I am an Amazon Associate who has experience with the Alexa Crawler. I believe the crawl is intended to find broken links, or links to products that are no longer stocked.
The Amazon Associates program has been around long enough for "page rot" to kick in, and I am sure there are many sites out there with links to non-existant products, such as old editions of books, etc. Historically, associates had to build static links (for the most part) by hand, and embedded them in more or less static page.
The problem comes in due to the recent introduction of their web services, where sites can build essentially unlimited pages based on dynamic real-time queries to amazon. I don't believe their intent is to "thrash around" in these sites, which is what is occuring.
A few month ago, I asked to have the Alexa bot crawl my site, (StarvingMind.net) , I was curious about the reports it was able to generate. The bot ended up in endless loops and had to be manually stopped by someone at Alexa. They spent an impressive amount of time trying to identify and fix the problem my site was creating for their bot. I don't know whether my specific problem was ever resolved, but I have the impression the bug was found and fixed. I also have the impression that the bot is very immature code and buggy.
Based on the personal and public responses I have seen from the Amazon and Alexa people involved, they actually do care about these issues very much, and don't wish to cause harm by the bots use. I believe their goal is to eliminate the link rot that has accumulated on associate sites over the years, manytimes with the site owner unaware of the problem.
Web services threw a curve into the mix, and that is where the major problems are occuring. The post I a replying to seems to imply Amazon may want to "use then throw out" the associates. I think that is pure speculation without any knowledge of the fact. Amazon has recently gone from what appeared to be no fulltime staff to a team of people dedicated to supporting and running the associates program. I believe they consider it a very cost effective way of advertising, and I expect it is doing quite well for them. Based on their recent actions, I believe they are trying to build a strong long term relationship with the active ones of us, as we bring them a fair amount of business.
Another post has pointed out they have stopped the crawl while the issues talked about here are looked into. They realize they may have made a mistake, and are trying to figure out how to address the problem. They have been responsive (with me at least) resolving problems like this in the past, they deserve a chance to resolve it this time as well. They have started down the right path, by stopping the crawl.
One of the real issues that may poke it's ugly head in all this is the value of TWAOL's content. How much is it worth? If you ask the executives, they probably can put a value on it. Is the value realistic? Maybe we will see.
I really think this is something that needs to happen, and it's about time. Content has a percieved value in old economy companies which is based on physical distribution mechanisms.
Right now the value of content is not known in my my mind. I don't think anyone else really knows either.
Just look at Salon.com. They, probably more than any other company, are in a battle to define the correct value of their content. At some point we need to progress beyond 1980's paradigms of content value in large media companies as well. Salon.com is in the thick of it as we are reading this. We see headlines almost weekly about their quest to break even, much less turn a profit. Salon has a problem that online content is their only product. AOLTW has other lines of business and markets to help keep them afloat. Maybe now it is AOL Time Warner's turn to test the waters and discover, or at least try to, the real value of their content.
This book, as he says, "is not an introduction to DHTML". If you are looking for a book to get started with DHTML, I highly reccomend Essential CSS and DHTML for Web Professionals (2nd Edition), by Dan Livingston. I learned most of my DHTML fundementals from the first edition, and recently purchased the second edition as well. This is a very short book, an unlike many of its kind, can be read almost in "novel" form to get a basic overview without getting bored. You can then go back and try the examples, and actually implement some DHTML. Without a doubt one of the best web development books I have gotten.
On a somewhat related note, I was in Best Try (or Buy if you like the place) today and saw a 24" RCA television with the label "XBox Ready" slapped on the plastic. We are not talking about a sticker, but the text is actually printed on the face next to the control buttons so it is a perminent fixture on the front of the unit.
The borg's marketing machine is in motion. (Like that should be news to anyone.)
What TV can you purchase now adays which is not "XBox Ready"? I wonder how much cash MS pushed their way to get that label. I would not even consider buying the unit just due to that.
At my last job we had a network of about 600 local users. Our server room had two racks of equiment on the building's ups, so the racks plugged right into the wall.
One day we had a broom leaning up against the wall next to two of our cabinet's. Someone bumped the broom, which fell in the long arc that brooms do when they fall along a wall when leaning. One the way, it happened to unplug our two cabinets from the wall. So much for uptime. The place when quiet and we all just stared at each other for a few seconds. This is in an envirnment where downtime isn't really tolerated at all.
