woosh, as the point goes straight past you. You appear to have done all your calculations in dollars. The problem with Google's tax affairs is that they do lots of business in the UK in pounds and pay very very little corporation tax because they use a double irish arrangement to wriggle out of tax on profit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
So we have GPS enabled guns that won't fire multiple shots with fast reload if there are no other similarly equipped guns in the area. Clever. I don't think anyone could defeat that except by, say, carrying two guns. Just as an example.
oh, interesting. I wasn't aware of any, but I didn't look massively hard (all those stores with an API that I am aware of were different to each other). Having now looked I am no closer to finding such an animal. Got a link?
That would mean everyone who wants to use it would have to register as an Amazon API developer themselves - and the registration process is a bit more involved than setting up an Amazon shopping account or even an affiliate account. You have to declare what you are developing and give them a URL to your site and other things. I could have a preference setting where people put their API codes which would then get passed to the web service and then on to Amazon, however that doesn't actually deliver any benefit whatsoever and it means it exposes their secret API codes to me (or to my server or whatever backend server they are using). You could run a local back end server and point the search client at localhost. I might write some instructions on doing that.
If there was an open vendor neutral API to plug into I would do that. I don't have the resources that google shopping have got to screen scrape loads of stores. I am certainly up for adding more stores, but they have to expose a search API and preferably an affiliate scheme (they don't have to do that, but realistically I am going to prioritise those that do). The code is all GPL v2 so feel free to enhance it to work with multiple APIs and search back ends. I don't *want* to limit it to one vendor.
ah, fair point. I guess I was expecting people to be able to connect the dots a bit better. I will add the relevant info to the root page of the web service. It was an afterthought putting anything there other than a 404 error to be honest. Libertus Solutions is my company and if you take the products bit off the front of the URL you get to the contact details and so on. I just flung up the web service to make the client work. The back end is trivial, it reads the query string, uses boilerplate code to set up the amazon web services connection, gets a datastructure from Amazon and spits the results part of that structure straight out again. The only reason it isn't published is that it includes the non-shareable API keys, I might split those out into a separate file so I can publish it. If I could have done without the intermediary and got the client to hit Amazon directly I would have done, but that would require everyone who wanted to use it to register as an Amazon API developer (giving up *lots* of privacy). At the moment it is doing the default logging of requests to/var/log/apache2/access.log because I haven't bothered to turn that off yet. I fully intend to do so because I don't want the log data because someone might legally demand it if I have it and I don't want to have to pay to defend my refusal to hand it over. I would rather not have it. I might get the back end to update some counters so I have some kind of daily load indicator but I certainly don't want to know what people are searching for. I will get a report from Amazon about what products I have earned commission on if people purchase through my affiliate ID. If you change the affiliate ID to some other value then someone else will get those reports so do bear that in mind. If you remove the affiliate ID then I will insert mine on the server side, (or Amazon get the commission and they are more evil than me so it is for your own good) but if you really want to give nobody the commission (or give it to Amazon) then put garbage in the affiliate ID and the only evil organisation that will know what you are up to is Amazon itself.
yes, me too. There are quite a lot of more imaginative (and probably better written) extensions on https://extensions.gnome.org/ I would encourage you to have a browse and see what else you can do with your computer. Then buy stuff. This volcano won't hollow itself out you know - I need the commissions.
The Gnome Shell terminology is that this is a search provider. I use the lens terminology because that is the Ubuntu Unity name for the same thing and was the inspiration for it. Also I am quite narcissistic and figured it would get me some attention.
This is a third party extension that they are hosting on their site for third party extensions. Extensions are how you extend and configure Gnome Shell.
dunno if I should be feeding this comment, but here goes. Unity is based on Gnome 3. Gnome Shell is based on Gnome 3. They are both shells for Gnome 3, but Unity is not Gnome Shell. Gnome Shell was pretty grim once, (as was Unity) it is now really really good, and Unity is OK. Try it. I am guessing you haven't used Unity much either. You can email Mark if you want to, or catch him on IRC he is quite responsive.
This isn't my primary source of income, we provide consultancy services around Free Software. This is just a bit of fun and an intellectual exercise in learning to do a gnome shell extension and figuring out how I would have done the Unity shopping lens if I had the opportunity to do it properly. If one day this earns me enough to meet the payout threshold of Amazon then I will be surprised and quite pleased.
This is a reasonable point of view, I just figured that someone was going to do it so it might as well be me - and if it was going to be done I might as well do it as inoffensively as possible!
