I’ve been doing a lot of training lately on Novell Identity Manager.
WOW what a sweet product. And the ROI is incredible. I hope to be able to share some of the features and returns here.
admin
My Almost Scam with techondigital.com
I was in the market for a Waterproof Digital Camera that my wife and I could take on our vacation to Hawaii at the end of August. I came across techondigital.com. I found the page from a google search for Olympus 1030 SW. This was the URL for the Ad: http://www.lowpricedigital.com/item.asp?item_Id=161557
They had a 5 star “Trusted” Rating so I proceeded to make the order. I was called back soon thereafter by them and was told that I needed to buy a battery for the camera. This was the first red flag. Why would a reputable company like Olympus sell a mid-range camera with no battery? The sales person then clarified that there was actually a battery but it was a stater battery that was only good for about 15 – 20 pictures. What the sales person didn’t know is that I was already planning on purchasing a second battery for the camera and had found a battery on another site for about $30. So you can imagine my shock when he told be the battery would cost $89! WTF!?
I politely declined his offer and asked if there was anything Else I needed to know about the camera. He said there was. And…..? As it turns out this camera was an “Gray Market” camera from Japan, all of the markings and instructions would be in Japanese. And If I wanted, I could upgrade to the US Model for an additional $179, which put the price way above what I could by the camera for locally here in town plus an extra battery. When I called him on the price of the battery and the fact the model number on the website was for the US Model and told him this sounded like a bait and switch he asked if I would like to cancel my order. He did and I was send a confirmation email the next day saying my order was canceled.
This is when I started to do some more research into this company.
The ratings company that had given this merchant a 5 star rating has its reviews listed here: http://www.lowpricedigital.com/merchant.asp?merchant_id=20, as you can see each and every review has only a pro comment, very generic, and no cons. Not a single negative review I don’t care who you are, you don’t get 200 reviews that don’t have a single negative comment, or con for the product. Also there is no place to add your own review…. hmmm very fishy.
Checked out other websites that had linked this company to many others with similar practices. It all came together when I found this site. http://donwiss.com/pictures/brooklynstores/
There are a dozen or so of these companies operating in New York that are on the same street. Again, very fishy, many of them are even in the same building.
From what I can gather I believe that all these companies are inter-related.
- Broadway family
- Broadway Photo LLC
- BwayPhoto.com
- A&M Photo World LLC
- AMPhotoWorld.com
- DigitalLiquidators.com
- RegalCamera.com
- CameraTopia.com
- Preferred Photo
- Preferredphoto.com
- preferedphoto.com
- wilddigital.com
- Milleniumcamerera.com
- Time 2 Envy
- stores.ebay.com/Time2Envy
- Camera Addict, LLC
- cameraAddict.com
- Prestige Lamera, LLC d.b.a Prestige Camera.com
- dBuys.com
- iBuyDigital.com
- iBuyPlasma.com
- RealDealShop.com
- DigitalMegaStore.com
- CentralDigital.com
- Time2Envy.com
- Quest 4 Cameras
- Quest4Cameras.com
For those of you who are wondering I ended up buying the camera from NewEgg.com. Best price I found, I even got a 2yr Accidental Damage Warranty (Trust me I’ll probably use it twice) and an XD photocard.
Thanks to my reader (to this day I think I only have 1) I found a much better website warning the consumer of these jerks. http://www.broadway-photo-warning.com
In Search of the Perfect Wiki
I set out on a mission this week to find the perfect wiki, I had been completely on finding a dozen or so wikis and installing them in various fashions and trying out a feature/wish list hoping that I would find one that suited all my needs and as many Wants as I could get. I fell in love with mediawiki when I was in school to document all my projects, and keep track of my thoughts. But the lack of ACLs has sent me back to the great cloud to seek out an alternative.
Here were my requirements
Needs
- Open Source – This particular project had a budget of 0 dollars. Preferably some GPL or LGPL project.
- Written in PHP – I already have a LAMP infrastructure so Python/Java/Perl were out.
- Flat File or MySQL page storage
- ACLs – Must be able to make some pages readable but not editable by certain groups.
- LDAP Authentication – Own Database ok but would prefer to centralize passwords
- Page Versioning – Must be able to roll back changes
- Search – Page Titles
- Syntax Highlighting – Trust me, its just better that way.
Wants
- Easy to setup – I know a pipe dream but there’s always hope.
- Page Versioning – Be able to diff pages between all versions
- Search – Full text
- Syntax similar to MediaWiki – Its what I’m used to
- Tagging – Have be able to order/organize the pages someway.
Then as I started my search I found a little site that took all the fun out of it.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/
The search feature quickly narrowed my search down to these few wikis. I threw MediaWIki into the works just to keep a baseline for features I would gain or lose.
http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/DokuWiki+MoinMoin+PhpWiki+TikiWiki-CMS-Groupware+MediaWiki
These are my finalists that I will be installing an playing with.
DokuWiki
MoinMoin – was quickly discarded because it was written in python.
PHPWiki
TikiWiki
MediaWIki – I’ve heard rumors of an ACL plugin that would just barely give the amount of control needed.