To support your point, it's trivial to find instances of this happening in 2000 as well
Frankly, I'm pretty sure this has happened periodically since amazon's launch in the mid-nineties; however, google's indexes don't go back that far. Sorry folks, a typo doesn't mean you get free stuff. And typos on amazon haven't been newsworthy in the better part of a decade.
the converse is equally true: if you buy a cd set from Amazon priced at $400 when another site has it priced at $30, it's your own damn fault for not checking the price.
Actually, amazon's policy is to refund you the difference if the price drops within 30 days of your purchase. So it shouldn't be hard to get a $370 refund in that situation.
It doesn't seem like it would be very hard to make a warning or require manual confirmation by a manager if a price of something is reduced to (say) less than 20% of its previous price.
That assumes that the price was ever correctly entered in the first place. How can a computer know the "correct" price for an item that being newly entered?
If you look at the cache links above, you'll notice that the list price is wrong, as well as the "amazon price".
merchant items, I had no less than 16 credit card charges for one single order. You see, each merchant bills you independently so if you have multiple items from multiple merchants -- you get multiple charges
I'm not sure about your situation, but I can assure you amazon is the only entity that bills you. I worked for a major amazon marketplace seller for years. Amazon never gave us a single credit card number -- they handle all the billing, and direct-deposited the funds they received into our bank account periodically.
There was a time when amazon did give sellers CC info for some types of transactions, but AFAIK, that hasn't been the case for over 4 years. Now everything takes place via "amazon payments" -- where amazons handles the billing, and passes the funds to the seller.
So, if this was a recent event, it's amazon's fault. If it was more than a few years ago, it may have been a 3rd party merchant's fault, but that sort of scenario doesn't happen any more.
Having worked for a large amazon 3rd party merchant for years, your story sounds like you actually used the amazon marketplace, and paid for "standard" shipping.
Anything that happens in marketplace transactions is as much amazon's fault as ebay is at fault when you have a bad experience there. Amazon marketplace sellers have no real connection with amazon. Anyone can sell on marketplace.
Secondly, the "6 weeks" line is what leads me to suspect you used marketplace standard shipping. Marketplace shipping fees for standard shipping are $4. The seller gets less than $3 of that, and amazon keeps the rest. Stop and think about that. How fast do you think you can ship a textbook for $3?
The answer is not very fast. There's only one shipping service available that will ship a 2+ pound book for under $3: USPS media mail. If you check amazon, you'll see that even they acknowledge this "standard shipping" takes up to 21 days to arrive However, any merchant can tell you it frequently takes longer. The USPS treats media mail as a last priority; in extreme cases, I've seen packages show up 2 months after shipping.
Lastly, the "wait to see if it shows up" attitude is classic marketplace -- had you ordered directly from amazon, they'd have a tracking number. However, amazon marketplace sellers frequently don't use tracking, due to the aforementioned tiny shipping budget.
So, long story short, your beef isn't really with amazon, it's with some small-time reseller who sells on amazon. Buy direct from amazon and you'll never have this experience.
How can you advise someone capable of learning not to do so?
Because we suspect that it's at best difficult to teach yourself aesthetic sensibilities. As an above poster mentioned, geeks are prone to being "colorblind" and aesthetically clueless -- I know my wife cringes every time I wear a blue shirt with brown pants.
If you reverse the situation -- say he was a graphic designer, and the boss asked him to write a little code -- you'd see the same sort of response here. Both programming and the arts really take years to get a good base understanding developed. Neither are the sort of thing where you can pick up a book and start producing something decent. You produce crap for years before you get it figured out.
Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma
Honestly, I always browse at +1 or higher, even when modding. So I never see ACs who post at 0.
I know, there are a few AC gems that really need to be modded up, but I don't have time to read the thread at "0" or lower.
I'm willing to bet there are lots of mods who do the same. Logged in users, and high karma users will always get modded up faster because of that.
I know that once my posts started with a score of 2, the number of posts that got modded up skyrocketed.
If it's a splice, it's the sloppiest splice in history.
You really think, if any of the potential targets have any reason to even imagine this was a splice, that they won't have divers down there to check, ASAP?
A wire tap your target notices is a failed wiretap. A wire tap that causes catastrophic infrastructure failure is... worse than failure.
I called my ISP and asked them to remove the blocks so that I could test my email server at work, set up a personal FTP, and, god forbid, accept Email. I argued with them for two hours, during which they told me, several times, that I could get Business Class cable internet service
For what it's worth, running server applications has always been against the ToS of every residential broadband ISP. The actual filtering of ports 25 and 80 is newer, but the clause in the ToS has always been there.
