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[Chopsdad]

The other big Ebay scam is that you get a bankers draft for more than your item is worth.  You bank the cq and when it clears (day 5) punter asks you to send the difference via Western Union or similar having taken off £50 for your inconvenience.  Next day the cq bounces and your left with your item less the money you've sent on.

The worst case of this I read about was £5000 sent for a Bow (as in arrow) worth £300.  Young lad sent £4650 and is left crying to his mum after being scammed.  Police can't trace cash so he's lost out  

[Martin_1962]

I dislike HTML emails as well - too big and they annoy me

[jonny2112]

I recently received emails from alleged ebay buyer stating that i had left negative feedback and that unless I withdrew it then negative would be left for me. I queried the item etc and was sent a link, but this did not work. A few days later an identical mail was received from a different 'buyer' and when queried the link opened an ebay sign in page, but I didn't go any further.

[Paul M]

They didn't invent HTML or RTF (there aren't many things M$ did actually invent ) but they certainly contributed a large part of the poisoning of the net with it. They decided a loooong time back that HTML should be the default for e-mail, so when non-computer-savvy gran decides to send a mail saying nothing more than "thanks dear" it gets wrapped up in loads of completely superfluous hypertext markup for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That was the start, now half the mail I get from Outlook users has all the line breaks screwed up and other general crappiness, even though the mails rarely contain anything other than some text.

I don't think mime is a particularly elegant solution either, but let's face it there was a demand to attach stuff to mail so the option was put there, in a standard way, for people to use if desired. Most mails don't contain MIME attachments, they're only used when the user chooses to use it, and even then I can simply discard the attachments. HTML mail is much more of a PITA - I'm fed up getting crap like "Your client doesn't support HTML mail, please upgrade"... Yes it does support it but I've deliberately chosen to disable HTML support so I don't have to read mail from retards who can't stick to some simple standards. Needless to say those mails go straight in the trash. Besides I do occasionally read my mail via telnet over an SSH link and I don't want to be picking through bloody hypertext just to try and read a simple text message body.

Contrary to the impression I may be creating, I don't hate M$ and have used their products for years - I have licences for XP Pro, Office Pro, Visual Studio and probably some others I've forgotten. However there are certain things that really p... me off with them, such as the whole "embrace, extend, destroy" thing they done with IE to basically force out all other vendors by leveraging their Windows monopoly to get a browser monopoly then introducing loads of new non-standard stuff so other stuff would have compatibility problems etc... The only reason IE wasn't updated (other than patches) for years is because their monopoly status made it difficult for others to switch, even though there have been much better products out there for ages.

They also tried (or are still trying?) to leverage their monopoly to get into the media markets... such as the threats to apple over quicktime etc. They basically forced OEMs to bundle *only* Windows on PCs, no other operating systems allowed otherwise the licence price went through the roof - basically unaffordable and you can't dump windows cos it has the monopoly!

Remember that M$ were found guilty of anti-trust violations in the US, but it was swept under the carpet when the Bush administration came to power in 2000. Likewise they were found guilty of anti-trust in the EU over media markets. And at the moment they're still failing to comply with EU rulings for them to provide interoperability documentation so that they can't leverage their desktop monopoly into server markets too, as they've been trying to do for god knows how long.

M$ make some good products, but their business practices are right up there with the worst of them. And quite frankly I don't trust them which is why I refuse to have Windows Genuine disadvantage installed on any of my PCs, and I'm very doubtful of whether I'll ever "upgrade" to Vista cos god knows what's next. There are other OSes out there that do the job just fine, and when the inevitable need for Windows arises (due to that M$ monopoly yet again) I can just fire up a copy of VMWare Player (which is free to download) running my previously paid for copy of WinXP Pro.

[TheBoy]

They didn't invent HTML or RTF (there aren't many things M$ did actually invent ) but they certainly contributed a large part of the poisoning of the net with it. They decided a loooong time back that HTML should be the default for e-mail, so when non-computer-savvy gran decides to send a mail saying nothing more than "thanks dear" it gets wrapped up in loads of completely superfluous hypertext markup for absolutely no reason whatsoever. That was the start, now half the mail I get from Outlook users has all the line breaks screwed up and other general crappiness, even though the mails rarely contain anything other than some text.

I don't think mime is a particularly elegant solution either, but let's face it there was a demand to attach stuff to mail so the option was put there, in a standard way, for people to use if desired. Most mails don't contain MIME attachments, they're only used when the user chooses to use it, and even then I can simply discard the attachments. HTML mail is much more of a PITA - I'm fed up getting crap like "Your client doesn't support HTML mail, please upgrade"... Yes it does support it but I've deliberately chosen to disable HTML support so I don't have to read mail from retards who can't stick to some simple standards. Needless to say those mails go straight in the trash. Besides I do occasionally read my mail via telnet over an SSH link and I don't want to be picking through bloody hypertext just to try and read a simple text message body.

Contrary to the impression I may be creating, I don't hate M$ and have used their products for years - I have licences for XP Pro, Office Pro, Visual Studio and probably some others I've forgotten. However there are certain things that really p... me off with them, such as the whole "embrace, extend, destroy" thing they done with IE to basically force out all other vendors by leveraging their Windows monopoly to get a browser monopoly then introducing loads of new non-standard stuff so other stuff would have compatibility problems etc... The only reason IE wasn't updated (other than patches) for years is because their monopoly status made it difficult for others to switch, even though there have been much better products out there for ages.

They also tried (or are still trying?) to leverage their monopoly to get into the media markets... such as the threats to apple over quicktime etc. They basically forced OEMs to bundle *only* Windows on PCs, no other operating systems allowed otherwise the licence price went through the roof - basically unaffordable and you can't dump windows cos it has the monopoly!

Remember that M$ were found guilty of anti-trust violations in the US, but it was swept under the carpet when the Bush administration came to power in 2000. Likewise they were found guilty of anti-trust in the EU over media markets. And at the moment they're still failing to comply with EU rulings for them to provide interoperability documentation so that they can't leverage their desktop monopoly into server markets too, as they've been trying to do for god knows how long.

M$ make some good products, but their business practices are right up there with the worst of them. And quite frankly I don't trust them which is why I refuse to have Windows Genuine disadvantage installed on any of my PCs, and I'm very doubtful of whether I'll ever "upgrade" to Vista cos god knows what's next. There are other OSes out there that do the job just fine, and when the inevitable need for Windows arises (due to that M$ monopoly yet again) I can just fire up a copy of VMWare Player (which is free to download) running my previously paid for copy of WinXP Pro.

With reference to a need for attachments, many users could argue there is an equal need for a formatted text system, such as html...   ...and only a tiny minority are going to be manually reading email via telnet...

Poisoning the net?  If HTML email 'poisoned' the net, then so did the worldwide web. Same technology, same browser dll's that render, same vulnerabilities. Same masked links.

IE won the battle with Netscape simply because it was a better product - Netscape screwed themselves with poor design and poor management of their development.  Equally, Media Player is possibly the best all round player (assuming you are licenced).

Yes, MS OEM practices could be considered harsh, but no different to other industries - I know our previous company car rules stipulated one manufacturer, simply because to get the right price, it was an exclusive arrangement...

I too have some concerns at some of the things in Vista.  Some of these restrictions (HD video content restrictions) will have to go in to other OSes as well if they want to play HD content...

If your XP is retail, you can legally run under VM, if OEM, then you cant...