Hi, I am Alan and I wrote it. I am not trying to get anyone else to pick up the intermediary role, I kind of like the idea of the floods of money pouring into my Amazon account, however I wanted to point out that other people have got the software freedom to fork the front end and run their own back end and do that. For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client then after the boilerplate there are basically two lines of active code:
$response = $amazonEcs->category($type)->responseGroup('Medium')->search($searchquery);
echo json_encode($response->Items); so it just spits out the "Items" array from the JSON it gets from Amazon as JSON. It isn't a personal site as such, it is one of our company servers running at Hetzner in Germany. I am a joint owner of the company so you could say it is mine:)
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone. This is a pretty high risk method of stealing stuff.
because this particular version that is being retired is not the GPL version. It is the yuccy non-free edition and being proprietary software you are using it at the whim of the copyright owner (Oracle) and not by the user. It is also buggy and insecure. It is being removed from users machines because it is buggy and insecure. If you want the GPL version that is safe to use long term and is actually in Ubuntu (rather than in the *canonical* partner repo) then use openJDK which is GPL licensed and you use it at your own discretion, not that of Oracle.
no, open source software won't do a lower bid because it doesn't come with a sponsorship deal in excess of the cost of it. This is the most commercially motivated games ever, with really really strict sponsorship deals for everything. You will be eating at McDonalds, the official food partner, if you want chocolate it will come from Cadbury the official snack partner, if you want to buy something to wear it will be Adidas, the official clothing partner, if you want to drive a car it will be a BMW, the official transport partner. If you want to pay for anything you won't be using anything but a Visa card because all the shops will be "proud to only accept Visa". Oh, and if you want to make a call on your mobile, I hope you are on O2 because the other networks are not allowed to put up towers to get enough signal to the venue.
it is rather good, I didn't get it from BT because they are crap at customer service, don't know what a fixed IP address is and have a fixation with their crappy homehub routers, I got it from Plusnet which resell the raw service, include a crappy but standard and functional netgear router and for a bit extra you can get a fixed IP address. I get 34MB downstream and 1.6MB upstream. Initially I had problems with the cheap nasty BT huawei interface box overheating, but they have a revised model that doesn't cook itself, but you must still wall mount it to get the passive cooling working properly.
No, really they didn't. There is no $deity, the universe was not formed from the flatus of a magic sky fairy with wind. Sorry to disappoint but the science is way more exciting and interesting than the alternative.
4) all PCs and laptops and motherboards will be stickered 5) windows 9 WILL require UEFI (perhaps) 6) OEMs will stop bothering to include an off switch for UEFI
funnily enough in/proc/cpuinfo you can see the chip has a java flag which was intended to be hardware acceleration for java bytecode. A suitable JVM could pass quite a lot of raw bytecode straight down to the processor. Eben described it as a bit of a failed concept but a cool idea. I don't know if there will be a JVM that uses it, but it seems java support at some level isn't out of the question. I was hoping it would run jython natively.
Slashdot Mirror
woosh, as the point goes straight past you. You appear to have done all your calculations in dollars. The problem with Google's tax affairs is that they do lots of business in the UK in pounds and pay very very little corporation tax because they use a double irish arrangement to wriggle out of tax on profit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
So we have GPS enabled guns that won't fire multiple shots with fast reload if there are no other similarly equipped guns in the area. Clever. I don't think anyone could defeat that except by, say, carrying two guns. Just as an example.
you have cheap fuel. Really. http://imgur.com/r/MapPorn/YIpi5
oh, interesting. I wasn't aware of any, but I didn't look massively hard (all those stores with an API that I am aware of were different to each other). Having now looked I am no closer to finding such an animal. Got a link?
That would mean everyone who wants to use it would have to register as an Amazon API developer themselves - and the registration process is a bit more involved than setting up an Amazon shopping account or even an affiliate account. You have to declare what you are developing and give them a URL to your site and other things. I could have a preference setting where people put their API codes which would then get passed to the web service and then on to Amazon, however that doesn't actually deliver any benefit whatsoever and it means it exposes their secret API codes to me (or to my server or whatever backend server they are using). You could run a local back end server and point the search client at localhost. I might write some instructions on doing that.
it is the key that wears it's underpants on the outside.
Those underpants have got a Windows logo on them for reasons of unspeakable evil.
If there was an open vendor neutral API to plug into I would do that. I don't have the resources that google shopping have got to screen scrape loads of stores. I am certainly up for adding more stores, but they have to expose a search API and preferably an affiliate scheme (they don't have to do that, but realistically I am going to prioritise those that do). The code is all GPL v2 so feel free to enhance it to work with multiple APIs and search back ends. I don't *want* to limit it to one vendor.
wow, thanks!
better now? I don't know what else you would like to see in a privacy statement but suggestions are welcome.
ah, fair point. I guess I was expecting people to be able to connect the dots a bit better. I will add the relevant info to the root page of the web service. It was an afterthought putting anything there other than a 404 error to be honest. Libertus Solutions is my company and if you take the products bit off the front of the URL you get to the contact details and so on. I just flung up the web service to make the client work. The back end is trivial, it reads the query string, uses boilerplate code to set up the amazon web services connection, gets a datastructure from Amazon and spits the results part of that structure straight out again. The only reason it isn't published is that it includes the non-shareable API keys, I might split those out into a separate file so I can publish it. If I could have done without the intermediary and got the client to hit Amazon directly I would have done, but that would require everyone who wanted to use it to register as an Amazon API developer (giving up *lots* of privacy). /var/log/apache2/access.log because I haven't bothered to turn that off yet. I fully intend to do so because I don't want the log data because someone might legally demand it if I have it and I don't want to have to pay to defend my refusal to hand it over. I would rather not have it. I might get the back end to update some counters so I have some kind of daily load indicator but I certainly don't want to know what people are searching for.
