Square Galaxy

Tell me your stories about how you have been separated with a working cell phone. Have you dropped your phone in the toilet? Has it just stopped working over time. Did it get hit by a car, or stolen on the pickpocket bus in Romania? Even if your story is not extremely interesting, drop a note so we can get an idea of what goes wrong with cell phones.

I have a friend who is trying to sell her 2004 eMachines computer. Please comment on how much you think this would actually be worth. After a few answers, or in a day or two, I’ll post how much she actually wants for it. Here are the brief specs that she’s posted:

-2.70 GHz Intel Celeron processor
-40GB hard drive
-Read/Write CD drive
-512 MB of Memory
-internet ready (LAN and Modem)
-Intel Extreme Graphics 3d video card
-Windows XP installed (I have the OS disc, and can reinstall a clean copy for you)
-Microsoft Office Student edition (I can leave it on the computer, but I can’t give you the install CD)

So how much is this worth, with accompanying keyboard and mouse? She also is selling her matching 15″ monitor, so she says.

I came across this line of code today, and while I don’t normally hate other people’s coding style, this one has something in it that really bothers me:

i = ((unsigned int)(crcAccum >> 24) ^ *dataBlkPtr++ ) & 0xff;

eBay, the online auction marketplace, facilitates somewhere in the range of $50 Billion in gross sales a year. Thats $50,000,000,000 worth of commerce that takes place because of eBay.

Recently, eBay has been making some changes, including changing its rates, eliminating seller feedback, and other various changes. Many sellers, including the power sellers, are not happy with all the changes, nor are they happy with some of the bugs they’ve been seeing because of the changes. There has even been talk of a boycott of eBay and all sort of embattlement accusations between eBay and its sellers.

Which leads me to the question: if not eBay, then what? Who is directly competing with eBay as far as providing an online market place? Craig’s List and Amazon.com both provide marketplaces, but neither of them provide a sufficient online auction system. The closest competitor was Yahoo! Auctions, but that site was taken off-line last year.

Obviously for an auction site to be successful, it would need to have a critical mass of both sellers and buyers, and with eBay around, those sort of sustainable numbers would be hard to achieve. But suppose sellers and buyers decided to leave in droves from eBay to another online auction site. Who is available to take them? Or does eBay have such a monopoly that there is no other alternative. If eBay were to suddenly stop existing, what would happen to that $50B of economy?

I was at the store the other night, and I saw root beer, orange cream and black cherry sodas, cranberry juice, and the list goes on. It made me think, what would be the finest single beverage you could just sit back, relax, and drink.

I think for me, I would like a nice bottle of fine, smooth, root beer, straight from the glass bottle.

What is your favorite beverage?