Our task the next weekend?
We took a whole package of zip ties, loosened up the plug wall plate, zip tied the plugs around the back of the outlet wall plate with an ungodly amount of zip ties, and screwed the wall plate tight again.
Our version of 120volt twist locks.:-)
Was interesting to hear what people would ask after seeing it for the first time.
Not quite the server room from hell, but the story's on topic.
I have a Dell C800, with a 15" LCD which can display 1600x1200. I love the thing to death. My eyesight has improved a great deal since switching from a 1600x1200 21" monitor to the LCD.
I would love to find the same screen, or similar in an LCD. 15" is fine for me as long as I can do 1600x1200. I havn't done much research, except browsing in stores, but none of the 15" LCD's seem to do 1600x1200. What gives?
Suggested things to look at anyone? I bought my last CRT about 3 years ago (a great Sony Trinitron 21"), I know my next monitor purchase will be an LCD.
I have been putting it off due to the price, although that aspect has come along quite a ways. I am sure there are others like me putting off CRT purchases and planning to go with LCD's instead once prices seem reasonable. 1600x1200 LCD's arn't cheap. LCD sales will only pick up once my "market segment" decides to shell out the cash.
I don't know if they have fixed any of this yet, but historically kde and Gnome have been to hard to configure due to having too many configuration tools all named similar things.
I have problems getting the correct tool to configure things manytimes on the first try, it's no wonder new users have problems.
Their users are much better looking that the Apple ones. ------ Of course they do! MS picked the model out of a catalog. Apple uses "real" people who really made the switch.
No pictures of the real product gives me real cause for concern. You would think at this point in development they would at least have a prototype (working or not) they could get pictures of.
Even with an otherwise poor website, they could have at least one real product photo.
I wouldn't consider buying a PDA like this from a company who has 75% of the pages on their site "under construction" (animated gif and all) with pictures of their product being computer rendered 3-D models.
Come on people! Whether this is a real product or not, it doesn't look to me like it has a cold chance in hell of taking off, the company just doesn't look like they have their act together properly. The "Agenda" had their act together a whole lot more than this company and the product went nowhere.
Most magazine subscriptions costs just barely, if at all, cover the mailing costs. With an online magazine like this one, fixed costs are a little different, but I am sure they are still planning to rely on advertising to plug the money gap.
Hell, I have a couple "newstand" magazines which the publishers send to me for free to get the ads in front of me, since I fit a valued advertising demographic for them. Think about PCWeek and stuff (are they still around?) I used to get a mailbox full of free computer trade rags each week pro-bono.
Have you ever called Verizon to try and get a problem with their service resolved?
For heaven's sake, when I pay my phone bill with a check over the phone with this company, I have to talk to a human and give them all the info they need to create a paper check which they then deposit. Who their size doesn't do the electronic check thing now adays?
Don't even get me starting with if one of our T1's at work has a problem...
Sounds to me like the RIAA is just sore they don't get better treatment than everyone else.
From am amature perspective, I have a 3megapixel Minolta D-Image5 with a 80 MB card.
I routined fly through 100+ photo's in the time I would still be on the first 24 on a role of normal film. Since the card can be rewritten for free, I am not concerned about the costs involved with wasting "bits", as opposed to wasting frames of film, which are of a limited quantity.
Out of a given space of time, I will catch many things on digital I would not have caught on an normal SLR, since film in unlimited and essentially free.
For printing, my Epson 785EXP can print out good enough 8x10 images to be hung. 5x7's come out just as good, if not better than 35mm film from a lower end camera with wallmart printing. It even costs less, since I only print the good ones.
This reminds me of a couple years ago when our AS/400 RPG programming group went to a users group meeting and found out about a "new" command which will finally allows them to manipulate dates as dates in RPG, not numbers!
The really shocking part was the function had been part of their language for over 5 years. Imagine if my Java skills were 5 years out of date. I would be making flaming applets on webpages thinking that was advanced.
In Fortran's favor, I do hear many people still use it today and it has plenty of good uses. I would like to know whether it really does, or whether the people who say that have their head in the sand. I am young enough to have missed most things Fortran, starting my programming with exposure with QBASIC then Pascal as my learning labguages.
