I thought of that too, but CDDB is a one shot deal. With this type of data, it needs to be constantly updated, and with the numerous different cable schedules and channel setups this would be quite labor intensive. I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, it will just take quite a bit of work to make it maintainable.
they're actually called vertical price fixing and horizontal price fixing. The court ruled that vertical price fixing (http://www.cnn.com/US/9711/04/scotus.antitrust/) is legal, while horizontal price fixing is not.
No one would buy from the Coke machine, since it's a huge pain in the ass to carry a dime or break the second dollar.
don't underestimate the willpower of a coke addict. they'll be the ones with a few rolls of dimes in the desk drawer, some in their pocket, and a few on loan to a few strategically located individuals in the workplace.
Of course, one must also fail to trust the client, so be careful what goes in anything the client sends back to you, hidden or not.
i guess this was my major point. it's not really hidden at all, it's just not displayed. you're saying "here client, can you hold this value(s) for me because i can't or don't want to"
why should the consumer pay with their time for an overblown outdated business model? haven't we been over this issue over and over again here on/.? 1 million $ per episode? it's not news to me, but it's fricking insaine. it's (Love. Football on TV. Shots of Gina Lee. Hanging with my friends. And... twins.) but i've had my fill of people running across a meadow, through a wooded area, and back across a meadow to see a nike symbol and learn that they're moving people.
it seems that the only people in this economy that aren't grossly overpaid are those that actually produce the food that keeps the rest of us getting larger and larger. and if it weren't for government subsidising our food production, the costs to the consumers there would be greatly higher (but more in check with reality).
the bottom line is that just because that's their business model doesn't mean it has to be the consumers comsumption model. i say rip all the commercials (with the exception of coors) out. shake their model up a little, or a lot. it's the consumers that control the business demands and not the other way around.
round h.. meet mr. square peg. it's amazing the many hoops and tunnels people will go through to put their "application" on the web. web is a great tool for presenting information. i would have thought the internet fall of 2000/2001 would have brought alot of companies back into check, but that doesn't seem to be the case.ole
don't know about gnome 1.4, but i've used gnome 1.2 i believe on an ultra-5 w/ 128MB Ram, and a shitty graphics card (don't recall the name), performance was ok with that and kde 2.2. though when i had to start a weblogic server, things would get a little flakey if i left the gui running much.
it would probably make a more interesting map if given out before the night of drinking. i'm not sure i would want to see my own map though, nor hear the stories that go with each twist/turn.
There is a ton of CHEAP old PC equipment on eBay you could use as the brain for a robot
sure and most of it isn't worth the shipping charges. generally you can get a decent pentium machine for 30$ at the local pc junkstore, why bother with ebay?
interesting. Hurd runs other code? really? non-gpl code? wow, i guess after 11 years on their project those hurd folks have reached an interesting milestone. and without the help of bitkeeper at that. damn those guys are 133t.
forget stephen king, what happened to elvis? or the lizard king? i could swear i've seen these guys doing performances at the center of a mall somewhere.
and Apple is any better with their Aqua based idesktop which lots of ipeople are switching to because it just iworks?
at least in the open source software we can kompletely get away from that ans use uber obfuscated names such as; QT, KDE, kalkulator, kalendar, and konrol panel to name just a few.
Who hasn't had this conversation in a modern workplace? me.
here on/. we have a nearly pateneted method (remember now, we like our patents, not theirs) for problem solving. it might not contain the uber genius problem solving skills that went into many internet startup companies in the late 90's, but we like it. it goes a little like this:
1) start off with some really pointless statement.
2) add another unrelated and even more pointless statement.
