|
|
December 11, 2011
It doesn't seem to be breaking any laws but it's certainly unfair and anti-competitive. This time Amazon is asking its customers to use its Price Check shopping app on products in retail stores and then turn around and buy the same items from Amazon and receive perks in the forms of discounts and credits. Of course people have the right to shop wherever they want, but asking people to troll stores and then robbing those stores from potential sales seems a bit sleazy
Amazon could argue that people could browse its web site just the same and then shop elsewhere but that is hardly a fair comparison. Amazon's costs are much lower and it's not saddled with collecting sales taxes in many states. A brick and mortar store has a multitude of cost factors to bear in order to accommodate its shoppers. Amazon has only a fraction of such costs in comparison because of its online nature.
Is Amazon's tactic of using the physical stores as showrooms fair? It doesn't seem to me. And if one insists on shopping online, why not use eBay instead? It has more selections, better prices, supports small business much more widely and probably pulls fewer dirty tricks.
October 14, 2011
The tech geeks have been abuzz over a critical article written by a Google developer and leaked on Google+ by mistake. In that article, the author criticizes Google for its lack of a coherent platform and its SOA shortcomings as compared to companies such as facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The author has since recanted his claims, calling them an opinionated rant. Surely a desire to remain employed by Google must have been a strong incentive. Never mind the Google critique, what really interested me was his depiction of Amazon. As an ex-employee of Amazon, he would have been in a position to know.
This is one of the passages describing Amazon:
And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas.
A comment post from an Amazon ex-employee reads:
Amazon was a purely political environment where, if you weren't watching your back you'd get stabbed and become a rung in someone else's ladder. In our group, the manager had zero engineering experience (literally had gone to college to be a prison guard, somehow ended up "managing" programmers, though barely computer literate.
One might suspect the author has an unjustified grudge against Amazon, but I don't see why the author would trash Amazon when the goal of the article was to pick on Google. Software people generally tell it like it is, so perhaps he just happened to be in bad teams over at Amazon. I give it that at best.
My opinion of Amazon was already low, brought down by their arrogant and unethical behavior, but reading this article gave me more validation for my dislike of this company. I have continued to bypass Amazon and shop elsewhere since my initial disturbing experience with them. It's been most satisfying to deprive Amazon of even a cent of my money.
October 1, 2011
So amazon finally announced its so-called secret product last week. With much fanfare the world was introduced the new Android-driven tablet called Fire, featuring the Silk browser. Oh, the Kindle is still there too, and at a huge discount to its more glorious days, but who cares about Kindle now.
As usual there has been a self-serving announcement on amazon's homepage alluding to the fact that they work hard to save their customers money via lower prices. Really? If that's the case how come Kindle was going for five times the current price not too long ago. Hate it when businesses pull that phony we-care nonsense when everyone knows money is the main objective and prices are determined based on what the market bears and not some altruistic algorithm. Whatever, amazon.
As for the new keyboard-less tablet, get ready for your every move to be tracked and recorded by amazon. You see, the Silk browser connects to the web via EC2, amazon's vast data network, allegedly to "optimize" user experience. Of course that also means amazon will take a little peep and record what the user does online. What it'll do with that data is yet undetermined.
Note: Author holds a negative bias towards amazon based on previous experience.
August 30, 2011
Hurricane Irene has come and gone causing much damage and destruction in its path. I ended up with a leaky roof and a power outage. Relatively speaking, that's not so bad, except that the power outage lasted for what it seemed like eternity.
Of course with the outage came the loss of this site as the server went dark. This right on the heels of the recent DDOS attack the site had suffered. The tools and utilities used by people around the world were no longer accessible and understandably that's a source of frustration. It's one of the hazards of self-hosting and not having an huge budget. Why not host the site with a hosting company in a data center, like it was at one time? I am working on a separate blog post on that.
For now, I offer apologies and the hope that the next outage, while inevitable, will be in a distant future. Nothing in life is certain and even the Titans of the web go down occasionally, let alone a small operation like this. I promise my best effort to keep the server up and running.