Automated software is a good baseline approach, but it falls far short of cunning humans hammering away at systems.
Then why is once an hour does my apache webserver have clients trying to access dll's in the log files? I am sure the IIS admins may not agree with that statement.
In high school (years ago for me now), we had a computer lab of about 25 machines. A friend and I got the whole lab to play a song using a simple program, written in either BASIC or Pascal. (I forget which)
Each machine had and endless loop checking for the existance of a file representing a musical note on a network drive. When found, if assigned to play that note, the machine would play the note until the file disapeared. Each machine was assigned a note. Each note had more than one PC assigned to it around the lab.
We were able to entertain ourselves, as well as anyone walking through the lab, for at least an hour tinkering with the end resulting music.
The music distribution industry is killing itself.
Running a business means one thing that they miss: Find a customer need/desire -then- Fill the customer need/desire in a way that satisfies the customer while making a profit.
They don't have their eye on the ball any more. The customer doesn't want what they have to sell in the format they want to sell it in. Therefore, the customers are looking elsewhere.
Because the customer does not want what they have to sell, they will either go out of business (however long that takes) or learn to fill the customers needs/wants. Either way the "modern" music consumer will win in the end.
If this law passes or not, music consumers will find a way to get their wants/needs filled. The horse is out of the barn. The consumer will work around the RIAA roadblocks in order to fill their need/want of a certain style of music listening.
For the ones with more initiative than myself, it may be time once again for the good 'ol buy...bitch...return, sequence of events. Be interesting to know if they honor returns. Too bad the CD is free.
Also, go to the review sites on the net and let this info be know about the Soundblaster Live. Amazon's a good place to start, I'm not up to date with all the current popular ones.
...the "virtualisation engine" that Sun will roll out soon will not include features that would scare the more on-the-ball nerds--say, software that automates the process of translating the concept behind a new service, such as online banking, into a computer system. This can wait until the basic system is entrenched.
Yeah, ok: "HAL, err, N1, I need an enterprise class online banking system. BTW - it should itegrate with our current legacy system/data and be a seemless addition to our current web site." --POOF!-- "Thanks N1, another problem solved!"
I'll believe it when I see it. Everything else just sounds like a new marketing spin on an easily administered cluster. Can you imagine the licensing fees for the software to run on such a beast? Oracle costs alone?
I run two production Servlet Containers. One is Tomcat 4.X, the other is on Resin. While Resin is not open source, the cost is only $500/server, which is quite low by J2EE standards. I believe it is free for development, but I could be wrong.
I tried Resin since I have heard "buzz" about it in message forums, and now can't say enough about it myself. Tomcat has a lot of quirks with reloading updated war files, reloading modified JSP's, etc. Resin does not have these problems, and I believe is much better suited for a non-stop production envirnment.
In Tomcat, it is not uncommon for me to have to restart the container when rolling out updates where certain things have changed. In Resin, I can even add or remove a JDBC Connection Pool from the resin.conf file and have to pool rolled out or back without any additional intervention from me. In short, it just works. Not only does it work well as far a few (if any) glitches, it is VERY fast as well.
For a commercial envirnment, I suggest you try Resin just to see if you find the value it adds over Tomcat worth it for you. I did.
I hate to promote this, but I live in Upstate New York (like in the state, not the city.) Revolution OS will be coming to my city...errr...well...probably never.
So, how 'bout someone posting a link to a Divx version of it?
As someone who installs RedHat on a regular basis since the 4.2 days, I much prefer the RedHat install. It is easy and fast.
Windows 2k seem to take forever to install, even on a fast machine. I can do a similarly sized (in data) RedHat install in much less than half the time it takes for Windows 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
I am an Amazon Associate who has experience with the Alexa Crawler. I believe the crawl is intended to find broken links, or links to products that are no longer stocked.
The Amazon Associates program has been around long enough for "page rot" to kick in, and I am sure there are many sites out there with links to non-existant products, such as old editions of books, etc. Historically, associates had to build static links (for the most part) by hand, and embedded them in more or less static page.
The problem comes in due to the recent introduction of their web services, where sites can build essentially unlimited pages based on dynamic real-time queries to amazon. I don't believe their intent is to "thrash around" in these sites, which is what is occuring.