That would be cool if they used your friends and such to suggest you new people to become friends with, à la Last.fm [www.last.fm], with people instead of music.
We've been arguing about that concept here at the office lately. I'm of the opinion that I don't care *who* has similar interests (the last.fm model), I just want to know *what* people with similar interests like (the amazon.com model).
Similarly, I like to think that a lot more goes into the decision of who I'd want to friend than can be divined from raw data on my interests. I'm interested in friending people that make insightful, well reasoned comments, even if their interests are completely the opposite of mine, in some cases; accordingly, I have no interest in friending someone who shares my interests, but happens to be a blathering, infantile bigot.
You don't need a sophisticated submarine just to break the cables in half. All you need to do that is a ship with an anchor and an approximate idea of where the cables are located.
Tapping a cable is a subtle move, requiring a lot of technical expertise and work. Breaking one isn't.
Well said. If this was a tapping, it wouldn't have made international news -- the outtage wouldn't have lasted more than a few minutes at worst.
And high-tech companies--stop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn't routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3.
As a response to that, I'd recommend reading "Good Software Takes Ten Years.". While Joel's frequently a fairly controversial figure, he makes a damn good point: the first 10 years of Microsoft Office versions, from 1.0 to Office 95 were actually incredibly valuable upgrades.
I haven't heard any artists speaking out about their royalties drying up. Maybe because they made 10 cents on the dollar before and now they make 10 cents on the quarter now since it's all digital?
Weird Al publicly stated that he makes *less* on MP3 sales then he does on CD sales, 'cause they fall under some sort of "new technology" clause in his contract. Similar issue to the WGA strike. As such, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most artists have a similar "new technology" clause that's screwing them out of online sales royalties.
However, that's the only artist I've heard either way from.
I cannot understand what use this sort of light has for civilian usage.
Honestly? In the last few years, high-power flashlight collecting has become a very popular hobby. The guy who runs http://candlepowerforums.com/ (a popular flashlight collecting forum) gets insane amounts of traffic.
As far as I know, that's pretty much the extent of it.
It sounds like a simple captcha image on the router's login page would thwart this.
If you happen to leave yourself logged in to your router, captcha wouldn't even cut it -- I'm pretty sure this is a CSRF attack, so any credentials your browser session has are applied. You'd have to put a captcha on every single page -- clearly the wrong solution.
my 20 minute drive to work is one of the times I have alone with my thoughts (such as they are). Why should I give that up?
Expense?
A long commute costs hundreds of dollars a month -- thousands of dollars a year. That 20 minutes may be costing you a significant fraction of your income.
Um, unless you live up in the air, lack of a reliable ground is your own damn fault no matter where you live.
I just moved out of an old POS I was renting for next to nothing in northern California's east bay area.
The first time I plugged in a power strip, the "Wiring Fault" light lit up. Lo and behold, not only had the grounding rod been disconnected from the system, but the whole house was wired up with 2-conductor wire, even though there were your standard 3-conductor, "grounded" outlets. So even if I reconnected the grounding rod, it would still have been necessary to rewire the whole house.
I was a little surprised to discover that -- I kind of assumed that would have violated some kind of building code. The price was right though -- the place rented for half the price of a comparably-sized apartment.
What the authors really want to gripe about is distributed "cloud" data management systems like Amazon's SimpleDB; in fact if you change "MapReduce" to "SimpleDB" the original article almost makes sense.
If you need to buy a new laptop every three years, you can almost justify it when they cost $600. Still annoying but you can live with it. When the laptop starts at $2000 and has the same upgrade cycle, that's when baby jebus starts crying.
Every laptop with specs comparable to the macbook carries roughly the same price as the macbook's $1100.
Good luck getting a $1100 HP to last more than 6 months, though.
Selling binaries for GPL'd apps is perfectly legal, as long as you offer to provide the source upon request.
That's exactly what redhat does. They sell linux binaries. They only have access to the source of the linux kernel thanks to the GPL.
There's a whole industry around selling open source binaries. It's called "software distribution", and the FSF condones it. Not everyone has a high bandwidth internet connection, so for many people, downloading a linux ISO is out of the question -- they'd much rather pay a couple of dollars to have someone ship them a DVD.
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To support your point, it's trivial to find instances of this happening in 2000 as well
Frankly, I'm pretty sure this has happened periodically since amazon's launch in the mid-nineties; however, google's indexes don't go back that far. Sorry folks, a typo doesn't mean you get free stuff. And typos on amazon haven't been newsworthy in the better part of a decade.
If you look at the cache links above, you'll notice that the list price is wrong, as well as the "amazon price".