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
we're still waiting the first real-world implementation of our problem solving skills, but rumor has it that the next Sims game will include the plan many times over.
some people don't read the specs, but 4. is marked as static final and cannot be overridden or redefined, it always has been an always been:
4. Profit!!!
likewise, 3., another static final singleton class always returns the following:
3. ?????
could someone with access to the slashcode cvs please ensure these methods comply to the standard s set forth by Slashdot Organization for Standards Implementation (SOSI aka, trolls)? much appreciated.
who should really pay much attention if it's legal or not? home users? (this software doesn't seem to attract much business domain). if the software works , then it's got an advantage on 90% of the software out there that is legal. me, i'll use whatever works before i wory about weather it satisfies the 200$/hr. lawyer's conclusion.
still coming down from yesterday's indulgence? i'm surprised the OP was able to find an ATI tech support, let alone a live body to speak to. getting drivers from anyone at ati is monumental, and i'd take them from the receptionist or the janitor. i don't care who builds the little focker, or what OS it's built for, as long as it gets some decent 3d rendering. hell, most microsoft drivers alledgely released from ati are more cumbursome to install than the linux drivers. ati drivers can require you to install a specific version of the operating system in specific manner just to get the damn things to boot.
and after all, who wants to spend christmas downloading windows drivers?
when the kernel obtains the uber 4.20 status as the recent xfree managed to do, then it'll truely be a rejoycefull moment. it would be extra kewl if they would use a : instead of a . just for that release, i'm sure RMS could probably start an insightfull thread on kernel.org to kick off the efforts.
as it stands, that leading 2 out there obfuscates the hidden national burn time and quite frankly i'm not buying it. it's 4:20 or the highway baby.
but I felt that Gentoo had a more active community and a quicker turn-over in the development cycle.
active community, yes. quick turn-over in development cycle? it all depends on how the dice roll that day. gentoo is young sure, but it's laden with bugs all over the place. you like AA fonts in x? ya might not want to upgrade your system right now. the stable ebuilds don't work 1/2 the time, and those that do give software that doesn't work quite right. it's a good concept and i can't wait till it gets to the "apt-get" stage of being able to always have an uptodate system.
TIVO'S EFFECTS Madison Ave. Isn't Getting It: Zapped Ads Are Zapped Sales 11/25/02
TiVo Posts Narrower Loss, Targets 1 Million User Mark 11/21/02
Couch Potato's Crisis: Is It Time to Get TiVo? 11/13/02
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COMPANIES Dow Jones, Reuters TiVo Inc. (TIVO) PRICE CHANGE U.S. dollars 6.35 -0.36 11:32 a.m.
* At Market Close RELATED INDUSTRIES Media & Marketing
Personalized Home Page Setup Put headlines on your homepage about the companies, industries and topics that interest you most.
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight What You Buy Affects Recommendations On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man." [TiVo Remote] Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
what's secure about windows? that's a better question.
there's many insecurities with windows. one that i recall is that a normal user could send a string to the command line which would bring down the box. sure, other OS's might have exploits like this, but when they're found out, a patch is on the way. the biggest insecurity lies in the users trust of the quality of the product microsoft provides.
and paying some shrink >150$ per hour to "cope" with the tradgey is any better? it might be a little different than the "norm", but i think she's doing a fairly good job of coping.
Or it could be his massive ego that won't let him admit that Apple has achieved in 2 years what Linux people couldn't do in 10: making a UNIX that nontechies can use.
it could be that massive ego. after all the linux folks took other's tools (gnu) and ended up building a OS kernel. these apple folks took an existing operating system, slapped a "pretty" gui on top, port a few applications and call it a day. i can see how they've got the linux kernel developers beat on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought of that too, but CDDB is a one shot deal. With this type of data, it needs to be constantly updated, and with the numerous different cable schedules and channel setups this would be quite labor intensive. I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, it will just take quite a bit of work to make it maintainable.
they're actually called vertical price fixing and horizontal price fixing. The court ruled that vertical price fixing (http://www.cnn.com/US/9711/04/scotus.antitrust/) is legal, while horizontal price fixing is not.
No one would buy from the Coke machine, since it's a huge pain in the ass to carry a dime or break the second dollar.
don't underestimate the willpower of a coke addict. they'll be the ones with a few rolls of dimes in the desk drawer, some in their pocket, and a few on loan to a few strategically located individuals in the workplace.
Of course, one must also fail to trust the client, so be careful what goes in anything the client sends back to you, hidden or not.
i guess this was my major point. it's not really hidden at all, it's just not displayed. you're saying "here client, can you hold this value(s) for me because i can't or don't want to"
why should the consumer pay with their time for an overblown outdated business model? haven't we been over this issue over and over again here on /.? 1 million $ per episode? it's not news to me, but it's fricking insaine. it's (Love. Football on TV. ... twins.)