A few month ago, I asked to have the Alexa bot crawl my site, (StarvingMind.net) , I was curious about the reports it was able to generate. The bot ended up in endless loops and had to be manually stopped by someone at Alexa. They spent an impressive amount of time trying to identify and fix the problem my site was creating for their bot. I don't know whether my specific problem was ever resolved, but I have the impression the bug was found and fixed. I also have the impression that the bot is very immature code and buggy.
Based on the personal and public responses I have seen from the Amazon and Alexa people involved, they actually do care about these issues very much, and don't wish to cause harm by the bots use. I believe their goal is to eliminate the link rot that has accumulated on associate sites over the years, manytimes with the site owner unaware of the problem.
Web services threw a curve into the mix, and that is where the major problems are occuring. The post I a replying to seems to imply Amazon may want to "use then throw out" the associates. I think that is pure speculation without any knowledge of the fact. Amazon has recently gone from what appeared to be no fulltime staff to a team of people dedicated to supporting and running the associates program. I believe they consider it a very cost effective way of advertising, and I expect it is doing quite well for them. Based on their recent actions, I believe they are trying to build a strong long term relationship with the active ones of us, as we bring them a fair amount of business.
Another post has pointed out they have stopped the crawl while the issues talked about here are looked into. They realize they may have made a mistake, and are trying to figure out how to address the problem. They have been responsive (with me at least) resolving problems like this in the past, they deserve a chance to resolve it this time as well. They have started down the right path, by stopping the crawl.
-Pete
One of the real issues that may poke it's ugly head in all this is the value of TWAOL's content. How much is it worth? If you ask the executives, they probably can put a value on it. Is the value realistic? Maybe we will see.
I really think this is something that needs to happen, and it's about time. Content has a percieved value in old economy companies which is based on physical distribution mechanisms.
Right now the value of content is not known in my my mind. I don't think anyone else really knows either.
Just look at Salon.com. They, probably more than any other company, are in a battle to define the correct value of their content. At some point we need to progress beyond 1980's paradigms of content value in large media companies as well. Salon.com is in the thick of it as we are reading this. We see headlines almost weekly about their quest to break even, much less turn a profit. Salon has a problem that online content is their only product. AOLTW has other lines of business and markets to help keep them afloat. Maybe now it is AOL Time Warner's turn to test the waters and discover, or at least try to, the real value of their content.
I don't see this as a bad thing.
-Pete
This book, as he says, "is not an introduction to DHTML". If you are looking for a book to get started with DHTML, I highly reccomend Essential CSS and DHTML for Web Professionals (2nd Edition), by Dan Livingston. I learned most of my DHTML fundementals from the first edition, and recently purchased the second edition as well. This is a very short book, an unlike many of its kind, can be read almost in "novel" form to get a basic overview without getting bored. You can then go back and try the examples, and actually implement some DHTML. Without a doubt one of the best web development books I have gotten.
-Pete
On a somewhat related note, I was in Best Try (or Buy if you like the place) today and saw a 24" RCA television with the label "XBox Ready" slapped on the plastic. We are not talking about a sticker, but the text is actually printed on the face next to the control buttons so it is a perminent fixture on the front of the unit.
The borg's marketing machine is in motion. (Like that should be news to anyone.)
What TV can you purchase now adays which is not "XBox Ready"? I wonder how much cash MS pushed their way to get that label. I would not even consider buying the unit just due to that.
The TV was on and endcap no less.
-Pete
At my last job we had a network of about 600 local users. Our server room had two racks of equiment on the building's ups, so the racks plugged right into the wall.
:-)
One day we had a broom leaning up against the wall next to two of our cabinet's. Someone bumped the broom, which fell in the long arc that brooms do when they fall along a wall when leaning. One the way, it happened to unplug our two cabinets from the wall. So much for uptime. The place when quiet and we all just stared at each other for a few seconds. This is in an envirnment where downtime isn't really tolerated at all.
Our task the next weekend?
We took a whole package of zip ties, loosened up the plug wall plate, zip tied the plugs around the back of the outlet wall plate with an ungodly amount of zip ties, and screwed the wall plate tight again.
Our version of 120volt twist locks.
Was interesting to hear what people would ask after seeing it for the first time.