At the moment it is doing the default logging of requests to
I will get a report from Amazon about what products I have earned commission on if people purchase through my affiliate ID. If you change the affiliate ID to some other value then someone else will get those reports so do bear that in mind. If you remove the affiliate ID then I will insert mine on the server side, (or Amazon get the commission and they are more evil than me so it is for your own good) but if you really want to give nobody the commission (or give it to Amazon) then put garbage in the affiliate ID and the only evil organisation that will know what you are up to is Amazon itself.
yes, me too. There are quite a lot of more imaginative (and probably better written) extensions on https://extensions.gnome.org/ I would encourage you to have a browse and see what else you can do with your computer. Then buy stuff. This volcano won't hollow itself out you know - I need the commissions.
The Gnome Shell terminology is that this is a search provider. I use the lens terminology because that is the Ubuntu Unity name for the same thing and was the inspiration for it. Also I am quite narcissistic and figured it would get me some attention.
This is a third party extension that they are hosting on their site for third party extensions. Extensions are how you extend and configure Gnome Shell.
dunno if I should be feeding this comment, but here goes.
Unity is based on Gnome 3. Gnome Shell is based on Gnome 3. They are both shells for Gnome 3, but Unity is not Gnome Shell.
Gnome Shell was pretty grim once, (as was Unity) it is now really really good, and Unity is OK. Try it. I am guessing you haven't used Unity much either.
You can email Mark if you want to, or catch him on IRC he is quite responsive.
This isn't my primary source of income, we provide consultancy services around Free Software. This is just a bit of fun and an intellectual exercise in learning to do a gnome shell extension and figuring out how I would have done the Unity shopping lens if I had the opportunity to do it properly. If one day this earns me enough to meet the payout threshold of Amazon then I will be surprised and quite pleased.
This is a reasonable point of view, I just figured that someone was going to do it so it might as well be me - and if it was going to be done I might as well do it as inoffensively as possible!
Hi, I am Alan and I wrote it. I am not trying to get anyone else to pick up the intermediary role, I kind of like the idea of the floods of money pouring into my Amazon account, however I wanted to point out that other people have got the software freedom to fork the front end and run their own back end and do that. For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client then after the boilerplate there are basically two lines of active code: :)
$response = $amazonEcs->category($type)->responseGroup('Medium')->search($searchquery);
echo json_encode($response->Items);
so it just spits out the "Items" array from the JSON it gets from Amazon as JSON.
It isn't a personal site as such, it is one of our company servers running at Hetzner in Germany. I am a joint owner of the company so you could say it is mine
from wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Sweden words for defamation include:
ärekränkning
grovt förtal
förolämpning
and rape is våldtäkt. I call BS on the "reputational rape" claim. +5 informative indeed.
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone. This is a pretty high risk method of stealing stuff.
because this particular version that is being retired is not the GPL version. It is the yuccy non-free edition and being proprietary software you are using it at the whim of the copyright owner (Oracle) and not by the user. It is also buggy and insecure. It is being removed from users machines because it is buggy and insecure. If you want the GPL version that is safe to use long term and is actually in Ubuntu (rather than in the *canonical* partner repo) then use openJDK which is GPL licensed and you use it at your own discretion, not that of Oracle.
no, open source software won't do a lower bid because it doesn't come with a sponsorship deal in excess of the cost of it. This is the most commercially motivated games ever, with really really strict sponsorship deals for everything. You will be eating at McDonalds, the official food partner, if you want chocolate it will come from Cadbury the official snack partner, if you want to buy something to wear it will be Adidas, the official clothing partner, if you want to drive a car it will be a BMW, the official transport partner. If you want to pay for anything you won't be using anything but a Visa card because all the shops will be "proud to only accept Visa". Oh, and if you want to make a call on your mobile, I hope you are on O2 because the other networks are not allowed to put up towers to get enough signal to the venue.
it is rather good, I didn't get it from BT because they are crap at customer service, don't know what a fixed IP address is and have a fixation with their crappy homehub routers, I got it from Plusnet which resell the raw service, include a crappy but standard and functional netgear router and for a bit extra you can get a fixed IP address. I get 34MB downstream and 1.6MB upstream. Initially I had problems with the cheap nasty BT huawei interface box overheating, but they have a revised model that doesn't cook itself, but you must still wall mount it to get the passive cooling working properly.
No, really they didn't. There is no $deity, the universe was not formed from the flatus of a magic sky fairy with wind. Sorry to disappoint but the science is way more exciting and interesting than the alternative.
4) all PCs and laptops and motherboards will be stickered
5) windows 9 WILL require UEFI (perhaps)
6) OEMs will stop bothering to include an off switch for UEFI
funnily enough in /proc/cpuinfo you can see the chip has a java flag which was intended to be hardware acceleration for java bytecode. A suitable JVM could pass quite a lot of raw bytecode straight down to the processor. Eben described it as a bit of a failed concept but a cool idea. I don't know if there will be a JVM that uses it, but it seems java support at some level isn't out of the question. I was hoping it would run jython natively.