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 — Continue reading Β»
Voyager 1 and Earth-like Planet
A pair of interesting space stories today. Voyager1 launched in 1977 is now 11 billion miles away from earth. It's in an area thought to be the final barrier between the solar system and the inner-stellar space which is outside the sun's sphere of influence. Who knows what sorts of stuff lie beyond the barrier — Continue reading Β»
Amazon vs. eBay on Tax Collection
So after all the bloviating and firing affiliates whose home states wanted to collect sales taxes from Amazon, suddenly it is talking fair taxation. Where was the fairness when Amazon was (and still is) crushing small business all across the country? I don't like Amazon to begin with anyways, but I hope eBay — Continue reading Β»
New Ugly Gmail Look
Yesterday I was greeted by an icon in Gmail to try their new look. I clicked, played with the new look for a while and ran right back to the old look. Alas, Google seems determined to push the new Gmail look on users, whether they like it or not, so the classic look may — Continue reading Β»
Amazonβs Humbling Moment
Two days before amazon announces earnings, it gets glowing remarks from a bunch of analysts with price targets of $280, give or take. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/24/amazon-blowout-q3-ahead/ Then amazon announces dismal earnings last night and takes a plunge down to around $200 today. What were these analysts thinking? So they just induce a bunch of people to sink — Continue reading Β»
Amazon Culture
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 — Continue reading Β»
Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C, Dead at 70
My first programming language exposure was 8088 assembly. Pascal was my second. but my third, C, was the one I absolutely loved. Today I mostly program in C#, PHP, and JavaScript and I like the fact that they're modeled after C. I don't know what it was about C that intrigued me. Maybe the liberal — Continue reading Β»
Google Powered by ASP.NET
Ok, it's not goggle.com or one of the more well-known google sites but the site survey.googleratings.com is powered by Microsoft's IIS running ASP.NET. I only noticed this after I received an Adsense survey invitation with a link ending in .aspx. I wouldn't be surprised if the survey results are stored in an SQL Server database. — Continue reading Β»