Not quite the server room from hell, but the story's on topic.
-Pete
I have a Dell C800, with a 15" LCD which can display 1600x1200. I love the thing to death. My eyesight has improved a great deal since switching from a 1600x1200 21" monitor to the LCD.
I would love to find the same screen, or similar in an LCD. 15" is fine for me as long as I can do 1600x1200. I havn't done much research, except browsing in stores, but none of the 15" LCD's seem to do 1600x1200. What gives?
Suggested things to look at anyone? I bought my last CRT about 3 years ago (a great Sony Trinitron 21"), I know my next monitor purchase will be an LCD.
I have been putting it off due to the price, although that aspect has come along quite a ways. I am sure there are others like me putting off CRT purchases and planning to go with LCD's instead once prices seem reasonable. 1600x1200 LCD's arn't cheap. LCD sales will only pick up once my "market segment" decides to shell out the cash.
-Pete
I don't know if they have fixed any of this yet, but historically kde and Gnome have been to hard to configure due to having too many configuration tools all named similar things.
I have problems getting the correct tool to configure things manytimes on the first try, it's no wonder new users have problems.
-Pete
Their users are much better looking that the Apple ones.
------
Of course they do! MS picked the model out of a catalog. Apple uses "real" people who really made the switch.
Reminds me of a lot of stuff MS does.
-Pete
No pictures of the real product gives me real cause for concern. You would think at this point in development they would at least have a prototype (working or not) they could get pictures of.
Even with an otherwise poor website, they could have at least one real product photo.
-Pete
I wouldn't consider buying a PDA like this from a company who has 75% of the pages on their site "under construction" (animated gif and all) with pictures of their product being computer rendered 3-D models.
Come on people! Whether this is a real product or not, it doesn't look to me like it has a cold chance in hell of taking off, the company just doesn't look like they have their act together properly. The "Agenda" had their act together a whole lot more than this company and the product went nowhere.
-Pete
In a word: Advertising.
Most magazine subscriptions costs just barely, if at all, cover the mailing costs. With an online magazine like this one, fixed costs are a little different, but I am sure they are still planning to rely on advertising to plug the money gap.
Hell, I have a couple "newstand" magazines which the publishers send to me for free to get the ads in front of me, since I fit a valued advertising demographic for them. Think about PCWeek and stuff (are they still around?) I used to get a mailbox full of free computer trade rags each week pro-bono.
-Pete
I don't see what the RIAA is complaining about.
Have you ever called Verizon to try and get a problem with their service resolved?
For heaven's sake, when I pay my phone bill with a check over the phone with this company, I have to talk to a human and give them all the info they need to create a paper check which they then deposit. Who their size doesn't do the electronic check thing now adays?
Don't even get me starting with if one of our T1's at work has a problem...
Sounds to me like the RIAA is just sore they don't get better treatment than everyone else.
-Pete
From am amature perspective, I have a 3megapixel Minolta D-Image5 with a 80 MB card.
I routined fly through 100+ photo's in the time I would still be on the first 24 on a role of normal film. Since the card can be rewritten for free, I am not concerned about the costs involved with wasting "bits", as opposed to wasting frames of film, which are of a limited quantity.
Out of a given space of time, I will catch many things on digital I would not have caught on an normal SLR, since film in unlimited and essentially free.
For printing, my Epson 785EXP can print out good enough 8x10 images to be hung. 5x7's come out just as good, if not better than 35mm film from a lower end camera with wallmart printing. It even costs less, since I only print the good ones.
-Pete
This reminds me of a couple years ago when our AS/400 RPG programming group went to a users group meeting and found out about a "new" command which will finally allows them to manipulate dates as dates in RPG, not numbers!
The really shocking part was the function had been part of their language for over 5 years. Imagine if my Java skills were 5 years out of date. I would be making flaming applets on webpages thinking that was advanced.
In Fortran's favor, I do hear many people still use it today and it has plenty of good uses. I would like to know whether it really does, or whether the people who say that have their head in the sand. I am young enough to have missed most things Fortran, starting my programming with exposure with QBASIC then Pascal as my learning labguages.
-Pete
Automated software is a good baseline approach, but it falls far short of cunning humans hammering away at systems.