Shots of Gina Lee.
Hanging with my friends.
And
but i've had my fill of people running across a meadow, through a wooded area, and back across a meadow to see a nike symbol and learn that they're moving people.
it seems that the only people in this economy that aren't grossly overpaid are those that actually produce the food that keeps the rest of us getting larger and larger. and if it weren't for government subsidising our food production, the costs to the consumers there would be greatly higher (but more in check with reality).
the bottom line is that just because that's their business model doesn't mean it has to be the consumers comsumption model. i say rip all the commercials (with the exception of coors) out. shake their model up a little, or a lot. it's the consumers that control the business demands and not the other way around.
it's nice how the value is so nicely "hidden". display="none" might be a little more intuitive.
so writing the document using "standard" html fixes the problem, eh?
out of curiousity, shouldn't the values of attribures also be enclosed in quotation marks?
round h.. meet mr. square peg. it's amazing the many hoops and tunnels people will go through to put their "application" on the web. web is a great tool for presenting information. i would have thought the internet fall of 2000/2001 would have brought alot of companies back into check, but that doesn't seem to be the case.ole
don't know about gnome 1.4, but i've used gnome 1.2 i believe on an ultra-5 w/ 128MB Ram, and a shitty graphics card (don't recall the name), performance was ok with that and kde 2.2. though when i had to start a weblogic server, things would get a little flakey if i left the gui running much.
it would probably make a more interesting map if given out before the night of drinking. i'm not sure i would want to see my own map though, nor hear the stories that go with each twist/turn.
There is a ton of CHEAP old PC equipment on eBay you could use as the brain for a robot
sure and most of it isn't worth the shipping charges. generally you can get a decent pentium machine for 30$ at the local pc junkstore, why bother with ebay?
interesting. Hurd runs other code? really? non-gpl code? wow, i guess after 11 years on their project those hurd folks have reached an interesting milestone. and without the help of bitkeeper at that. damn those guys are 133t.
forget stephen king, what happened to elvis? or the lizard king? i could swear i've seen these guys doing performances at the center of a mall somewhere.
and Apple is any better with their Aqua based idesktop which lots of ipeople are switching to because it just iworks?
at least in the open source software we can kompletely get away from that ans use uber obfuscated names such as; QT, KDE, kalkulator, kalendar, and konrol panel to name just a few.
Who hasn't had this conversation in a modern workplace?
me.
here on /. we have a nearly pateneted method (remember now, we like our patents, not theirs) for problem solving. it might not contain the uber genius problem solving skills that went into many internet startup companies in the late 90's, but we like it. it goes a little like this:
1) start off with some really pointless statement.
2) add another unrelated and even more pointless statement.
3) ???
4) Profit!!!
we're still waiting the first real-world implementation of our problem solving skills, but rumor has it that the next Sims game will include the plan many times over.
some people don't read the specs, but 4. is marked as static final and cannot be overridden or redefined, it always has been an always been:
4. Profit!!!
likewise, 3., another static final singleton class always returns the following:
3. ?????
could someone with access to the slashcode cvs please ensure these methods comply to the standard s set forth by Slashdot Organization for Standards Implementation (SOSI aka, trolls)? much appreciated.
who should really pay much attention if it's legal or not? home users? (this software doesn't seem to attract much business domain). if the software works , then it's got an advantage on 90% of the software out there that is legal. me, i'll use whatever works before i wory about weather it satisfies the 200$/hr. lawyer's conclusion.
and after all, who wants to spend christmas downloading windows drivers?
when the kernel obtains the uber 4.20 status as the recent xfree managed to do, then it'll truely be a rejoycefull moment. it would be extra kewl if they would use a : instead of a . just for that release, i'm sure RMS could probably start an insightfull thread on kernel.org to kick off the efforts.
as it stands, that leading 2 out there obfuscates the hidden national burn time and quite frankly i'm not buying it. it's 4:20 or the highway baby.
