when and why something will catch on never ceases to amaze me. of course, shopping bots have been around for awhile, but it seems that they are seeing increased usage because of the popularity of ps2:
“Amazon.com, Gohastings.com and Kmart’s BlueLight.com are among the online merchants selling PlayStation 2 consoles that have had outages or slowdowns while featuring the popular, and scarce, toy. While Amazon has said its troubles are unrelated to heavy traffic, BlueLight and Gohastings, the Internet arm of Hastings Entertainment, say shopping bots are at least partially responsible for their technical glitches.
“We sat there and watched the site get 80,000 hits in a period of minutes,” said Dave Karraker, spokesman for San Francisco-based BlueLight, which has suffered periodic delays in doing business because of heavy traffic. “It’s clear to us that there are people using bots to scan the site for the PlayStation 2.””
i’m betting that in one year or two the bots will engage in the virtual equivalent of racing to the aisle and engaging in less than scupulous tactics to ensure that it’s owner actually gets the product.
“For two weeks, I’ve been trying to write about the Blogger phenomenon. Make coffee, turn on the computer, check e-mail, stare at Microsoft Word for a while, and look at some Web sites for inspiration.
And then, instead of writing this column, I would add a bunch of nonsense to my Blogger buddy. It’s freakin’ addictive. So, if you write for a living, don’t read this, and don’t try the Web-log game. It’s too easy, and it will Suck Your Soul Away.”
and is it a coincidence or not that dave points to a new blog by newsweek reporter deborah branscum – who is definitely not pulling any punches:
“Earth to execs: Your quotes are bullshit. You know it. We know it. Don’t force your PR folks into fiction writing. Why not quote a customer or supplier—and then only when there’s some actual news-related development? Or be really wild and quote an unrelated credible third party. Finally, consider quoting this
person saying something that meaningful or, at the very least, plausible. Otherwise, just stop it. Please, I’m begging you.”
“New evidence suggesting people are turning off the Internet in droves may be due to
its increasing commercialization one academic suggested Tuesday.
Figures just released by research firm Cyberdialogue show that in 1999 30 million
people in the U.S. no longer used the Internet, describing themselves as “former
users”. This has led experts to question whether a backlash against the Web is
beginning. ”
with the news that redhat is scaling back a bit, i’m motivated to explore the viability of the open source as a business again, especially in light of coments made in the wired article:
“After Linux generated a certain level of buzz, big companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard began to latch onto it. In recent months, some observers have questioned whether pure Linux companies such as Red Hat could succeed in the long term given the entry of such companies, with their firmly entrenched support services, into the market.
“The original idea of making money from a free operating system was dubious from the start,” said a former Red Hat executive who asked not to be identified. “To make it work, if it could work at all, would have required highly skilled management. But with the price of the stock going from 151 to about 6 today, it’s clear that the business model is impossible, or that Red Hat’s management isn’t up to the task, or both. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for Red Hat.””
“A key main reason there’s so much uncertainty in the industry right now is simply because we’re in between equilibrium states. The prior state saw the closed source software/bits for bucks model dominate, with free support, later moving almost entirely to paid support. In that state we had software-only companies of all sizes making a profit, from one-person shareware shops to outfits like our cousins up in Redmond. It was and largely still is an economically viable business model, and it fueled a lot of companies and some spectacular investment portfolios.
The next equilibrium point will be more oriented toward open source, and I suspect that in the long run this will all but eliminate the software-only companies. There will be a lot of consolidation as companies merge and acquire each other, and also evolution, as companies try to stay independent and convert themselves into service companies. I won’t guess how far this new equilibrium point will be from the old one, in terms of either time or degree of change from the last point; I don’t think anyone can tell for sure while we’re in the middle of the transition.