Then why is once an hour does my apache webserver have clients trying to access dll's in the log files? I am sure the IIS admins may not agree with that statement.
-Pete
In high school (years ago for me now), we had a computer lab of about 25 machines. A friend and I got the whole lab to play a song using a simple program, written in either BASIC or Pascal. (I forget which)
Each machine had and endless loop checking for the existance of a file representing a musical note on a network drive. When found, if assigned to play that note, the machine would play the note until the file disapeared. Each machine was assigned a note. Each note had more than one PC assigned to it around the lab.
We were able to entertain ourselves, as well as anyone walking through the lab, for at least an hour tinkering with the end resulting music.
-Pete
The music distribution industry is killing itself.
Running a business means one thing that they miss:
Find a customer need/desire
-then-
Fill the customer need/desire in a way that satisfies the customer while making a profit.
They don't have their eye on the ball any more. The customer doesn't want what they have to sell in the format they want to sell it in. Therefore, the customers are looking elsewhere.
Because the customer does not want what they have to sell, they will either go out of business (however long that takes) or learn to fill the customers needs/wants. Either way the "modern" music consumer will win in the end.
If this law passes or not, music consumers will find a way to get their wants/needs filled. The horse is out of the barn. The consumer will work around the RIAA roadblocks in order to fill their need/want of a certain style of music listening.
-Pete
Thawte may be worth looking into. They used to be a competitor to Verisign, although now I believe they are owned by them (what isn't?).
They have certs available for $199. Still not cheap, but better.
-Pete
My understanding is the CD is free. On the other hand, the sound card that supports this is not, and most stores accept hardware returns.
-Pete
For the ones with more initiative than myself, it may be time once again for the good 'ol buy...bitch...return, sequence of events. Be interesting to know if they honor returns. Too bad the CD is free.
Also, go to the review sites on the net and let this info be know about the Soundblaster Live. Amazon's a good place to start, I'm not up to date with all the current popular ones.
-Pete
I would like to use Net-Flix, but refuse to based on their use of Pop-Under ads. I get them all the time on my windows machine running IE.
I know this is semi off-topic, but I think it is important.
I refuse to buy anything from most pop-under advertisers, I suggest you do to.
-Pete
...the "virtualisation engine" that Sun will roll out soon will not include features that would scare the more on-the-ball nerds--say, software that automates the process of translating the concept behind a new service, such as online banking, into a computer system. This can wait until the basic system is entrenched.
Yeah, ok: "HAL, err, N1, I need an enterprise class online banking system. BTW - it should itegrate with our current legacy system/data and be a seemless addition to our current web site." --POOF!-- "Thanks N1, another problem solved!"
I'll believe it when I see it. Everything else just sounds like a new marketing spin on an easily administered cluster. Can you imagine the licensing fees for the software to run on such a beast? Oracle costs alone?
-Pete
I run two production Servlet Containers. One is Tomcat 4.X, the other is on Resin. While Resin is not open source, the cost is only $500/server, which is quite low by J2EE standards. I believe it is free for development, but I could be wrong.
I tried Resin since I have heard "buzz" about it in message forums, and now can't say enough about it myself. Tomcat has a lot of quirks with reloading updated war files, reloading modified JSP's, etc. Resin does not have these problems, and I believe is much better suited for a non-stop production envirnment.
In Tomcat, it is not uncommon for me to have to restart the container when rolling out updates where certain things have changed. In Resin, I can even add or remove a JDBC Connection Pool from the resin.conf file and have to pool rolled out or back without any additional intervention from me. In short, it just works. Not only does it work well as far a few (if any) glitches, it is VERY fast as well.
For a commercial envirnment, I suggest you try Resin just to see if you find the value it adds over Tomcat worth it for you. I did.
-Pete
I hate to promote this, but I live in Upstate New York (like in the state, not the city.) Revolution OS will be coming to my city...errr...well...probably never.
So, how 'bout someone posting a link to a Divx version of it?
-Pete
As someone who installs RedHat on a regular basis since the 4.2 days, I much prefer the RedHat install. It is easy and fast.
Windows 2k seem to take forever to install, even on a fast machine. I can do a similarly sized (in data) RedHat install in much less than half the time it takes for Windows 2000.
I dread installinf Windows 2000.
-Pete