but I felt that Gentoo had a more active community and a quicker turn-over in the development cycle.
active community, yes. quick turn-over in development cycle? it all depends on how the dice roll that day. gentoo is young sure, but it's laden with bugs all over the place. you like AA fonts in x? ya might not want to upgrade your system right now. the stable ebuilds don't work 1/2 the time, and those that do give software that doesn't work quite right. it's a good concept and i can't wait till it gets to the "apt-get" stage of being able to always have an uptodate system.
yeah, and i've got some herbal viagra to sell you to. or a way to pay off all your debt. perhaps you're intersted in enlarging certain body parts?
money can't buy happieness, but it sure as hell can buy ugliness. gawd that's horrid.
good luck getting Mel to give his up. doesn't there have to be a donor to do a transplant?
TIVO'S EFFECTS
Madison Ave. Isn't Getting It: Zapped Ads Are Zapped Sales
11/25/02
TiVo Posts Narrower Loss, Targets 1 Million User Mark
11/21/02
Couch Potato's Crisis: Is It Time to Get TiVo?
11/13/02
advertisement
COMPANIES
Dow Jones, Reuters
TiVo Inc. (TIVO)
PRICE
CHANGE
U.S. dollars 6.35
-0.36
11:32 a.m.
* At Market Close
RELATED INDUSTRIES
Media & Marketing
Personalized Home Page Setup
Put headlines on your homepage about the companies, industries and topics that interest you most.
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay,
Here's How to Set It Straight
What You Buy Affects Recommendations
On Amazon.com, Too; Why the Cartoons?
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.
Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."
"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."
He mentioned his TiVo tussle to a friend, who told an executive at CBS's "The King of Queens," who then wrote an episode with a My-TiVo-thinks-I'm-gay subplot.
A lot of gadgets and Web sites now feature "personalization technologies" that profile consumers by tracking what they watch, listen to or buy. The software, embedded in sites such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, then recommends other books, videos and music based on a customer's tastes.
The Willies
Many consumers appreciate having computers delve into their hearts and heads. But some say it gives them the willies, because the machines either know them too well or make cocksure assumptions about them that are way off base. That's why even TiVo lovers are tempted to hoodwink it -- a phenomenon that was also spoofed this year on another TV show, HBO's "The Mind of the Married Man."
[TiVo Remote]
Remote Control: Viewers help TiVo understand their tastes by giving TV shows thumbs up or down.
Mike Binder, creator and star of that show, had set his home TiVo to record his 1999 movie, "The Sex Monster," about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. After that, Mr. Binder's TiVo assumed he would enjoy a steady stream of gay programming. Unnerved, he counteracted the onslaught by recording the Playboy Channel and MTV's spring break bikini coverage. It worked, he says. "My TiVo doesn't look at me funny anymore."
His wife, however, was taken aback when she saw all the half-naked women he was ordering through TiVo. He told her those women meant nothing to him: "I'm just counterprogramming because TiVo thinks I'm gay." She was unamused. The incident inspired an episode of his show.
Though some users contend TiVo has sex on the brain, TiVo's general manager, Brodie Keast, explains that the box is merely "reacting to feedback you give it." Still, the machine employs algorithms -- searching several thousand key details (favorite actors, movie and TV genres) -- that leave some people wondering whether it is judging their predilections.
Mr. Karlsson, 26, says he "pre-emptively" found all the religious shows in his TV listings and used the "thumbs down" button on his remote control to tell TiVo he has no interest in them. (Giving three thumbs down is the best way to block a program.) After that, his TiVo recorded movies about creepy homicides. "They all have titles like 'Murder on Skeleton Isle,' " says the computer system administrator in Cambridge, Mass.
He uses the "thumbs" button to tell TiVo he hates such films. He also orders cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of him. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer," he says.
Mr. Cohen, 30, has a TiVo that mysteriously assumed he wanted Korean news programs. The Philadelphia lawyer gave thumbs down to anything Korean, and his TiVo got the message. Sort of. "The next day, it recorded the Chinese news," he says.