The really interesting thing is that the further we go along this path, the more software will be produced by either the stereotypical open source project, staffed by people scratching an itch and not getting paid for their work, or by large companies, like IBM, HP, Compaq, Intel, and others, that have a financial incentive to spend big money on software they can give away. Don’t think for a nanosecond that these companies want to spend horrendous amounts of money developing software they can give us because we’re nice or lovable; it’s simply in their best interest to do this to promote more pragmatic endeavors, like making money from hardware sales. Seen in this light, the only thing surprising about IBM’s stunning, wall-to-wall Linux commitment is that it’s not even bigger. IBM, thanks to the variety of hardware platforms it sells and supports, probably has more to gain from Linux’s long-term success and arrival as a unifying platform than any other single company.”
“Another market with perhaps the biggest potential for Linux is embedded systems (see Resources for a link to another LinuxWorld.com article on embedded Linux). Linux isn’t the perfect embedded OS, but it’s fast, tight, and free. You can’t beat free, especially when the margins on devices can be low or even dip into negative numbers. (It is not unusual for companies to intentionally lose money on game consoles and other devices that use embedded operating systems, since they make money elsewhere.)
Pure software companies are in a much more difficult position than companies that add value through hardware in one way or another. It is getting increasingly difficult to sell people something they can get for free, and more and more software is free these days.”
“The problem isn’t to figure out how to sell it, but to mostly give up on the idea of selling software, and
look to add and sell value in other ways.”
“And what do we make? Software for those who grew up with computers. Software for people who hate wizards, and plug and play, and lack of control. Software for people who can see the beauty of a properly working system. We make software for people who love choice. We make software that works, even when hardware manufacturers won’t pony up the documentation, even when we have to reverse engineer things that should be publicly available, we make it happen.
These are the things that make open source great. This is why even after an 18-hour day, I still have the desire to settle down at my Linux box. This is why I work all week in commercial software and still look forward to a weekend of uninterrupted time to catch up with my own development projects. This is why I’m here, and why I’ll continue to be here. This is what open source is all about.”
regular visitors will already know that jakob has been on a waplash crusade for awhile. recently he reinvigorated [with some help] the campaign with the release of the wap usability report:
“When users were asked whether they were likely to use a WAP phone within one year, a resounding 70% answered no. WAP is not ready for prime time yet, nor do users expect it to be usable any time soon. Remember, this finding comes after respondents had used WAP services for a week, so their conclusions are significantly more valid than answers from focus group participants who are simply asked to speculate about whether they would like WAP. We surveyed people who had suffered through the painful experience of using WAP, and they definitely didn’t like it.
The report details the many usability problems that caused users to come to this negative conclusion. Unless the usability of mobile Internet services and devices improves considerably, people will simply not use them and billions of dollars will be wasted.”
the only reason i’m linking to it here is that the register made me giggle with its summary that wap is cwap.
say it ten times really fast. you’ll find it popping into your head at the oddest moments.
want to feel superfine every single day? then maybe you should run charities.cron. giving has never so easy:
# This is a cron script in the gawk language to frequent the various
# charity sites affiliated with thehungersite.com. These sites have
# obtained corporate sponsorship to enable web users to donate food,
# health care, and other goods to the needy by clicking on a link. The
# sites generally count one click per IP address per day. While it’s
# hard for people to remember to return to each site each day to donate,
# it’s a perfect task for a cron job. This script uses lynx to download
# the page to a temp file, identify the proper link, “click” it (sending
# output to /dev/null), and then remove the temp file. By making this a
# daily cron job, you can cause thousands of dollars to be donated to
# charity each year.
maybe i should call the gore camp and do a little legal advising. as you’ve probably heard they were pummeled in court today:
“The strongly worded decision from Leon County circuit court judge N. Sanders Sauls was the most severe blow yet to the Gore campaign. He ruled there was “no credible statistical evidence” or other substantial evidence to show that further recounts had a “reasonable probability” of throwing the presidential election to Mr Gore. “
“The infamous ‘butterfly’ style ballot card used by Palm Beach County, Florida, in the recent US presidential election causes voting errors and raises doubt over the final result — not the conclusion of a democrat-led inquiry, but the finding of psychologists who have examined the controversial ballot paper
in new experimental trials.”
“Almost eight per cent of people using the butterfly ballot in the trial made mistakes — most inadvertently voting for Clark when they believed they were choosing Chretien. Many more said that the card was confusing.”