I went around and counted that we seem to have around 30 birick and wall-wart DC power supplies plugged in around the house, and many more that are not plugged in which charge or power various devices. More and more of what we buy is getting to be more efficient and lower power, which is good.

But it's time for standardization in DC power and battery charging. In fact, I would like to move to a world where DC devices don't come with a power supply by default, because you are expected to be able to power them at one of the standard voltage/current settings.

One early experiment is on airplanes. I have an adapter that takes the 12v from the airplane, and has many tips which put out different voltages for different laptops. These are expensive right now, but on the right track.

Our other early venture is USB, which provides up to 500ma at 5 volts. Many small devices now use USB for power if that's all they need. There are devices that plug in to USB only for power, they don't use the data lines. Some come with a small cigarette lighter plug that has a USB socket on it for car use. This includes cellular chargers, lights etc.

I think a good goal would be a standardized data+power bus with a small number of standard plugs. One would be very tiny for small devices and only provide minimal USB-level power, a couple of watts. Another would handle mid-level devices, up to a couple of amps. A third would be large and handle heavy duty devices up to say 20 amps, replacing our wall plugs eventually. There might be a 4th for industrial use.

In full form, the data bus would be used for the components to exchange just what power they want and have. Years ago that would have been ridiculous overkill, today such parts are cheap. However, to make it simple there would be a basic passive system -- perhaps as simple as a finely tuned resistor in place of the data components -- to make it easy and cheap to adapt today's components.

A fully smart component would plug into the smart power and get a small "carrier" voltage designed to run the power electronics only. A protocol would establish what power the supply can provide and what the component wants, and then that power would be provided.  read more »

Like many, I am interested in reputation systems, and eBay has built the largest public reputation system. Many have noted how feedback on eBay is overwhelmingly positive — a 97% positive rating would be a reason to be wary of a seller.

It’s also noted that people do this because they are scared of revenge feedback — I give you a negative, you do it back to me. One would think that since the buyer’s only real duty is to send the money that the seller should provide positive feedback immediately upon receipt of that money, but they don’t.

Some fixes have been proposed, including:

• letting you see the count of total auctions the party has been buyer or seller in, so you can see how many resulted in no feedback at all. Right now only eBay knows how large that number is.
• double-blind feedback. That is to say that feedback is not revealed until both parties have entered it, or if only one party enters it, after the feedback period has expired.
• Marking revenge feedback, ie. putting a mark next to negatives that were a response to an outgoing negative.

Thus you could have very low fear of revenge feedback and there would be no argument about who should go first.

This idea’s fairly obvious, so like many other obvious ideas about eBay one wonders if eBay doesn’t feel some benefit to themselves from not doing it, though it’s hard to see. I’m also curious as to why eBay doesn’t offer a “going, going, gone” auction where the auction closes only after 5 minutes with no bidding. That seems to be in the interests of sellers (and eBay which gets a cut of the selling price) and it’s certainly not something they are unaware of.

The only proposition I’ve heard is that eBay has decided that there is a positive value to itself (and possibly sellers) from bid-sniping, the process of bidding preemptively in the last minute of an auction to not give other live bidders (who didn’t use the automatic rebidder) a chance to come in with more. The only way this could be good woudl be if Snipers deliberately overbid in order to trump anything. Any research or thoughts on this? It may also be the case that the sniped auctions are more “fun,” or more of a contest. And finally having fixed closing times does facilitate participating in multiple auctions for the same thing.

I have also posted updated eBay thoughts and an even simpler system which eliminates revenge and in fact now have an eBay tag for all eBay related posts, including thoughts on eBay’s solution to all this.

Please Note: This thread is for discussion of philosophical or abstract aspects of the feedback system. Please do not post stories of your own particular problems from a particular seller or transaction. Keep it abstract.

For some time I have been musing over the design of an ideal home A/V system using digital technology. Sadly it's not coming, in part because it's illegal under the new Broadcast Flag rules.

To read my design of this system, and the musings of the legality of it and why that presents a problem, see a draft on an Ideal A/V digital system