TiVo's 500,000 subscribers use the box primarily to record programs they specifically request, and many laud its ability to pause live broadcasts and record a show's entire season. Still, in TiVo-focused online chat-rooms and in secretive admissions to one another, some say they resent being pigeonholed by TiVo's suggestions.
'A Pregnant Gay Man'
Like TiVo, other techno-profilers run hard with limited information. Ray Everett-Church of Fremont, Calif., who is gay, ordered "Queer as Folk" videos from Amazon.com. Understandably, the site began suggesting gay-related calendars and books. Then he bought a baby book for a pregnant friend. So for weeks, the site also recommended parenting books. He says it was as if Amazon.com decided he was "a pregnant gay man."
He fought back, he says, "by inundating it with additional data. I searched for other stuff -- on politics, computers -- so it would stop throwing baby books at me. Now it thinks I've abandoned the baby and I'm preparing for a career in politics."
Mr. Everett-Church, a privacy consultant for businesses, predicts that as techno-profiling increases, more people will purposely muck up their profiles. They'll fear ordering books on mental illnesses or sexual preferences because they'll wonder if they'll somehow be publicly identified.
All techno-profiling companies contacted for this article said that information gleaned is for the customer's personal use only. Still, even Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos knows the potential mortification factor.
For a live demonstration before an audience of 500 people, Mr. Bezos once logged onto Amazon.com (amazon.com) to show how it caters to his interests. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD for "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity." That popped up because he had previously ordered "Barbarella," starring Jane Fonda, a spokesman explains.
Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."
"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."
Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "
Dissing Ice Cube
A.J. Meyer, a 35-year-old Web site developer in Minneapolis, ordered the DVD for "Scarface," the Al Pacino gangster movie, from Netflix.com (netflix.com). After that, the site kept recommending movies about gangster rappers. He stopped the assault by giving negative ratings to all movies starring Ice Cube. (Netflix allows members to rate any of its 12,000-plus titles with one to five stars -- whether they have rented a film or not. That helps the site calculate future recommendations.)
After Mr. Meyer ordered a documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him countless documentaries -- even one on the history of the thimble. He stopped the Ken Burnsification of his profile by searching the site for plasma TVs. "That way, I identified myself as a high-tech guy," he says. "The thimble is more low tech."
Virginia Heffernan, TV columnist for Slate.com, doesn't understand why some people are resistant to techno-profiling, or find it creepy. She didn't look for any deep meaning when her TiVo kept giving her TV shows in Polish. And after buying self-help books on Amazon.com, she accepted that every time she logged on, the site pitched products to make her a more self-fulfilled human being.
"I like the idea that someone cares," she says. "Even a machine."
TiVo users can program the machine to skip certain channels entirely. But many users don't bother to figure out how to do it, or are too intrigued by TiVo's recommendation process, says a spokesman. TiVo is paid to promote programs and products it calls "advertainment" on a special screen. But the company says none of these are given to users as suggestions.
Some people have given up trying to manipulate personalization technologies. Dino Leon, a hair-salon owner in Birmingham, Mich., says his TiVo quickly figured out that he and his partner were gay. They were OK with that, but just for fun, they tried to confuse the software by punching in "redneck" programs, like Jerry Springer's talk show.
TiVo wasn't fooled, and kept recording gay shows. Mr. Leon believes the box was giving them a message: "You're definitely gay. And you're watching too much TV."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Updated November 26, 2002
what's secure about windows? that's a better question.
there's many insecurities with windows. one that i recall is that a normal user could send a string to the command line which would bring down the box. sure, other OS's might have exploits like this, but when they're found out, a patch is on the way. the biggest insecurity lies in the users trust of the quality of the product microsoft provides.
and paying some shrink >150$ per hour to "cope" with the tradgey is any better? it might be a little different than the "norm", but i think she's doing a fairly good job of coping.
Or it could be his massive ego that won't let him admit that Apple has achieved in 2 years what Linux people couldn't do in 10: making a UNIX that nontechies can use.
it could be that massive ego. after all the linux folks took other's tools (gnu) and ended up building a OS kernel. these apple folks took an existing operating system, slapped a "pretty" gui on top, port a few applications and call it a day. i can see how they've got the linux kernel developers beat on that one.