Thanks for your support and trust,
Robert
August 25, 2011
Sometimes I'm so tempted to to do this: Block China Web Traffic IP Addresses and Chinese Hackers.
Of course if everyone blocked everyone else indiscriminately that would go against the spirit of the Internet.
What's needed is for the ISPs to get off their lazy and greedy butts and block attacks at their sources.
Certainly a bunch of zombies (unwitting users with infected machines) will be caught in the dragnet too, but they can be contacted and urged to clean up their machines before they're allowed back on.
It'll be good for us, it'll be good for them, it'll be good for the Internet.
August 1, 2011
Tying browser usage to intelligence makes as much sense as linking hair color to sleeping habits. No doubt someone will come up with that study at some point too.
So going by this study, a few years back 90% of the world was stupid and suddenly most people smartened up by switching away from IE.
And no, I'm not switching to Opera just because its users were shown to have higher IQ. I'll continue using Chrome and remain stupid.
Are Internet Explorer users dumb?
May 5, 2011
Deleting flash cookies (aka, Local Shared Objects or LSO) has always been a twisted and onerous task. I wrote about flash cookies a few years back.
Now comes the welcome news that Adobe has decided to integrate the task of deleting the LSO's with the browsers' delete cookie feature. In other words when you delete your browser cookies using the menu option or ctrl-shift-del, flash cookies will also be deleted along with the standard web cookies and localStorage objects.
It isn't quite finalized yet, but it's in the flash player's latest release candidate, so it should hit our browsers sometime soon.
Deleting “Flash Cookies” Made Easier - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
March 24, 2011
 I saw some news today that the Firefox 4 download numbers beat those of IE 9 by a large margin. And that even with IE 9 getting rave reviews for being built from scratch and being speedy, while Firefox 4 came out of beta way too late.
Why is Firefox so popular and Google Chrome gaining market share like crazy? Barring the bad wrap IE has had for years for being sluggish and buggy, these browsers can work on a wide array of operating systems, including Windows XP. By contrast IE 9 only works on Windows Vista and 7 and I'm willing to bet that's a marketing decision and not a technological barrier.
I can just imagine how badly the IE 9 team would have wanted to make their creation available on XP, but the powers that be just vetoed that idea. Something like 40% of all Windows users are still on XP and Microsoft would like them to get off that platform. If IE 9 were to be supported on XP, it would probably see much greater adoption, yet that would be tantamount to a tacit approval of XP by Microsoft and they just couldn't have that, such conundrum.
Now imagine if the IE group was independent from the Windows group, as in two separate companies. Then there would be no conflict of interest, no corporate policies would be violated and no one will get mad if IE 9 would work on XP. Microsoft should break itself up for its own good. It's only harming itself in its current behemoth form.
July 14, 2010
 Ever needed to go to a web page only to be road-blocked by an insipid form with a million questions? Ever needed to test your own web forms and wanted a tool to quickly fill out a bunch of fields and pick a bunch of options for you?
If you use Chrome, you're in luck. I developed the JunkFill Chrome extension for just that purpose, something to get me quickly through testing web forms. There are other extensions that have similar or better functionality. For most, you need to configure them and save the data so they can to fill out the forms properly for you.
JunkFill isn't about being proper, it's about being quick. It works right out of the box, so to speak, no configuration necessary. You can download it from the Chrome Extension Gallery. Give it a click and see how it works out for you.
July 11, 2010
The fact that YouTube has a number of the original Star Trek series is pretty cool for geeks like me who grew up on the series.
This one below shows an upload date of over 43 years ago. You think Roddenberry was time-travelling and uploading them to YouTube then?  ARPANET deployment was still a couple of years away when this episode was made.
Older Posts »
Powered by 
Read Financial Markets |
Home |
Blog |
Web Tools |
News |
Articles |
FAQ |
About |
Contact
© 2001-2012 Robert Hashemian
|
|
Liked this page?
Please consider creating a link to it
from your Web site.
|
|
|
