhat hidden. I will tell you how to find it for free.
First, login and click on sell item. Try to find the category your item is in.
Read the rest of this entry »
Monday, Oct 5th, 2009 by
admin
Category:
statistics
I don’t like to pull the “I told you so” card, but when you have so many people, telling you otherwise, you simply have to.
A short summary: Last week, OKCupid, an online dating website showed a diagram of message reply rates by males to females arranged by race. They left out the axis which I was easily able to copy and paste over from another one of their diagrams (they were the exact same size!).
Many people refused to believe that today’s society would be so racist and started saying that I was dumb for completing the diagram and that OKCupid rearranged it to trick people like me.
You took the teaser diagram for next week and put labels from a completely different diagram about how people match. You should be shot for being a idiot.
-dre
This week, OkCupid has released their final diagram. Let’s see if I really was “a idiot”.
Read the rest of this entry »
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