There was a time when amazon did give sellers CC info for some types of transactions, but AFAIK, that hasn't been the case for over 4 years. Now everything takes place via "amazon payments" -- where amazons handles the billing, and passes the funds to the seller.
So, if this was a recent event, it's amazon's fault. If it was more than a few years ago, it may have been a 3rd party merchant's fault, but that sort of scenario doesn't happen any more.
Having worked for a large amazon 3rd party merchant for years, your story sounds like you actually used the amazon marketplace, and paid for "standard" shipping.
Anything that happens in marketplace transactions is as much amazon's fault as ebay is at fault when you have a bad experience there. Amazon marketplace sellers have no real connection with amazon. Anyone can sell on marketplace.
Secondly, the "6 weeks" line is what leads me to suspect you used marketplace standard shipping. Marketplace shipping fees for standard shipping are $4. The seller gets less than $3 of that, and amazon keeps the rest. Stop and think about that. How fast do you think you can ship a textbook for $3?
The answer is not very fast. There's only one shipping service available that will ship a 2+ pound book for under $3: USPS media mail. If you check amazon, you'll see that even they acknowledge this "standard shipping" takes up to 21 days to arrive However, any merchant can tell you it frequently takes longer. The USPS treats media mail as a last priority; in extreme cases, I've seen packages show up 2 months after shipping.
Lastly, the "wait to see if it shows up" attitude is classic marketplace -- had you ordered directly from amazon, they'd have a tracking number. However, amazon marketplace sellers frequently don't use tracking, due to the aforementioned tiny shipping budget.
So, long story short, your beef isn't really with amazon, it's with some small-time reseller who sells on amazon. Buy direct from amazon and you'll never have this experience.
If you reverse the situation -- say he was a graphic designer, and the boss asked him to write a little code -- you'd see the same sort of response here. Both programming and the arts really take years to get a good base understanding developed. Neither are the sort of thing where you can pick up a book and start producing something decent. You produce crap for years before you get it figured out.
I know, there are a few AC gems that really need to be modded up, but I don't have time to read the thread at "0" or lower.
I'm willing to bet there are lots of mods who do the same. Logged in users, and high karma users will always get modded up faster because of that.
I know that once my posts started with a score of 2, the number of posts that got modded up skyrocketed.
Note that the term workstation usually means a high end system used for something a little more complex than web browsing and spreadsheets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
I believe the progression, marketing-wise, goes:
Desktop -> Workstation -> Server
You're thinking of desktop hardware/software.
My father's smacked a Wiimote into his ceiling-mounted projector at full force twice now, both times due to overly enthusiastic Wii Tenis serves.
Both devices aren't any worse for ware, but I think he's bruised his hand up a bit.
To self isolate, you don't need to cut undersea cables.
You just turn off the routers on the border, and pass a law making them illegal to operate.
If it's a splice, it's the sloppiest splice in history.
You really think, if any of the potential targets have any reason to even imagine this was a splice, that they won't have divers down there to check, ASAP?
A wire tap your target notices is a failed wiretap.
A wire tap that causes catastrophic infrastructure failure is... worse than failure.
Similarly, I like to think that a lot more goes into the decision of who I'd want to friend than can be divined from raw data on my interests. I'm interested in friending people that make insightful, well reasoned comments, even if their interests are completely the opposite of mine, in some cases; accordingly, I have no interest in friending someone who shares my interests, but happens to be a blathering, infantile bigot.
"Sorry, I can't friend you, you'll screw up my search results"
However, that's the only artist I've heard either way from.
As far as I know, that's pretty much the extent of it.
There are some better solutions, though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery#Prevention
Expense?
A long commute costs hundreds of dollars a month -- thousands of dollars a year. That 20 minutes may be costing you a significant fraction of your income.
The first time I plugged in a power strip, the "Wiring Fault" light lit up. Lo and behold, not only had the grounding rod been disconnected from the system, but the whole house was wired up with 2-conductor wire, even though there were your standard 3-conductor, "grounded" outlets. So even if I reconnected the grounding rod, it would still have been necessary to rewire the whole house.
I was a little surprised to discover that -- I kind of assumed that would have violated some kind of building code. The price was right though -- the place rented for half the price of a comparably-sized apartment.
Good luck getting a $1100 HP to last more than 6 months, though.
Selling binaries for GPL'd apps is perfectly legal, as long as you offer to provide the source upon request.
That's exactly what redhat does. They sell linux binaries. They only have access to the source of the linux kernel thanks to the GPL.
There's a whole industry around selling open source binaries. It's called "software distribution", and the FSF condones it. Not everyone has a high bandwidth internet connection, so for many people, downloading a linux ISO is out of the question -- they'd much rather pay a couple of dollars to have someone ship them a DVD.