Ebay shill bidding

In the online auction marketplace, shill bidding is the corrupt practise of bidding on your own items or having friends (or other corrupt associates) bid on your items, purely to artificially inflate the final price and make the legitimate buyers pay more for the item you’re selling.

Shill bidding is probably most widespread on Ebay, the worlds largest online auction site. While Ebay have largely downplayed the fact that shill bidding seemingly still occurs on their network, buyers continue to complain about it’s regularity, despite Ebay’s allegedly sophisticated detection methods.

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Programmers excuses

Recently, I stumbled on this amusing list of things developers have said, when their software doesn’t quite work as intended:

1. I thought I fixed that.
2. Why do you want to do it that way?
3. Where were you when the program blew up?
4. Did you check for a virus?
5. Somebody must have changed my code.
6. It works, but it hasn’t been tested.
7. You must have the wrong version.
8. It worked yesterday.
9. It’s never done that before.
10. That’s weird.

I’m personally guilty of (1), (6) and (7) on the odd occasion with my own code. Looking at someone else’s code, I’ve often been heard to mutter (10) on a regular basis.

What about you?

Office and backup files

One of our readers commented on a negative side-effect of our disk cleaning tip we posted last week. It seems that if you use our batch file to clean your hard disk, your Microsoft Office applications may no longer work correctly.

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